Canadians (20 page)

Wenty would prove no exception.

The little boy consumed and was consumed by the Bible. He believed that train travel, the rage of the times, had been prophesied in the Book of Isaiah—the “swift beasts” that were going to bring the believers to Jerusalem. Scholars, on the other hand, have always read that to mean “camels.”

But that was only a small part of what Wenty found in his beloved black book. He predicted the telegraph, then only a few years off, but also saw the world connected by a vast and immediate communications network. He saw that one day there would be weapons of mass destruction. He was a modern Nostradamus in that he predicted, accurately as it turned out, Y2K, the bizarre millennium anxiety that was then still more than a century and a half away.

And he didn't even have a computer to back up.

Wenty had an epiphany one Good Friday when, during the collect, he opened his Bible at random and read: “Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics, and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to this flock, that they may be saved among the remnants of the true Israelites.” From that moment on, he believed that world peace was attainable only if, first, a home for the Jews was established in Palestine.

At age fifteen this strange, bookish loner returned to Canada and was struck by culture shock. His father had hoped he'd take over the dismal little farm, but Wenty had no interest. He had a scholarship to divinity school, and was soon off again. But not for long. He quickly became convinced that the clergy were nothing more than “blind leaders of the blind.” He decided to take up the farm offer after all.

In his slim 1947 book on Monk,
For the Time Is at Hand,
Richard S. Lambert writes that Wenty couldn't put down his Bible long enough to lift a plow or an axe and that the farm began failing. Wenty decided to give the farm to a brother, renounce materialism, and become a full-time prophet. He headed for Jerusalem to save the world.

It's a long and twisted story, the tale of Henry Wentworth Monk. He travelled by merchant freighter and met up with the soon-to-be-famous religious artist Hunt in Jerusalem. Hunt, who was also a bit strange, believed Monk had somehow modelled by telepathy for a portrait he'd painted of Christ years before the two met. They became fast friends and soon Monk began modelling in the flesh. The portrait that hangs in the National Gallery is but a small study of a much larger Hunt work.

Wenty put all his visions and prophecies into a book, but no Canadian publisher would touch it. He set out for
London to prove them wrong but still ran into a lack of interest. When he finally did get a publisher to bite, he had the enormous misfortune of having his book on Bible interpretation published against Charles Darwin's
The Origin of the Species,
and Darwin, as they say in the trade, buried poor Wenty.

He returned to Canada, left for Washington to put a stop to the brewing Civil War—even got in to see Abraham Lincoln—but got nowhere with his grand peace scheme. So, it was off to Jerusalem and, frustrated once more, back by freighter to North America. The ship foundered and sank off Nantucket Island and Wenty, a strong swimmer from his childhood days along the Ottawa River, was the only survivor. He reached shore, was set upon by dogs, and then shot by a farmer who mistook him for a treed bear.

This is a true story.

By March 1865, still weak but recovered from his wounds, Wenty was finally back home. He suffered terrible headaches. He created disturbances in the street—verbally and sometimes physically attacking those who wouldn't listen to him. He was institutionalized at least once.

But he also made it back to London, where Hunt the artist stood by him and proclaimed his friend “a wild genius, a soul of spotless innocence.” Others grew tired of him. Doors that were once open now closed. He headed, once again, back to Canada. This time he was home for good.

Wenty ended his days as a Parliament Hill eccentric, wandering the paths under an umbrella and straw hat, his long white beard and hair flowing behind him. He wrote pamphlets and, periodically, for the
Evening Citizen,
at one point informing his bewildered readers, “I am determined that it shall be through no fault, or neglect, on my part, if people shall refuse to take advantage of the ‘great light' and understanding that has been imparted to me for their benefit.”

He thought Prime Minister Macdonald should arrange for him to take a seat in the House of Commons. He lobbied for a senate appointment. But they were offering nothing. When the idea of a permanent international tribunal began to pick up steam there was some parliamentary debate that poor Monk, the originator of the idea of a United Nations, should be given his credit, but nothing was ever done.

