Read Online Canadians by Roy Macgregor - Free Book Online Page B

self-identity.”
    PICKING THROUGH THE LINT of the national belly button is at once a useful and useless exercise. Useful to authors of thick books and newspaper columnists and talking heads and academics, all of whom have made acottage industry of it, but rather useless to people getting on with real lives in what has now been a real country for 140 years.
    Al Purdy spent a lifetime looking at his country through poetry and prose and would regularly rail against those who dared dismiss the land he so adored. It irritated him that outsiders, usually Americans, acted as if the country were “a kind of vacuum between parentheses.” It was not, he said in his essay collection No Other Country, some godforsaken place devoid of culture or art or literature, some “4,000-mile wide chunk of Arctic desert.”
    Purdy believed the country was essential to his own personality, his adult experiences on the road as formative as his parents had been while he was still a child at home. He once drew up a list of all his journeys across Canada and declared, “This is a map of myself, what I was and what I became. It is a cartography of feeling and sensibility: and I think the man who is not affected at all by this map of himself that is his country of origin, that man is emotionally crippled.”
    A big, hearty man who liked to order his beer two at a time—when I first met him I thought, wrongly, he was ordering for us both—Purdy felt that everyone else should share in his wild enthusiasm for figuring out what, exactly, made Canadians tick. It was his greatest passion during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time of Centennial Year, Expo 67, and early Pierre Trudeau, a time when Canada seemed particularly anxious to distance itself from the Vietnam War, Watergate and, of course, Richard Nixon.
    Purdy set off across the land, writing about the landscape and periodically dropping in to collect the wisdom of some of Canada’s most respected minds. At Campbell River on Vancouver Island he called on Roderick Haig-Brown, a renowned nature writer and West Coast judge who considered fly fishing the ultimate court of decision.
    The scotch had been poured, the judge’s pipe lighted, and Purdy had deftly steered the conversation toward the country. He was certain that the London-born judge would be as puzzled as he was by the parochial nature of most Canadians—a people who, in a direct reversal of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, might list their address as the universe, the world, North America, Canada, province, city, street, room….
    But Haig-Brown would have none of it. “‘What does the cockney know of rural England, or the countryman of London?’” he asked Purdy. “‘I’m not at all sure that provincialism is such an evil thing at that. No man becomes a great patriot without first learning the closer loyalties and learning them well: loyalty to family, to the place he calls home, to his province or state or country.’”
    And as for Purdy’s request to have Haig-Brown pontificate on “The Canadian Identity”—this country’s equivalent of the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin—the country judge just shook his head. “‘That,’” he said, “‘is a question manufactured by writers and intellectuals.’”
    The judge, it turned out, was far more interested in the coming salmon run.
    A CANADIAN COMES to a fork in the road, the old joke goes. The sign pointing in one direction reads “Heaven.” The sign pointing in the other direction says “Panel Discussion on Heaven.” The Canadian heads straight for the panel discussion.
    â€œThe English,” Jeremy Paxman says, “at least, have the saving grace of being able to laugh at themselves. Which must be based on a profound self-assurance.” That may go some way toward explaining British comedy, but it does nothing to explain the