He seemed like a nice enough guy, but so did Ted Bundy from all accounts. And it wasn’t like Bread Loaf was short on desperadoes. It was a writers’ conference, after all. Charlie Manson could have hidden in plain sight. Still, here I was, following this guy across campus in the middle of the night to see something he just had to show me.

It started after dinner, up at the gathering place they call the Barn. Wine flowed for a buck a cup and jangled enthusiasm a whole lot cheaper. Even people who didn’t know each other seemed to know each other, their shared exuberance as contagious as it was creepy.

I retreated to the sidelines, fell in with the wallflowers. We swapped credentials, chronicled the despair, rejection, hope and colourful brochures that had brought each of us to Bread Loaf. Before you knew it, our exuberance was as contagious and creepy as the best of them.

I was quick to mention how I’d studied with Mordecai Richler and Clark Blaise, but the name-dropping got me nowhere. Screw that. I switched to Plan B: Paraded my short story sales to magazines like Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories and Realms of Fantasy, capping the rundown with consecutive appearances in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Hardcover, yet! My newfound writing pals appeared not unimpressed, especially Lyle, an IT manager from Georgia. No, I may not have been the stuff of Kirkus or Kenyon, but at least I’d been paid for my fiction. Not just in contributors’ copies either, but real bucks. Cheques! Cash you could buy things with. Toaster ovens, iPods, organic bananas. Yup, these eleven days at Bread Loaf were shaping up to be mighty swell. The self-doubt. The loathing. The chronic schadenfreude . . . All would be left behind. Unlike most of these wannabes, I was a published author and way ahead of the game, even if I’d yet to sell a novel. That’s when Lyle patted me on the knee, invited me to step outside. “I gotta show you something,” he said, his words a tad too moist upon my ear. “It’s in my car. Over at the lot.”

“Huh?” The last time a man had patted my knee and invited me into his car had been in the 70s, during my hitchhiking days in Vancouver. It had not gone well.

It was dark, the moon nowhere near as bright as I expected on a summer night among the Green Hills of Vermont. Robert Frost had exaggerated, if not outright lied.

Regrets surfaced. If only I’d listened to my mother, memorized the Reader’s Digest article she had clipped for me: How to Escape from the Trunk of a Car.

Lyle popped the rear of his Civic. A pair of Joe Boxers flopped onto the gravel. Jeez! If this didn’t bear the earmarks of a nut job, what did? Sweatpants, shirts, underwear, socks and assorted flip-flops mushroomed from the trunk, side to side and top to bottom. It was enough to give an FBI profiler a case of the giggles.

“I left in a hurry,” Lyle explained.

He kneeled on the bumper, dove into his wardrobe. Whatever he needed to show me was well buried.

I braced, waffling as to how I might handle the assault, deflect the blade of his combat Bowie, neutralize his TEC-9. Damn! Why hadn’t I listened to David Morrell, not only a professor of English at the University of Iowa, but author of First Blood and creator of Rambo, too. His Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing had stressed the importance of learning stuff outside your comfort zone, the need to make summer vacations meaningful. He’d gone to the G. Gordon Liddy Academy, for God’s sake: “The instructors were ex-CIA, ex-FBI, ex-DEA, and numerous other ex-operatives of various high-level alphabet-soup government agencies.” Had I followed his lead, I wouldn’t be in this fix to begin with, wasting vacation time at some panty-ass writers’ conference, that was for damn sure.

“Yes!” Lyle cried. “Got it!”

His feet hit the gravel.

Could I buy him off? Would my life be worth the ninety bucks in my wallet? Sure, forty of it was Canadian, but . . .

Distant laughter from the Barn. I became nostalgic for my life of ten minutes before.

Lyle surveyed the parking lot. There could be no witnesses.

I shifted position, frantic to identify the object he kept concealed behind him. Suddenly, his fists flew toward my face, rocked me onto my heels. And there, held aloft before me, mere inches from unbelieving eyes, illuminated by the penlight on his keychain, was the September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Mouth dry, hoarse, he whispered, “I subscribe.”

That was it? “Yeah. Well. Great.”

“You don’t get it, man. Once they know you’re into genre, you’re toast.”

2 The first genre writer I ever met

He turned up one day in the middle of term, asked if he could sit in. As creative writing classes go, I guess we weren’t all that creative. We dubbed him the obvious, Old Guy. Seventy, easy. Maybe seventy-five. Blue suit. Legion pin on lapel. Striped tie, silver clip. Boxcar moustache. Hair slicked straight back like shoestring licorice. It was a seminar class. No shortage of seats. Richler shrugged, circumspect behind his Schimmelpenninck smokescreen. “I guess.”

Old Guy hoisted his briefcase onto the conference table. “You know,” he said, drawing our attention to Richler’s cigarillo, “in The Big One, we called them coffin nails.” Some of us laughed; it was the respectful thing to do. Richler inhaled, exhaled, proceeded to the week’s readings.

Old Guy did not speak again. He listened and observed. Until the end of class.

He raised the lid of his briefcase. “I wonder, Mr. Richler, if you might be so kind as to read mine now?”

We froze, attention riveted to our renowned mentor.

You knew for sure Richler had seen it coming. The moment the old man tapped the door, he’d seen it coming. Hell, he sensed it before the geezer showed his face. So, you figure he might’ve been better prepared. “Um – uh – ”

There’d be no denying him. Not this day. Old Guy served up a slab of manuscripts as thick as a butcher block, Duo-Tang plies of red and yellow, pink and green, brown and blue, black and orange.

Richler shifted his tin of Schimmelpennincks from his right hand to his left. “Not all of them.”

“How many then?”

“I dunno. A couple.”

“But – ”

“Two.”

“But – ”

“Two.”

“Two.” Old Guy shook his head in a manner to suggest the loss would be Richler’s and fanned out the options. “Mystery? Science fiction? Western? South seas adventure? Romance? Erotica? Comedy? War? Horror? Crime – ”

Richler plucked a yellow and a green.

A week went by.

Old Guy showed up early. He didn’t wait for Richler to take his seat, put it right to him: “So, what did you think?” He was pretty much foaming at the mouth, spazzing with joy. This was the moment the Mordecai Richler would forever change his life.

Richler pulled the manuscripts from his satchel, handed them over. “Well, they’re not very good.”

“Wha – ?” It was like Dementia had dropped in for a quickie. He stood uncomprehending, let the critiqued Duo-Tangs fall into his briefcase. “Oh.”

We couldn’t look at him. We couldn’t look at Richler.

Head down, Old Guy gathered up his belongings and crossed to the door, stopped, hesitated, turned. “Well,” he said to Richler, “what do you know, anyways?”

3 Some genre writers are not born

This is the ill-advised part. This is where I blow any chance of winning a Hugo, Nebula or Stoker, never mind a Booker or Giller.

I was the first of my father’s family to graduate university. His pride was short-lived. I let slip I wanted to write. I might as well have told him I’d booked a ticket to Bangkok for sex reassignment surgery. “Gottenyu! A writer? A writer? Who’s going to hire you as a writer? Tell me who, goddammit! Who?”

He worried I’d end up like him. Frustrated. Disappointed. Penniless. Not tired of living so much, just tired of being the subplot of a Jolson movie.

My mother, meanwhile, urged me to give optometry a try. “Look how well your cousin Jerry does.”

Neither knew to ask whether I’d be pursuing literary or genre. Not that I would have had the answer. Despite the formidable influences of Richler and Blaise, I believed writing was writing. Literary or genre did not matter; I’d skip between the two as inspiration dictated. I could be Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon one week, Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg and Ray Bradbury the next.

And so I begin to write. Short stories. Novels. An apocalyptic SF novel. A porn novel. A coming-of-age novel. Pieces for Mad and Harpoon. All are rejected.

I roll carpets at Eaton’s warehouse. Cut broadloom. Drive a lift truck.

I write gag lines for cartoonists and make my first pro sale to an illustrator in Puerto Rico. He sends me a cheque for $1.50. The bank charges me $10 when it bounces.

I write university term papers for seven bucks a page. Engineering. Law. English. Philosophy. I sell short features to the Montreal Star and Vancouver Sun.

I get married. Have kids. Take a fulltime job as a copywriter at an advertising agency. But it’s temporary, you understand. Only temporary.

Career highlights are many, especially the personalized rejections. A personalized rejection is almost as good as an acceptance.

The editor of Harpoon returns Know Your Asshole Better with an encouraging note: “We’re doing a farting issue next if you’d care to contribute.”

My porn novel, The Mammary Recordings, earns a handwritten reply: “While we found your novel amusing, our readers will not. Please limit the plot of any future submissions to the main character hopping from bedroom to bedroom, sex scene to sex scene. Please, no humour.” Wow! They found it AMUSING – enough to keep me going for months.

Rejection, of course, is not limited to publishers and editors. Life in Henk is my coming-of-age epic. It is about growing up in a Jewish family in Trenton, Ontario in the late 50s, early 60s. I give the manuscript to my older sister to read. She had wanted to be a writer, but eloped at 18 and had babies instead. She is both concise and incisive: “What am I supposed to write about now?” I decide to write a serial killer novel next.

Wait! It gets worse. I’m at my urologist. Yeah, urologist. Cripes! Even he has published a book – Private Parts by Yosh Taguchi, MD. And mid-point of my digital rectal examination I hit rock bottom: I ask if he might put a good word in for me with his agent.

My urologist’s agent does not reply. No Canadian agent does. And I accept, at last, my father was correct. Who would want to hire me as a writer?

Until one Christmas Eve. The phone rings. The caller is Virginia Kidd, an American literary agent, and she loves Life in Henk and she wants to represent me and I’m thinking maybe there’s more to this Baby Jesus thing than I’ve been led to believe. She wants every damn piece of fiction I’ve ever written. And within a month, she sells one story to a UK fantasy anthology, Destination Unknown, and another to Fantasy & Science Fiction. And soon word comes down that Houghton-Mifflin is about to put an offer in on Life in Henk and my wife and I stay up the entire night, excited by the prospect of dream becoming reality . . . Alas, the offer never happens. The editor is apologetic. Virginia is angry. And I proceed to write a short story about a boy who finds a tiny human skeleton in a bug jar. A few months later, it makes the cut for the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.

The science fiction, fantasy and horror writers I know were passionate readers of the genres before they began to write in the genres. They were fans. Huge fans. And still are. I read a lot of SF growing up, but I never lived and breathed the stuff. I still don’t. That’s not to say I don’t like to write it; I simply didn’t set out to write it.

So, why did I become a writer of genre? Isn’t it clear?

Because nobody else would have me.

4 A painful truth

Ihave a wife and three daughters. All are avid readers. Literary, big name stuff. Ishiguro. Munro. MacLeod. Franzen. Roth. Atwood. Mistry. Shields.

They often discuss the books they read. And love.

The only genre fiction they read is mine.

I have never heard them discuss anything I have written. Never.

I have requested they stop talking about books and authors when I am around. They laugh. They think I am kidding.

5 Stranger in a strange land

Have I gone about this the right way? What does CNQ expect of me? I do not write essays. I am a not a literary deep-thinker. I do not belong in CNQ. This is a prank, right? CanLit Punk’d.

I’ve gone through the short story issue. The erudition intimidates me. Worse, I now find myself using erudition in a sentence. Jeez, two sentences.

I have never read Alexander MacLeod, Guy Vanderhaeghe or Michael Ondaatje. I have never heard of Mark Anthony Jarman, Audrey Thomas or Douglas Glover. Not that I expect they’ve heard of me. Do they read Fantasy & Science Fiction? Occasionally? Ever? Stephen King called the magazine “the gold standard for short fiction in America,” though it’s unlikely he garners much respect in these pages. Kirkus claimed it “eloquent, scintillating, often sublime.” I know Margaret Atwood isn’t a fan, otherwise she’d abandon her crusade to sever speculative fiction from science fiction. Is anyone buying that? She’s a savvy marketer, sure. Still, I resent how her defensiveness puts me on the defensive. Kurt Vonnegut never made me feel this way.

CNQ is wordy. Does literary critique demand no less than fifteen sentences per paragraph? Where is the pacing? The white space? The exclamation marks!!?? Would a larger font kill them?

Nasty, too. Like some high school clique. Mutual admiration society one sec, mutual denigration the next. They rip into their peers like it’s Boxing Day at Walmart. There’s so much nitpicking going down, it’s a wonder the pages don’t scab over. What am I doing here? I fear for myself.

I know it sounds whiny, but if you’ve never gotten a bad review before, you have no idea what a unique kind of heartbreak it is. And I’m not talking about getting constructive criticism from your seventh grade English teacher . . . . I’m talking about a complete stranger telling other complete strangers that something you’ve been carrying inside you for months is stillborn.
—The Escapists (2007)

The Escapists? It’s a graphic novel. Okay, a comic book. Oh, that’s going to go over well around here. The point is, you’d never catch a critic of genre fiction behaving the way your CNQ piranhas do. Is genre, as a group, not more humane, empathetic and respectful of one another’s craft?

Of the three slightly longer, independent short stories, Michael Libling’s ‘Pheromitey Glad’ I found to be a sophomoric, unfocused and ambling attempt at arch cuteness, which failed miserably. It just didn’t make any sense on any real level, and was difficult to read with all of the cUTe spellings . . . Sometimes literary experiments work, sometimes they don’t. This one totally failed for me.
—Dave Truesdale, SF Site
(1998)

Oh, man. Is that what I’ve done? Delivered another “sophomoric, unfocused and ambling attempt at arch cuteness”? Perhaps if I say something nice . . .

With a name like Canadian Notes & Queries, I expect it to be about as action-packed and provocative as Stephen Harper’s sex life. But the irreverence surprises me. The frequent shots at the Giller Prize are fun. So, I’m not the only one who finds CanLit stultifying. “Murder, stillbirth, war, suicide, scalding, genocide, another stillbirth” (as Ryan Bigge sums it up) have a place in genre, too. A big place. But we do not as a matter of course take the angst-ridden poems we wrote as teenagers and expand them into novels. We do not ramble on all mopey-dreary about our pain for 400 frigging pages without throwing a little action into the mix, an appealing character or two and a plot. (Come to think of it, there’s not much difference between literary fiction and porn; plot is secondary to both.) Most of all, we do not measure the quality of our writing by the extent of its inaccessibility.

Still, if I stick around for an issue or two, I might even learn something here. Maybe I have more in common with these CNQ guys than I think. Perhaps I do belong in these pages. Well, once every 42 years, anyhow.

I wonder. Has CNQ done a genre issue before? What’s that about? Are they slumming it? A My Man Godfrey sort of deal? Should I expect to be rolling my eyes?

