Lesson
44
Regional
histories with national appeal
When Writing in the Rain by Howard White floated to the top of my
Leacock Medal reading list, I assumed its stories of salmon, steamboats, and
rainforests would remind me of how much I miss British Columbia.
When it comes to passion for the West Coast,
it’s hard to match Howard White. He has pretty much dedicated his life to a
celebration of the province and its people. After school and a few years of
bouncing around on bulldozers and backhoes, White[3]
settled on the coast near Pender Harbour, where he not only started a family
but also gave birth to Harbour Publishing, the enterprise that, in turn,
brought hundreds of BC authors and thousands of BC stories into the world. The
Order of Canada, the Order of B.C., and many industry awards have recognized
White, the publisher, as the champion of B.C. regional histories.
Writing in the Rain exemplifies the subject
matter, but it differs because publisher White wrote this book himself. It’s an
anthology of essays that do exactly what I assumed they would. They serve up
starfish, hermit crabs, and otters and use terms like “throw it out in the
chuck,” “gyppo loggers,” “haywire,” and the “big cumpney’s running the show,”
which I don’t hear elsewhere and always associate with British Columbia.
But instead of making me wistful, the
stories usually prompted thoughts of places and people that I encountered after
moving away. Now being more elsewhere than of BC, I see White’s coastal
characters as just a particular flavour of personalities found in many parts of
Canada.
White’s comical story of trucking fish
guts around the coast, which recalled my BC
experience, could be easily
recreated with the entrails of other animals in other locales; his essay on
astronomy and tides, while important to the BC coast, touches a global
curiosity; and his encounters with aboriginal youth in the BC interior could be
restaged easily in Northern Ontario or Quebec. The loggers and fishermen who
wrote poetry, sang songs, and told stories reminded me of “versifying” Ottawa
Valley farmers, and White’s story of the Easthope marine engine sounds a lot
like Farley Mowat’s adventures off the East Coast.
Yet Howard White would have a hard
time accepting the suggestion that British Columbia is anything but unique. He
finds little parallel, for example, in Newfoundland: “one of the bleaker places
human beings have chosen to stand” with towns “like lichen clinging to the
crevices of a huge windswept boulder.” In the rocks, trees, and ocean of the BC
coast, on the other hand, he sees beauty that gives him a “shivery old feeling”
of “mystery and wonder.” White has probably eaten more than his share of lotus
fruit.
Of course, many writers aspire to tell
stories about a specific locale that speak to universals, and this
commitment-to-BC feature of Writing in
the Rain probably points to White’s strengths rather than a parochialism or
fault. I don’t think you can find a technique or trick to achieve this effect.
It probably flows, when it flows, naturally from a writer’s fascination with
regional history and caring about the people. This leads into a humanity that
can touch everyone everywhere and, in this case, a national audience.
Another challenge I had in studying Writing in the Rain was the question of
how it rated a humour award. White was not particularly funny in this book.
The chapters that brought me closest
to laughing were those that relied, not on White’s words, but oral histories
told by old timers. I’d never think of terms like “booze kitten” or “Holy
Mexican Jesus” unless I’d first read them here. These stories reminded me to
quote other authors when I can--and that none of us is as funny as all of us.
But, as with several other books, the
humour of this one may rest in something unspoken. It’s the presumption that British
Columbia does not have a culture and history worth documenting: a hypothesis
that does not do well in the face of this book and that constitutes a pervasive
incongruity. If such a view ever held sway among Eastern elites, it’s been
disrupted over the decades in large part by the work of Howard White and
Harbour Publishing, which, in turn, makes the book even less humorous today and
its Leacock award more ironic.
Those thoughts give me a headache, yet
they’re all I have. Perhaps I should go back into the closet, talk to myself,
and think of the B.C. coast some more.
Writing Exercise
Record
interviews with three people over the age of eighty-five about life in the late
1940s. Transcribe them and use the words as dialogue in a story about an
unemployed writer set in 2014.