Canadian Letter [1963]

Kingston, Ontario, is at the north-east end of Lake Ontario at the place where Lake Ontario becomes the St Lawrence River.  For a short period Kingston was the capital of Canada.  But the site was too close to the wicked Americans for safety and a new town (called Bytown, now Ottawa) was invented inland to become the capital.  This accident of history has left us with a splendid courthouse, customs house, and town hall, and a number of beautiful stone houses and farmhouses, mostly Georgian in spirit, dispersed among the clutter of a Victorian town with its more recent split-level outer fringe.  Population about 50,000.  Queen’s University, founded in 1841, has about 3500 students, the number now increasing rapidly.  There are also a number of Army establishments – Royal Military College, National Defence College, Army Staff College, Area Headquarters, RCEME School, and School of Signals; there are sizable industrial plants for nylon and aluminum, and a large complex of federal penitentiaries, and one excellent grocer’s shop.  One side of the city lies along Lake Ontario.  When you look south-westerly towards Oswego (invisible), the eye catches first an absurd little island that looks like the desert mirage of an oasis; actually a cluster of elms growing out of a gravel bank; Snake Island, populated with cormorants, said to be the farthest place from the sea for cormorants to nest; beyond that, nothing but the sky because the lake is wide.  But to the eastward, the beginning of the river is half stopped by large islands which in the next fifty miles downstream break up into the coniferous and granitic Thousand Islands.

It is about a month since we last had snow.  The days are mostly cool still, and until the end of May a clear night will almost certainly be frosty.  But it is possible for the unwary to get a vicious sunburn on a clear day, and the trees are now coming into leaf.  Until a fortnight ago we would hear regularly, at dawn and in the first dark, the geese flying north.  The urgent and tempestuous sound of their wings and feathers and their crack-brained calling often woke us in the morning, but sometimes we would see them in full day, looking delinquent and in a hurry.  Perhaps they prefer to avoid the wide water.  Year after year, spring and autumn, they fly across the town, bound southerly before the winter, and at this time of year heading north for James Bay and the Eastern Arctic.  The flightline varies so little that when a few skeins of geese pass over the commercial part of the town east of our house, we wonder whether they have mistaken their way a little, being such excellent navigators.  Some days ago the flights thinned out, then there were no more.  The end of the migration of geese brings a momentary autumnal regret to the spring.  Last year I was in Wisconsin at this season and saw wild swans for the first time, also bound for the Arctic – birds even more graceful, strong, and mysterious than Yeats makes them, when you actually see a hundred or more of them approaching to land.  We never see the swans here, perhaps because there are no shallow thaw-ponds of the kind they need for resting places.  I am told that it is the young who lead the flights, not the old and experienced.  These rhythmic passages are a twice-yearly delight and reminder and accusation: these birds are the last free people in the world.

I find it difficult to imagine a country where the leaves do not all fall together in one season, and where there is no clearly marked rhythm of winter and summer, warm and cold.  But New Zealand was brought closer than it looks in the atlases by a visit paid to us by Antony Alpers.  As guest of the Canada Council, he made his headquarters at the University of British Columbia and made visits to eastern Canada to meet students and to talk about his work.  It is not for me to introduce Antony Alpers to New Zealanders.  He spent a week at Queen’s University and spoke to students and professors about the problems and accidents of literary biography, to students about Maori legends, and to biologists and all comers about dolphins.

What interested students most about Mr Alpers, they said, was that he was obviously not a ‘professor’.  A distinction so subtle and positive is interesting, if unnerving, to those who care to look at themselves through the wrong end of a telescope.  Students hear a good many lectures in the course of an academic year; some of the lecturers are well-informed, a few are eloquent, one or two have charm.  The students were making their distinction against that background.  They sensed at once that a writer was ‘different’; that his values were more direct if less judicious than the academic, that his way of mind though firm is heuristic; simplicity, courage, gaiety were the words that recurred.  The writer, they guessed, had actually more at stake; the danger affected his attitude and poise.  I found myself wondering whether, by contrast, academics are much capable of unaffected merriment, and whether we show often enough an unabashed enthusiasm for the material they are working with.  Self-conscious Canadians are passing (–again, perhaps?) through a phase of high cultural seriousness at present; we try to turn everything to an instructive or improving purpose, and naturally the tone at times becomes hectoring and punitive.  Students (though too polite to say this plainly) felt at once that Antony Alpers, without intending to do so, accused the professors of superficiality and earnestness, simply by what he was and how he worked and the way he looked at his work.

