Book Notes: Scott McIntyre and Erna Paris

I've been reading two recent books about the history of Canadian writing and publishing in the last half-century or so: Scott McIntyre's A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing and Erna Paris's Hunting History: A Writer's Odyssey (and with Richard Stursburg's Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Publishing, previously noted here, in the background.)

Scott McIntyre had a remarkable career as a publisher, from holding a senior executive position at McClelland & Stewart at the age of 25, to building Douglas & McIntyre, one of Canada's best and biggest trade publisher, and having a lot of fun all the way through. Also he published one book by me and one by my father -- a good experience for each of us.

But looming over his story is 2012, when Douglas & McIntyre went into receivership -- a defining moment in the collapse of Canadian publishing in the "free trade era" when all the promises of cultural exemptions proved hollow. And when several writer friends of mine were left with royalties never to be received. Stursburg's book is the big picture; McIntyre's is the lived experience.

Erna Paris's memoir is not about a failing publisher. From a very early age, Erna Paris developed a profound involvement with justice, human rights, and how societies deal with the horrors of their past. She did it entirely as a journalist and a writer, always outside academia, but well supported by publishers. Her memoir does take readers into her life experience, but the book is structured by her books, one after another, to reveal her remarkable lifelong continuity of interests and concerns. 

As a Jew (from a relatively privileged beginning in Toronto), she began with painful questions of how to confront the Holocaust. After studying in France and marrying a Frenchman, she wrote Unhealed Wounds, using the trial of Klaus Barbie to interrogate how France denied and dealt with its collaborationist past.  

In The End of Days, she went back to how early modern Spain went from multi-cultural tolerance to the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews.  

She studied Israel and Palestine in The Garden and The Gun. Long before Gaza loomed over all, she concluded, "The policies of the State of Israel as they had evolved challenged my most deeply held convictions of ethics and justice."  

In Long Shadows, perhaps her best and most original work, she travelled the world to explore the much-contested rise of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions as a way for conflicted societies to confront their past.* (I'm proud to say I was part of the jury that awarded Long Shadows the Writers' Trust prize in nonfiction.) In The Sun Climbs Slow, she moved on the International Criminal Court and its possibilities for redress and judgement. 

I knew and admired Erna Paris, but before reading Hunting History, I really had not grasped the magnificent scope of her achievement. Nor had I had known how much of an international audience, and worldwide translations, and even political influence and respect she had earned over the years

So maybe she was sheltered somewhat from the travails of Canadian publishing.  But this memoir -- lovingly completed by her children and published after her death in 2022  -- is published (quite beautifully) by the ominously named At Bay Press, a small Winnipeg publishing house I had never heard of before, when it deserved to come out triumphally to national acclaim from a major Canadian house with the resources to give it the attention it deserves. Those days have ended too. 

Will Erna Paris be remembered in Canada as she deserves? We will need a Canadian literature and a Canadian culture to make it so. 

____

* Long Shadows was published in 2000. Erna Paris was already living with cancer as Canada's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission transformed how we discuss Indigenous and settler-colonial issues in Canada. Her brief closing remarks on that matter in Hunting History are sensitive to the topic, but not what she might have given us had she lived longer.     

Maria Tippett 1944-2024 RIP, cultural historian

Judy Stoffman in the Globe and Mail provides a detailed obituary of Maria Tippett, and places her (accurately I think) as a pioneer of academic cultural history of Canada. 

She led a charmed life, living part of the year in Cambridge, England, where she was a senior research fellow at Churchill College, married to the Cambridge historian Peter Clarke, the master of Trinity Hall.

During the summer months, they would return to British Columbia – at first to Bowen Island then later to South Pender, one of B.C.’s idyllic Gulf Islands. There she and her husband began their day at 7:30 a.m. at their writing desks, then discussed what they had written in the afternoon.

Book Notes: Undressed Toronto. Anyone for vernacular swimming?

Mostly by accident, I recently came across a 2021 history by Dale Barbour entitled Undressed Toronto. The title was intriguing enough for a glance, but in fact this is an significant and intriguing history with some fresh things to say about Canadian cultural history. I kept reading, and learned some things.

The full title is Undressed Toronto: From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside: How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850-1935, from University of Manitoba Press. (Barbour previously wrote about the evolution of Winnipeg Beach on Lake Winnipeg.)

