1962 Jake and The Kid - W.O. Mitchell

The shiny shoes, pressed pants, and neat barn on the cover of my copy of W.O. Mitchell’s[i] Jake and the Kid will strike anyone who has lived on a farm as a little too tidy. 

The Norman Rockwell-style artwork features a barn interior around an open door that looks out into bright daylight where a young boy is sitting on a horse.  An older man in the clean shoes and straight coveralls holds a strap coming from the bridle. 

At times, reading Jake and the Kid feels like a stroll through a Rockwell painting. It’s a saving-kittens-at-Christmas version of the Canadian prairies that makes you nod and smile. This is not a bad experience, but it works best as literature if it also supports you in the messier real world where you have to watch your step and what you step into.

The book, which won the Leacock Medal in 1962,[ii]  celebrates the relationship between Jake, the hired hand, and “The Kid,” an unnamed boy who tells the story and who helps his mother  farm while his father is overseas in World War II.  The Kid’s world is the farm, school, and the mythical town of Crocus, Saskatchewan.[iii] 

The Kid, starving to make sense of the world, eats up Jake’s every word with wide-eyes and the certainty that his hero “always knows what he is talking about.”

Jake’s too old for WWII, but misses few opportunities to summon his Vimy Ridge role in the Great War and his battles with Boers before it.  In fact, the farm hand never passes over a chance to reference anything he can relate to the Kid’s problems.  Jake’s recollections of “Looie” Riel and “Wilf” Laurier seem dubious and conflict with historical facts.  But the older man believes his own stories and always has a point beyond self-aggrandizement.  In everything, he is trying to assure the Kid and make life a little easier.

Jake explains that the key distinction between women and other humans is their preoccupation with having things “just so,” and it rings true. Miss Henchbaw, the teacher, is always insisting on decimal points being in just the right place, and the Kid’s Ma takes great care every Sunday to saliva down each and every hair on her son’s head before church.

The stories are comforting and easy to follow, absorb, and enjoy.[iv]  We laugh because Jake’s explanations are simultaneously innocent and shrewd, nonsensical and common sense, and we smile because it all has an undertone of caring and trying to lessen the hardship.  Jake is not alone.  Crocus has other yarn spinners who have all seen “the deepest snow, the worst dust storms, the biggest hailstones ...Rust and dust and hail and sawfly and cutworm and drought.”  “Terrible things,” but Jake and his cohorts can make them less frightening if they are made ridiculous through tall tales.

Half way through the book in “The Liar Hunter” episode, one character explains “These men lie about the things that hurt them most ... If a man can laugh at them he’s won half the baffle ... When he exaggerates things he isn’t lying really; it’s a defense, ... He can either do that or squeal.”

In the same way, it doesn’t matter much that W.O. Mitchell’s paradise in the prairie never  existed.  Like the Rockwell-ish painting on my book, the image makes for a good mental reference when wrestling with reality in any era. 

The popularity of Jake and the Kid in books, radio, and TV over many decades suggests Canadians are particularly inclined to the image of a regular guy trying make the world a little softer with his stories.[v]

Parliament Pete and the Kid - Parody

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[i] W.O. Mitchell influenced a generation of authors as a teacher: a Writer in Residence at Trent University, the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto’s Massey College, the University of Windsor, and the Banff Centre.   He also studied at the UofA and the University of Manitoba and mentored others outside of formal settings, encouraging many from his time as Literary Editor for MacLean’s magazine.  Mitchell has been credited with “discovering” writers like Ray Bradbury and fellow Leacock Medal winners Farley Mowat and Ernest Buckler.  (see David O’Rourke for Essays on Canadian Writing. 20 (Winter 1980): p149-59.)

[ii] William Ormond - W.O. - Mitchell (1914 to 1998) was not an unqualified admirer of Stephen Leacock, once calling him “a little slapstick.” Mitchell said the writer who had the greatest influence on him and his writing was Virginia Woolf.

[iii] Mitchell started writing Jake stories in the early 1940s and then polished them into a popular CBC radio series in the 1950s.  

