1958 Girdle Me A Globe - by Eric Nicol

It was a Good Year

1958 must have been a good year for Eric Nicol.  By then, the humorist and writer was a well-established and popular newspaper columnist; he was firmly settled in his beloved Vancouver; he had the means to travel for many months at a time, and his new book, Girdle Me A Globe, had brought him a Leacock Medal for Humour for the third time in less than a decade.  He became the first person to have earned the honour that many times and would remain the only three-time winner for decades.

Eric Nicol had these reasons and more to be happy. Yet a light skimming of that new book could have left some readers thinking that he was a hopeless grumbler.   In the book, Nicol shares his particular take on international travel by drawing upon a year-long, round-the-world trip.   Nicol’s take, like his newspaper columns, focuses on minor adventures and the struggles of an ordinary Canadian, only it is not in Canada; it is on the road, on the rails, in the air, and abroad.

This tendency toward the routine leads him into an intricate detailing of the aggravation of choosing clothes to pack and the befuddling conventions that govern the use of dinner jackets and satin pants on travel status.  He recounts misfortune with foreign laundries in epic terms comparing them to the Odyssey, shudders over the ordeal of standing for hours on cold marble museum floors, and warns would-be travelers with dread of the implications of the multi-gauge Australian rail system.   He cites a hypothetical stay in an old inn where “the food is dreadful and the beds have lumps” as the “solid foundation of real suffering” for future travel war stories.

He is joking, of course, and making fun of himself and those travelers who see the foreign world as exotic and enticing, yet somehow wrong and unjustifiably inconvenient.  But, most of all, he is lampooning the popular approach to travel writing and swaggering travel writers who use their trade as a platform for thinly veiled personal aggrandizement.

The sum of this short book, which might seem on the surface to be a catalogue of funny fussiness or at best a collection of witty essays, is a subtle satire in the best Jonathan Swift tradition.   Labeling Girdle Me A Globe as a compilation of light stories about laundry, trains, and foreign food would be akin to branding Gulliver’s Travels as a children’s book about horses and giants.

It is typical of Nicol to dwell on the everyday activities with which many Canadians can identify while only nonchalantly mentioning his passage through patchy countries like Ceylon and Syria and  cities like Baghdad and Karachi.  Instead of trying to impress us with cocktail-party place dropping, he draws us to international travel by showing it to be something all can access, appreciate, and understand, demonstrating how the core experiences around bathrooms and showers, eating and sleeping, and other necessities have common features everywhere and by showing us that many inconveniences can be wiped away with a laugh and a smile.

He mocks those who see travel as the means to amass imposing stories, not only by filling his own book with minor adventures and non-events, but by advising the reader to merely adopt “a certain manner, a superiority that has no need to assert itself, like that of the veteran of many battles” and assume a mysterious “far-away look” when any dark corner of the world is mentioned in social settings.      

Nicol makes you smile with ease because he seems to be smiling a lot himself, and, again, he had many reasons to smile in 1958.

His trip around the world and book brought Eric Nicol back to the kind of life and theme he had celebrated in his first Leacock Medal book, The Roving I:  the experience of a Canadian abroad.

 The Roving I  was a comical account of his year as a graduate student in Paris. In its teasing introduction,  Nicol jokes that he “would like to thank (his) wife for her unfailing help and encouragement during the preparation of this book” adding “but, I’m not married.” In that first medal-winning book’s concluding pages, he closes off his time in Paris with the melancholy lament of not having “had someone to share it with.”

Eight years later with Girdle Me a Globe, Nicol is not only writing about a world tour, but his honeymoon and dedicating the story to his new wife “who held my hand all the way.”  Again, it was a good year for him.

Eric Nicol Trivia

1957 The Grass is Never Greener by Robert Thomas Allen

Lesson

 

When home is not a place

 

In 1976, my cousin Rod, then around thirty years old, was working in a sometimes odious cardboard box factory near Oshawa, Ontario.   One night, he came home to his humble, bare apartment to find a brown envelope holding an unanticipated income tax refund for just over $500.  It may have been the largest unclaimed, unencumbered lump of money he had ever seen, and it changed his life. 