Others, however, did not offer a cold shoulder. Czar Nicholas II of Russia responded to his letters, as did Lord Salisbury, former prime minister of Great Britain.

It seemed, for a brief shining moment, as if Wenty might finally find redemption when, in 1896, a small campaign was mounted to give him his due recognition. The
Montreal Star
even called him “the philosopher of the capital.”

Unfortunately, Wenty died of blood poisoning that summer and was buried in an unmarked grave in Ottawa's Beechwood Cemetery.

CANADIANS, UNLIKE AMERICANS, have always had difficulty mythologizing their own past—we are, perhaps in true northern personality, actually quite adept at stripping the past and knocking down the ones who should stand out. As George Woodcock said, Canadians tend to distrust the heroes they could so easily celebrate. Louis Riel, who would surely be considered a democratic renegade and nation builder had he been American, was to a great many Canadians a madman and a traitor. Tom Thomson, the romantic painter whose work has so defined the Canadian landscape and who lost his life so mysteriously in the deep woods in 1917, was a drinker and a philanderer who either committed suicide or fell overboard when he drunkenly stood in his canoe to take a leak. Billy Bishop lied about his war exploits. Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister and the man who, more than anyone else, put this mysterious entity called Canada together, was a drunk.

As Andrew Malcolm pointed out in that email from California, the United States will put Davy Crockett on a stamp while Canada will go with one celebrating antique furniture.

There may be no better example of Canadians turning their collective backs on the great than in whatever became of Will Barker.

Barker, a farm kid from Dauphin, Manitoba, won the Victoria Cross for what many argue was the greatest aerial dogfight of the First World War. On October 27, 1918, Barker was alone in his Sopwith Snipe over La Forêt de Mormal, France, when he was attacked, according to the official account, by sixty enemy aircraft.

So typically Canadian in his self-effacing humility, he always said it was only fifteen. But whether sixty-to-one or fifteen-to-one, what were his chances?

Barker evaded the initial attack, turned, and counterattacked, shooting down three enemy craft while taking fire himself. As the third plane went down, he passed out from devastating wounds to both legs and one arm. His plane plummeted, another enemy aircraft tailing him to make sure he was finished.

Somehow he came to in mid-air, turned on the fighter tailing him, and took that plane down, a fourth kill. But he could hold his plane in the air no longer and crashed within view of astonished British ground troops. The British soldiers had witnessed the battle, seen Barker's heroics, and now ran to where they expected the young RCAF flyer to have surely died. They were stunned to find him still alive, pulled him free of the wreck, and got him to safety.

Those four kills took Barker's list to fifty downed enemy aircraft. He returned to Canada as Lt. Col. William George Barker, VC, DSO, and with enough other medals to lay claim to being Canada's most honoured combatant—if he'd ever cared to do so. He never did.

But as British Air Chief Marshal Sir Philip Joubert wrote, “Of all the flyers of the two World Wars, none was greater than Barker.” Billy Bishop, Canada's best-known flying ace, called Barker “the deadliest air fighter that ever lived.”

Barker came home and settled in Ottawa, where he went into the aviation business with Bishop, who had also returned with the Victoria Cross. He married Bishop's wealthy cousin Jean Smith and had a miserable dozen years. The business failed; the marriage teetered; he suffered depression and terrible pain from his injuries. The teetotaller became a drinker.

It seemed life was taking a turn for the better early in 1930 when Fairchild hired him to help sell aircraft to the Canadian government. A test pilot had been sent to show off the plane at the Rockcliffe base airport, but the veteran fighter insisted on taking it up himself for a run. He lost it, and crashed near a concrete landing on the banks of the Ottawa River.

Some said Barker committed suicide. Some said he was showing off for the cute teenage daughter of another pilot. Some say he simply made a mistake with an unfamiliar machine.

They held Will Barker's funeral in Toronto, the cortège two miles long, with two thousand uniformed men, honour guards from four countries, and fifty thousand people lining the streets. As the coffin was carried into Mount Pleasant Cemetery, six biplanes swooped down, sprinkling thousands of rose petals over the crowd.