[iv] Mitchell was the author of the bestselling book in Canada, Who has seen the Wind. Its sales were approaching the million mark before his passing.  It had displaced  Maria Chapdelaine, a novel set in French Canada around Mitchell’s birth.

[v] Mitchell’s son Ormond and Ormond’s wife Barbara were both literary scholars who produced a well reviewed and uniquely intimate biography of W.O. in two volumes: The Life of W.O. Mitchell, Beginnings to Who has seen the Wind, 1914 to 1947, and The of W.O. Mitchell, The years of Fame, 1948-1998.

 

My copy of W.O. Mitchell’s Jake and the Kid is a later edition, paperback version of the

 

1960 Just add Water and Stir by Pierre Berton

Lesson 13

Why someone would abandon
humour writing

Like that of many Canadians, my last memory of Pierre Berton[1] comes from his appearance on the CBC’s Rick Mercer Report in 2004.  Eighty-four-years-old at the time and fated to die later that year, Berton took part in the TV program  to demonstrate how to roll a  joint.    

The image made people laugh because most Canadians knew Berton as a literary icon and as part of a generation not tied to notorious marijuana use.  I’m grateful for the scene because it will remind me forever of just how damn funny Pierre Berton could be. 

Despite all the achievements that marked his life, the television vignette purposely celebrated his funny side and stressed it by highlighting Berton’s Leacock Medal for Humour.  However, setting aside the joint-rolling lesson, he had, arguably, reached his peak as a humorist in Just add Water and Stir, the book that earned him that 1960 Leacock Medal.[2] 

Berton devoted his subsequent writing and achieved most of his literary success working on history and other serious subjects.   In 1960, his career was taking him away from magazines and newspapers into television and radio.  This gave him different opportunities to indulge his personality and to poke at politics and culture, and he decided to direct his writing to ambitions that required research and respect.

As someone who aspired to make Canada’s history accessible, Berton had a challenge. He needed to link the fact-laden, pursed-lipped world of academia to the language and the imagery that make books interesting.   Perhaps, he didn’t want to risk eroding his reputation with the brand of humorist, which some writers think marks you for a spot at the children’s table and the basement of the CanLit outhouse.

Crude Drawing

Too bad.  I think Just add Water and Stir pulls it off, fluctuating between humour and the deadly serious in a way that make a coherent sounding whole.  It leaves you smiling, but it also includes pieces that are grim. Berton struggled to describe the book calling it “a random collection of satirical essays, rude remarks, used anecdotes, thumbnail sketches, ancient wheezes, old nostalgias, wry comments, limp doggerel, intemperate recipes, vagrant opinions, and crude drawings...”

Although officially an editor and journalist, Berton admired parody and satire and imbeds his editorial comments on education in episodes entitled “Fun with Dick and Jane” and “Little Red Riding Hood.”  His observations on the changing Canadian society includes essays on the size-of-your-office corporate culture and his “Modest Proposal for a Divorce Ceremony.”[3]  In critiques on popular periodicals, he attacks Time, Vogue, and Mayfair, but lauds Mad Magazine.[4]

You recognize the outrage in Berton’s humorous pieces because it echoes the opinions in the accompanying somber ones on social reform, racial profiling, capital punishment, wiretapping, and torture in Canadian prisons.  He also rants over commercialization, politics, and mass media. But, surprisingly at first reading, his harshest words fall on food recipes - the issue behind the title of the book.

Berton calls “Just Add Water and Stir” the “most hideous phrase to enter the language ... (adding that) ...the greatest and most monstrous villainy foisted on the consuming public has been instant coffee.”  In the middle of the book, via a pink paper insert, he tries to counter the 1950s version of fast food with his own semi-serious recipes. They’re different.  Rather than setting out an ordered combination of ingredients and steps for preparation, they tell stories - the story of making a soup, some baked beans, and a plate of corned beef hash. 

Anticipation and the joy of food fill these recipe-yarns.

The phrase “Just Add Water and Stir” makes an ideal title for this book because it evokes a bouillabaisse blend of different kinds of spices with meaty chunks, but it also speaks directly to Berton’s overriding message and the notion that pulls the mix together: that people should care about things. 

