Mariposa
Podcast
INTERVIEW
Orm
Mitchell (OM)
Yeah,
he did influence quite a few people. I think he felt, in terms of his career,
he had a number of irons in the fire. He considered himself an actor in his
30s. He did a lot of little theatre. And then secondly, when he got writing,
obviously with Who has Seen the Wind, which was a major, major book that came out in
1947. It was published by Little brown in the States and Macmillan in Canada. That
book has had an extremely long shelf life. In fact, right now my wife and I
just finished reading the first proofs for a special 75th anniversary
edition of Who has Seen the Wind that will come out this November, and
it uses the Kurelek illustrations. I
believe there’s eight color and 32 black and white. In preparing that, it was
amazing for me to see how this book has continued. Just in fact, at one point,
I believe it was when the Kurelek M&S edition came up, which was the first edition
to go back and publish the full-length version of Who has Seen the Wind. When
it was published in 1947, the Little Brown editor had made something like seven
or eight thousand words in cuts. But Macmillan
went ahead with the W.O.’s preferred version. And it was my wife, in fact, who
discovered this when we were in the early stages of collecting material for the
biography, and we had gotten an edited copy, they sent us a copy of the
manuscript. And it was amazing what she found. As a result of what she found,
Douglas Gibson agreed to publish that full length version, with the
illustrations by Kurelek in 91.
DBD (DBD)
Were
the edits given to it by Little Brown aimed at de-Canadianizing the story?
O.M.
There
was a number of things that they didn't like – like all the references to the
wind, and they cut out whole paragraphs. Who has Seen the Wind is very
poetic and richly textured prose. And so he wrote to his editor at one point to
say,” hey, look I'm not doing a weather report here. These references to the
wind and so on are for atmosphere and are quite deliberate.” And he managed to
get some of the cuts that they originally wanted to do back in. But the M&S
version has many more passages that weren't in that first one. The book has
gone through, I don't know, how many editions, you know, it's into the 20s,
DBD
I read
the cumulative sales in Canada exceeded a million Is that correct?
O.M.
That's
right. It's, you know, it's past the million mark now. And, and that's just in
Canada. Now, it's one of those books, I think that will just simply keep going
on and on. And to come back to the Leacock awards that he got the first one for
the 1961 Jake and the Kid stories, and then 91 I believe it was, According
to Jake and the Kid, those stories
have a long shelf life to go back to your first question about the impact that
he had on other writers. So he thought of himself as an actor and a writer. He also was a teacher, and he, in fact, was
principal of two different schools during the early 40s. And he filled in, in fact, to teach in, in I
think, was around 1949, at the High River high school. My wife's mother,
Dorothy Mae, was pregnant. And so she had to leave the school and W.O. taught
for her for eight months, and he loved teaching. And then of course, he did, he
started the writing program at Banff, and he was head of it, I think, for close
to 10 years. And then, as you said, he was Writer-in-Residence at numerous
universities across Canada, the last one and the main one, the University of
Windsor. He was there for something like eight or nine years.
DBD
Trent was
one of them as well, I think.
O.M.
Yeah. He taught at Trent for, I think it was it was more one or two week things. But he was
 |
W.O. |
writer in residence at York, at Toronto, at Calgary, and others. And he took very, very seriously his role as a teacher of creative writing. And the reason for this is that he had a very significant person looking over his shoulder when he was first beginning. During the 30s, he tried to publish numerous short stories and failed. He met my mom in 1939 at a swimming pool. Well, actually, he just sold a set of encyclopedias to her mother, and he came by to deliver them and it was my mom who met him at the door. And he fell for her right away. And he noticed her a few weeks later at the swimming pool; she was teaching kids how to swim. He was the lifeguard, and it was mum who introduced him to a guy at the University of Alberta - F.M. Salter. He was a Renaissance scholar. And he had a creative writing course that he did for the Department of Education at the University of Edmonton. So, Dad didn't actually take it; he sat in on it, and Salter worked with him. Salter read some of his stuff and realized here's talent, and he spent a lot of time on him, and it was Salter, in fact, who played a key role in the Jake and The Kid short stories starting in 1941. And it was Salter who acts as a kind of agent – W.O. referred to him his agent sans 10%. He shilled for W.O. and got him that first publication in Maclean's magazine and it was a Jake and the Kid short story.