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have brought up that Margaret Atwood thing. Is it too late to take that part out? I mean, who am I to –

One of the first things a visitor tended to notice on entering the massive, three-storey brick house on Bedford Road was the stuffed emu hanging upside down over the main staircase. After the bright sunlight outside, the sudden gloom might well have obscured the framed collection of Papuan penis gourds immediately opposite the front door, or the array of red and blue prize ribbons plastering the lobby. But even if you missed the gourds and the horse-racing ribbons, the stuffed emu fixed one’s attention. As one’s eyes adjusted to the low light, more exhibits came into view, crowded among the massive antique furniture: arrangements of shark jaws and monkey bones, stone axes and tribal weapons, a coffin decorated like an ornate wedding cake, display cases filled with mounted Goliath beetles and huge flying insects, a stuffed zebra head surrounded by more equestrian ribbons, an egg from the extinct elephant bird. Above the stairs and partially obscured by the emu hung a striking 8×4 foot painting, a full-length portrait of a young man in a forest of tendrils. From another room, peculiar sounds from resident animals contributed to the unique atmosphere.

For thirty-five years, 140 Bedford Road in Toronto’s historic Annex district was the home of explorer, equestrian, painter, writer and local personality Norman Elder, and the location of the Norman Elder Museum and Gallery, repository of curious artefacts from some of the most inaccessible regions of the globe. The gutting of the unique Museum in 2004 and the dispersal and partial destruction of its contents constituted the final chapter of an unusual and ultimately tragic story.

I first met Norman Elder in the summer of 1967, the legendary Summer of Love. In late Sixties Toronto, Rochdale College was briefly thriving as an alternative university, the club scene was jumping, and the Yorkville district had become a favourite destination for hippies and travellers from across the country. A jazz and blues enthusiast in those days, I had visited most of the city’s music clubs to hear Sleepy John Estes, Rev. Gary Davis and Woody Herman’s Third Herd. I had read my poems at the Bohemian Embassy and the Inn of the Unmuzzled Ox. And I wrote for Ron Thody’s irreverent pulp tabloid, Satyrday.

I was sitting with Ron in a sidewalk caf in Yorkville when Norman Elder stopped to say hello. Norman was then in his late twenties, with a handsome, open countenance that retained its boyish aspect in spite of the beginnings of male pattern baldness. His private Museum and Gallery was then housed across the street from the café. I encountered him again in 1970 when visiting the novelist Scott Symons who was lodging with Norm at the same Yorkville location. I remember that along with Norm, Scott, and a collection of large snakes, the Museum was home to a strikingly attractive young man who appeared to be in his late teens. Someone said he was Norman’s boyfriend.

My first visit to Norman’s Bedford Road mansion was in 1972, when we exchanged books: my first slim chapbook of poetry for a copy of Noshitaka, a handsome production by Coach House Press consisting of poetic notes and sketches from a trip to the headwaters of the Amazon, deep in the interior of Peru, near Machu Picchu. This taxing, mind-bending trip was one of the first of Norman’s countless excursions to remote parts of the world.

Norman’s objective, he wrote, was to live among and study the Machiguengas, a tribe that had migrated to the dense jungles of the Upper Amazon during the Inca conquest, reverting to a pre-stone age existence. There, “geographical isolation has produced a uniquely primitive social organization . . . a strange religious practice and a stoic but dynamic individualism.” The Machiguengas are reputed to be head-hunters, eaters of genitals, executors of girl children. They make meals of parrots and monkey-brains, hunting and killing with arrows the chimp-sized howler monkeys that inhabit the forest. They are subject to uncontrolled epidemics and infections that often result in death. Without words for affection or beauty, they are totally survival-oriented, reflecting “a cultural gap of fifty-thousand years.” Most had never seen the face of an outsider.

Norman’s stopping-off point for this unusual adventure was, paradoxically, a club for Lima’s moneyed equestrian set, “lush to the point of overpowering decadence,” an instructive contrast to the wretched squalor of the jungle towns with their half-naked prostitutes, “sperm-drenched gutters” and fetid smell. By comparison, the jungle was another world, immense, weird and hallucinatory. “About this place,” he wrote, “the vast Amazonas stretches its 50,000 miles of navigable water tributaries . . . it nourishes one quarter of the world’s forests . . . eighty-six percent of all things that grow . . . it breeds more animate species than the rest of the world . . . its growing rate excels all other earthly things . . . the eternal anaconda boa is its king . . . its fearful carnivorous god.”

Penetrating deep into the territory of the Machiguengas, Norman discovered a humid, jungle world hostile to every apparent concept of human life. Parrots were “thick as mosquitos” and thorn-covered vines moved “with the dense tensile life . . . (an) ever-extending layer of intestinal vegetable pulp . . . Enormous trunks uproot the undergrowth and heave their phallic erection one against another . . . like animal tendons knotted . . . pulsating . . . dripping from severed limbs . . .” Cancerous white fungi, silhouettes of tangled vines “producing strange jagged fans in the sky’s flesh,” lush, black organisms that twisted and knotted in the vivid red light and a cacophony of shrieking cries all added to this surrealistic, visionary world.

Here, fourteen-foot fish, poison frogs and giant crocodiles were common, and small, parasitic water creatures could swim into your genitals to feed on their delicate membranes. Bermiflies and screw-worms lay their eggs in your sweat-drenched clothing, burrowing into flesh and hatching white grubs under the skin, producing large abscessed swellings and infected wounds. “Insects,” Norman noted, “are breeding in the small of my back.” In this environment, common staples of civilization like shoes and leather jackets soon become fetid and useless. Leaving the hut at night to answer the call of nature, the humid air pierced by violent, overpowering shrieks, it was advisable to carry a club to deter attacks by wild dogs.

The book’s final chapter breaks off unexpectedly. Norman has managed to befriend one of his guides, a young man called Hector. They exchange presents – some carved totems, anaconda skins and monkey skulls in return for a shirt, flashlight and shoes, “all I have except my cut-off jeans and my shotgun.” But later there is a falling out when Hector “becomes irksome.” Norman sculpts a sand image of Hector and unaccountably stabs its head with a bamboo pole. He immediately regrets what he has done, remembering that in this strange society, perceived insults sometimes lead to suicide. Instead, the sensitive boy’s tentative friendship changes into poisonous glares and an avoidance of contact. Finally, surrounded by a cloud of vampire bats, Norman muses on the power of Hector’s soul as it merges with a mysterious “ovalistic symbol into the most perfect sympathy of union of two bodies.”

Noshitaka is written in a sketchy, poetic style without capital letters, with only ellipses for punctuation, and illustrated with the author’s prepared photographs overdrawn with spiky, tangled vines and spidery tendrils. The book resembles accounts of hallucinatory experiences, drug “trips” – except that this trip is a real journey, to a real place on the earth, as far as possible from the neatly tended surroundings of Bedford Road.

The book was attractive and intriguing, but I found its ambiguous conclusion confusing and unsatisfactory. I couldn’t help thinking that something important here was hinted at but unstated: “I shall leave unrecorded the rest of my diary.” It seemed to me that for all the grisly masochistic splendours of the arboreal forest, the real story here was the story of Norman and Hector – and it had apparently ended badly.

Next to the equestrian trophies in Norman’s front lobby was a large, ornate book stand displaying a copy of either Who’s Who In the World or Who’s Who in Canada, open at an extensive entry for Elder, Norman. Norman was proud – and amused – that his listing occupied the same page as the Queen Mother’s. It was there, in his front hall, scrutinizing Who’s Who, that I first began to learn about Norman’s background.

Norman Elder was born in Toronto on July 17, 1939, the youngest of five children of a manufacturing family with an address on the exclusive Park Lane Circle. His next door neighbour was Conrad Black with whom he was boyhood friends. Educated at Upper Canada College, where he was a reticent student, reluctant to speak up in class, he became an avid equestrian and skydiver, winning his first competitive medals before his tenth birthday. He was also something of a hell-raiser, burning down a historic barn, breaking both arms in fights, and getting jailed for vagrancy. When he broke a leg, he continued his sporting activities wearing a cast.

Four years later, Norman and a friend attempted to cross the Sahara in a Jeep, Norman drawing and filming oasis communities and making extensive notes on the sex customs of desert Arabs. In those days, he was describing himself as “a hippie.” His family had varied reactions to his idiosyncrasies. His grandmother encouraged him to travel, telling him “it will be enlightening for you.” His father on the other hand seemed peculiarly indifferent. “The first time I came back from the Amazon,” Norman wrote, “I was dying to tell Dad all the details of the trip, but he kept turning the TV up louder. Then I thought of a great way to get him to listen. I phoned up (television personality) Betty Kennedy and went on her talk show.”

At the age of twenty Norman won Gold and Bronze Medals in the Pan-American Games three-day equestrian event. (He won his Silver Medal at a later Games.) As a result, he was made Captain of the Canadian Equestrian Team at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics where he shared a mutual love of horses with Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. He became friendly with the Prince, who remarked to him during a long ceremony, “One thing you learn quickly as a Royal is to never pass up an opportunity to go to the lavatory.”

Stints at the University of Western Ontario and the Banff School of Fine Arts preceded Norman’s second major trip when he used the money from sales of Noshitaka to strike out for Inuit villages in the far Canadian North and “hitch-hiked to Greenland,” a journey that resulted in his second book, Oksitartok, published in 1966 in an edition uniform with Noshitaka and equipped with a Foreword by his friend the 86-year-old Lady Eaton.

Oksitartok (“the uninhibited beautiful minds”) was dedicated “to the great globs of raw humanity;” like the earlier book it consists of on-the-spot journal entries, unredacted notes in sketchy bursts (complete with occasional misspellings and grammatical solecisms) and broken up into short lines resembling poetry. In this journal account of living, sleeping and working with the Eskimos (before that term was discarded), Norman comments on the Northern peoples’ elusive character and daily habits, their attitude to their Skidoos (“this machine can’t smell the wind”) and their love of Coca-Cola and country music. He observes with pleasure that among the varied incursions of the modern world, “a primitive element shone through.”

“I feel the same respect and deep honour toward the Eskimo as I did for the Machiguenga. They personified a superior being . . . an uncorrupted purity and honesty of heart.” Several times in the book, he returns to thoughts of the Amazon forest, and to Hector, and a friendship that was sabotaged by impulsiveness and misunderstanding. In the back of the book there is a photo of the author with the dates 1939-1989. Like Glenn Gould, he predicted he would die at fifty. Unlike Gould, he outlived his prediction.

In 1967, Norman made his first trip to New Guinea, hiking 160 km into isolated overgrown volcanic highlands to collect artefacts for the Royal Ontario Museum. He published his account of the trip in Cannibalistic Catharsis, the final volume of his self-published trilogy.

The people he stayed with were men naked except for gourds tied over their penises, wild pig tusks through their noses and quills piercing their cheeks. His aim, he wrote, was to “tap the untouched resources of human behaviour” in “this oddest of circumstances, a choking sanctuary of unhygienic native smells, a blackened thatched atmosphere sealed in smoke, body odours from birth, urine drenched bamboo wall, rot of food residue on dried mud; my new home, alive with humanity.”

Norman set out on these journeys systematically prepared. He carried his necessities (including insect repellent, antibiotics, cash, and garbage-bags as wrapping for cameras and notebooks) in two army surplus canvas bags, with additional empty bags for artefacts and insect specimens. Black’s Film provided free film for some of the trips and Alex Tilley, proprietor of the Tilley clothing company, supplied free shorts and shirts. Many items were intended as gifts. “Shirts are a big thing,” he said. One man he met in New Guinea wrote to say he’d “broken” his shirt, “so I sent him fifty.” Other trade items included candy and locally-purchased cigarettes, salt and machetes. His mosquito nets and hammocks he gave away at the end of each trip.

“I’m just off running around in the bush like a little kid,” he would say with a grin, making light of the taxing, often horrendous conditions – and the recurring dysentery, intestinal parasites and malaria which, inevitably, had to be dealt with. Betty Kennedy, in her Forward to Cannibalistic Catharsis, wrote that “Norman is a man who dares simply to be himself . . . a free spirit . . . open to all ideas and all people . . . he has a natural grace that makes him equally at home with sophisticated cosmopolites or strange-tongued primitives . . . He savors every minute of life.”

The late sixties and early seventies were an especially active time, even for Norman. He made his first film, Alcoholism’s Children, and painted his best known picture, a large, fantastical image of Pierre Trudeau that later made its way to Ottawa; it was said to have adorned Trudeau’s outer office for a while. As a graduate architect, he worked for a time as a draftsman for Parkins Associates and joined the Board of Directors of the Ontario Epilepsy Foundation. Supported by the wealthy maverick politician Dr. Morton Shulman, he made several runs for provincial and civic office. (He once had to be dissuaded from parachuting into Nathan Phillips Square to announce his candidacy.) He also joined the Acres Think Tank, under a fellowship program for five “creative young thinkers,” sponsored by the Norman C. Simpson Foundation. At Acres, Norman designed something he called Earth City, a prototype for the development of the Pre-Cambrian Shield that included a research college and a Peace Centre. Earth City – based partly on Middle Eastern architectural forms – formed the basis of his graduate architectural thesis but, ahead of its time, it did not meet with favour.

I knew nothing of Earth City, but Norman did discuss with me some of his other Acres ideas. He proposed the construction of a network of riding trails in the Don Valley (ideal, he felt, for handicapped children as well as for tourists). He was also interested in planning integrated old age living and addressing the problems of drug-addicted young people, not a few of whom ended up staying at the three-storey mansion. “The Gallery turned into a hippie haven by accident,” he wrote. At one point, a young woman and her small family were living in the basement while various youthful transients crashed upstairs. “I have no interest in being a social worker,” Norman said. “But what else can you do? I see them turn from carefree kids into hard-bitten members of a criminal sub-culture. More and more of the kids are turning into speed freaks. But it is hard to get treatment for kids until they are too far gone.” Norman even became an advisor to the Ontario Department of Corrections, when his rooming house was designated an official group home – an arrangement that would have ramifications for Norman years in the future.

The Amazon continued to be a prime source of fascination for Norman and he made several expeditions there in the years to come. Some of these were sponsored by the CBC and turned into a film, Indians of the Upper Amazon, one of three films he made on native peoples of South America and Papua New Guinea. On one trip, he lost his way in the rain forest, defenceless against prowling jaguars and poisonous snakes; he seemed to take it all in stride. “Some of the best parts of the trips,” he said, “are the things that go wrong.” He said he learned from his early trips to the Amazon that “you could go into a new society and as long as you are honest and friendly and smile and aren’t loud and making them uncomfortable, you’d be accepted.” When he heard about a naked jungle tribe who killed outsiders, he determined to disarm them by parachuting into their midst in the nude. As any old-fashioned Imperial adventurer might, he believed that “being a gentleman is the key.”

By the early seventies, Norman had established the pattern of living that would last for almost thirty years. He would spend a few months of each year in travels and explorations, the rest at home, writing, painting, fundraising, and hosting visiting potentates like the Emir of Fujairah and the King of Rwanda. Norman used to say he considered his adventures to be both recreations and personal trials, a way to confront his fears. “It’s the only way I can keep myself balanced and keep my environment in perspective. When I come back, it makes me appreciate being here in Canada. I put myself in a whole new environment, a whole new dimension, so that when I come back, I find a real refreshment, a real catharsis.” In 1972 alone, Norman travelled deep into the New Guinea jungles with his friend Manny Benjamin, took a photography tour of Nepal with his friend Randy Frost, and collected wildlife specimens in Bali. He usually managed to be in Toronto for the annual Royal Winter Fair which he called “the Christmas of my life.”