“We live in a dehydrated age and we are in mortal danger of having our souls dehydrated as well,” he says explaining that “in the kitchen ... we will cheerfully eat sawdust, as long as it can be poured straight from the package to the plate.”

For him, instant coffee reflects a society increasingly coloured by “not caring” - in this case, not caring about the effort taken to cultivate the coffee beans and not caring enough to honour your guests with a decent beverage.  We would classify the recipes and food rants as humour, but many words - about people not caring - could have been easily injected into his pieces on legalized torture and capital punishment.

The book closes with some of those “Old Nostalgias,” around his father, his childhood in the Depression, and early days in journalism.[5]  Berton was still in his thirties when this book was produced, and I am not sure whether he really had the credentials for quality nostalgia, but his words stimulated my own.  I miss the funny Pierre Berton, Ben Wicks, Barbara Frum, Peter Gzowski, Eric Nicol, Mordecai Richler, Gary Lautens, Bob Johnstone, Max Ferguson, and all the others who, through a mix of humour and caring, gave meaning to the word “Canadian” for most of my life.  

Berton’s book amplifies this impulse for nostalgia with profiles of Glenn Gould, Charles Templeton, Russ Baker, and others.  But Just add Water also admonishes people like me who become wistful over a past that doesn’t seem to exist any longer. Berton says it “still exists ... as (it)  always did...You (just) do not see it any more, my friend.”

Perhaps, this jab makes a better reason to be grateful for my last, joint-rolling memory of Berton.  It ties the history of Canadian humour to Mercer and his generation of still-existing, Canadian personalities who still care, help define our country today, and persist in doing it proudly branded as humorists.

Click for Pierre Berton Trivia

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[1] Pierre Francis de Marigny Berton was born on 12 July 1920 in Whitehorse in the Yukon.  A comprehensive resource on Berton is the 2008 biography by historian A.B. McKillop, (Pierre Berton: A biography). 

 

 

[2] Although Berton had started to dabble in other media by that time, he was still known primarily as a newspaper columnist, and the book draws heavily from his pieces in the Toronto Star.  He rarely drifted into humour writing again.  One exception came, however, not long after he won the Leacock Medal.  This was The Secret World of Og, which he wrote for his own children.

 

[3] More Swiftian humour. Complete with a “Worst Man” and the father taking back the Bride.

[4] In Just Add Water and Stir, Berton also lampoons 1950s society in “Modern Fables” that mock commercial enterprise (“The Great Detergent Premium Race,” “Goliath Tobacco’s Big Comeback,” and “The Legend of (a Las Vegas-like) Healing Mountain,” and in verse like “A Toast to (the) Woodbine (Racetrack in Toronto)” and “The Sixty-Five Days of Christmas” as well as parodies of  1950s Television shows like Perry Mason and Gunsmoke.  

[5] In this book, he also celebrated the UBC student paper (The Ubyssey ­­-a  training ground for a number of  Leacock Medalists) and his work at the defunct Vancouver News-Herald. 

 

 

 

 

1961 Mice in the Beer by Norman Ward

The Gentle Art of Watching Mice in Beer 

Historian Jack Granatstein once said Leacock Medal winner Norman Ward’s writing was “as dry as the Prairie soil of the dust bowl years” and that his prose “sits on the page like so many cow flaps in a farmer's field.”[1]  He was, however, directing those comments at the wordiness of Ward’s scholarly work, not his humour writing.

Ward spent over four decades as a professor at the University of Saskatchewan[2] where he  sharpened his opinions but evidently felt restrained.[3]  The political scientist[4] saw gentle satire, humour not directed at a specific person and conveyed in plain talk, as a sand box.  A place to play, to be creative, and to express thoughts without sticking to the facts too much or fear of offending.

Ward, whose book Mice in the Beer won the medal in 1961, could make reviewers laugh until they cried[5] with his humourous work and his mastery of that “Gentle Art of Satire,”[6] writing  that seems mild on the surface, but hides a prickly base below the veneer.