DBD
So, in
1941, he was not established as a writer per se?
O.M.
Oh,
not at all. In fact, it was Salter, who was seeding the ground and was, you
know, preparing him and worked with him for close to five or six years on the
manuscript of Who has Seen the Wind. W.O. would write stuff and Salter
would send it back. And it was Salter, in fact, who made the contact with the
editors down in the States. Really neat story, Salter wrote to the editor of
Atlantic Monthly, and it was through his correspondence and complaining about
how terrible one of the stories in Atlantic Monthly was and saying he had some
writers who had better stories. And the editor wrote back and said, “Well send
some to me.” And so he sent W.O.’s and that's how he got a short story
published in Atlantic Monthly. It was 42 or 43. I can't remember the exact
date. And it was a section or a story from Who has Seen the Wind, and the story was called the Owl and the
Pound. And it was that short story being published that then led to Atlantic
Monthly’s coterie press Little Brown getting interested in W.O.’s stuff and
ending up publishing Who has Seen the Wind in 1947.
DBD
In those
years, he also sold a story to Maclean's on the Jake and the Kid
O.M.
That's right, in fact, the first Jake and the Kid story was 1941. MacLean's loved them, and ended up publishing six during the 40s and others later on. So, there are 10 short stories – Jake and the Kid short stories that ended up being published in Maclean's and that's where the audience first started to build for these stories.
DBD
Then
your dad moved to Toronto to take up the job with Maclean's.
OM
That's
right. And then when he became editor, fiction editor at MacLean’s, he
made a point of reading anything that came in from Canadian writers. That stuff
that came, as they said, over the transom; there was stuff that came from established
writers who would come in and get published, but there was stuff that came over
the transom. And in fact, one of the stories that came over the transom, and it
was read by mum first and she said to dad, hey, look at this, and it was Ernest
Buckler, and it was the story that Ernest Buckler ended up publishing, Penny
in the Dust, a beautiful little story. To come back to my original train of
thought, because of Salter’s help. He felt that he had to kind of pass on the
baton. He felt that it was part of his responsibility as a serious writer to
pass on whatever advice he could to younger, beginning writers.
DBD
Well,
I'd like to talk a bit about Jake and the Kid stories. Of course, it's
all intertwined with your dad's career and in the success of his other works.
Did he have a relationship with a hired man when he was young or was there
something he witnessed?
OM
Jake is based on a composite of a number of
people: one of them was his Uncle Jim, who appears In Who has Seen the Wind
as Brian's uncle, and another one was Jack Kelly, who was our next-door
neighbor in High River. And there were also characters that he had met during
the dirty 30s because he worked on threshing crews and did various odd jobs in
order to survive.
DBD
I read
in one of the bios that he spent a time is what they called a hobo. Is that true
– did he ride the rails?
OM
Yeah,
he did. And, in fact, he rode the rails out to Montreal and got on board a
Greek tramp steamer. And this is in the year after his first year at university
at Winnipeg, in the early 30s . In 1931. And he went over to Europe, and he
hiked around Europe and he did various jobs over there. He was a lifeguard, and
he was in France a lot. And then when he came back, he did continue his university.
He was one course short of his degree at that point, when he went to Calgary. He sold sheet music, sheet
advertisement, radio advertisement, he sold magazines, you know, door to door.
DBD
And encyclopedias
to your mother's mother.
OM
Encyclopedias.
That was one of the last things he did. He sold insurance. He sold oil well,
royalties. He lived in Calgary and Edmonton, mainly in Calgary about this
point.