“His name,” said Canadian forces commander Sir Arthur Currie, who had led the troops at the battle of Passchendaele, “will live forever in the annals of the country which he served so nobly.”

Not quite, sir.

Barker's name didn't live even long enough to be etched on the crypt where he was laid to rest. His wife's snobbish family could never accept, and certainly could not glorify, the rough-hewn outsider from a prairie farm. The only mark on Barker's grave is the most common name imaginable: “Smith.”

Many years later, when little Dauphin approached the government to place a small plaque in the town to commemorate his Manitoba birthplace, it was at first rejected.

Today, no one but the military historians remember the name that “will live forever in the annals of the country which he served so nobly.” Barker's biographer, Wayne Ralph, thinks that perhaps he was too much the “warrior” for Canadian tastes.

Had Will Barker been born only a little farther south of Dauphin, just over the Minnesota border in, say, Humboldt, he might well have been the Audie Murphy of his day, the much-decorated war hero who became an even bigger hero on the silver screen. But Canadians today don't even know what Barker looked like.

“He was an international superstar,” Ralph told me in an interview from White Rock, British Columbia. “Barker had all the traits of the great Hollywood heroes. He was disobedient, gregarious, flamboyant. He was a frontier kid, a classical figure in the American style of hero. Born in a log cabin, went on to fame and fortune, and died tragically at thirty-five.

“Now he's basically buried in anonymity. To me, it's the perfect metaphor for Canada, where we bury our past.”

“NATIONS,” Aldous Huxley claimed, “are to a large extent invented by their poets and novelists.”

Huxley obviously knew nothing about Canada. This country was far more
failed
by its early recognized writers—bad poets, bitter immigrants, and outright frauds.

For the most part, the mirror held up by early writers wasn't for Canadians to stare into to see themselves but for British readers and, to a lesser extent, British theatre audiences to look into and imagine a country that often didn't exist. Such are the realities of the book business. There weren't enough readers in early Canada to bother writing for—so they wrote, instead, for the outside lecture circuit.

Early Canadian literature, then, is the literature of other countries. “The books that are made elsewhere,” Father of Confederation Thomas D'Arcy McGee said not long before he was assassinated in 1867, “even in England, are not always best fitted for us, they do not always run on the same mental gauge, nor connect with our train of thought.”

In many instances, a connection wasn't even sought. The train of thought—a more delicate phrase than “economic necessity”—that drove many early writers was British first, then American, where the markets lay for magazine serialization, books and, with luck, stage presentations.

The lecture circuit required persona as much as product, and so it's hardly surprising that so many of the early known Canadian writers weren't at all who they said they were. Grey Owl was no “full-blooded Red Indian,” as he advertised, but a full-blooded Englishman named Archibald Belaney. Pauline Johnson, though half Mohawk, was not Princess Tekahionwake. Frederick Philip Grove was really Felix Paul Greve, the rich son of a merchant back in Hamburg, Germany. Ernest Thompson Seton, whose eyes were known to cross under the slightest stress, changed his name so many times he ended up telling people to forget all the previous incarnations and just call him “Black Wolf.”

Grey Owl, to give Belaney due credit, at least wrote with some accuracy, unlike Seton, who liked to give his animals names and emotions and reason. Belaney also genuinely loved the wild, of which he had no fear. Seton was almost as terrified of the deep bush as he was of those awful nocturnal emissions that haunted him and could be treated, he believed, only by sleeping on hard boards and splashing his private parts frequently with ice water.

I don't know how much Seton a young Northrop Frye bothered reading—he read everything, it seemed, so would certainly have studied some—but I do know that Frye eventually produced the seminal study on Canadian literature:
The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination
. He looked at a vast array of Canadian poetry and fiction and saw Canadian writing unique in that the question that preoccupies artists in the rest of the world—“Who am I?”—had been replaced in Canada with “Where is here?” and “How do I live here?”