I often liken Eric Nicol’s writing to chocolates. I find sweet pleasure in his sense of fun,
his sometimes weird sense of humour, and his ability to look at the ordinary in
unusual ways. His newspaper columns were
always a treat.
In his second Leacock Medal winning book, Shall We Join the Ladies, he showed off
this skill for making the mundane amusing and for adding life to a variety of
subjects from the colour of a shirt and the average height of men to the new phenomenon of surgical sex
changes behind the title of the book.
In talking about the simple matter of ways to get warm, for example, he
notes that “women are wonderful, money is
more so, but there is really nothing like central heating” and “I put on so many socks people thought I had
elephantiasis”.
But like a box of treats, a cluster can be a bit much if
consumed all at once without pause. For
this reason, I find collections of his columns and essays to be almost overpowering
despite my appreciation for the individual pieces of wit. I am more at ease in books with the ebb and
flow of a story and paced humour or at least an overriding theme that whisks
the chocolate into a cake greater than the sum of the chips.
Of the three Leacock Medal-winning books written by Eric
Nicol, two are held together by the theme of international travel. The first, The Roving I, recounts Nicol’s experiences in Europe during his
time as a graduate student at the Sorbonne in Paris, and the third book, Girdle Me a Globe, is ostensibly a experienced-based
compilation of travel tips for globe trotters.
But this winner in the middle, Shall
We join the Ladies, is a bit different.
It is a series of outwardly disconnected stories, and, at times, seems
like that overwhelming box of partitioned little sweets.
If any theme could be ascribed to the book, it might be “anti-Travel.” For two reasons. One is that many of the stories are detached
from any real need for a sense of place.
They are celebrations of routine tasks like buying a shoe or minor adventures
like riding a bike. While Nicol
sometimes cites locations, they are less than secondary to the transcendent
silliness and sense of the absurd that would be Nicol’s essential experience
and manner no matter where he was.
The other reason that this probably would not strike the
reader as “Travel Writing” is the initially subtle and ultimately blatant
homage to home. For Nicol, home was and
would always be Vancouver, British Columbia, and you bit by bit realize this is
where he likes to be most of the time as you work through his stories and
recognize them as commemorations of the joys of his home. His anti-Travel theme is evident, for
example, when talking about his vacation plans: “I think I’ll spend most of my
holiday at a quiet little place I know, near to the beach, tennis
courts, golf course, yet handy to the city and serving first-rate victuals. You
guess it: home.” The early 1950s “Stay-cation.”
He also hints at his love of life in Canada in his proposal
for a Canadian flag. It all culminates
in the final chapter that sets out his reasons for wanting to stay in Vancouver
and build a creative career in British Columbia when so many colleagues suggest
that success can only be achieved abroad or at the very least in the east. ”For
a writer, such a plan indicates a sorry lack of ambition.” His essential
argument is that Vancouver has so much potential, will be great, and he wants
to be part of it.
At the same time, he also says he does want to see the world
even though his trips “from Vancouver can
never be more than that of the yo-yo that flies forth from the hand for the joy
of whizzing straight back to it” explaining that he hoped “to see the world in a series of zips out
and zips back, so that the graph of my voyages will look like a lie detector
with the hiccups.”
Yet Shall We Join the
Ladies may, in the end, be about travel.
In order to travel, you have to be leaving someplace behind, someplace that gives you a framework
to evaluate the new places, and someplace to address your observations and
accounts when writing about your travels.
You cannot say you are travelling unless you have someplace other to
call home. Nicol seemed to know that
better than most people and even many travel writers.
This may be the nugget in the chocolates.