In the early years of Norman’s adventures, he brought back many live “specimens.” The return baggage for one trip included nine monkeys, forty snakes, three turtles, four alligators and a vulture. In those days, there were fewer restrictions on the import of such creatures and Norman sold most of the animals to zoos and used the money to finance his trips. A few favourites were given names and kept as pets. Ferrets, pythons (housed in a large herpetarium in the basement and fed on specially prepared mice), monkeys, a tapir, dung beetles, millipedes, fluorescent weevils, hermit crabs, an electric eel, and eventually, lemurs all shared the Bedford Road house which at one point housed about fifty living creatures. For a time, a basement tank housed a big, vicious-looking fish that liked to be fed cherries. “I can’t imagine what it would be like not to live with animals,” he said when one magazine called him “Toronto’s Dr. Doolittle.” Two monkeys rescued from Amazonian hunters escaped the house and grounds one day and ended up swinging from nearby trolley-bus wires causing short circuits and “bothersome delays” before they were electrocuted. “With their hair standing on end and a full blast of current racing through them,” Norman wrote, “the jungle creatures saved from becoming food died an even more useless death.”

The inevitable problems and mishaps – and the progressive tightening of the import rules – eventually convinced him to take a new look at “collecting.” “Ten years ago,” he told me, “I’d see an animal in the jungle and bring it back. But I’m happy with all the conservation rules in place now, so I don’t do that any more. When it comes to wildlife issues, when I have a chance to speak out, I do.” He particularly enjoyed taking animals to public schools. One of the most popular guests was Tony, a 300-lb. Galapagos tortoise, a Museum resident for over a decade. At one point an electoral poll at the Museum had to be moved when nervous voters became alarmed as the great creature ambled placidly through the voting booths. (Tony’s stuffed remains now have pride of place in a private collection.)

Norman’s favourite of all his animals was Henry the Pig, actually an amiable sow whose sad story was one of good intentions gone awry. “I held her on my lap for hours and she quickly gained confidence,” Norman wrote in an article in Toronto Life in 1971. “At first she drank milk from a bottle, then graduated to commercial ‘pig starter’ and ‘pig grower.’ Later I sometimes fetched a bucket of slop for her from a restaurant . . . Henry’s size and affection grew by the day. She liked to jump on the couch when I was resting, nuzzle her way across my chest and lie there. As she approached 200 pounds, this became ludicrous, and my only recourse was to scratch her stomach. A stomach scratch sent Henry into ecstasy. She would immediately roll off the couch onto her back and call for more. She uttered an amazing range of sounds to signify hunger, thirst, leisure, fear, love, anger,” and enjoyed playing games with the neighbourhood children.

Henry loved beer which she would cadge from guests. Intelligent and house-trained, she “only had accidents when frightened. Once when we were guests on Elwood Glover’s show, I picked her up, which Henry hated; she squealed and forgot herself all over the guest chair on national television.” Baths were not enjoyed; her screams could be heard down the block. But most of the time, Norm declared, she complemented what he described as “the informality of my house” with “great good humour and grace.”

“Everyone in our house loved Henry, except Herman the Pony and our senior cat. The cat, a tough old matriarch who feared neither man nor dog, tried to bully the pig. Thick-skinned Henry ignored her claws, which freaked the cat out so badly she finally left Henry alone.” But Herman the Pony couldn’t get along with Henry and had to be returned to his farm – in the back of Norman’s beat-up old limousine which caused a police summons for “blocking traffic.”

“Henry and I often strolled down Yonge Street,” Norman recalled. “People would follow us for blocks. Henry paid little attention until some thoughtful person scratched her stomach, whereupon she instantly rolled onto her back in the middle of the sidewalk . . . Otherwise she trotted along about ten paces behind me. I never needed a leash. She never dirtied the streets or molested passersby.”

None of Norman’s immediate neighbours objected to Henry. But for one woman down the street, the pig’s very existence became unbearable. “In the end,” Norman lamented, “she brought the overwhelming wei4ght of officialdom down on us.” She complained to the alderman, who eventually involved the police, the fire department, the Humane Society, the City Buildings Department, the Health Department, a mortgage company and three insurance companies.” Once Norman had to jump out of bed to hide Henry from a particularly officious inspector. Henry dragged Norm, still naked, into the yard while the inspector took notes. On the other side in the pig war, whole school classes wrote letters to the Mayor and the authorities pleading leniency for Henry.

On her premium diet, Henry grew healthy and hearty, eventually topping 300 pounds. One day Norman returned home to find sixteen policemen with six squad cars and two motorcycles in front of the house. Henry had gotten into the street. One cop had her by the tail; another had a coil of rope and a third was threatening to shoot her. “I rushed over, asked them to release her and called her name,” Norm wrote in an account of the Henry saga he wrote for Toronto Life magazine. “Go indoors!” he told her. She promptly ran into the house. “The police stood around looking formidable and a bit foolish. Some were angry; the rest came in for coffee. One cop warned, ‘If I ever see you and that pig on the street again . . . I’ll arrest you.’“ Soon afterwards, Norman’s house insurance was suddenly cancelled on unspecified “moral grounds.” This left the mortgagee free to foreclose on the uninsured mortgage. Norman was in peril of losing his home, but managed to save it at the last minute thanks to some reinsurance through an influential friend.

Over the years Norman and the Bedford Road house came to the attention of the authorities for various misdemeanours including, most memorably, the electrocuted monkeys. But the outrageous presence of Henry the Pig became a particular irritant to local officialdom. In the face of increasing opposition, Henry’s supporters bailed out one by one as her enemies grew more determined. Norman came to see the stockyards as the only solution.

“I called Henry from the back yard where she was playing, tossing leaves over herself. She came running. As we went down the lane, I knew she expected to go for another stroll. I opened the car door and she hopped in obediently. As we drove to the stockyards, she put her big head over the seat and rested it trustfully on my shoulder.” The carnage at the stockyards panicked Henry and she cowered in a corner as the other pigs butted and sniffed her. Her ear was bitten. “Henry kept looking up at me. I felt it painfully.” Norman knew she was asking for water but her new owners refused.

“I spent hours that night, thinking. Where did my responsibility end? On the day Henry was slaughtered, the inspectors and others who helped drive her to her death still kept coming to the house to look for her. On that same day, I had a meeting with Ontario’s deputy minister of correctional services to talk about prison and reform schools . . . I could only think of Henry. Should I have consigned her to the prison of a farm? Was I wrong in permitting her slaughter? I wish now I had tried harder to find an alternative.”

A few years later, Toronto’s Riverdale Farm, now a well-run children’s farm with a small number of cattle, horses, goats and chickens might have made a pleasant home for Henry. But in Henry’s time, the farm was an overcrowded zoo, and no place for a sensitive pig. Too late, Norman realized he had not fought hard enough, and his guilt weighed heavily on him. “She trusted me, and all humanity, and all of us let her down,” he wrote. “There is no place in urban officialdom for the nonconformist.”

The Henry problem was followed by other run-ins with local authorities. At one point Norman rescued a ten-foot high ornamental iron fence that had once kept polar bears in an enclosure. Installed around the front of his property, it made a handsome addition to the site. Unfortunately, it contravened local height restrictions and a neighbour complained. Another protracted struggle ensued. Norman eventually won that one, but the official files labelled ELDER, NORMAN were growing ever fatter.

Once Norman and I were cruising down Yonge Street in his old car, a former mourner’s limousine acquired from a funeral parlour and enhanced with putty and animal bones. I remember that Norman was sporting the excellent toupée he wore only to gala events and parties. We were stopped by the police. Apparently a fringed blind in the back window was obscuring the view from the driver’s seat, or so the cop said. Norman amiably agreed to remove the obstruction. “Weren’t you on TV?” the cop asked. Once he realized who Norm was, it was all smiles and Norman was let go with a jocular caution. Fortunately, they saw no need to inspect the trunk, as a large reptile was sleeping off a meal in there.

Our leisurely cruise up Yonge Street was halted by a commotion just ahead of us. Norman got out of the car and ran over to a man who had just been hit by a now-stopped vehicle and was lying on the ground moaning. Norman ran over, threw a coat over him – he appeared to have a broken leg – and by the time the police arrived (which was very quickly as they were nearby stopping miscreants like us) Norman had calmed the accident victim down and the two of them were chuckling together. Norman gave an officer his name and particulars and we went on our way. Then I remembered Norman had left his coat behind. “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Even this shirt I’m wearing came from someone’s garbage.” I remembered his remark that “I always keep one foot in the gutter.”

Throughout the seventies Norman continued his journeys to the jungle. He returned to the Amazon to collect reptiles for zoos, filmed the isolated people of the remote Buka Buki on the April River in the New Guinea highlands, took a photography tour of the Nepalese mountains and a collecting tour of Bali. He went canoeing on the Onakawana River near James Bay, explored the Florida Everglades, Namibia and the Tierra Del Fuego region in the far south of Argentina.

In 1974, Norman published The Destructive Will, a title taken from a quotation by Schopenhauer about the “all-consuming devouring will that creates itself in order to destroy itself.” Dedicated to a list of friends, the book consists of a series of free verse meditations accompanied by fantastical, sometimes violent, pen-&-ink sketches resembling Cocteau’s drawings under the influence of opium: people jump – and shit – out of windows; a bird is impaled on a weathervane; a naked man with an erection reads to a crowd of rooted heads; long-necked creatures emerge from the belly of a horse with a man’s face; a headless corpse dismembers itself with an axe. Friendship and love are contrasted with apocalyptic visions and “blessings too sweet to endure.” The Destructive Will reveals Norman’s hit-and-miss learning; he knew his Schopenhauer but spelled chimpanzee “chimpansey.”

At the end of the decade, excerpts from the Amazon notebooks were published in an illustrated edition by Toronto’s New Canada Publications as This Thing of Darkness, with a Foreword by his old acquaintance, H.R.H.Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. People often asked how he was able to “get the Duke.” Norman said he just wrote to the palace and asked him. Charmingly illustrated with drawings and photographs, this account of journeys to the Marubas and Ticunas is straightforward and poignant, quite different from the elliptical, poetic Noshitaka trilogy. The book includes a photo of Norman wrestling a five-metre-long anaconda on a muddy riverbank, and a note about “the almost claustrophobic feeling of being trapped with no escape from paradise.”

In a Postscript, Norman recounts the problems that befell the “large menagerie I had saved from the jungle stewpot.” Shaking with malaria, he nurses a sick monkey (who shits on him and eventually dies in his arms) and then spends two days of delirium in a Bogota hospital before having to do battle with Customs officials at the Toronto Airport. Homes were eventually found for all the animals, though Victor the Vulture hung around for a while, becoming a picturesque, if unpredictable, TV personality. The tapir went to the Toronto Zoo, but “it took action by the chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Canadian Federal Government to get him there.”

Often Norman took one or two companions with him on his travels – usually young men who valued a unique opportunity to see hidden parts of the world. For the rest of the year he made the Museum his home base. It became “a revolving door” for artists and travellers. At one point, several artists were using different parts of the house as studios. Norman lived in the main floor and the basement (where the big snakes were kept in a large, sturdy herpetarium). The top two floors of the house were separated off for lodgers. Norm always slept late, had breakfast every day at the same restaurant and took everyone’s washing to a Chinese laundry on his way to swim his regular round of laps at the local pool.

The Norman Elder Museum and Gallery became a well known feature of the area. Its proliferating exhibits (animal specimens, odd artefacts, Norman’s paintings and trophies and an assortment of taxidermal relics from the Victorian age) provided glimpses of its proprietor’s taste in collecting. One visitor, who attended a slide show about Haiti, remembered that the projector was housed in a baby’s coffin. Museum exhibits were frequently rented out as film and theatre props. The interior of the house was constantly being altered as new artefacts had to be accommodated by additional rooms or knocked-out walls. It was used as a set for countless inexpensive horror movies, one TV series, Robocop, and one masterpiece, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch in which the hapless rent-boy Kiki is buggered by the giant monster in Norman’s living room.

The Museum’s grounds were modest and well-maintained, not out of place in the leafy, expensive old neighbourhood. Most of the residents behaved themselves. But a house filled with roomers and strangers inevitably gives rise to strange rumours. There were said to be tunnels somewhere under the garden. Someone once tried to find one of them and got locked in a windowless basement room in the dark for over an hour. Once a teenager dashed into the house carrying a cache of stolen goods. A snake got loose. A monkey stole a sausage from a neighbour’s barbecue. More than once the police had to be called. But the Museum stayed open to the public (not before 2 PM please). Norman was invariably agreeable and polite, and the atmosphere at the house tended to be more quiet than rowdy. Any real troublemakers were asked to leave. The press continued to treat Norman kindly, appreciative of the many good stories he provided. For Toronto Star columnist George Gamester in particular, Norman’s travels, animals, eccentricities and remarks were a regular source of good copy, and were amiably reported with a mixture of condescension and amazement.

Norman also made his own press, writing articles for magazines like Horse Sport (“Riding in Madagascar”), The Explorers Journal (“The Dyaks of Borneo”) and Doctor’s Review (“Hippo Hunting Hazards”). He played the part of the Great White Hunter in an insect repellent commercial, exposing his bare flesh to the hunger of 10,000 blackflies. His “From Pandas to Penguins” presentations at local schools were always a hit.

Hamish Grant was twelve when Norman brought his travelling wildlife show-and-tell to the Grade Six class at Jesse Ketchum Public School. He began dropping by the Museum and was soon assigned the task of ensuring that Norman got to his morning school presentations on time. Bypassing a sign on the front door that said “Do not knock or press buzzer before 2 PM,” Hamish would bang on a bedroom window to wake him up. “Norm would come to the front door and let me look around his collection while he got ready. We’d load a snake or a ferret or a chinchilla into a canvas bag and head off in one of Norman’s cars, stopping off for a donut and coffee on the way. It was tremendous fun. One time on the way back, I got curious about the day’s exhibit, a big jar of thirty live fruit bats.” Hamish tried to take one out of the jar but of course “the bats took their cue and exploded out en masse, a dark, furry cloud filling the air in the car as we drove along Bloor Street. Norm typically kept his head and pulled the car onto the sidewalk, We spent the next twenty minutes or so climbing all over the interior of the car collecting bats, laughing all the time.”

Such mishaps were not untypical. Kevin the Goose and Henry the Pig both disgraced themselves by taking bathroom breaks at inopportune moments on national television. Victor the Vulture did the same while flapping around above the heads of a live studio audience. But to Norman these messy minor mishaps were all part of the jolly fun; they made him laugh. He told me he would like to have taken the animals to hospitals too but of course, it was impossible. He joked about keeping a giraffe in the back yard. “If I get a young one – only twelve feet high – I could train it at Central Don Stables. He’d be comfortable there because he could stand with his head up in the hayloft. Of course I’d have to mount him from a stepladder. I don’t know about the reins because the neck is seven feet long. I might have to direct him with feathers attached to the end of a long stick. And if I brought him into the city, he’d have to wear boots because of the hard pavement.”