Basically Barbour observes that (greatly to oversimplify) nobody went to the beach in 19th century Canada. Around Toronto people mostly swam off the wharves in the harbour or here and there in the Don and Humber rivers, or on Toronto Island, or wherever they damn well pleased, pretty much. People meant men and boys: mostly adolescents and unmarried men. They swam without bathing suits.  

Barbour explains the reasons why they could do this in modest, Victorian, church-going, 19th century Toronto. For one thing,  there were no women around. Nineteenth century women did not stroll around industrial areas on the harbour or in the wooded glades along the river, let alone swim. It's a vivid, largely unremarked clue to the degree of purdah that most women endured in the western world not very long ago. Men had the big world mostly to themselves when they wanted it.  

For another thing, a cult grew up celebrating the "bathing boy," as a glorious symbol of young manhood expressing health, strength, and appreciation of nature. Even as social strictures changed,  conservative elite males on city council vigorously supported the cult of the naked bathing boy well into the 20th century, even if it was often boys and young men of the working classes who did the naked bathing. More prosperous Toronto males had bathtubs and could bathe at home, but they defended the principle. 

What Barbour recounts is the long, slow, often contested evolution from what he calls the "homosocial" bathing of the 19th century into the "heterosocial" beach-going of the early twentieth. The occasional "dirty man" or homosexual activity? Bathing-boy culture mostly denied its existence. Beach culture would try to police it out of sight.

Briefly, Toronto invented beaches (sometimes literally dredging to produce them on the shores of muddy York), and it hired lifeguards to patrol beaches, and it stipulated precisely what would be worn at beaches, and it began to define appropriate behaviour at beaches.  At the same time, it introduced Toronto women to the new freedom to swim outdoors. But to do so, they would accept that beachgoing, even in neck-to-knee beachwear, involved a level of personal public display hitherto mostly unknown. 

Beaches, shorelines, and riverside paths quickly became prime sites of unchaperoned courting of a kind largely unknown in the previous bathing-boy era. Like other cities in Canada and internationally, Toronto had successfully "written the beach," "scripted the beach."

Barbour draws extensively on international social and cultural theory, but he uses it wisely and lightly. I laughed rather than groaned to discover his coinage, "vernacular swimming," to describe the 19th century practices that gave way to the more officially scripted and controlled behaviour of later times. 

Undressed Toronto touches on issues of government, environmental ideas, the extension of policing, urban and industrial policy-making, and many other issues of Toronto's development.  Above all, perhaps, Barbour demonstrates how useful gender history can be at opening up new angles on what might seem familiar or inconsequential topics.  

A new kind of beach read, for sure.       

Canadian History in trade market publishing: still not dead yet but...

I've been thinking it has been another pretty slow year for trade-market Canadian history. Then I started making a list, and it's longer than I thought, even though I mostly limited myself to books that seemed to get some kind of national attention and/or distribution.

Robert Amos, E.J. Hughes: Canadian War Artist.  West-coast artist Hughes is a longtime favourite of mine. This is the third of a remarkable three-part tribute to and study of his work.

Ted Barris, The Battle of The Atlantic: Gauntlet to Victory. One of Barris's ongoing series of military histories often based on his oral history interviewing.

Mark Bourrie, Big Men Fear Me.  Bourrie shows again that you (or at least he) can still produce buzzy books on obscure Canadians. Had you heard of George McCullagh before?

Tim Cook, Lifesavers and Bodysnatchers: Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War.  Medicine and war.

Jon Dellandrea, The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case. I just seemed to keep hearing about this book, so it must be clicking.

Ken Dryden, The Series. Maybe the best, at least the most noticeable, of the 1972 hockey Summit Series retrospectives.  But Gary Smith's Ice War Diplomat, by the foreign service guy who managed the international-relations part of it, seemed to get a lot of buzz too.

Michael Gates, Hollywood in the Klondike: Dawson City's Great Film Find.  

Ted Glenn, A Very Canadian Coup.  I'm not sure why Mackenzie Bowell is having a moment, but this may be the most substantial of the recent examinations of his brief tenure as prime minister.

Doug Hunter, Jackson's Wars: A.Y. Jackson, the Birth of the Group of Seven, and the Great War.  I didn't realize this was an academic press book until I looked for the publisher link, but since book and author both seem mostly "trade," I'm keeping it in.

