one of my labours was the compilation of an Ihalmiut vocabulary, the doing of which made me at least somewhat familiar with their language…
.
The book must have a heart and, equally vital, a purpose. The fate of the Ihalmiut is at the heart of the story, and the purpose is to draw attention to their plight and to that of all the native peoples of the north. And elsewhere, for that matter. So you can expect me to beat the drum about that quite a lot. But if it gets out of hand I am sure your editorial wisdom will find a solution
.
I suspect this is a pretty poor sort of prospectus, but if it interests you enough to warrant even a tentative commission, it will have served. You understand, don’t you, that I must write this book?
The time required to write it will depend on how well the Mowats manage to scrape a living during the book’s gestation period but my guess is it will likely be as much as a year. An advance would be of great assistance of course but it will probably be necessary for me to hammer out a mess of pot-boilers too
.
You will suspect from the foregoing that I await your reply with great anticipation and no little trepidation. But please, Mr. Cloud, despite my sins of omission this past summer, don’t keep me on tenterhooks too long
.
Farley Mowat
Urgently needing money, I now revised the short-story manuscript that had been rejected by
Atlantic Monthly
magazine and sent it away again – this time to
Maclean’s
magazine in Toronto. I hoped it would do better in home waters. My anxiety about it mounted until a day in mid-November when Fran returned from a mail trip to Palgrave waving an envelope. It was a small envelope – too small to contain a rejected manuscript – and hope leapt within me as I tore it open. It contained a handwritten note from W.O. Mitchell,
Maclean’s
fiction editor, inviting me to drop in to his office for a chat the next time I came to town. Nothing was said about my story.
Fran and I were on our way to Toronto a couple of hours later. I took a bath at the Thornhills’ house, donned one of my father-in-law’s clean shirts, and drove downtown to the formidable Maclean-Hunter building, having convinced myself that Nirvana was within.
W.O. Mitchell (his friends called him Bill) was a little older than I and had published a number of folksy short stories and radio plays, thereby becoming one of Canada’s few successful writers. His recent appointment as fiction editor of
Maclean’s
had been something of a coronation, yet he greeted the novice in friendly fashion, waved me to a comfortable chair, and suggested I light up as he searched for my manuscript amongst the papers cluttering his desk. Finding it, he sat back and, in the nicest possible way, blew me out of the water with a single salvo.
“Interesting little story you’ve got here. Unfortunately it doesn’t really fit our needs. A little too grim. So I can’t buy it but I
can
give you some useful advice.”
He paused before delivering this.
“Fact is that what general circulation magazines like ours want these days is boy-meets-girl-three-thousand-words-with-a-happy-snappy-ending. You should bear that in mind.”
With which he stood up and shook me warmly by the hand.
Torn between fury and despair, I drove to my father’s office in the nearby provincial parliament buildings, where I subjected him to a blasphemous account of what had just happened to me. And he forever redeemed himself in my eyes by taking me to the nearby Mocamba Bar for a double rum and this apology.
“Sorry, old son, if I haven’t seemed to be playing on your side these past months. I
was
, you know, but felt I had to keep it deep inside me.
“Truth is that what you were trying to do was what I had most wanted for myself after my war. And, well, I didn’t have the ability, or maybe the guts, to carry it off. I was afraid you’d fail too. That’s what I was trying to shield you from. But I was wrong to try. Dead wrong.
“It
.
The book must have a heart and, equally vital, a purpose. The fate of the Ihalmiut is at the heart of the story, and the purpose is to draw attention to their plight and to that of all the native peoples of the north. And elsewhere, for that matter. So you can expect me to beat the drum about that quite a lot. But if it gets out of hand I am sure your editorial wisdom will find a solution
.
I suspect this is a pretty poor sort of prospectus, but if it interests you enough to warrant even a tentative commission, it will have served. You understand, don’t you, that I must write this book?
The time required to write it will depend on how well the Mowats manage to scrape a living during the book’s gestation period but my guess is it will likely be as much as a year. An advance would be of great assistance of course but it will probably be necessary for me to hammer out a mess of pot-boilers too
.
You will suspect from the foregoing that I await your reply with great anticipation and no little trepidation. But please, Mr. Cloud, despite my sins of omission this past summer, don’t keep me on tenterhooks too long
.
Farley Mowat
Urgently needing money, I now revised the short-story manuscript that had been rejected by
Atlantic Monthly
magazine and sent it away again – this time to
Maclean’s
magazine in Toronto. I hoped it would do better in home waters. My anxiety about it mounted until a day in mid-November when Fran returned from a mail trip to Palgrave waving an envelope. It was a small envelope – too small to contain a rejected manuscript – and hope leapt within me as I tore it open. It contained a handwritten note from W.O. Mitchell,
Maclean’s
fiction editor, inviting me to drop in to his office for a chat the next time I came to town. Nothing was said about my story.
Fran and I were on our way to Toronto a couple of hours later. I took a bath at the Thornhills’ house, donned one of my father-in-law’s clean shirts, and drove downtown to the formidable Maclean-Hunter building, having convinced myself that Nirvana was within.
W.O. Mitchell (his friends called him Bill) was a little older than I and had published a number of folksy short stories and radio plays, thereby becoming one of Canada’s few successful writers. His recent appointment as fiction editor of
Maclean’s
had been something of a coronation, yet he greeted the novice in friendly fashion, waved me to a comfortable chair, and suggested I light up as he searched for my manuscript amongst the papers cluttering his desk. Finding it, he sat back and, in the nicest possible way, blew me out of the water with a single salvo.
“Interesting little story you’ve got here. Unfortunately it doesn’t really fit our needs. A little too grim. So I can’t buy it but I
can
give you some useful advice.”
He paused before delivering this.
“Fact is that what general circulation magazines like ours want these days is boy-meets-girl-three-thousand-words-with-a-happy-snappy-ending. You should bear that in mind.”
With which he stood up and shook me warmly by the hand.
Torn between fury and despair, I drove to my father’s office in the nearby provincial parliament buildings, where I subjected him to a blasphemous account of what had just happened to me. And he forever redeemed himself in my eyes by taking me to the nearby Mocamba Bar for a double rum and this apology.
“Sorry, old son, if I haven’t seemed to be playing on your side these past months. I
was
, you know, but felt I had to keep it deep inside me.
“Truth is that what you were trying to do was what I had most wanted for myself after my war. And, well, I didn’t have the ability, or maybe the guts, to carry it off. I was afraid you’d fail too. That’s what I was trying to shield you from. But I was wrong to try. Dead wrong.
“It
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