Along with the animals, some of Norman’s friends came to live at his house, a few of them after having proved unmanageable elsewhere. Duane Robertson, who would accompany Norman as cameraman on several trips, met him as a teenager at the suburban taping of a TV show. He was causing his mother concern and needed a place to stay. He ended up living at the house until his marriage, twenty years later. As unofficial curator of the Museum, he suggested making it the headquarters of a Canadian chapter of the Explorers Club in order to encourage more visits by Norman’s fellow adventurers. They wrote to all seventy Canadian Explorers Club members, and the Explorers Club of Canada was founded. It is now the largest foreign chapter. Duane’s mother believed Norman “saved his life.”

“Norm offered opportunities for interesting experiences to a lot of people,” Robertson recalled. “He showed me that the world was bigger than Richmond Hill.” Long-time friend and house-mate John Haddad said Norman “showed me how to be assertive without being rude.” Another acquaintance said simply, “he helped me to grow up.”

Norman’s travelling companion on his 1982 trip to New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands was not an adventurous young guy with a few free months to spare but Frank Ogden, also known as “Doctor Tomorrow,” the eminent author, pilot, LSD researcher and futurist, then 62 years old. The trip proved an unusual one, even for Norman. He and Ogden arrived in the Trobriand Islands at the time of the month-long Yam Festival, which turned out to be something of a local version of Sadie Hawkins Day. “It’s really a socially accepted time,” Ogden explained, “for the young women of the islands to go out and sexually attack the men in what amounts to gang-rapes.” During this popular celebration of predatory sex and lovingly cooked yams, Ogden reminisced, “about 4,000 man-hungry women go on a rampage wearing only coconut oil and tiny loin-cloths.” To escape the loud enthusiasm of the local ladies, the two Canadians got lost in the jungle for a few days where they were able to collect specimens of some of the 10,000 different insect species native to the region. Having dodged, more or less, the seasonal yam frenzy, Norman returned to beguile the locals by touching his nose with his tongue and walking on his hands – tricks he found hugely popular in most parts of the world.

Later in the Eighties Norman went to the former Belgian Congo with Robert Cudney and Ralph Reppert, on a journey sponsored by the Toronto Sun. “I’m just back from Zaire,” Norman wrote, “and I’ve got a few amoebic parasites in my system. I was living with the pygmies and they kept offering me these live slugs which are a special treat for them Well, you don’t want to hurt their feelings so you have to eat them. But you do get tired of slugs after a while.” In Namibia and Botswana, Norman had to be careful not to go into the local villages at night as it was considered impolite to refuse a chief’s offer of one of his wives. “The women wash only three times in their lives,” Norman noted in one of his many journals, “on their wedding day and with the deaths of their parents.”

On another trip, to the interior of Borneo, Ralph Reppert fell into a river and was almost swept away. “The incident made me think of how serious it could be if someone were to get hurt,” Norman mused, as though the thought had never occurred to him before. “There are no doctors anywhere in these mountain communities.” But Norman – and his companions – always seemed to be lucky – a luck that was often bolstered by considerable help from friendly local missionaries, for whom Norman always expressed great appreciation.

Nineteen-eighty-nine marked Norman’s fiftieth birthday. “”I am amazed that I ever made it to fifty,” he said. “I didn’t think that I would come back from all my trips or walk away from all my sky jumps. And now I feel I’ve got this extra time that I’m not quite sure what to do with.” He wondered if he had a death wish, but decided he “didn’t want to die.” As it happened, he had another fourteen years left to go.

For all his eccentricity and apparent independence, Norman always maintained his ties to his family and the Rosedale horsey set – wealthy, generally conventional people who knew Norman through family or sporting connections. (Norman’s brother Jim was also a prize-winning Olympic equestrian and Norman earned extra money by painting portraits of the horses owned by family and friends.) With these relations in mind, he was always discreet about his homosexuality. At a time when gays were ostensibly becoming more accepted, Norman played no apparent role in public gay life. He belonged to no gay community groups, was involved with no gay charities, frequented public swimming pools rather than bathhouses, and avoided not only gay bars but even discretely ambiguous bisexual gathering places. At Gay Pride celebrations, he was absent. He had gay friends among whom he could speak frankly, some of them as closeted as himself. But to the increasingly visible gay community, he was a stranger. Perhaps like many gay men who had grown up in an era of total illegality, he believed that discretion was the better part of valour.

The social and legal situation for gay men in Canada changed rapidly throughout the eighties and nineties as the AIDS crisis and a series of hard-fought legal and judicial victories brought new visibility. It was rapidly becoming unacceptable to scorn or persecute gay men as such. But where once group fantasies had been projected upon “homosexuals,” now the feared offenders were characterized as a growing army of male “pedophiles.” This terminological slight of hand was facilitated by the fact that while being gay had become theoretically acceptable, the Age of Consent for homosexual relations, set at 21 by the Trudeau reforms of 1969, remained in force. Well into the eighties, even sexually mature males of 19 or 20 were said to be legally children, and therefore incapable of consent to homosexual activity. This at a time when increasing numbers of young people were coming out as gay or lesbian, some even forming high school gay clubs and taking same-sex dates to the prom.

Public awareness of past sexual abuses in Canadian orphanages and Native schools increased public anxiety. Old fears began to surface in the form of a series of moral panics involving allegations of manic sexual violence. In one urban centre after another, groups of children were claiming to have been raped, forced to drink blood, consume human body parts and have intercourse with dogs and bats. Babies were said to have been skinned alive and barbecued, or flown to Mars and thrown into schools of sharks. Investigations uncovered no missing infants, the alleged burial sites yielded no remains, and no sharks were located. Nevertheless, several high-profile jury trials resulted in convictions and heavy sentences. Innocent people were jailed, families broken up and lives ruined. Eventually, many of the children involved admitted their lies had been prompted by social workers and court officials and most of the sentences were reversed. Years later, Saskatchewan Justice Minister Frank Quennell lamented this “truly regrettable situation,” calling the eighties and nineties “a unique period in the history of the justice system throughout North America.”

In the early nineties, Julian Fantino, the ambitious Chief of Police in London, Ontario, claimed, with much fanfare, to have uncovered a “kiddie sex ring” that turned out to be an unremarkable series of consensual relationships among adult men and a few teenaged hustlers. Again, there was a great deal of damage to lives and reputations; one man committed suicide. Other similar cases followed. It was in this toxic atmosphere that a series of sensational revelations about boys, sex and hockey, was given maximum publicity by the national media during the late nineties. Sheldon Kennedy, a young hockey player, had revealed that his coach, Graham James, had been having inappropriate relations with some of his young players. The Globe and Mail editorialized about “a diseased game.” Suddenly, people were asking big questions about the world of junior hockey. Crime writer James Dubro wrote that it seemed as if sex with boys had become “the crime du jour.”

Soon after the Graham James case broke, Martin (originally Arnold) Kruze, a troubled, sexually confused bankrupt in his mid-thirties, added his own twist to the sports scandals, revealing a series of unsavoury sexual goings-on twenty years in the past at Toronto’s famous Maple Leaf Gardens, the nation’s premier hockey arena. Two years earlier, Kruze had been paid $60,000 for an “agreement of silence” about the repeated sexual abuse he said he had suffered as a boy at the hands of low-level Gardens employees. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Board awarded him another $22,000.

The Gardens had traditionally been run with quasi-military punctilio, but with the advent of the Harold Ballard regime in 1972, “everything went to rat-shit” because, as one former employee put it, “the new employees were a bunch of pirates.” Under “Pal Hal,” Gardens staff were often left unsupervised. Several men on the staff began using games tickets and other favours to entice young boys to have sex with them, and with selected girls. As oversight declined at the Gardens, revenue plunged, and the impulsive Ballard decided more seats were the answer. The iconic half-century old gondola from which Foster Hewitt had called every game was unceremoniously torn out and thrown into the incinerator. Ballard’s action was solemnly denounced by the Toronto Star as “the barbaric destruction of one of Canada’s great cultural monuments.” When Ballard heard this – an employee read it to him – he is said to have exploded in paroxysms of rage and hilarity, choking on his cigar and sending a shower of ash across the accumulated detritus of his desk. Ballard was eventually convicted of 47 counts of theft, fraud and tax evasion and sent to an institution he laughingly described as a country club, where he was allowed to drink beer with the guards.

By 1997, Ballard had been dead for several years and the Gardens was about to be squabbled over as an immensely valuable piece of Toronto real estate. With the Graham James case already engaging the media, Martin Kruze decided to renounce his previous vow of silence and go public with claims of abuse. News programs publicized his charges and the Maple Leaf Gardens scandal became a huge story of its own. In a letter to the media about the case, Kruze alleged that he had been taken advantage of not merely by a few hired maintenance men but by an organized “ring” that decades later was still operating at the Gardens. Kruze, who had begun to describe himself as “an innocent child of God,” rapidly became a professional survivor (he even had a calling card printed with SURVIVOR on it). Ostensibly heterosexual, with an official girlfriend, he admitted he was still having sex with men, claiming he did it to punish himself for past misdeeds. He had become part of what he called “the sexual abuse industry.” When asked by one reporter if he was a blackmailer, he referred any such discussion to his attorney.

Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein admitted later that the subsequent press and television coverage of the sordid Maple Leaf Gardens case was largely driven by homophobia. One veteran police detective who worked the case tried to tell the media there was no truth to the claims of a wide-ranging “pedophile ring” responsible even for a notorious 1977 child murder. But the lack of a “ring,” he said, “spoils their whole story . . . The whole thing about this sex ring grew and grew.” As a result, the Toronto Police Force was under great pressure to uncover more participants in the elusive ring. After Detective Dan Tredrea, chief investigator on the case, went on the Six O’clock News asking for more victims to come forward, the phones, said one officer, began “ringing off the hook . . . It’s been dozens and dozens, literally.” One complainant claimed to have been molested “about fifty times,” and to have told no-one. More men who had known the accused Gardens employees (there were three, one of them deceased) presented themselves to the police. As no sex ring could be substantiated and no Gardens officials could be implicated, the men were pressed to remember names from further afield. One name that came up repeatedly was that of Norman Elder, and the police were able to produce a fat file of past misdemeanours and complaints, including the trolley-fried monkeys, the big pig and the polar bear fence, as well as the names of various reform school graduates who had dallied at the house.

Martin Kruze’s sensational revelations about pederastic goings-on in our national sport’s most sacred site were inevitably discussed in taverns and coffee-shops across the country, often in tandem with the enviable sum he had been paid to keep quiet. And it set in motion a chain of events that led to the first of a dozen serious criminal charges against Norman Elder. Norman had no connection to Maple Leaf Gardens or its employees, and no interest in the young boys involved. But several of the boys had later met Norman, and knew he was gay. His house was only a few hundred yards from Varsity Stadium, the main sports field at the University of Toronto. Of an evening, Norman would often stroll down to catch a game. He would fall into conversation with other spectators, sometimes inviting them to make the short trip home with him. Some enjoyed a cup of tea and a tour of the Museum. Others stayed the night. And back in the seventies, what occasionally ensued afterwards was deemed criminal if one or both parties were shy of the legal age of 21.

While the police began to prepare their case against Norman, there were ominous developments even closer to home. A one-time Bedford Road resident, a mentally disturbed man with a penchant for petty theft, had at one time become involved with a friend of Norman’s called Steve, the putative heir to a well-known Canadian food chain. The relationship had worked out badly, the young thief had been asked to leave the house and had later come to the notice of the police. He blamed Steve, and secondarily Norman for his troubles, and when he read about the Maple Leaf Gardens case, he and a friend began to talk discuss the possibilities of blackmail. One evening, they phoned the Norman Elder Museum and Gallery, looking for Steve, or at least his phone number. None too happy to hear from the pair, Norman told them the facts: “You’re too late. Steve’s dead. He died of a massive aneurism in Belize a few months ago.” Shortly after that call, Norm began confiding to a few close friends that an acquaintance was trying to blackmail him, and that he was neither willing nor able to pay. Before the year was out, Norman was arrested.

Hundreds of people had stayed at the Museum in the decades since the move from Yorkville. Many of his friends and protégés had now become established citizens with families, jobs, businesses or professional lives. But others had become petty criminals, hustlers or perennial bankrupts. It was this second group that provided most of the ten men who now revealed to the police that Norman had initiated sex with them up to a quarter of a century earlier.

After the shock of his initial arrest, Norman realized he would have to decide quickly on a course of action. The question was: whether to contest the charges in court, or to fold and hope his exemplary record and establishment connections would outweigh the flawed recollections and contradictory contentions of an apparently growing list of accusers. “Dr. Tomorrow,” Norman’s old friend Frank Ogden, strongly urged him to plead Not Guilty and fight. One of Canada’s best-known criminal lawyers was mentioned as a possible counsel. The substantial fees involved might have presented a problem, but there were several able local lawyers who could have taken the case, including one whose unofficial office was a window booth in a Yonge Street fast food restaurant, from which perch he had become a shrewd observer of the very world in which Norman’s accusers moved. Others of riper vintage retained their ancient knowledge of those obsolete sections of the Criminal Code under which Norman had been charged. Family members on the other hand dreaded what promised to be a long and gruelling trial with much attendant publicity and embarrassing unpleasantness. Norman decided to avoid further disgrace by signing a court document known as an “Agreed Statement of Facts,” otherwise referred to in the business as a confession. As his solicitor he retained a young attorney with connections to the Elder family.

Norman’s arrest was kept quiet; many of his friends heard nothing about it. Nevertheless, the word was soon out on the street. Men whom Norman had bailed out of jail decades before suddenly remembered him – the guy with the weird house on Bedford Road who took them water-skiing, or offered them cash for a blow job, or let them crash in his upstairs and took care of their laundry.

In October of 1997, I answered Norman’s request for a letter of reference to present to the court. His attorney amassed fifty-eight of these, all from people who knew him, including an impressive number of well-known and distinguished names. They described Norman in “the highest possible terms,” the court agreed, “and as a valued and highly respected member of the community.” Many of the letters attested to Norman’s taking in “confused and lost” young – and not-so-young – people, helping them, re-establishing contact with their families and setting them on the path to “productive lives.” His trial began in January, 1998, with the prosecutor asking Judge Faith Finnestad to give “minimum weight” to any letters attesting to the defendant’s good character on the grounds that his supporters were obviously “not aware that this aspect of his personality existed.”

Against the stack of character references were the sworn statements of ten accusers. The men, all sexually mature males at the time of the alleged events and now approaching middle age, were seen by the court as having been children in the eyes of the law, and thus incapable of consent. Under the statutes in force in the early seventies, no force or even coercion needed to be alleged; a mere sexual advance was an illegal act. One man said that when Norman had “gotten on top of him,” he had “got up and prepared to leave the premises.” After calming him, intercourse was attempted but “no penetration took place.” “At the present time,” he wrote, “I fantasize . . . that I will stop having the nightmare of being chased by an old male.”