DBD
All
that speaks to an experience that would be rich to be mined for the kind of
stories you read in Jake and the Kid.
OM
Yeah,
yeah, for sure. And he knew that farm rural life really well. You know as a kid
at his uncle's place. And also during the thirties, he quite often was working
on threshing crews. He was also doing a lot of lifeguarding. He was the head of
the pool, lifeguarding at the Hanna swimming pool. And there's a funny story. They
set up this gala where people had to pay to come in, and he's making money
doing this with another guy. They did this. They did diving shows and so on.
They had this horse costume. And that guy that he was working with was the hind
end and W.O was the front end. And they would go up on the high board, the
three-metre board, and drive off the board.
DBD
Yeah,
I think I saw a picture of that. Did you have a photo of that horse?
OM
That's
right. I think it's in the biography.
DBD
So,
this bouillabaisse of experience - working on threshing crews and having an
actor's bent. And then of course, his education. And you can see it all coming
together in the theatre of those stories that made great radio as well as
books. When I read the first one, it was, I believe, entirely written in the
voice of the boy.
OM
Yep,
the Kid. Most of them were a first person that Kid told; there are a few that
are Jake
DBD
I was
going to ask you about that - do you know of any reason why he did adopt Jake's
voice? Or is it just a specific story seemed to lend it to it.
OM
I'm
not sure, The ones that Jake narrates are not as effective, I think, as
stories. He had a real knack for getting in the head of a kid. And he gets
inside that kid. And you see that world from the Kid's point of view. And it
was Salter who said to him, you know, you're good with kids and that rural
world. Salter had sent off to MacLean's
to try to get them to publish a story called Eva and Annie. And it's a story
based on the incident in Who has Seen the Wind when they were going to
hit Pit over the head with a hammer and the kid Brian gets very upset. And it's
a really neat story but MacLean’s turned it down. But they said they
wanted to see more stuff. And Salter said, you know, you’re really good with
the kid and why don't you do a story where you've got a hired man and the kid.
And then so W.O. took it and ran with it. And that's how Jake started. Now he'd
already done some stories involving a character called Jake - there was one entitled
called Jake and Frobisher. We never we never were able to find it. He probably
threw it out. But he had already done some work. And he had a real ear for
voices and for dialogue. Oh, and the other thing that Salter said, you know,
and there's nobody has done once with the tall tale thing. Why don't you play
around with that? That's absolutely central to the Jake and the Kid
short stories. The tall tale.
DBD
I
think it was in the first book that there's an episode called the Liar Hunter.
OM
That's
right.
DBD
It
talks about why we tell tall tales and exaggerate – it’s because we're trying
to diminish the things that we fear.
OM
That's
right. Yeah. And that's a central story. And it's no mistake that it happens to
be the centre story because it is the center and one of the things that's
working throughout Jake and the Kid when you look at them as a group of
stories, it was subtitled a novel by Macmillan, which is not the case. It's
more like a collection of short stories around the same characters. It's kind
of like Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women or Margaret Lawrence's A
Bird in the House where they're separate stories. They were published
separately, sometimes years apart. But they gel when you put them together,
there's something added to the whole. And one of the things that is added here in
this group of stories is about the education of the imagination about the
education of the Kid’s imagination, and there are two poles; there's Jake,
who's telling his tall tale stories, lies, and then there's Miss Henchbaw, who
wants the absolute pure truth. And what the Kid realizes, as a reader realizes,
is that tall stories are built on facts. But they are a story that is built on
facts then lies in order to take the reader, the creative partner reader, in
and explore universal truths. So, it's kind of, you know, you move from bits
and pieces of factual things, sensory images, and so on. You move from that to
a lie, an overall lie such as you know, the buffalo jumping or Jake saying
that, you know, he wrestled Louis Riel and three times made him say uncle each
time, once in French, once in Cree, and once in English, but it then takes you
further to exploring universal human truths about what it is to be human about
how we maybe could live our lives in a better way. That's the kind of drift.
