Norman Levine - Canada Made Me

Cape Breton is

the T hought-Control
Centre of Canada

RAY SMITH

A Night at the Opera

RAY SMITH

Going Down Slow

JOHN METCALF

Century

RAY SMITH

Quickening

TERRY GRIGGS

Moody Food

RAY ROBERTSON

Alphabet

KATHY PAGE

Lunar Attractions

CLARK BLAISE

An Aesthetic Underground

JOHN METCALF

Lord Nelson Tavern

RAY SMITH

Heroes

RAY ROBERTSON

A History of Forgetting

CAROLINE ADDERSON

The Camera Always Lies

HUGH HOOD

Canada Made Me

NORMAN LEVINE

First Things First

DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN

Vital Signs

JOHN METCALF

CANADA MADE ME

NORMAN LEVINE

BIBLIOASIS

Copyright Norman Levine, 1958

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Levine, Norman, 1923, author

Canada made me / Norman Levine.

(Reset books)

First published: London : Putnam, 1958 .

Issued in print and electronic formats.

isbn 978-1-77196-060-1 (paperback) . isbn 978-1-77196-061-8 (ebook)

. Levine, Norman, 1923 TravelCanada. . Levine, Norman,

1923 Biography. . Authors, Canadian (English) th century

Biography. I. Title.

ps8523.e87c35 2015 c813 . 54 c2014-907973-7

c2014-907974-5

Readied for the press by Dan Wells

Copy-edited by Andrew Steinmetz

Cover and text design by Gordon Robertson

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support
of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

To Margaret

FOREWORD

I left canada for England in the summer of 1949 . Towards the end of 1955 we were living in St. Ives and I wanted to return to Canada in order to do a personal sort of travel book. (I had read Graham Greenes travel books about Africa and Mexico. And I felt I wanted to write this kind of book about Canada). John Pudney, at that time a director of Putnam in London, had just accepted a short story (A Small Piece of Blue) for his annual anthology, Pick of Todays Short Stories. I wrote to Put nam to see if they were interested in my doing this type of book. And on the strength of A Small Piece of Blue they said yes.

The trip began early in March 1956 . And the ship stopped at Dublin before crossing the Atlantic to Halifax then going on to New York. I got off at Halifax. And made my way west, to the Pacific. Then back east, to Quebec City, before returning to the uk from Montreal in June. (The original title of the book was The Double Crossing.)

I wrote isolated sections of the book, in London, during the rest of 1956 . (They appeared in the monthly, The Twentieth Century). And most of it in 1957 when we lived in Brighton. The book was to come out as a joint publishing venture between Putnam and McClelland & Stewart. But when McClelland & Stewart read the manuscript they turned it down. Putnam (mainly because their chairman, Roger Lubbock, liked it) decided to go ahead and publish on their own. They told this to McClelland & Stewart. And McClelland & Stewart agreed to take copies for Canada. But they did not want to have their name on the book.

Canada Made Me was published on November rd 1958 by Putnam in an edition of ,ooo copies. Nothing much happened until a review by Paul West appeared in the Christmas 1958 issue of the New Statesman. This was read by Honor Balfour of the London office of Time. She interviewed me. And after the piece appearedin the January 1959 issue of Time things began to happen. I started to receive a growing number of letters, mostly from angry readers and non-readers; journalists came down to interview me, and Canadians came down to Cornwall to see what I looked like.

When McClelland & Stewart sold their copies they did not want to take any more. And after the Putnam copies were gone, I tried to get the book republished in paperback as well as cloth. But the UK publishers I approached all said that this was really a book for Canadians and they would have to consult their Canadian branches before going ahead. All the Canadian branches consulted turned it down.

Until 1978 . I had a phone call from Ottawa from a new publisher Denis Deneau of Deneau & Greenberg. He said: I didnt have a Canadian publisher and he would like to publish my next book. I told him it would be a book of short stories (Thin Ice). He said that would be fine. I told him he could have the book of stories if he first published Canada Made Me. He said he would be delighted.

I have a growing affection for this bookprobably because it was so unloved. (Although there have been a number of supporters for it from the start. And Im glad to say the number is increasing). Reading it again, I see that I could only have written it when I did. And in arranging the first Canadian publica tion I resisted a temptation to rewrite. For when I did, it took away the one quality it hadits youth. Not only in the writing but also in its attitudes. What surprised me was to see how little Canadian life has changed in the areas I was interested in. And also surprising, in a technical sense, is how the bookdespite its detoursfinally gets there in the end. For at the time of writing I had only the vaguest notion of structure.

I had two small books of verse and a novel published before Canada Made Me. But my writing starts with this book.

Norman Levine, 1993

This change was probably helped when Northern Journey (a little magazine in Ottawa) published 13,000 words from Canada Made Me in their June 1976 issue. The first publication in Canada, of Canada Made Me , was in the spring of 1979 by Deneau & Greenberg.

AUTHORS NOTE

T he idea of writing this book on Canada came while I was living in St. Ives, Cornwall. But I did not know how I would go about doing this trip, for one would need both time and money. Instead, I found that whenever I came up to London I would go into Canada House, look over some of the old newspapers, magazines, listen to the sound of the voices, look at the faces, just sit and watch. And when I found I couldnt go and make this trip, I began to do it imaginatively. I wrote down places I would visit, often just for the sound of their names. I filled up notebooks with what I would do in the morning, where I would go in the afternoon. I walked through Montreal from the docks to the airport; in Ottawa from Rockcliffe through Lower Town and out into the country. I wrote about the seasons. I went back to the Bush, to Ile-aux-Noix, to the Laurentians, Toronto, Quebec City, the West where I once did my flying training. And I began to people it not only with the things I could remember that happened to me in Canada as a child and a young man, but with incidents and people that I had since met elsewhere; and then going on from there...