In a brief address to the court, Norman admitted he had broken the law, apologized for the distress he had caused and added that “it’s been very difficult for my friends, my family and myself.” Nonetheless, the prosecutor demanded jail time, stressing the large number of offenses and characterizing the defendant as “a predator” who had “ensnared vulnerable youth.” Sympathetic observers heard echoes of the notorious summing-up by Mr. Justice Wills in the Oscar Wilde case a century earlier, when he remarked from the bench that “you, Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men.” On March 12, Judge Finnestad handed down a sentence of two years less a day, to be served in a provincial prison. Disheartened, Norman instructed his attorney to appeal; he was freed until the appeal was heard. Two weeks later, the police laid two additional charges against him, to be tried, together, the following January.

The following ten months were difficult ones for Norman and friends saw little of him. Though he had always enjoyed reasonably good health, his sleep patterns had become increasingly disturbed, perhaps aggravated by the “listlessness” that sometimes accompanies recurrent malaria. A physician who had been close to Norman’s deceased parents began prescribing the drug Ativan, a powerful soporofic and anti-depressant. He began taking the drug regularly, and came to rely on it to get to sleep.

In January of 1999, Norman faced his second major court appearance. Stunned by his failure to avoid a jail sentence in the first, uncontested, trial, he had decided to fight the additional accusations, which were made by two men he knew well but who by court order could not be identified. He pleaded Not Guilty to indecently assaulting the first complainant in 1979 and 1980 and the second in 1989. Both men alleged that Norman had performed oral sex on them. One claimed that Norman had once gotten him drunk in Muskoka. Norman was able to show that the beer was bought by the complainant. The man’s long history of alcoholism, drug abuse, theft and domestic violence tended to cast further doubts on his veracity, as did his pressing financial troubles and threats of lawsuits. The second man claimed Norman had paid him twice, for sex, and said he had kept the proffered $200. But there were a number of serious inconsistencies in his testimony.

Mr. Justice David McCombs pointed out that the Crown’s case relied wholly on the claims of these two witnesses, both of them silent for twenty years. He found their testimony neither credible nor reliable. “However morally repugnant the conduct of Mr. Elder may be,” he said, “I am not convinced the acts were criminal . . . I do not know where the truth lies, so I therefore find Mr. Elder not guilty on both counts.” One of the ten accusers in the earlier case was in court for the verdict. Indignant, he told the press, “This man is a legendary pee-dophile” who should be forced to “take treatment.” He and the others were having a victims’ meeting that very afternoon, he said, to discuss civil action.

A few days after the acquittal, an old friend of Norman’s held a quiet dinner party at his Rosedale apartment to celebrate the acquittal. The guests included historian Don McLeod, crime writer James Dubro and playwright Sky Gilbert; Norman was the guest of honour. The host was John Grube who had taught the adolescent Norman years before at Upper Canada College where he remembered Norman as a quiet, personable athlete. A writer, artist and translator, Grube was the author of a fictional treatment of the notorious 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids which galvanized the gay community to mass civil disobedience. He had been close to Jacques Ferron, the Quebec novelist and doctor to the poor who later founded the Rhinocerous Party.

The old professor was silver-haired now and beginning to grow frail, but had lost none of his radical fire. Over after-dinner drinks, he mounted a forceful argument for a rallying of public opinion against Norman’s sentence. The testimony of fifty-eight citizens might have been set aside, but maybe the outrage of fifty-eight hundred could make the difference between prison and freedom. Norman sipped his brandy and appeared unconvinced. Shy of further publicity, he suggested his establishment connections would see him through in the end. One guest, a young friend of Grube’s whispered, “Who does he know? Conrad Black?”

Don McLeod recalled meeting Norman at the party. He found him charming but “a bit befuddled or dazed” by his trials. “I remember clearly,” he recalled, “that he didn’t even remember some of the young men who brought the charges against him. I think he was optimistic that the verdict (in the first trial) would be overturned on appeal. At the end of the evening, Norman drove us all home in the snow in his big Lincoln. We briefly got lost trying to find our way out of Rosedale.”

The next month, Norman’s appeal was denied and he began his two year sentence in a minimum security jail near Brampton, Ontario. In May, his accusers filed a four million dollar lawsuit. Perhaps they believed Norman to be wealthy. In fact, he had almost no money, his house and car were mortgaged, and his only assets were the various records of his travels and a ramshackle cottage in Torrance, Ontario.

In September, Norman wrote to me from prison: “Great to hear from you! It is very easy to feel very cut off when in jail. So it means a lot getting your letter.” He mentioned John Grube’s much-appreciated dinner party. Jail, he said, “has truly been an interesting experience, with each day a challenge to see if I can make the adjustment to a world that is definitely harder for me than any of my travels into the rainforests. I do like to pretend I’m in a different sort of adventure here. I keep busy reading, drawing, keeping fit and working in the craft shop. Everyone here has been respectful including all the staff.” He mentioned that he still had the books I’d given him over the years – at home of course; he was allowed no outside literature. To another friend, he mentioned the pleasure he took in preparing the hot rocks the Native prisoners used for their sweat lodges.

I visited Norman soon after his release, several months ahead of schedule. Sitting in his old bedroom, glad to be back in familiar surroundings, he was relieved that he had at least been able to keep his property and belongings. He looked well and seemed eager to get on with life. The following January, I invited him to attend a literary party at the Idler Pub, just around the corner from his house. It was a chilly night; the occasion was a memorial get-together to commemorate the life of the poet Edward Lacey, who had died in a Toronto rooming house in 1995. Norman was in good spirits. It was the last time I saw him.

Soon after the Lacey memorial, Norman began hearing rumours of possible further police action against him. In addition, the four million dollar lawsuit was making its way through the court system, and he again faced the prospect of losing virtually everything he owned. Understandably, he became somewhat paranoid, fearing every knock on the door.

For some time, Norman had been taking Ativan, a strong benzodiazopine tranquillizer misprescribed to him for his persistent insomnia. Ativan is a problematic drug. Its side effects can include “agitation, anxiety, depression, persistent and unpleasant memories and a feeling of unreality.” Nightmares, paranoia and panic attacks are not uncommon. At around the time of the Idler gathering, Norman’s prescription for the drug had been suddenly cut off. Ativan is highly addictive and can require regular increases in dosage to achieve the required effect. Going off the drug without a carefully supervised program of withdrawal can lead to mental disorientation and suicidal thoughts. Sleepless and agitated, Norman began buying it occasionally on the black market. The disorientation brought about by Ativan probably intensified an already anxious mental state. His worries about his precarious financial situation and the ongoing civil suit began to prey on his mind. He feared being arrested again, and imagined being left destitute.

One day in October of 2003, a friend accompanied Norman to a meeting at the home of an Elder family member. Hoping for a loan on generous terms that would at least meet his ongoing expenses, he asked his friend to wait for him in the car while he went inside. When he returned, he looked shaken: no loan would be forthcoming. At about this time, he phoned his friend, Bill Jamieson, a fellow Explorers Club member. Jamieson was a dealer in rare tribal artefacts who had purchased the contents of the old Niagara Falls Museum, storing some of the former exhibits at Norman’s house. Norman told Jamieson he was going to sell the building; would he please come and remove his belongings? Jamieson suggested he could tide Norman over with a loan; Norman thanked him but declined the offer.

That evening or the next, John Haddad, the friend who shared Norman’s part of the house, cooked Norman his favourite meal of bacon and eggs. As they sat together in the rudimentary kitchen, the cupboard door immediately opposite Norman, which a slight tilt to the floor invariably kept shut, slowly swung wide open. John Haddad made a comment about omens. Norman smiled but said nothing.

The following morning, John Haddad was puzzled to find the pet lemurs Norman had brought back from Madagascar had not been fed. Shortly afterwards on his return from a shopping trip, Haddad found one of the lemurs in a highly agitated state, jumping back and forth onto a day-bed in Norman’s room. When he went into the bedroom to sit on the day-bed and find out what the lemur wanted, he saw Norman’s body, hanging lifeless from a fixture in the ceiling. In one of those visual hallucinations a sudden shock can induce, the corpse appeared eerily, impossibly small. Police and ambulance were summoned. As a pair of paramedics eased the body down, one of them remarked to the other, “He’s in pretty good shape.”

Seven squad cars quickly descended on 140 Bedford Road and for the last time, official investigators ranged over the premises, taking note of the excited lemurs and curiously decorated coffins, and stringing crime scene tape around the perimeter. For years there had been rumours that tunnels had been dug under the property. Some people had discerned a resemblance between Norman and the actor Bob Crane who played Col. Hogan in the eighties’ TV show Hogan’s Heroes, set in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp. Now, Toronto’s Finest were convinced that Norman’s bed, like the trick bunk in Hogan’s barracks, must be the concealed entrance to a tunnel or system of tunnels leading to an outbuilding, or to the house next door, or even under the street to a manhole cover serving as an escape hatch. Seismic equipment was brought in, revealing no secret passages, only Norman’s windowless “funky room” in the cellar and a false door fastened to one of the walls. Nothing was found in the garden but a few old lion bones.

Shortly after Norman’s death, Duane Robertson had a dream of his old friend hoisting a cup of coffee, saying “I’m not afraid now.”

There seems little doubt that Norman committed some of the acts with which he was charged. He propositioned, and sometimes had sex with, young men, at a time when Canadian law made such activity illegal. But in writing this piece, I spoke with a number of men who in their youth had lived or travelled with Norman. Without exception, the heterosexual ones, some now married and with families, said Norman had never even made a pass at them. One man said, “I’ve slept in beds and hammocks with Norman and he never did anything.” They were surprised to hear of Norman’s arrest and did not believe the charges against him. But a gay man who had known Norman, a retired civil servant who lived briefly at the Bedford Road house as a long-haired hippie youth, remembered Norman offering a reduction of his already low rent should a bit of sex be involved. As he didn’t fancy Norman and was not in the prostitution business, he declined the offer and no more was said about it. He didn’t believe the charges either.

It might seem odd that though the young men Norman was accused of assaulting were said to have “immediately fled under cover of darkness,” in the court’s somewhat melodramatic phrase, he nonetheless continued the unsuccessful seduction technique of suddenly appearing in his victims’ beds. Perhaps, like the man who picked up women at bus stops, he was often met with outrage but was pleased to get quite a few takers as well. Still, the stories of innocent youths assaulted as they slept do not seem to square with accounts of gentlemanly behaviour in other, similar circumstances. But there may be a relatively simple explanation.

For bisexual men, uncomfortable with their own capacity to be aroused in the presence of another male, compromising situations have traditionally been explained away by pleading (a) I was asleep through the whole thing, (b) I was so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing, or (c) I did it for the money. All these explanations were used by witnesses against Norman. One accuser said “I told him to stop but he said, ‘Go back to sleep, don’t worry.’ He performed fellatio for a half-hour.” Another claimed, falsely, that Norman had gotten him drunk. Others admitted they were aroused, and paid. Though Norman’s gaydar seems to have been in good working order, his courtship techniques might have benefited from a little polish. Whether his actions merited a prison sentence so many years after the fact is debatable.

It was not long before members of Norman’s family removed the furnishings and other useable items from the house. Most of Norman’s paintings were auctioned off in lots along with the rest of the contents, including items Norman had borrowed or was storing for friends. One collector remembers seeing some of his own property at an antique stall, acquired from Norman’s estate as one of a large number of lots. On Bedford Road, dumpsters rapidly filled up with bug-ridden crocodile parts and moth-eaten stuffed sheep. John Haddad and the remaining lodgers moved out and the interior was gutted. The polar bear fence and the stone memorial for Jim Butcher, an old friend of Norman’s who had died young, were all hauled away, just as many of the tribal cultures Norman had visited were being swept aside by bulldozers and factory farms. Today, the house at 140 Bedford Road bears no trace of what for thirty-five years had been the Norman Elder Museum and Gallery.

Though he seemed utterly at home in the Toronto of the late twentieth century, Norman Elder resembled nothing so much as an English gentleman adventurer of the Edwardian era, his cabinet of curiosities enlarged into a private museum with trophies mounted on its walls and curious creatures taking over the anteroom. Like any number of Edwardian gentlemen, Norman appeared to be wealthy but in fact was not. He was an eccentric who insisted, “Norman is normal,” his use of the third person distancing him from his own ingenuous claim.

Norman was one of those people who always seem faintly amused by life. Once, just for fun at a fancy Toronto party, he placed a enormous, somnolent snake beneath a warm pile of coats on a bed. As the affair wound down and the dowagers were retrieving their wraps, a sudden shriek made everyone jump: Toronto the Good – meet the jungle! Though there was no malice in these childish pranks, they could be disturbing, especially after a few drinks. But it was a party to remember.

To the end of his life, Norman retained a certain boyishness of appearance and temperament – “running around like a little kid.” Hamish Grant said of him that he had something of a Curious George attitude to life. Though he loved an emir or an exiled king, he pretty much took everyone as he found them. Whoever you were, he was invariably interested in what you were up to, and greeted any piece of knowledge sent his way as a revelation, what someone called his “Gee, golly!” approach – Curious George having just found the banana. As with most trusting, good-natured people, Norman often appeared naive. He had seen hunters shoot howler monkeys out of the trees and eat them, yet was shocked by conditions in the local stockyards. He continually confronted the world’s destructive will, the “fearful carnivorous god,” the anaconda you wrestle for the camera, that almost drowns you. Yet an English poet, who had once fallen into a drunken sleep on Norman’s couch over forty years before, remembered him as “one of the calmest and most quietly civilized characters I am likely to meet.” He could do extraordinary things on a shoestring, just by being “polite but assertive.”

Norman Elder is buried in Torrance, Ontario, near his old cottage. His tombstone describes him as “Explorer, Equestrian, Author and Adventurer.” On the grounds of the the cottage is an animal graveyard. No-one who saw Norman with any of his animals could doubt his affection for them. Here their graves are arranged in neat rows, each with its own individual, sometimes highly idiosyncratic, marker. The cottage and its home-made outbuildings are now falling into desuetude. The cemetery is still maintained by John Haddad.

Even after forty years attending them I still get nervous when a coveted item approaches sale. No matter your experience or determination, an anxiety occurs which must be similar to those stories one hears about actors, even famous and distinguished ones, who vomit before every live performance in the theater. I have worked out elaborate personal rituals over the years both to minimize anxiety and to operate efficiently, for myself and in pursuing the interests of my clients. One often must make instant decisions and one must be prepared to revise estimates on the spot, so a careful dealer must never relax.

In my early days, Waddington’s on Queen Street, an old established general auctioneer, had been purchased by Ron McLean, one of several auctioneers who had learned their trade at the old Ward-Price Gallery on College Street.

Every Wednesday and Saturday morning Waddington’s had estate sales where anything could appear. Nobody cared then about books and often one could buy a whole wall of books as a single lot and usually quite cheaply. It was perfect for a used bookseller, providing large lots of general books, cheap. I went to every sale and often did quite well.

One Saturday morning I had just bought two shelves of rather seedy looking books when Richard Landon wandered into the rooms. Landon, not long then at the University of Toronto’s Rare Book department, was already a serious private collector, regularly frequenting all the used bookstores and socializing a lot with much of the book trade.

