Read Online Eastern Passage by Farley Mowat - Free Book Online Page A

hackles rose. But I did not want to alienate the man who evidently considered himself in command of the project, and I contented myself with giving him some of my own thoughts about the proposed book.
    Dear Mr. Cloud:                       Jan. 16, 1950
    So far I have written five chapters – and discarded four. Now I leave the typewriter alone for a few days while I cut firewood
.
    My information about the Eskimos is, as I have previously explained, by no means as complete as I would like. So I want to make another expedition to the Ihalmiut country but unless I obtain a good advance for the book I won’t have funds to finance it. As my grandmother was fond of saying, “I am in a quarry about this.”
    I have come to the conclusion that I must divorce my personal “travel” experiences from the book. I have come to feel that the best way to write it is as a straightforward history of the people, explaining my presence in a foreword only. Since it is the Eskimos who are important to the story, and not myself, I think this is the best plan
.
    I think that the book should be as simple, as direct and unadorned as the life of the people it will try to portray. It will be no scientific treatise, nor will it be a “travel yarn” … it will begin with the genesis myth and then continue with the lives and history of the people from about 1850 until the present. My part in it will be that of narrator only. The central, tragic theme will therefore emerge in its own way without distortion
.
    Please let me have your reactions as soon as possible and in the meantime I will get back to work, even though the cellar leaks, our new dog is in heat, and my wife has stomach flu!
    Cheerio
,
    Farley Mowat
    This letter crossed with one from Cloud in which, though he wrote with a velvet touch, he made it painfully clear who would set the rules. He dismissed
my
plan for the book in summary fashion.
    Principles were at stake here but so was our livelihood. I bent to the wind and on January 21 returned the signed contract to Atlantic Monthly Press. I derived no joy from doing so. And received no applause. AMP took a month to acknowledge my surrender, and six weeks elapsed before I received the option fee.
    It had been nibbled at. Ten per cent had been retained byWilkinson as the agent’s fee, which was as it should have been. But fifteen per cent of the whole had been seized by the U.S. government as “alien income tax.” After the exchange on the cheque had been paid, little more than two hundred remained. On March 5 I wrote:
    Dear Mr. Cloud:
    Yesterday I had a long letter from Mr. Wilkinson. It was in the nature of a lecture about the wisdom of heeding good advice. I went to bed and did some powerful thinking. The outcome is that I am scrapping my first six chapters and beginning again
.
    Will send a progress report in a few weeks
.
    Trust you are well
.
    
Mowat
    I had, with great difficulty, masked my feeling, but nevertheless hoped my pique was showing. Then I began work on the book anew.
    In July I bundled up what I had written (tentatively titled
River of Men)
and sent it to Dudley without a covering letter. The next move would be up to him.
    That spring and summer I did a number of things to keep our pot boiling, including broadcasting six programs about the Ihalmiut on CBC Radio and writing six magazine pieces, five of which, together with another to
Saturday Evening Post
, Wilkinson sold. With or without a book, I was earning a living for us.
    We also did a great deal of work about the house and property. It had always been my intention to become as nearly self-supporting as possible; now it was an imperative. That spring we planted a dozen fruit trees and prepared an enormous vegetable garden. In anticipation of a bumper crop, I dug and roofed a root cellar in which we eventually stored apples, cabbages, potatoes, turnips, carrots, onions,and squash. I also built a chicken house and run that we