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Reprinted from the Globe and Mail, February 28, 1998:

Requiem for a master storyteller: in memoriam.
W.O. Mitchell was a national icon, a link with the old Canada of farms and small towns that many still think of as home.

by Douglas M. Gibson

Toronto — W.O. For millions of Canadians the initials alone were enough to identify him. They knew W. O. Mitchell as the author of a famous book called Who Has Seen the Wind and a series of stories, immortalized on CBC Radio and beyond, about Jake and the Kid. And if they had ever seen him in person or on television they knew that he was a wild-haired old guy with a salty tongue and a scratchy Prairie voice. A real character. And they liked him.

It went beyond liking for those who had read his books — 13 in all — and seen his plays and laughed till they hurt at his public performances. Peter Gzowski summed it up best at the Calgary Tribute to W.O. last October; he said that other Canadian writers may sell more books, may be better known around the world, may even be more widely read in Canada — but that among them all W. O. Mitchell was indisputably “the most widely loved.”

I suspect that the news of his death in Calgary on Wednesday has produced widespread grief from coast to coast, with people far beyond the literary world feeling that they have lost a friend. He was a Canadian icon, a link with the old Canada of farms and small towns that, defying urban reality, many of us still tend to think of as home.

On the Prairies, his status was special, and walking a block with him on any Main Street in the three provinces was a slow but lively business; within 20 seconds it seemed he could find a common link — a relative, a former neighbour, a doctor — with anyone.

Other Prairie authors have talked and written about how his work opened up possibilities for them, and all of them come fully equipped with their share of affectionate “W. O. stories,” since nobody ever forgot meeting him. His inspiration was humorously noted by the Alberta writer who said that she didn’t know you could put gophers in a book until she read W. O. Mitchell.

Gophers, I should add, were to play a prominent part in the rich vein of Mitchell lore: When he wrote a role for a gopher squeak in the CBC Radio version of Jake and the Kid, he ended up producing the most convincing squeak himself, and being paid for it. The old Depression Prairie boy needed no prompting; thereafter gophers started popping up in his scripts with profitable regularity — until an edict came down from on high, and the gophers squeaked no more.

His special hold on Prairie people is easy to understand. He was one of them — from Weyburn, then Winnipeg, then High River and then Calgary — and for them the brief sojourns elsewhere didn’t really count. When he wrote about the land and its people, he showed that their everyday life and its setting could be the stuff of literature, and they appreciated what he was doing, in every sense. Discussing his last collection, An Evening with W. O. Mitchell, the newspapers ins Saskatoon and Regina produced precisely the same phrase in their very different reviews. In something more than a coincidence, the phrase was “he belongs to us.”

Coincidence — and history — dictated that I should be smitten by the man. Everyone who has read Who Has Seen the Wind will remember that at a time of sorrow the old Scottish granny takes down the family Bible and reads, “This is Maggie Biggart’s Book. It was given to her on her wedding day in Dunlop, Scotland — May — 1832.” Like many of the details in his books, this reference is to a Mitchell family link. As it happens, Dunlop, Scotland, is a small town of fewer than a thousand people, even when all the dairy farmers are in town.

I know this because the Gibsons have lived in Dunlop for generations, and I was raised there, and my mother still lives there. So when as a young editor in 1974 I found myself working on a new edition of Who Has Seen the Wind illustrated by William Kurelek, I realized that running into this fellow Mitchell was significant. Over more than 20 years we were to work together on 10 books.

There were strong indications from the outset that working with W. O. would be an interesting proposition. The signing of the contract was marked by a celebratory lunch at the Westbury Hotel where Kurelek, my boss, Hugh Kane, and I watched enthralled as Bill (for so I was learning to call him) launched into a cutlery-rattling sermon by his creation, the hypocritical preacher the Reverend Heally Richards. Our fellow diners — stolid Harold Ballard look-alikes to a man — were not amused. There were complaints. When the flustered maitre d’ reached Hugh Kane, Kurelek and I gaped while money discreetly changed hands, and Bill was persuaded to resume a normal conversational tone.

Not, of course, forever. The Westbury Hotel incident was almost repeated in a Victoria dining room when Bill’s delight at embarrassing a TV interviewer with the full-volume punch line “So when did you last have an erection?” resulted in a a few old ladies nearby almost fainting into their soup, and the head waiter hovering.

I have never known anyone around whom stories clustered ins such numbers. He was, shall we say, incident-prone. Pierre Berton tells of visiting the Mitchell household in Toronto during W. O.’s stint as fiction editor at Maclean’s magazine. As Berton tells it, when he arrived for dinner an indignant mother-in-law was leaving, suitcase in hand, the house was on fire, and the children were outraging the neighbours in imaginative ways.

The three Mitchell children went on to lead respectable lives but, as you would expect, produced their own share of stories. Once, W. O. contacted his teen-aged daughter Willa, then living a determinedly independent life in Vancouver, and they had a talk in his Hotel Vancouver room. Taking a crowded elevator down to the lobby with her, he pressed a fatherly $20 into her hand. True to her Mitchell genes, she loudly denounced this sum, noting that most guys usually gave her far more. W. O. was reportedly speechless.

From the Foothills, Andy Russell recalls hunting trips with groups that included our man. One duck-hunting expedition set W. O. digging his pit off to the right. After the ducks had come in, the silent gun on the right was noted. A search party found W. O., red-faced, buried shoulder-high in caved-in dirt.

He knew that he was “incident-prone,” but prided himself on his powers of recovery. He once regaled a Banff Publishing Workshop with the tale of an outboard failure in mid-lake when he was at his summer place in the Shuswap region of B.C. Trying to fix the outboard, he spilled gasoline all over his shorts (his only garment). A quick glance around assured him that no boats were nearby on the silent lake, so he slipped out of the shorts and crouched to work on the spark plugs. Standing up, arching to ease his back, he found himself 10 feet from a sailboat drifting by, full of pop-eyed female sailors. “What class is that boat?” W. O. gamely inquired.