That morning Landon looked at my two shelves of unappetizing looking books and said with some disdain, “What did you have to pay for that pile of crap?”

“Eighteen dollars,” I replied. “Why?”

He said, “You’ll be lucky to get your money back from that junk. Why would you do that?”

A bit nettled, I made my first grievous auction error. “Because of this,” I replied a bit testily, pulling off two thick quarto volumes lacking covers. They consisted of just the text blocks but they were in very nice condition otherwise, without the soiling generally to be found on books which have lacked their covers for many years.

Landon searched past the preliminaries to the title page of the first volume. The coverless book was an eighteenth century edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, dated 1775. It was some twenty years too late to be the first edition and besides, it had a Dublin imprint, which indicated it was probably a Dublin piracy, although I didn’t know anything about the Dublin piracies then, or even that books could, and often had been, pirated.

“Oh,” said Landon, in a subdued voice, comprehension sinking in. In those days his favorite author, whom he quoted incessantly, was Samuel Johnson and so enamoured was he of Johnson and his world that he had even named his cat Hodge, after Johnson’s pet. “Well, what do you expect to get for that?” he asked in an entirely different tone of voice, no doubt wishing he had got there ten minutes earlier.

I was caught – one of my earliest bookselling lessons about keeping my mouth shut. (I’ve had 10,000 others since then, none of which has ever sunk in, it seems.)

What could I do? It wasn’t just that he was a friend, he was a librarian – in the rare books department of the largest university in Canada which then was the only institutional client I had. And it didn’t take a lot of insight to be aware that his ambitions as a librarian were considerable. He was going to rise and I needed to rise with him.

I saw no way out. He knew what I had paid for the entire lot, because of my big mouth, and I didn’t think it would be in my interests to come back to him later with a price of ten or twenty times what he knew I had paid for them.

I bit the bullet. “OK, to you – right now – $36,” I said reluctantly, doubling my investment. (Maybe Richard will think that booksellers always only double their purchase price, I thought.)

“OK,” said Landon. “I’ll pick it up when you get it back to the shop.”

When he picked it up, he asked for an invoice claiming lack of cash. Landon then took the book to Michael Wilcox, the great bookbinder who had recently quit his job gluing bird skeletons together at the Royal Ontario Museum to return to his first love. This was some years before Wilcox began to do design bindings for which he is now justly world-famous. The standard trade bindings Wilcox did then were lovely and technically perfect; I always buy them when I see them. And, of course, I’ve been beggaring myself for his design bindings ever since he started doing them, at the behest of Roderick Brinckman of Monk Bretton Books whose specialty was finely printed and bound books.

It turns out the Johnson was the first Dublin edition in quarto and it preceded the London quarto edition of the same year, making it the first quarto edition and, as Landon constantly likes to boast, worth a fair bit, especially now that they are housed in lovely Wilcox bindings.

However, some two or three years later, sorting papers, I found Landon’s invoice with no markings to indicate it had ever been paid. I called him.

“I just found the invoice for the Dublin Johnson. You never paid me.”

Landon replied brusquely and firmly, “I always pay cash.”

That has been his regular defense in the many instances when I have brought it up in the years since.

And I have been bringing it up periodically ever since – often at the Landons’ dinner table with foreign dignitaries from the book world present. I’ve had a lot of fun doing this but I finally stopped when someone told me privately that Marie Korey, Richard’s wife, had said she was so sick of hearing about it, and that she was going to pay me the $36 herself, if I did it once more.

I guess I should admit here that all the evidence points to Landon’s probable innocence. For $36 would have been a lot of money for me then and it’s unlikely that I wouldn’t remember that it was owed. Once I suggested that we could rectify this unfortunate misunderstanding by Richard leaving the Dictionary to me in his will.

He replied, “I always pay cash.”

My first serious auction was also at Waddington’s, one of their rare early sales entirely devoted to books. They had acquired a very good library of Canadiana which attracted all the collectors and dealers in Eastern Canada.

I was then still apprenticing with Joseph Patrick who specialized in Canadiana. I knew nothing about Canadiana and, in truth, very little about books at all. However, my ignorance didn’t matter because I didn’t have any money anyway so I was hardly in a position to be competition for anyone. But, in spite of my complete lack of any qualifications or money, I already had the instincts of the player and I wanted to participate badly and was determined that I would. The excitement generated by visiting dealers in the shop and talk of great rarities caused me to want to be involved as well. Most of the major dealers in Canadiana in Canada were in town for the sale.

I studied the books, not knowing which were the $10 books or which the $1,000 books. But I was hooked on the action, wondering how I could possibly compete.

I had been studying modern literature and learning how to ascertain what was, or might be, a first edition. I realized that my only hope of buying anything was to focus on what the other dealers ignored.

There were two books I did know and which I ascertained were first editions. They were the three-volume first edition of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico (1845) and the two-volume first edition of Conquest of Peru (1847), both important historically and both in stunning, almost new condition. I was too inexperienced to know then that this was very unusual. That period, from the 1830s to the 1870s, was a period of some of the ugliest book production ever, especially in America where these were published. The cloth used in America at that time was ugly and cheap. It chipped easily at the extremities, cracked at the hinges, and the gilt titling usually was so shoddy that titles regularly became tarnished or simply disappeared. And the paper, because of the reactions of chemicals in the still time-untested experiments of paper-making from wood chips, often turned dark brown, and worse, became so brittle that turning a page could cause the page to snap into pieces and crumble like a stale cracker. Institutional libraries now find themselves needing to deal with these books, which are literally in danger of disintegrating at any handling whatsoever.

These two copies had none of these defects. In fact, in the forty-some years since that auction, I’ve seen many copies of both those books but never have I seen either in such fine condition. I guess they were included because they were technically Americana even though they dealt with Central and South America. This is not so strange when one realizes that until after the American Revolution all books dealing with the Western Hemisphere were considered Americana, including books on Canada. Even after the revolution there were many books which legitimately were considered both Americana and Canadiana (and there still are) but Prescott, being an American writing on Central and South America, was collected as Americana.

I decided my only hope of participation was to try and buy them. I asked my boss Jerry Sherlock what I should do and what he thought. “I haven’t a clue, Dave,” he said, not even attempting to hide his indifference; he was too busy preparing for his own fights with his competitors for the prized Canadian rarities to care about a couple of books that weren’t in his field. I was on my own.

And here, of course, is the lesson. None of the other dealers cared either, as I found out. Both books came up very early in the sale, luckily for me, because of the level of my anxiety.

Mexico came up and I can still feel the frozen, time-suspending terror I felt as the auctioneer said, “Now we have a set of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. What am I offered? Let’s start with $15 for the three volumes. Do I have $15?”

I timidly raised my hand – my first bid at a real auction! I was both terrified and exuberant – indeed the only difference between then and now is that I lacked any sense of what I was going to do next. I lacked any sense of determination, which is the real key to an auction.

No one else bid. Ron McLean, the owner and chief auctioneer then at Waddington’s and the best auctioneer I’ve ever dealt with, didn’t fool around. He barely paused, then knocked it down to me. I was stunned, still shaking with excitement, but aware that I had another book right after it.

“OK,” said McLean. “Here’s the sequel, The Conquest of Peru. How much am I offered? $10?”

I raised my hand again. Ten seconds later it was mine, too. I remember nothing else of that auction. No doubt there were many great struggles for the desirable Canadiana but I missed it all, savouring my great coup. I got them only because no one else bothered to consider them, not the last time I profited from the carelessness of others. After much research and considerable trepidation I priced Mexico at $75 and Peru at $45. After around ten years, by which time the prices had risen to around $350 and $250 respectively, they sold. In case ten years seems like a long time I should say that in those days, with neither the customers nor the knowledge of how to acquire them, that was not at all unusual. From that and many other similar purchases I learned another very important lesson: a good book, especially in fine condition, will always sell. I believe it is foolish to expect it to sell immediately, and I never fall into the trap common to many dealers of thinking I have failed if I don’t sell it the next day.

Of course, a real businessman would point out – as my father, the banker, regularly delighted in doing – that any merchandise, even if you get it free, which sits on a shelf in rented space for ten years is hardly a bargain, or even feasible for any real business.

That lesson, compounded some time later by a second lesson, caused me to formulate a system I have used ever since.

The second lesson occurred when I was much more experienced at auctions, but it was still a confirmation of the first. At Waddington’s they would often put up the least desirable books early on, the principle being that bidders, especially dealers, will bid carelessly before they have spent serious money. The more they spend, the more serious – and cautious – they become. Sitting there at this auction the first lot was a set of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911-12), known as the Scholar’s Edition, probably the best general encyclopedia ever done and still the only encyclopedia that serious booksellers buy for stock. Like everyone else, I had assumed that one of the many collectors or dealers present, knowing that, would pay around $300-$400, its going price then. But it was knocked down for $30 because no one had the sense to bid, all of us ignoring it because we were concentrating on the exciting rarities awaiting us. Really we were making assumptions, presumably assumptions based on logic and common sense, but our error was in entertaining the notion that common sense had any part in the equation.

And that was the lesson. Don’t assume that the obvious will occur. Don’t assume that people, even dealers, will assess everything sensibly and act accordingly. Once, as we were packing up at the end of a bookfair I idly picked up a book from a neighbour’s table. It was a good book on the Klondike which everyone knew was a $200 book. This man had priced it at $15. No one had bothered to look at the price during the entire fair since we all assumed that he too would be aware of its value. Same lesson. Ever since that day I have always used the system that those two incidents taught me, and I never deviate no matter how boring the material or how broke I may be. I look at every book and never reject a book – even the ones I’m not interested in – unless, or until, I have a satisfactory reason for doing so. There are books one can reject because of serious condition problems but even those need to be studied closely in case their intrinsic value or rarity could justify today’s high cost of restoration. So I am always prepared. After viewing two to three hundred lots your memory will be faulty so I depend on my notes. Therefore, when a book reaches $200 and my note says $300, I will drop out if the bidder is a friend or a client, otherwise I go up to the limit as noted. I cross out any book I don’t want at any price, and, using my code, I note the minimum under which I will not allow anyone else to buy that lot.

All dealers have a code, used to provide themselves with details of purchase, etc., while hiding them from others. Many dealers enjoy attempting to break their colleague’s codes. Sometimes such information can be helpful, but I think the real motivation is simply for the fun of it, like solving a puzzle.

These codes are usually formed from a ten-letter word with no letters duplicated – that informs a dealer what they paid for a book. It is usually accompanied by the date and the initials of the dealer they bought it from. This allows them to consider discounts or deals when they are sick of looking at a book.

I have two codes, one of which, after so many years, I can read as though it were the actual numbers. In fact, so deep is it imbedded in my brain I can actually add totals in code as easily as if it were the real numbers. This is a necessary defense and I do all my written business using it. And here’s one reason why. Once, I was sitting behind a close friend – another bookseller at an important auction – and as this dealer turned around to say something, I could see written beside the next item in their catalogue the notation “So and So [a very prominent London dealer] $15,000.” He obviously had a commission from that dealer. What a slip, I thought. If that dealer hadn’t been a close friend, and if that prestigious London dealer had been guilty of some perceived sin against me, even jealousy, it could have been a very costly mistake for my friend and his London client.

Ward-Price, the old firm on College Street, held occasional book sales generally handled by a man called Lee Pritzger who lived out around Hamilton and came in to run the sales.

Things would be bundled at Ward-Price sales and it was necessary to carefully count the books in any bundle before and after the sale, even though the lots were always tied together by string.

Once I bought a lot, its only desirable book a fine early T.S. Eliot. I successfully bought the lot but when I went to pick it up, the Eliot was missing, even though the lot was still securely tied together.

I told the man in charge “There’s a T.S. Eliot title missing from my lot.”

“How could that be?” he wondered.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe my lawyer might, though.”

Off he went, returning a few minutes later, handing me the Eliot. “It must have slipped out of the lot” he said, carefully not looking at the still tightly tied bundle.

Yes, indeed. I heard quite a few instances of that curious “slipping out” of books from Ward-Price lots, escapes worthy of Houdini, one could say.

Iattended many Waddington’s auctions over the years. A very colourful part-time dealer and school teacher named Robert Russell had come to an arrangement with Waddington’s and took to running their book sales.

With Russell in charge of the books the sort of “slippage” found at Ward-Price took on a whole new meaning, culminating some years later when the publisher Charles Musson consigned what in a later magazine article he called a priceless collection of 4,000 books formed by his grandfather, the original Charles Musson. The whole collection slipped out of the bundle, so to speak. Some four thousand books, lost in this “slippage,” later appeared at Memorial University of Newfoundland donated by Bob Russell who, coincidentally, had received an honorary degree from the University.

Even those of us who knew Russell well remained skeptical of Musson’s accusations. Amongst other things, Musson claimed there were many first editions of Charles Dickens, inscribed to the original Musson, who hadn’t even founded his company until 1903 when Dickens had been dead thirty-three years.

Musson also claimed that the collection had resided at his cottage in some thirteen or fourteen wooden crates for some years. A curious way to deal with a priceless collection, some of us thought, storing it in a cottage, unheated for six to seven months of the year and infested by mice and other rodents. Not to mention that such crates might hold fifty to sixty books each at most – more would make them impossibly heavy – but certainly very many less books than Musson contended were stolen.

At an auction, any number of things are going on to which you are completely oblivious. For instance, you, a stranger, will be getting checked out at the preview by dealers, trying to decide if you might be a threat to their interests. They were, also unbeknownst to you, watching you to see what items you looked at. If you looked more than fleetingly at anything which they believe to be in their territory, they took note.

Some people seem to think they can go to an auction and need only outbid a known dealer to get a bargain. Such people could be in for a rude surprise. For a hundred years or so, any outsider thinking that way who entered, say, Sotheby’s or Christie’s in London, might leave with books for which they had paid three or four times the value, because the English book trade believed that auctions were their territory and they made any fool who didn’t accept that pay very dearly.

Here is an example of what can happen if a dealer follows the old rule of always watching and always trying to figure out what’s going on.

One evening I went with a couple of dealer friends up Bayview Avenue to a new auction which was small enough that you could easily preview it in the hour before the sale. While we were looking at the material I checked out the other viewers, as I always do. I noticed one man who was meticulously examining every item with great concentration. It seemed strange to me that a man whom I had never seen in any bookshop should be acting like a sophisticated connoisseur, so he kept my attention.

After the viewing my friends and I went out to eat before the sale and, it not being a significant sale, I relaxed and allowed myself a couple of drinks, something I usually would not do, for a lengthy sale demands intense concentration and instant decisions, sometimes involving real money. Not to mention that it is unwise to place yourself in a position where you might need to visit the washroom at an inconvenient time during the sale.

Back at the sale all of us were in a jolly mood, not really dangerous for pros in that kind of sale. My earlier focus of interest was seated in the row ahead of me so I was curious to see how he might conduct himself. At previews everybody is equally important. It is common to see people, who looked at everything in an apparently knowledgeable manner, who then bid on a few items but miss everything by dropping out at a very low level, thereby demonstrating their entire lack of understanding and any sense of the value of things.