Rod quit his job, stuffed his possessions into a trunk, and jumped on a train to Vancouver where he lived with me for a while on his way to California, the warm, sunny setting for the rest of his life.  He was just part of my very Canadian, rural Ontario family that made the southern U.S.  home.

Rod’s $500 life-changing story has always made me smile, and it makes it easier for me than perhaps many other early 21^st century readers to accept the premise of the 11^th Leacock Medal winning book The Grass is Never Greener, Robert Thomas Allen’s account of what he labeled his family’s search for “the Perfect Place to Live.” 

By the mid-1950s, Allen, born in 1911, had established himself as a fairly successful freelance “Magazine Writer,” certainly by Canadian freelance-writing standards, causing him to dream about breaking away from the routine of his downtown Toronto advertizing job.  His fantasy congealed around the prospect of selling his family’s home for a $2000 to $3,000 profit and using those proceeds to live in warmer spots in the U.S. for at least a year or so while he pursued writing assignments with newspapers and magazines.   He was equipped with a Chev with running boards and bucket seats that he had bought for $400 in his wedding year of 1934.

When I first read the liner notes and references to The Grass is Never Greener, I wondered whether it would really be a vigorous contribution to Canadian culture.  It was purportedly an account of life in the U.S., published in the U.S., promoted in the U.S. market, and labeled by the publisher as the work of a “fresh humorist” for “American readers.”

But it is very much the story of a Canadian family.   In fact, most of the book takes place in Canada: first during the set up to Bob’s plunge into itinerant, freelance employment;  then during a transition period in an Ontario cottage; then back in Toronto and a spell on a small farm outside the city.   In between, he takes his wife and two young daughters on a bumpy road trip, settling for a while in a beach house in northern Florida, then in a small Arizona town near the Mexican border, and finally to Pasadena before capitulating and heading back to Canada, temporarily.

One Canadian feature that persistently frames the travels and the tales in this book is the climate and the ongoing references to the warmth of the weather and sunshine relative to winters in Toronto.   It is the way Allen judges most places, and the tool he uses to structure many of his choices and the small adventures that ensue.

Much of the humor and gist of the stories, however, flows from concerns that are neither Canadian nor American, neither warm nor cold.  They are about children and schools, husbands and wives, making money and spending it.  The humble experiences and concerns that touched his readers and the readers of the magazines that first published excerpts from the book.

As expected, some of the humor and situations seem quaint and dated.  The comparison of pipe-smoking men and “hairdo” loving women regularly remind the reader that the setting is in a different time and place.

“There are no schools that teach men how to teach women how to drive,” Allen tells us.

Facile references to corporal punishment for children and domestic turmoil and archaic terms like “retarded” stand out as reminders that the book was the product of a different time, particularly when we know that they sit in a work by a writer who was universally remembered as “gentle and kind.”

But more often, The Grass is Never Greener is startling in the extent to which some themes and issues still resonate as eternal or have otherwise persisted in popular culture and society.   Allen’s musings on Self-Help books and the mass-marketed happiness advice of celebrities (Gene Autry was one fifties vintage personalities cited in this regard) are not much different that the satire and send ups of the current generation of simplified psychology for sale.

At times, the search for “the Perfect Place to Live” premise seems faint and far in the background to the specific stories and reflections and maybe a little contrived.  But it worked for me, in part because of my cousin Rod, but also because I knew from separate reading that Allen’s struggle over where to live was authentic and continued for most of the rest of his life. 

He and his wife really liked California from the first time they lived there, and the book ends with them back on the U.S. west coast, this time looking on the Pacific, where he recalls his family feeling that “it’s good to know we don’t have to move around anymore ... wonderful to know we can dig in, for good.”

One page later, the Editor added this note “When this manuscript went to press, the author and his family had started back to Toronto.”

But even that note did not end of the story, Allen would return to Florida repeatedly and finally settling for the last time around San Diego in 1983 where he lived out the remaining seven years of his life.

He likely found that the “Perfect Place to Live” for Robert Thomas Allen was many places and that, as he said, “the only way to get the best out of anything is to make the best of the good things you’ve got”  no matter where you are or how much ice and snow surrounds you.

Robert Thomas Allen Trivia