Presumably his ill luck with things such as matches and gasoline persuaded him to stop smoking in favour of taking snuff. His snuff-taking became legendary; indeed, such a strong smell of snuff accompanied every Mitchell manuscript that I could identify it almost before the package hit my desk.

Once, for the cover of a collection of his plays entitled Dramatic W. O. Mitchell, I took him to a photographer’s studio to encourage him to be dramatic. It was, I discovered, like asking the Atlantic Ocean to be wet.

He was a man of gigantic enthusiasms. Once, visiting his publisher’s office, he was asked to look at an ailing potted plant. This led to an enthralling, arm-waving, audience-generating account of the titanic battle he had waged against the evil forces of the white fly in defence of his beloved orchids. His alder-smoked salmon was, apparently, beyond compare, like his youthful prowess on the diving board.

He led a life of superlatives: a fairly good Chinese meal would be the product of the Best Chinese Restaurant in Canada. And his enthusiasms for people were equally strong: if some of his swans were actually geese, there are many worse faults in a man’s view of the world.

Ironically, for a writer who gained great fame in the bookshops, he seemed to set great store by success in the movie theatres. This continued to elude him, despite constant excitement about this proposed deal and that potential director and that interested star. As the subject of a movie, Robert Duncan’s NFB documentary W. O. Mitchell: Novelist in Hiding, W. O. was incensed by the thesis that he spent too much time “being” a writer, giving the public performances that he loved, and not enough time actually writing. His anger (and he really did, on occasion, hoot with rage) was so fierce that he turned out more books in the next 10 years than in the previous 30.

His public performances, of course, are legendary. All of the doubts that he associated with the lonely act of writing (“like playing a dart game with the lights out,” he once famously observed), were removed by the instant response of the audience.

As a one-time actor, he loved “the immediate thrust of a live audience as it responds to story magic,” and it showed. His performances were immaculately professional; voice husking or thundering, fist raised, white hair flying, mouth creased in a foxy grin or eyes wide in innocent astonishment at a double entendre raising a laugh. His performances, now fortunately captured on audio cassette, were unforgettable, and he was himself arguably his best character creation.

He was such a stellar presence — and such a mischief-maker — that anyone introducing him before a speech had an impossible task, as I learned at my cost. If I gave him a well-deserved reverent introduction (“a man whose work has altered the course of Canadian writing, one of Canada’s cultural treasures”), he would get to the lectern and look around, then say, with impeccable timing, “Aw, horseshit!” So if the next time around I gave him a funny, irreverent introduction, using his own “folksy old Foothills fart” description, he would come up, look over his glasses, and gravely give us 10 minutes of “the role of literature in society,” while I squirmed, and people wondered why that rude lightweight had been asked to introduce this fine old scholarly gentleman.

Another irony: This larger-than-life performer, not short of ego, valued selfless work. A couple of years ago, when his health was failing, I asked him what, looking back at his long career, had brought him the most satisfaction. He thought hard and then said, “The teaching, I think.” Grateful former students from his high-school days, and later, writing students who had learned from “Mitchell’s messy method” at Banff, Windsor, Calgary, Toronto and elsewhere, will know why. Perhaps the fact that both of his sons, Orm and Hugh, became teachers is not an accident.

He was, of course, only half a person. The other half was the redoubtable Merna Mitchell, known to most of us by the full appellation “Fercrissakesmerna.” As his loving, caring, and remarkably tolerant wife for more than half a century, she deserves a book of her own. She was more than a glasses finder, a snuff-box retriever, she was the Organizing Principle in his life, to the extent that any arrangement made with him was worthless unless entered into the agenda by Merna.

Their relationship was a constant delight to their many friends. No phone call to their house was ever complete until the phone had been wrested away so that the previous speaker could be joyfully contradicted by his or her spouse. When that stopped happening, I knew that he was losing the long battle against prostate cancer. Confirmation came the day he was too tired to recount a juicy anecdote and said, “You tell Doug the story, Merna.”

The last time I saw him was on a cold October day in Calgary. Opposite his house, in the park where we had once walked and talked about plot twists, the last cottonwood leaves were falling. Inside the house the hospital bed was set up in the den, where he received 24-hour-a-day care. Merna, Orm and his wife Barbara had warned me that the morphine produced good days and bad days, but this was a good day, so he would recognize me.

To cover my predicted dismay at his appearance, I had prepared an opening joke; I praised Merna’s gallant reading of one of his stories at the recent tribute, suggesting that all these years we had had the wrong member of the Mitchell family performing his work in public. He snorted at that and we were briefly back to the affectionate insults that marked our relationship. He complained at one point, however, that the drugs were taking away his memory. There was not much to say in response.

But like a great comedian he had prepared his punch line. When I announced that it was time for me to go, the others tactfully disappeared, I stood by his bed saying my goodbyes, trying to tell him how much he had meant to me, and not doing a good job of it. Merna returned to say, “Bill, Doug really has to go now.” A few more words from me, then he turned, looked me in the eye, and said, “Well . . . goodbye, Jimmy.”

This was awful. But the alarmed noises from Merna were cut off by the mischievous grin spreading across his now-boyish face. And I blundered out of the room, marvelling at the grace that had turned a hard farewell into a brave joke. Goodbye, Bill.

Douglas M. Gibson is the publisher of McClelland & Stewart Inc., Toronto. He was a long-time friend of W. O. Mitchell and worked with the author on 10 of his books.

read a passage from Who Has Seen the Wind
read a review of Who Has Seen the Wind (1991 edition)
return to W. O. Mitchell