At about the fourth lot in the sale the auctioneer said, “Now we come to the Canadian whaling log and drawings.”

The whaling log – what whaling log? I hadn’t seen any whaling stuff, nor any manuscript. As the floorman lifted a large bundle, string-tied, I turned to the colleague beside me.

“What’s the whaling thing?” I said, a bit confused. “I didn’t see that.”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see it either,” he replied.

The dealer on the other side of me shrugged, “Me neither. I must have missed it too.”

Suspicious.

The bidding began and who should start bidding but my strange, over-attentive gentleman of earlier. That son-of-a-bitch, I thought. He hid it under the table. I’m going to buy that whatever it goes for. I started bidding, too. When the only other bidder, that unknown gentleman, finally dropped out, it was mine. I think it went for $200, not a fortune then, but not a small amount either.

“What was so good about that?” one of my friends asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I had a hunch. I’ll find out later whether I was smart or stupid.”

Examining it the next day I found it was a hand-written diary/log of a seaman from Quebec who had shipped out on a New England whaler in the 1870s. It was incomplete but substantial, including quite a few drawings in a competent hand of ships and scenes of whaling.

It turned out the only Canadian connection was that the man had been from Quebec and shipped out from there. I shopped it around some Canadian institutions first, but no one wanted it. So I raised the price to reward myself for my cleverness and nerve and sold it to one of the many New England institutions who collect whaling history.

I was very pleased with myself and secretly thanked the two or three drinks I had had which no doubt contributed to my sense of adventure and to the nerve to follow my hunch.

I got, if I remember, $4,000 for having the confidence to trust my instincts and so I should have, for I could just as easily have lost my investment.

And, of course, I never saw that mysterious unknown man again, who thought he could outsmart the pros by hiding something under the table. But ever since I have paid as much attention to the people at the previews as to the material.

So if you think auctions are logical and straightforward you should think about that story before you venture into unknown territory. Why do you think it is that knowledgeable librarians or collectors never bid for themselves at auctions? They always hire a dealer at the usual 10% commission which must be one of the great bargains in all bookselling.

One of the most relevant such auction anecdotes I know was told me by Justin Schiller, the acknowledged preeminent children’s book dealer in the world.

Two copies of the true first edition of Alice in Wonderland came up in Paris – the 1865 printing which had so dissatisfied Lewis Carroll because of the inferior printing of Tenniel’s illustrations that he had suppressed it. His publisher had withdrawn the entire edition, excepting the very few copies sent out before publication. They sent the whole edition to America where it was issued with a new titlepage as the first American edition. So rare is the real first edition (there are twenty-two recorded copies of the 1865 Alice, of which only five were then still in private hands) that the new, 1866 printing is generally referred to as the first edition, the true first edition being almost unobtainable.

Two copies of the 1865 Alice (as it is generally referred to amongst the cognoscenti) came up at a sale in Paris run by Drouot, the major Parisian auction house.

There are so many bizarre details in this anecdote I hardly know where to start. Both these copies were extraordinary.

One of the copies of Alice had ten of the original Tenniel drawings tipped in and was then believed to be Carroll’s own copy since it had markings in it in the purple ink Carroll habitually used. The other copy was inscribed by Carroll to Dinah Mulock Craik, the Victorian novelist who wrote John Halifax, Gentleman, and was rendered even more important because her husband, a partner in Macmillan, was Carroll’s editor. Not only two copies of a great rarity but both copies enhanced by stunning associations.

Both copies were together, as the last lot in a sale which mostly contained very early and important books in other fields.

These Carroll books had been purchased by the great dealer Dr. Rosenbach and sold to a collector named Eldridge Johnson. How Johnson handled these priceless treasures is so amusing and eccentric that I cannot resist recounting it. Johnson would travel with them on his yacht, carried in a solander case, and he would place them in a special waterproof safe he had anchored in his stateroom. If ever the ship were to sink a huge buoy attached to the safe with a long thick rope would rise to the surface. On the buoy, in bright red letters, was painted “ALICE” so that the world could locate the safe and rescue these priceless treasures. The Alice’s would be saved even if the humans weren’t. Who said collectors are eccentric?

Justin wanted these badly, one of them for his personal collection. But how to deal with the competition? He learned through a colleague that his biggest competitor was likely to be John Fleming, a prominent New York dealer, who had worked for Rosenbach and wanted to buy them for the sentimental connection. Rosenbach had, in fact, bought them twice at auction over the years.

Justin very cleverly approached Fleming, who agreed to act for him – a brilliant ploy – thereby eliminating the competition at the mere cost of a 10% commission.

And then it got more bizarre.

It is said that a private offer was made before the sale of $250,000 for the two Carrolls but the French auctioneers made an exchange mistake and the catalogue estimate was shown as 250,000 francs (then between four or five new francs to the dollar). It was a long sale and the auctioneer must have been weary, wanting it over. He announced the last lot and started it at 220,000 francs. Fleming raised his hand and the auctioneer banged down his hammer instantly, and departed. Justin got both books for well under one third of what he had been prepared to bid.

But more important to a dealer is the lesson which can be learned from wrestling with such a dilemma and I have factored the implications into many of my own business strategies since. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” goes the old adage. For a bookseller, revise that to, “If you can’t beat ’em, have ’em join you; hire ’em.”

At a San Francisco bookfair a couple of years ago, a man stopped to examine books in my booth, and in the ensuing conversation it came out that he was a surgeon who collected early medical books. After chatting for a bit, the subject of rarity came up, which in turn led to talk of what happens when really rare books appear at auctions. He mentioned that an important book in his field, one he badly wanted, came up at auction on an afternoon that he had a heart surgery scheduled.

“Did you have a dealer bid for you?” I enquired.

“No. With really scarce books I like to do it myself. Sometimes it’s necessary to revise your upper limits on the spot.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I bid myself.”

“And you had a colleague do your surgery?”

“No, I did that too.”

“You mean you interrupted an operation to bid at an auction?” I enquired, intrigued, picturing the anesthetist, and the assistants and the nurses, standing around someone with their chest open, waiting for an auctioneer to bang his gavel.

“No, I did both.”

“Both? You mean you bid while you were operating?”

“Yes.”

“Where was the phone?”

“On my shoulder. You need both hands with a heart.”

“You mean you were operating on a man’s heart and buying a book at the same time?”

“Yes,” he said grinning sheepishly.

The only response I could think of, to an anecdote like that, was to say, “Well, I was intending to avoid heart surgery anyway, but you’ve given me an added incentive.”

“I would strongly advise you to avoid heart surgery – if you can,” he said, his grin wider.

Especially one done by a serious book collector, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

“And did you get the book?”

“Yes! It’s a beauty. But it cost plenty.”

But in spite of his sheepish grin, he still spoke with the quiet confidence of a man who knows his capabilities. I knew he wouldn’t have said such a thing if he didn’t know he had the goods to handle whatever might ensue. There’s bravado, and there’s the confidence that comes to all pros and I could tell he had the latter. This was not Dr. Benway in The Naked Lunch calling for the toilet plunger; this was a man who had performed many, many such procedures and knew he was in control of his operation. It was that sort of professional who landed his plane safely on the East River, not long ago, arousing admiration and pride in all of us who still admire human capabilities and pure nerve. Or, like the airline pilot who has three hundred people on autopilot and is talking with his second officer about his mortgage or his daughter’s despicable boyfriend, but is never unaware of his airplane or his duty.

Still, I thought, I’m going to start dieting and taking regular walks tomorrow.

Any auction, indeed any interplay between dealers in general, will contain elements of envy and spite over perceived advantages or old grudges.

No outsider can understand, even partially, most of these factors. Obscure reasons can be in play: the other bidder, another dealer, could be his sworn enemy and he may have decided that his despised opponent will not buy that book no matter the cost. Vanity and malice are emotions which will defeat common sense every time.

The story of my own favorite auction triumph gets complicated because it operated on several of those levels. The auction I refer to here, with the attendant subtleties, included a rivalry between two dealers, who had once been friends, but no longer were by the time of the auction. It also includes one of the greatest examples in my experience of the kind of cooperation between a dealer and a librarian which can occur when both parties are operating in an area where they understand each other and each carries, in regard to the other, a professional respect and trust.

On viewing the offerings in the preview, a few days before the sale, I found a copy of Robert Service’s rare first book Songs of a Sourdough. The copy offered was bound in plain paper wrappers instead of the cloth it was issued in, making it appear to be a book missing its covers, which had had brown wrapping paper pasted on. It had come from the estate of Fay Fenton, a journalist who had lived in the Klondike, and it was immediately obvious to me that it was a proof copy and probably unique. It made sense to assume that she would have known Service and that he had undoubtedly given it to her. Service’s first book, for which he had paid the printing costs, at least for the first 100 copies, was already a legendary rarity selling, even then, for $2,000 or so.

Like many another hopeful scout, I had always been looking for it. For many years every time I went into the Old Favorites Bookshop, I went first to “S” in the Canadian poetry section hoping that one day it would be sleeping there, waiting for the handsome prince (me) to come and wake it from its slumber. One day I walked in and there it was – priced at $10 – another example of why scouting is so exciting. It was a fine copy and I sold it for $2,500 the next day.

The people then in charge of Waddington’s book sales were a little short on experience and they had not realized that it was a proof copy and had it described as “in plain wrappers,” and had estimated it in the catalogue as selling in the $100-$200 range. I knew it was worth very much more than that and left hoping that other dealers might go past it without seeing it, or if they did see it, would also be too inexperienced to know its importance. I knew that was unlikely, but . . .

I thought about it for some time and arrived at what I considered should be a proper retail value – $30,000 to $35,000.

But unfortunately I knew who would be very unlikely to miss it: my ex-friend Steven Temple. Still deeply hurt by and smarting from his actions over the Canadian Editions debacle, I was determined that he would not get it. But in spite of my continuing anger I knew he was far too good a bookseller not to know exactly what it was and what its value should be. His specialty was Canadian Literature then and I had no doubt that he would be my most dangerous adversary.

I knew that my anger towards Temple was both childish and unbecoming but it was still there and my whole strategy was influenced by those feelings.

I figured it would take around $10,000 to buy it if Temple saw it and I figured he would try to raise that amount, maybe by borrowing, or maybe by taking on a partner.

Given the threat from the competition and my financial state I wondered if I should contact Richard Landon and work on commission for the University of Toronto. If I did that and he commissioned me I would get only a 10% commission for my trouble. But recently I had done that for a very scarce early Canadian Literature item which was about a $750 book. Not caring much, but my still-hurt feelings demanding that I not let Temple get it, I mentioned it to Richard and got his commission, which was a sad result for me, since Temple didn’t attend and I had no knowledgeable competition at all and bought the book for the University of Toronto at $90 . . . making a profit of $9 instead of the $700 or so I should have made. So with this one it could work both ways. My cowardice could do me in as easily as my spite.

Checking my credit line I found I had a $15,000 credit limit, still unused, at the bank, which was about exactly what I felt would have to be my uppermost limit if I bought the Service on spec. So it would take all my available resources of credit, an uncomfortable situation. Even though I firmly believed it was a $30,000-$35,000 book, any book in that range becomes problematic, for any such price demands the resources to pay it. And, of course, when books get up in that price range, customers are limited; one might sit on such a book for several years until a knowledgeable collector appears.

Finally, two days before the sale, I decided I was too close to the edge and I decided to contact Landon. By this time I was far more concerned with just getting the book than with any potential profit. The problem was that Landon was in England. I knew he usually stayed in London with Ian Willison, a retired librarian at the British Museum, but they didn’t have Ian’s phone number at the Fisher. On a hunch I phoned Marie Korey’s assistant at Massey College to find that Marie had left Ian’s number for any emergency. I phoned. It was evening there and Ian was home alone. He informed me that Richard and Marie were in the Lake District and he expected them the next day. I explained my dilemma: a unique format of the first book of a very important Canadian writer (before you dismiss Service as a writer of doggerel, remember Kipling). As we spoke, Ian became more and more excited himself. My God, I thought, a real librarian, who actually cares about books and understands their importance – what a wonderful surprise. I hadn’t yet met Ian. The next year when I did, it was at the Landons’ dinner table and I could see instantly that he was indeed that wonderful rarity, a real librarian, who was a real bookman. And to compound my pleasure at meeting him, he had known one of my youthful intellectual heroes, Colin Wilson, when they were both young and Wilson was writing The Outsider in the reading room of the British Museum.

We left it that he would have Richard call me as soon as he returned. And the next morning, the day of the sale, Richard did call. I explained the situation to him and said we couldn’t count on others making the same mistake that Waddington’s staff had. “What do you think it will go for?” Richard asked.

“I think it should go for $10,000-$12,000,” I said.

“OK,” he said, “I’ll go that high.”

A pause. I knew I had to say more.

“Listen, Richard, if it goes for $12,000 or less, it’s yours. But I have to tell you, if it goes higher I’m going to go on for myself. I want that book.”

Another pause. “What do you think it’s worth, Dave?”

“I think it’s a $30,000 to $35,000 book,” I replied. “And I think I can sell it for that pretty easily. And I’m going to buy it, if you don’t.”

A longer pause.

“Okay, Dave. I don’t have any money” (meaning his budget was exhausted); “Just buy the book. I’ll get the money somehow.”

I had an unlimited bid, every dealer’s dream. This is what can happen when a system of trust exists between two knowledgeable people, a trust which has developed over many years.

An unlimited bid – almost unheard of. An unlimited bid contains unlimited power in its essence, a wonderful feeling. Of course, I didn’t really have an unlimited bid, as both Landon and I tacitly understood. He was trusting my professional expertise. If some unknown fool had crazy ambitions I was expected to realize that and desist if necessary. Still, up to $25,000 or so, I was free to act. We had both understood this without any need to state it.

When I entered the saleroom that night it was full. I surveyed the crowd, noting several western dealers whom I knew would covet it too, and, of course, the entire eastern trade was there, including the one I saw as my real competition, Temple. I felt an almost benign affection for the lot of them. Poor guys, I thought magnanimously. Their dreams of glory, so soon to be shattered. So sad.

I looked, as I always do, for a spot where I could observe my presumed probable competitors without being seen myself. I sat two rows back and on the other side from Temple and the two most dangerous western dealers who were also plainly in view – including their hands, which you need to monitor most, since they not only bid, but give off the most effective indication of the buyer’s intentions.

The Service came up very early. Ron McLean, a very astute man, and as I said earlier, the best auctioneer I’ve ever encountered (his son Duncan is not far behind him), announced the lot number, adding, in a manner he often adopted – where he pretended to be dumb – that someone had told him that the next item might be unique.

“What do I know?” he asked with a shrug. “It’s estimated at $100 – $200,” he said slyly, “so in case that unique stuff is true, I guess I’ll start at $200. Do I have $200?” He knew very well what he knew and I’m sure he expected exactly what happened, to happen.