DBD
That's
really interesting to hear you say that. I think I sensed what you just said but
I don't know if I congealed it in my own mind. My favorite book is Don
Quixote - that interface between the real and the imagined too - it's that
sweet spot where you move back and forth.
So,
the stories that were written for Jake and the Kid were they radio
scripts?
OM
The first ones were short
stories that were published in MacLean’s. And as I said, I think there
was something like six that were published in the 40s. After that, it was Harry
J. Boyle at the CBC who came to Dad when he was fiction editor at MacLean's
and said, you know, these would make a great radio series. Why don't you do
that? And Dad had to be persuaded. And it was John Drainie and his wife, who
played Jake and Ma, who, when they heard this and heard W.O. tell the story and
said “Yeah, this would be good.” And so the Kid was played by Billy Mae
Richards. And it was neat, because her first name Billy suggests that it is a
male actually. And it was a closely kept secret at CBC for years, like the
Jake and the Kid series around for at least six years. And then there were
repeats in later years and series with new actors. Billy Mae was always the one
who was playing the Kid. And gee she was a neat lady. I remember when Barb and
I interviewed her at her retirement home, she just sounded like, you know, she could
do the Kid's voice just like that. And the Kid has some very poetic prose at
times, and I remember her saying she just loved it when she got those long
passages and would start to read them. And then music would come in in the
background, and it would lift you up. And it was just so wonderful for her to
read those passages.
DBD
It
sounds so authentic. I remember thinking when I was reading Jake and the Kid
material the first time how the Kid would use metaphors like he compared the
fighting roosters to wind up toys or the color of the colt was like pull Taffy -
you know it was apt metaphors, but yet something that you could actually imagine
kids saying,
OM
There is one that I was just looking at earlier
this morning, where he's talking about being on the prairie, and how it gets so
still and how there's the silence. And it's as if you hit your elbow and your
elbow went numb. And there are these wonderful images that kids often come up
with. I remember when Dad was teaching high school at New Dayton, and he asked
the kids what does it pig's nose look like? And one kid says it looks like a
milk bottle. And there was that ability to see something and bring words to it
that makes the image immediately click – in Who has Seen the Wind, he
describes the grandmother, the backs of her hands and that the veins that look
like earthworms. And he has such a knack for that. And he ascribes that to the
Kids so that the Kid comes up with some of these really lovely poetic images,
the way in which he sees things.
DBD
So
just to clarify, those stories that originally appeared in Maclean's
inspired Harry J. Boyle, who, by the way, was a double Leacock medal winner
himself.
OM
Yes.
DBD
… to
approach your dad and then we had a whole raft of radio scripts in the 50s.
That initial Leacock medal winning book was mined from those or was there anything
specifically so?
OM
So,
the original Leacock collection that came out I think it was in 61 I believe,
there's 10 and they were all published as short stories in Maclean's or Liberty
also published a couple.
DBD
The According
to Jake and the Kid ones, did they have similar …?
OM
Okay, According
to Jake and the Kid ones. Elbow room
was the first one in it. And that was
the very first short story – Jake and the Kid story W.O. wrote. And so
that's as it appeared in Maclean's magazine. But then he had to rewrite a
number of those stories because they were originally written as radio plays.
And so he had to go the other way. So, with the first original Jake and the Kid
CBC series, a lot of those early episodes, were simply taking what he had
published as short stories and turn them into a radio play.
DBD
An then
According to Jake and the Kid was the other way around?
OM
Most of
the ones in According to Jake and the Kid were the other way around.
DBD
Okay,
so for the Leacock Medal pantheon, it makes for an appropriate kind of
combination – the different stages in the Jake and the Kid stories.
Yeah. Well, it's an honor to talk to you. It's not just fun, but also
interesting that the 75th of Who has Seen the Wind is coinciding with
the 75th of the Leacock Medal. Interesting year in Canadian literature. Yeah, worthy
of celebration.