Dean Jobb, Acadian Saga: a People's Saga of Exile and Triumph. I see this is a revision of a 2005 book, but no matter.

Russell Potter et al, May We Be Spared to Meet Again.  Letters from the Franklin Expedition, from its most vigorous student. (Okay, another academic press title.)

Alasdair Sweeny, Thomas Mackay, Laird of Rideau Hall. Also an academic press, but Alasdair has been grinding it out in the public history trenches long enough to qualify on any score.

Mark Zuehlke, Ortona: Canada's Epic World War II Battle.  Zeuhke continues to build out his substantial World War II series.

Nathan M. Greenfield, Hanged in Medicine Hat. A prisoner-of-war murder. And a miscarriage of justice?

So: not too hard to find a substantial list of worthy titles. And my selection criteria (above) mean I left out a great many local or more specialized topics, titles, and authors. Local and regional history thrives perennially, whatever the state of the more (seeking-to-be) commercial market.

Two PenguinRandom House titles, one from HarperCollins is the extent of the big foreign publisher contribution.  Remember when Canadian-owned publishers were a cultural-policy priority? It's obvious the policies remain essential, but government long since dropped that ball. It leaves small still-Canadian-owned houses to carry at least some of the slack. Let's mention Harbour/Douglas&McIntyre, Dundurn, Nimbus, Goose Lane, Biblioasis, Touchstone, and Sutherland House, as well as McGill-Queen's and University of Ottawa Press. 

But I'm a bit appalled to find my list is all white-male authors (quite a few of pensionable age, too, I guess). In any other recent year, I think I would have seen at least some female and indigenous authors delivering notable books. And it's notable that about half the titles are military or military-adjacent (though art history has outpaced hockey history). These are not signs of a healthy field.  

 

 

History of theatre: new Paul Thompson doc

A significant turn in the history of Canadian theatre was marked when Paul Thompson left the Stratford Festival in 1970 to become director of Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto.

TPM had been founded in 1968 (sez Wikipedia:)

Its radical intention was create a distinctly Canadian voice in theatre. It was conceived in the notion that theatre should transcend real estate; that plays can be made and staged anywhere—in barns, in auction rings, in churches, bars, basements, lofts, even in streetcars; and it was interested in the idea that theatre need not be a vehicle of social change, but rather it should endeavour always to be a mirror to social change.

They succeeded. Thompson's productions like "The Farm Show" made a powerful cultural force out of indigenous Canadian theatre, plays that created work from Canadian materials, often in the place where they came from.

This year film maker Rachel Thompson is launching "Theatre Beyond Walls with Paul Thompson," a new documentary about her father and his movement ("How to build a country, one play at a time").  It's showing in Toronto November 13

History of the Labrador Creative Arts Festival

Wednesday marks the opening of the 40th Labrador Creative Arts Festival, and it's such a great event that I have to note the anniversary. The festival brings writers, painters, dancers, musicians from all genres, mostly but not exclusively from Atlantic Canada, into Happy Valley-Goose Bay for a week each year. The artists, billeted with local families, tour schools around Labrador all week, and then the students come to Goose to present plays they have been creating all year -- sometimes works from the canon but mostly scripted by the student-actors themselves and rooted in local experience. It's an extraordinary educational and theatrical project in a community that understands it has to make its own cultural experience, and I still feel privileged to have been one of the visitors (as a children's author) in 2010, my only extended visit to Labrador.

I vividly remember a presentation of Romeo mak Juliet by the Innu students of Natuashish.  They did it in vernacular English, not the Shakespeare text (or Innu), but it was set in Natuashish and the sense of rival community factions making life miserable for the young people was powerful as hell.

I also remember eating cod, caribou, and even Canada goose, not as some kind of cultural experience but just a part of ordinary meals since, given the cost of food, everyone hunts and fishes.

Also that the community of North-West River is locally pronounced "Striver."

I don't think many historians get included in their artist selections.  But I'd go back like a shot.  Rock on, everybody.

History of Bob Dylan

Never took much interest in David Letterman, frankly, and pretty much never watch music videos. But lately I always have some time for Bob Dylan. Even when he is terrible, he is searching for something, and his whole career seems like the history of 20th century American popular music.  This piece about Dylan's first Late Show appearance in 1984 (he was on again yesterday, apparently) has a pretty good explanation of all that.  And the music does kick ass.