Early in Mice in the Beer, he covers himself by stating for the record that this book is “fiction, in the sense that the events and conversations chronicled here did not happen as recorded.”  He certainly enjoyed the free space of funny fiction when mocking his university world.  In his opening piece, “A Meeting of Minds,” Ward explains to a passing workman that musing over an academic article with eyes closed, sitting under a tree is work for a university professor.

 “When I write articles, my wife calls it loafing,” said the man.

But Ward is commended: “For a fellow who never does anything but read books ... you seem to know a lot.”

Gentle, but making a point.  This style of humour flows out of the low-key  prairie voice[7] that Ward says adorns “conversation with homely asides and earthy aphorisms,” is expressed in simple declarative sentences, and enlivened only by references to farm concerns like “bloat, heaves, and various other murrains that disturb our animal friends from time to time.” 

The prairie perspective is not easily impressed and looks at “the banking belts of Toronto and Montreal” and my town of Ottawa with skepticism.  Ward proposes that the winners of federal elections stay home in Saskatchewan because the “losers, being demonstrably less smart than their victorious opponents, could probably be allowed to take their places in Ottawa without damage to the public weal.”  Ward explained that “an Ottawa terrier—(is) a descriptive phrase that must be taken as signifying not a special breed of dog, but a cynical frame of mind” and linked it to alcohol. “Half the business and political history of this country could be told in terms of its alcoholic content,” says a politician in the book.

With this, I squirmed and assumed Ward would suggest that the “Mice” here in Ottawa were the culprits drinking up the nation’s beer. But the rodent reference in his title is not targeted in this way.  A bottle-collector tells Ward that mice crawl into empties, “attracted by the malty smell.” The mice lap up drops, spin around, and expire. Ward loves the intoxicated mouse story because anything that can discredit animals “should be widely publicized, so as to make man seem a little better by comparison.”

He thinks humans need all the help they can get.  His book not only pokes at politicians, Ottawa bureaucrats, and Eastern bankers, but also bird watchers and teachers, pig farmers and cowboys, students and cemetery salesmen, and, persistently, people like Ward himself. By the end, you realize that we are all like the “Mice in the Beer.”  

Canadians - we scurry around, lap up a few drops of delight, act silly, and die.  Not a particularly cheery thought, but if we can find enough drops in life, we can, like the mouse in the bottle, leave this world with a “face .. wreathed in smiles (with) ... ears ... at a rakish angle (and) ...  happy.”   Norman Ward, the serious academic, evidently found his droplets in simple language and the art of writing gentle satire.

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[1] In 1969 Ward was designated as the official biographer of James G. Gardiner, former Premier of Saskatchewan.   In a newspaper review of the Gardiner Biography, Granatstein made these “cow flap” comments.

[2] Norman Ward not only spent most of his career at the University of Saskatchewan, he spent most of his life there.  He died on February 4, 1990 at the age of 71. He had retired in 1985 after 40 years at UofS.  His funeral was held in the University Convocation Hall.

[3] Ward was a busy humour writer during the 1960s and 1970s, writing articles as well as Mice and two follow-up  books, The Fully Processed Cheese, published in 1964, and Her Majesty's Mice in 1977.  But his greatest national recognitions, including election to the Royal Society of Canada, came for his work as a political science and economics researcher. Ward’s Order of Canada only cited his services as an economist and political scientist.

[4] One of Norman Ward’s books, the fourth edition of The Government of Canada (University of Toronto Press) was the first Canadian book to be translated and published into Punjabi.

[5] Laughed until I cried is how the Globe and Mail reviewer Joan Walker described the book.

[6] The Gentle Art of Satire is an expression you don’t hear too often. Google produced just 204 immediate web references for the phrase.  We usually describe “satire” as “biting” or “bitter,” and the Internet will cough up over millions of quick hits for those expressions.

[7] Norman Ward, known as a voice of the prairies and solidly associated with Saskatchewan throughout his career, was, in fact, born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario where he attended university before earning his doctoral degree at the University of Toronto.  The only institutions to recognize him with honorary degrees were Ontario universities McMaster (1974) and Queens (1977).