As a memento of his visit, Antony Alpers left me a copy of the Caxton Press Printing Types: A Second Specimen Book, 1948.  Typography is a relatively new extension of the Canadian conscience.  There is now a professional association in Toronto, some of the designers very accomplished and with sound European experience.  The most aggressive and prolific, as in any art, are inclined to be coarse or slick.  But one at least – Allan Fleming – is scholarly and fastidious; profoundly inventive, his work is always marked by the refined simplicity of intelligence.  He recently made a simple two-letter monogram for the Canadian National Railways which – repeated now all over the country – has set many people, as an alternative to debased heraldry, doodling in sans serif.  But there has not yet been issued in Canada, as far as I know, a specimen book so affectionate, witty, and literate as the Caxton Book; nor indeed have I seen its like anywhere else.

The Canadian Letter I wrote to Landfall in 1960 had its beginnings in Saskatoon.  Saskatoon has since seen the first official establishment of a principle long axiomatic with you: that government has a responsibility to see that all people are insured at reasonable rates against medical disaster.  The Saskatchewan government passed legislation providing for a government medical insurance scheme, to which all citizens of the province were to contribute, and which all doctors were to serve.  The medical profession reacted in a way that is allowed by law only to a union – they went on strike.  The Saskatchewan government kept their heads and stuck to their guns and the doctors went grumbling back to work after a time though they continue to repeat on all possible occasions that the government scheme is ‘a failure’.  The medical profession, as publicly represented by the officers of the medical association, has left the unfortunate impression that – as a group – they are wealthy, voracious, intransigent, and in political matters ill-informed and a little naive.  The campaign to resist legislation has been in progress for some time, and must have been quite expensive: it makes standard use of slogans, half-truths, and incomplete comparisons; and relies much upon ambiguous and often irrelevant repetition of such phrases as ‘government interference’, ‘the doctor-patient relationship’, ‘the sacred right of the patient to choose his own doctor’.  It is difficult not to regard the doctors’ campaign as irrational and retrogressive; certainly it is not disinterested and has some of the desperation of a last-ditch stand.  A social historian would find, I think, that the doctors’ defiance of government in Saskatchewan and its plans to extend their defiance elsewhere, has taken some of the bloom off the carefully cultivated Madison-Avenue-TV-Serial ‘image’ of the doctor as beneficent, wise, generous, self-denying, omniscient.  It will be interesting to see the redeployment of the same motives under slightly different slogans now that Ontario is introducing legislation to protect its citizens against medical disaster.  In a ‘free’ society, all causes must sail under the flag of ‘freedom’, otherwise you could too easily tell your enemies from your friends.

An interesting conflict arose this year between the recently formed ‘private’ television ring called CTV and the national system called CBC, with the independent BBG (Board of Broadcast Governors) acting as uneasy umpire between them.  In Canada the word ‘private’ means ‘devoted to profit’; that is, a ‘private’ broadcaster is one primarily interested in selling advertising, or one who uses his broadcasting facilities primarily as a medium for advertising.  The logic of advertising is primitive and arcane and tends not to coincide with cultural or social values.  One of the red-letter days in the calendar of Canadian Secular Rituals is the final play-off in professional rugby football for the Gray Cup in December.  To see the Gray Cup Game is an imperative that nobody is allowed to decline: the broadcasting rights are therefore matter for close commercial scrutiny.  Traditionally the CBC, as a national system, has carried the Gray Cup Game as a national necessity.  This year CTV managed to outbid the CBC for the television rights of the Gray Cup Game.  CTV, who have only limited network facilities at their command, assumed that since all Canadians must have Gray Cup coverage the CBC would have to carry the Gray Cup Game complete; in this way CTV would secure that all the advertising built into the programme would be carried for them on the CBC Transcanada network, and the ‘private’ principle of ‘advertising before all’ would be endorsed by the austere and detached national corporation.  The CBC were not content to have so obvious a pistol held to their heads.  In the course of tense negotiations, the BBG instructed the CBC that they would have to take the broadcast complete in whatever form CTV gave it to them.  The CBC replied – properly, many thought – that they were under no obligation to accept advertising negotiated by CTV and that they would if necessary, pick up the broadcast with their own equipment and rebroadcast it without the advertising.  In the end the game was broadcast in two versions, one by CTV with advertising interspersed, one by the CBC with only ‘courtesy advertising’.  It is not difficult to imagine which version most people watched.

