I
saw Robert for the last time in the fall of 1973. He had just passed his 23rd birthday.
We
sat on the porch, drank a beer, looked out on the fields, and talked about his
plan to move out west with some new friends, a group of people who didn’t mind
being called “hippies” and didn’t care much about the laws around drugs. Their plans begged refinement.
Bob and his friends wanted to get a cabin
somewhere in B.C.’s Slocan Valley. They
weren’t sure where it was, what it would cost to rent, or whether it
existed. Bob was certain of one thing
though.
“It
won’t have any electricity,” he said. “So we’re sellin’ all the amps and
electric guitars to get acoustic ones.”
Just
finishing university and beginning what I believed would be my career I wasn’t
sure what to make of Bob’s plans and his new friends. I didn’t see him, our high school
valedictorian and most promising academic, fitting in, and I laughed at the
thought that the transition to acoustic music could be his prime concern. Bob disappeared in November. His body surfaced in Lake Ontario early the
next year.
The
Promised Land: a novel of Cape Breton, the book that won the Leacock Medal for
2014, brought back this memory, but also allowed me to imagine a different
ending to Bob’s life. The book tells the story of another group of hippies leaving Ontario for another end of
the country in the early 1970s. The
characters in this story identify Cape Breton Island as the place to live based
upon some light conversation. The
group included the same mix of male, female, naïve and wary that sat on Bob’s
porch near Port Perry that fall day forty years ago. Their relocation to the east coast opens the book.
I read The Promised Land a few times: a second one to make
sure I got the connections between the hippie first half of the story and the
not-so-flower-child second phase. But when I picked up the book for a third time, I wanted to look specifically for the voice of
Bill Conall, the author. I attended the
Leacock Banquet to hear his acceptance speech in June of this year, and I was struck
by his comfort in front of the crowd, his particular sense of humour, and his
message.
While
the Leacock Medal by its nature may attract exceptions to the rule, writers usually
make better typers than talkers, and given that Conall can describe himself as
“a cranky old man who lives in the woods and rarely talks to people,” I kept my
entertaining speaker expectations in check before the dinner.
But,
as I learned later, Conall has stood facing wary audiences many times as a
musician over the years.
That
night on the shores of Lake Couchiching, he used his skill to make a passionate
plea for humour as an art form distinct from just clowning and joking. For
Conall, humour is “gentle, forgiving, kind, understanding” - something that
takes time to develop and reach into your soul. Something different than the
“slash and burn of comedy.”
Yet,
he seems to have a capacity to appreciate the latter as well. In his speech, he poked impromptu fun at the
Leacock Medal sponsor the TD Bank, made the audience laugh by telling an old
joke in Gaelic, and responded to the presumed question about plans for his
prize money with “mostly none of your business” before adding that it will fund
a short story competition for high school students back in Nova Scotia.
 |
| Lake Couchiching from Geneva Park - Hour before Conall Speech |
Some
of the hippies find work, most make friends, and almost all settle on the
Island for good. The last part of the book follows, for the most part, a young
doctor, Ellen Coulter, coming to Cape Breton to work in 2012. Unlike the group
of odd-looking and dubious strangers that arrived forty years earlier, the
doctor is alone and has something obvious to offer the community.
The Promised Land shows not the differences, but the similarities in their challenges and in the cautious, sometimes comical, but orderly integration of an outsider into a community and how each adapts and absorbs influences from the other. The feature that elevates Conall’s collection above other gentle stories set in small towns comes from this two part approach that forces you to think, compare, and maybe, like me, re-read.
The Promised Land shows not the differences, but the similarities in their challenges and in the cautious, sometimes comical, but orderly integration of an outsider into a community and how each adapts and absorbs influences from the other. The feature that elevates Conall’s collection above other gentle stories set in small towns comes from this two part approach that forces you to think, compare, and maybe, like me, re-read.
The book
might frustrate those looking for edgy jokes, wrenching drama, or more action. But the slower
approach gives you a window on what makes a community work, when it does work,
and viewing this phenomenon unfold over decades makes you smile.
Community
might make a good default theme for a work of humour. Certainly, a lot of the Leacock Medal winning
books have looked at the nature of small Canadian communities - from the
mythical prairie towns of Blossum in Gophers Don’t Pay Taxes and Winego in The
Night We stole the Mountie's Car to the sea-sprayed town of The Salt Box, the
Fort Vermillion that surrounded the childhood of the Ferguson brothers, and
W.P. Kinsella’s Hobbema Reserve.
In
his speech at the 2014 Leacock banquet, Conall suggested that in the smaller
towns “every voice matters; every person is important.” But I think the history of Leacock Medal
humour shows that this can be achieved in bigger towns too - if those voices
and individuals are situated within a smaller entity like the tiny Jewish
community in the Sault Ste. Marie of Morley Torgov’s Good Place to Come from
youth or in the varied Montreal sub-cultures profiled in Saturday Night at the
Bagel Factory.
In
forms like army platoons and hockey teams, community shines bright in other
Leacock Medal books, echoing their spiritual inspiration, the Mariposa of Sunshine Sketches.
“Mariposa
is not a real town,” Leacock prefaced his book. “On the contrary, it is about
seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to
the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same
churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of the land of hope.”
Community
and social responsibility sat at the core of Stephen Leacock’s outlook on life and
his works according to scholar Gerald Lynch, who saw the humorist’s philosophy
of life as one that valued “moderate, painstaking progress” and balanced “the
needs of the interdependent community against the rights of the individual.”
So,
The Promised Land does not offend the Leacock Medal tradition, but its win
raises the question of whether it might not be time for the award to shift to
an edgier perspective and harsher approach to humour writing. As someone of Bill Conall’s generation and
one who could even pass as a Conall Clone in a bad toupee (we even share the Peterborough/Kwartha country connection - see Chronicle Herald story), I admit a bias for
the gentle, persevering kind of humour that often gets overlooked in other fora
and think that community makes a worthy focus for humour writing.
The
reason that someone filled with wit and exuberance, like my friend Robert,
might take his own life or, like others today, might head off to another land
to take the lives of others will always have elements of the mysterious. But
one cause seems to be a feeling of not fitting in, not belonging, not having a
community of support.
In
a world torn by forces that divide us and amplify differences, reading and
reflecting on a book like The Promised Land, though branded as humour, might be
best justified by the prospect of insights into what makes a community tick,
not just the hope of another laugh or occasion to smile. But then, according to
Leacock, humour is all about kinship, contemplation, and reconciling our incongruities.
September 2014