The room erupted, arms in the air everywhere, McLean pulling in bids as fast as he could call them, the place chaos. I didn’t bid; I watched. Sure enough, the West was bidding frantically. Then Temple raised his hand and kept it up imperiously, the gesture presumably intended to tell all of us that it was futile to thwart him, but telling me that he had indeed obtained money, a loan, or a partner, or both. The bidding died down in the $3,000 to $4,000 range – as always, an indicator of lack of imagination. I entered at around $4,000. There was only Temple, his arm still pompously in the air, and a couple of others. By $5,000 it was just me and Temple. He couldn’t see whom he was bidding against, but at $7,000 he started to get nervous – this wasn’t going the way he’d planned. At $8,000 he started lowering his arm, then it went up again, then down, then up again – but each time more hesitantly on the up part. McLean watched us both intently, back and forth, a small smile on his face, continuing now in $500 increments.

Down came Temple’s arm, a look of intense frustration on his face; a pause, up again, one more try, the hope born of desperation. I bid instantly every time, hammering it home. Finally at $10,000 Temple was at his limit and showed it. After a few seconds he made his last desperate move, one more bid, hoping his opponent’s level was also $10,000. I raised my pencil one last time and Temple slumped in his seat, defeated. It was mine at $11,000!

There was silence for a moment and then the entire room erupted in loud applause. I had always believed such applause at an auction to be vulgar and stupid. Imagine cheering just because some fool spends a lot of money? Crazy, I’d always believed.

But curiously this time I did finally see the sense in that just acknowledgement of the victor’s superiority.

In this case it clearly wasn’t the money spent they were applauding; it was my cleverness and courage they were celebrating. I positively basked in it. Then Ron McLean joined the game. A born actor, as are all great auctioneers and great salesmen of all sorts, he knew how to play a crowd. He knew how to turn any result to his advantage, to create a feeling that anyone could do it.

“That’s David Mason who bought that,” he announced. “I can remember when he would come in here as a kid to buy a wall full of books for $10 or $20 dollars. Who would have thought then that he’d be spending $11,000 for a single book today?”

Ron was still playing the room. He was telling them all that they too could be applauded. You too can be world-famous here tonight, all you have to do is stick your arm up and keep it up and we will cheer for you, too.

And so, the University of Toronto got a unique copy of the most famous book of poetry ever published in Canada. But I got the glory – and this story.

I am a feminist . . . I also feel that sex and pornography is really powerful for the female. Even if she has eight dicks on her face, she’s still the queen of those eight dicks . . . It’s hard for me to say that porn is degrading to women, because the women are the most desirable and beautiful and attractive people in the porn . . . .

Lindsay is confused.

To Lindsay, pornography is concerned with the desirability of women. On the surface, it appears to be. But to pornography’s main audience, its male audience, the subtext is the desirability of men, and specifically, of the penis. Mainstream pornography is penis worship. The woman in the video is only queen of anything until her clothes come off; thereafter, her role is to worship those eight dicks, avidly, and to make hungry, animal noises while doing so. As desirable as they may seem, women in porn are numerous, and interchangeable, a dime a dozen.

But Lindsay believes what she wants to believe. That’s how porn works.

The times, they are a-changing: in 1963, Hugh Hefner was charged with “publishing and distributing an obscene magazine,” and today, the same magazine struggles to stay afloat, chiefly because it’s too tame. Hardcore pornography has entered the mainstream. The past 20 years has seen a tenfold growth in the production of porn movies, with over 13,000 produced in 2005 – more than even the most enthusiastic aficionado could watch in a year, even by diligent multitasking. Traci Lords, underaged porn queen of the 1980s, took a role on Melrose Place. Sasha Grey, reigning porn queen, starred in a legitimate movie, The Girlfriend Experience. Porn has become a feature of the cultural landscape, broadly accepted if not universally welcomed. And there’s no sign of it going away.

Yet the Canadian novel, with rare exceptions, behaves as if pornography doesn’t exist. Not that CanLit needs delicately rendered scenes of men masturbating to Young and Tight, in the best Anne Michaels soft focus. (Although that does raise endless parodic possibilities – writing contest, anyone?) But how does such a prominent feature of contemporary culture escape literary notice?

Perhaps, as accepted as porn now is, we’re still reluctant to admit actually knowing anything about it; if you can name two porn stars, not including Jenna Jameson, you might be taking it too seriously. Or perhaps we’re just chicken. You risk becoming too edgy for the book club. And if you’re a man, you risk getting it all wrong. The last thing you can trust is your instinct; this topic is a minefield. Everywhere you turn, you risk tripping over a high-explosive cliché, or at the very least, the accusation that you’re oblivious to the extent of your patriarchal entitlement.

Besides, your mom might read it.

Your best option, therefore, is to write historical fiction. No one will complain that you’ve got Fort William, circa 1926, all wrong. And if anyone does, you can rest assured that nobody will be listening, except for the readership of the magazine formerly known, for reasons unique to our time, as The Beaver.

How can a writer, in particular, a male writer, approach a character who works in porn? Sex-positive feminists insist on viewing women in porn as happy, well-adjusted people who entered the porn business of their own free will – in short, as happy hookers. Anti-pornography campaigners portray the same women as messed-up girls who sign up on the promise of good money, only to find themselves coerced into increasingly degrading acts. They are victims.

Michelle Sinclair, Wildworks productions

Who are we to believe? We could ask a pornstar. Consider Belladonna (Michelle Sinclair), who appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live in 2003. Although Primetime portrayed Sinclair as a fresh-faced girl-next-door – which at some point, she undoubtedly was – she left home at 15 and worked in a variety of retail jobs (most proudly, she says, as a Subway “sandwich artist”) before becoming a stripper, and then moving into porn. In her first scene, at age 18, she was pressured into anal sex:

I think I was just so, like, wow, I’m gonna be famous . . . and I’m like, well, I’ve never even done anal sex in my entire life, never, never even thought of it . . . it was painful, you know . . . I didn’t know any better, you know, I didn’t know that I couldn’t get work again if I didn’t do that.

Within a year, she had contracted chlamydia, started using drugs, and had thoughts of suicide – but the money kept her going. She kept resolving to quit the business, and then going back to it. During the interview, Sinclair smiles continually, until Diane Sawyer asks her why. Then, without warning, she breaks down:

[I smile] because I like to hide my, everything, you know . . . Now I’m gonna cry . . . I just, I like to hide my real emotions because I want everyone to see how happy I am. But inside, really, I’m not happy. I don’t like myself at all.

Sinclair later complained of Primetime’s manipulative editing, and said her many positive statements about porn were excised. Her fans complain that Diane Sawyer manipulated poor, naive 18-year-old Belladonna into crying on camera, forgetting that poor, naive 18-year-old Michelle Sinclair is supposed to be capable of entering, fully informed, into all her performance contracts.

Sinclair, now a producer and director, offered these insights on her fulfilling work in a recent segment on Adult Video News:

To me it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, doesn’t matter how extreme it is or how soft it is . . . it’s a great feeling to feel like, you know, you’re not just fucking, you’re actually making a difference, you know, people are getting more confident in their sexuality because of you.

They say public service is our highest calling.

Active performers present the sex-positive position; some former performers take the opposite view. So perhaps we oughtn’t to ask the pornstar, after all. Porn movies are, in the end, movies: pure illusion. You can pretty much believe anything you want to. Which puts us right back to square one.

No writer can be blamed for steering clear of these risks. Mob rule on the Internet quickly forces all parties into opposing camps and lowers the tone of debate to a level just below that of the average schoolyard. Everyone has to wear a label. Liberal feminists risk being caricatured as old-school anti-porn crusaders and allies of the Christian right; in the other corner, sex-positive feminism becomes pro-sex, and then, pro-porn. You must either be in favour of all pornography, regardless of its content – hey, somebody enjoys it, and who are we to judge? – or be a zealot who hates sex. There is no room for nuance.

Violet Blue, a self-described “sex-positive pundit,” offers this refutation of Feminists Against Pornography in a video posted at a pro-porn website, “Our Porn, Ourselves”:

According to anti-porn pundits, pornographic imagery is such a powerful mind-control weapon that it could make Gandhi into a serial killer. That is because the people that make porn are rocket scientists . . . the people who use pornography are creepy guys who smell really bad and can’t have a real relationship, and watching pornography makes them into brain-chemical drug addicts, wife-beaters, and baby rapers . . . How to label the anti-porn evangelists can be tricky. Some people call them Christians, most people call them douchebags, but a loud and very vocal, but small, minority call themselves feminists.

The goal, according to Violet Blue, is “a world where we can all be grownups about our sexuality.” Apparently, being a grownup in other respects is not on her agenda.

Her favourite punching bag is Gail Dines, a self-described anti-pornography feminist. Dines is a professor of sociology and womens’ studies at Wheelock College, and the author of Pornified: How Porn has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Dines, speaking to an anti-pornography conference in 2007, saw porn everywhere:

Everywhere we go, we are bombarded with the droppings of the pornography industry. Our lives are overwhelmed by images that scream misogyny. Turn on the TV, surf the Internet, flick through a magazine, pass a billboard, and you are visually assaulted by images that encode male visual entitlement to technologically effected female bodies. And then, as if this isn’t bad enough, we are told that these images represent our sexual freedom, and to be angry or enraged is clear evidence that we are anti-sex, prudish, and hopelessly old-fashioned. To this, I answer that our rage is clear evidence of our refusal to be colonized and commodified by corporate patriarchal ideology . . . .

This is the quality of our discourse at the dawn of this brave new century.

In his recent book Reality Hunger, David Shields attacks the conventions of character and of linear narrative, saying “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel . . . since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now.” It’s not clear to me, on the other hand, that being alive now differs significantly from being alive at any other time, save for the degradation of our discourse into diametrically opposed snark bites. If the conventional novel is failing, it is not because of the conventions of character or of linear narrative; it is because the conventional novel insists on being set in 1840s Saskatchewan, or on following abstract lines of inquiry into the significance of place, or on any number of other tricks by which it can avoid the inherent risks of being alive right now.

Even writers who court controversy generally avoid the here and now, and it’s not hard to see why. Nobody can say that The Handmaid’s Tale “got it wrong.” No one can claim to have interviewed dozens of handmaids, and found that they’re all happy and proud of their work. Imagine, on the other hand, if Margaret Atwood was to write a novel about strippers working in present-day Montreal. The controversy would not be about the novel itself, but about whether Atwood got it right.

Witness the mixed reaction to Russell Smith’s Girl Crazy, much of which swirls around gender. Chandler Levack, writing for Eye Weekly, asks, “Male members of Pop Fiction – did you relate to Justin’s sexual obsessions? Is this how guys really are?”

Fiction isn’t about guys and girls, or any other convenient category by which we can divide the population into large groups, except in the minds of people who can’t actually read. Fiction, unlike political rhetoric, is never about the general case. It deals in specifics. A work of fiction is never “about pornography”; it is about its own story, carried by its own internal logic and adhering to its own internal rules. The story may depart from reality in any number of ways, but we can only say the writer got it wrong if the work fails as fiction. And fiction’s sole obligation, beyond being interesting, is that it be accurately observed and true to its own rules. Fiction isn’t about how guys are; it’s about how one guy is.

Mordecai Richler said that a fiction writer’s job was to be an honest witness to his time and place. The fiction writer’s job is not to decide if porn performers are victimized or empowered. An observer need not reach conclusions. In fact, he probably shouldn’t, because conclusions inevitably deny the contradictions, the nuances and the complications that distinguish real worlds from invented ones. Nothing is so sterile as an unambiguous story. Nothing is so obviously fabricated. It is artifice, without the art.

Chandler Levack fretting over how guys are, Violet Blue tapping out another blog post, Gail Dines preaching to the choir at an anti-pornography conference: none of these people inhabit the real world. They live in worlds of their own invention, worlds constructed of ideals and desire, simplified worlds defined by comforting ideologies. To be alive right now is to be muffled, insulated, comfortably numbed by an information medium, the Internet, that allows us to select only the news we want to believe. The job of fiction is not to show us what it feels like to be alive right now; we are already here, and we know what that feels like. The job of fiction is to be the axe for the frozen sea within us, to disturb and unsettle us, to open us to the full breadth of reality. In an age where our public discourse has devolved to schoolyard levels, only fiction can do that. More of it should.

CNQ 78 is within a week of finding its way to the printer, and less than a month from finding its way to mailboxes across the country. At the moment I am aghast to report that yours is not one of them. So I thought it best to take a couple of minutes and let you know what we have planned, in the hopes of enticing you back into the far-too-select fold of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries subscribers.

There has been a lot afoot in recent months at the journal. Though we will continue to cover literature and art and publishing, and offer a selection of thoughtful book reviews in every issue, we are also expanding our focus to include theatre and travel and bookselling, with regular features and columns you are certain to appreciate. Each issue will also henceforth include a new short story by some of the leading practitioners in the country, to accompany our regular poetry feature. Additional stories, poetry and features – including regular blog postings – can be found on our new website.

Beginning with our Summer 2010 issue (#79), noted graphic novelist and celebrated book designer (& fellow CNQ subscriber) Seth has agreed to redesign and re-launch the journal. CNQ will, no doubt, be henceforth one of the best-designed Canadian journals on the newsstand. As an added incentive, we will also be offering subscribers – and only subscribers – a limited printed collectible keepsake with every issue: these will include bookmarks, broadsides, chapbooks and prints, printed and designed by the likes of Gaspereau, Greenboathouse, Biblioasis and others.

Highlights from forthcoming issues include:

Issue 78 (Feb ’10): David Hickey, David Helwig, Ross Leckie and Zach Wells on the poetry of PEI poet John Smith; Antiquarian Bookseller extraordinaire David Mason’s Reflections on Scouting; an interview with Norm Sibum; reviews of books by Annabel Lyon, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Nino Ricci, David Adams Richards; the Selected Sonnets of John Smith; a short story by Terence Young; and much else besides.

Issue 79(June ’10): The Short Story Issue: Clark Blaise, Mark Anthony Jarman, Alex Good, John Metcalf, Robert Thacker and others on the Short Story in Canada; a new short story by Rebecca Rosenblum; the CNQ Interview: Ray Smith; Chris Reed remembering Pages Books & Magzines; Ryan Bigge on the Giller Prize, reviews of short story collections by Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, Stuart Ross and Carol Shields; and much more…

Issue 80 (Nov ’10): The Gender Issue: Nicole Dixon on the new face of feminism in CanLit; Steven Beattie on Ray Robertson and masculinity; Ian Young on gay writing and Canada’s small press in the 1970s; Brian Busby on Glassco’s collage; Mike Barnes on the Automatiste movement; new poetry, fiction, and a full slate of reviews . . .

So why not consider resubscribing now? We’ll let you renew at the old rates (subscriptions will be going up a few dollars a year very soon) and you won’t miss an issue or any of our planned keepsakes. You’ll get access to some of the best critical writing , short fiction and poetry, delivered in our charmingly irregular fashion to your mailbox three times a year, all bound up in a beautifully (re)designed graphic package. If you don’t like what you see, just let us know and we’ll refund your remaining subscription. There’s no risk! So, please: take a chance on us once again. I’m certain that you won’t be disappointed.

Dan Wells