Part of the difficulty is that the CBC, originally deriving all its revenue in the same way as the BBC from government grants and licenses, was at one stage instructed to earn from advertising some of the cost of its operations.  This was announced as a temporary measure, but like the temporary government measure of systematically diluting all whisky and other spirits, it has become permanent through failure to rescind.  The ‘private’ broadcasters never tire of complaining of unfair competition from the CBC: that is, the CBC is accused of taking advertising revenue that might otherwise go by default to private broadcasters.  The association of private broadcasters now announce that they intend to bite the hand that has so far somewhat lavishly fed them – the BBG; they will, they say, receive direction from nobody; nothing but absolute freedom is good enough for them.  But much of this is sheer fantasy, acceptable only to a bemused or brain-washed public.  As far as broadcasting is concerned, there is no competition between CBC and CTV: private broadcasters do virtually no serious programming, certainly nothing that can compare with even the run-of-the-mill CBC productions.  CBC spends money on programming and private broadcasters do not.  The CBC is one of the few national efforts that has reached and maintained a level of excellence: some hold that it is just about the only distinctive Canadian achievement in the past quarter-century.  When the CBC was founded, it was intended to help establish and clarify ‘the national identity’.  When the CBC introduced full-scale television, at very short notice some five or six years ago, the object was to secure the integrity of the Canadian air, which – in the definition of successive Royal Commissions – belongs to the Canadian people and not to the advertising industry.  Private broadcasters, whose concern is for revenue and therefore wish to obliterate all national distinction, complain that the CBC receives money from state sources, is ‘paid for’ by the Canadian people, and therefore should not ‘compete’ for revenue with the ‘private’ broadcasters who have to ‘pay their own way’.  This argument neglects the fact that the Canadian people also pay for ‘private’ broadcasting by having to pay, one way and another, every penny that is spent on advertising.  Some recent analyses of the hidden cost of ‘free enterprise’ in this area suggest that we pay a very high price for a very questionable product; and certainly everybody is obliged to pay unwittingly and indiscriminately which is not true of payments from state sources.  When private TV stations were first licensed they made pronouncements, even promises, about serious and responsible programming; but to fulfil such a promise would be not only expensive but contrary to the basic principles of ‘private’ broadcasting.  Advertisers know that they inflict incurable wounds by giving continuous offence; by definition the ‘private’ programme should be a kind of mild narcotic, rather like the doped coffee the Gestapo used to feed to its victims between beatings.  Underneath the high talk about free enterprise, freedom of the press, what the people want, and the virtues of competition, the question arises whether a civilized society will allow indefinitely the cynical and irresponsible exploitation of media of communication.  This is not a question of censorship but of privacy and the right of protection against malicious nuisance.  One quick and easy way of finding out whether a broadcaster is serious about broadcasting is to tax the advertising.  Another related question is whether we can afford indefinitely the rising costs of the vast parasitic industries of advertising and packaging.  But there are no signs that we are ready, as individuals or as a society, to face these questions just yet.

In a lapidary’s workshop the other day I saw a notice: LOOK ALIVE.  YOU COULD BE REPLACED BY A BUTTON.  Only a low-grade intelligence can be replaced by a button; no machine will replace a man who can do anything better than a machine.  We are not in danger of being ‘taken over’ by machines; but we are in danger of losing our way.  We still have to find out how to use machines so that we don’t waste intelligence, time, patience, and intuition; and then we have to find out how to use ourselves.  I think there is a growing but subterranean awareness of issues as radical as this.  During the recent federal election campaign, one had the feeling that some of the old unexamined notions of the virtues of political parties and partisan politics were being questioned.  At some political meetings – not least of all in Kingston (I am embarrassed to report) when the Prime Minister was the main speaker – students made such an uproar that the speaker could not be heard.  These unorganized outbursts were deplorable, a breach of good manners, a defiance of elementary democratic principle.  Yet they were widespread and apparently spontaneous and may represent something other than callous disrespect for propriety.  Did they represent a growing suspicion that we are outgrowing the era of snake-cure sellers and the cult of the irrational?  Have we grown disenchanted with the traditional circus performances – the clown and dancing dogs, the fat lady and the games of chance?  Can it be that we would, on the whole, prefer – if we could get it – government by intelligence, skill, compassion?

Kingston, 12 May