DESTINATION CANADA

Off the beaten trac

* Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign
Writers: The Wild is Always There,
Volume | (1993); The Very Richness Of
That Past, Volume It (1995). Edited by
Greg Gatenby (Alfred A. Knopff, Canada)

By John Goodman
Contributing Writer

well be an abstract concept on the same
legendary level as Timbuctoo.

Seasoned travellers will tell you it is easier
to find a drink in the Sahara De-ert but other-
wise we are running neck and neck in the
Condé Nast exotica sweepstakes.

Canada’s appeal to the creative imagination
is amply illustrated in Greg Gatenby’s ongoing
series Canada Through the Eyes of Foreign
Writers.

The ambitious undertaking is no less than a
literary tour through time from the Icelandic
sagas to the present day.

_ Gatenby’s: werk is a model of scholarly
. research which also manages to entertain the
general reader.

Rather than following a dry, chronclogical

Fe MUCH of the world Canada may as

i approach he has chosen to present the material

in a non-linear fashion — the first volume, pub-
lished in 1993, selected 36 writers from a field
of over 1,500 unearthed during his research.
‘The length of the entries varies considerably
~— Albert: Canis’: brief half-day car trip to

Montreal from New ‘York in May of 1946 rates. E
a page,. while the first-ever English «anslation -

- SOUTHERN SONS: Mark Twain (left)

- of Rossini’s ‘Opera La Cambiate De Matrimonio
vis presented in full.’

» Gatenby’s . - discussions. with Morley
Callaghan on the Emmest Hemingway cra at the
Toronte Daily Star: initiated
the entire project... :

* The -young: Hemingway
was responsible for smuggting
into North ‘America copies of :

his most famous work is: Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea, or the Marvelous and
Exciting Adventures of Pierre Aronnax,
Conseil, his Servant, and Ned Land, a
Canadian Harpooner,

That other French fabulist Cyrano de
Bergerac also drew inspiration from New
Franc: in his mid-1!7th century satires of “the
other world” (compiled in English as Voyages
to the Sun and the Moon, France in general
(Andre Breton, Voltaire) is particularly well-
represented in The Wild Is Always There.

Wednesday 0905 hours. Milepost 2,401.2
GOLDEN... The sky is blue the snow is white,

- the train is red. We are trapped in a technicolor

Photo out of the National Geographic maga-
zine. 1235 hours. Milepost 2,355.2 LAKE
LOUISE. It is all over. The grandiose scenery
has been packed away to wait for the next train.
— Michel Tournier from his 1975 novel Les
Méteores. The narrative includes a train journey
from Vancouver to Moutreal.

__ In the introduction to the just-released sec-
ond volume Gatenby notes that “male authors
greatly outnum-
ber the female ...
and descriptions
of the east out-
number those of
the west” but he

has succeeded in.

finding examples

fy. from a variety of
9 sources.

Willa Cather

and Washington Cabie oc3se for

; 1085 § Canadian tour r publicity photo.

and Harriet Beecher
Stowe made the 1993
edition and several more
women are included
among the 33 selected
for The Very Richness Of
That Past: such as
tabloid-weary Margaret
Blennerhassett_ who is
thought to have been the
first woman visitor to
publish in Canada —
The Widow of the Rock
(1824).

Among the more
famiiiar authors in the
second volume are
world-traveller Rudyard
Kipling, that world-class
Satanic whiner Aleister
Crowley, lefty Theodore
Dreiser, the unrealistic
romantic Chateaubriand,
and film noir crime-
writer par excellence
Raymond Chandler who
spent time stationed in
the army in Victoria.

Kipling provides one
of the more extensive
studies of Western
Canada and in fact pub-
lished a book of travel
essays From Sea to Sea, He made at least seven
trips to Canada including several cross-country
rail tours.

Kipling went through several fortunes in his
lifetime and Vancouver played a part in his
money woes. According to Gatenby a con man
sold the author two ots in North Vancouver's

(sic) Mount Pleasant area which Kipling paid

taxes on: for years before learning ‘be |

claim to the land. Gatenby’s books pu
back into the open skies of. modem
can yt thete from bere but you oan

Library. To purchase them’ inna at The Book a
Company i in | Park Royal's north mail.

James foyce’s banned: novel -
Ulysses .when he: returned ..

~ from. his ‘stint ‘as the paper's

- Paris correspondent in the fall

of 1923.°

. 2° Other- highlights from the
first volume include: Borges:
on a totemic gift; Mask Twain’.
‘and George Washington Cable -
on a’ reading ‘tour. (the latter
would open the. evening by |
‘songs); *
Charles Dickens. and Wilkie’
* Collins collaboration on The

singing — Creole ;.

Frozen. Deep, a play inspired
by, the disastrous Franklin
expedition; . and _ Umberto

- Eco’s ode to the University of

‘Toronto Library. Canada's

" largest city is a second home
for the Italian semiotics pro-
fessor.

The Tory leanings of cen-
tral Canada that so appalled
Dickens on his mid-19th cen-
tury visits had the opposite
effect on the French writer
Jules Verne (1828-1905).

He was so taken with the
old-world conservative ways
of New World Quebec that he
set seven of his novels in
Canada. The complete title of

i
Dial 1-800-667-9913 7
Fax: 725-2138 {604 725-3919 |!
box: 129, ‘Tofino, B.C. VOR 2Z0

‘Detective. Killaine: Over on ‘the other side of the inlet,:

there’s Grouse Mountain. ‘It's about four thousand feet
high. There’s a restaurant on top of it. Very nice restaurant.
(He turns ‘to Betty) I’m sorry we couldn't have met in
pledsanter circur stances, Miss Mayfield...

2 You're a ‘police officer. A very nice one — but you

‘have a job to do. I’m a girl who's in a jam, and it’s your
job to keep me there. Bon’t go considerate on me. | might
start te baw!.

— From Scene 62 of Ra mond Chandier’s unfilmed 1947
screenplay Playback. Chandler created the character of
Philip Marlowe’ whe was portrayed in the movies by
Humphrey Bogart (The Big Sleep) and Dick Powell
(Farewell My Lovely). “in t e. a) of 1947 Universal

‘Hampton ‘Court

Horticultural Tour
July 9-20, 1996 - 12 days

64199 per person, dbl occupancy

doin host George Radford, one of Victoria's
pre-emiient gardeners, on this tour feauring the
Hampton Court Flower Show and some of
England's finest private homes & gardens.

CHD)

Price Includes:
Return airfare on British Airways
Hotel accommodation (inc. private bath)
Some meals & tour guide (inc. George Radford)
_ Entrance fees te all homes, gardens & Hampton Court
4 All air! hotel taxes & porterage (except air $16) for luggage! we

Call taday for details! 7 ;

“$65 N. Park Royal Mall
W. Vansouver, 8.0.
=

PHONE: 922- 451

Pictures, to tempt Chandler from Paramount, offered him,
a breathtaking salary of $4,000 per week to write an orig-:|
inal screenplay on any subject of his choosing. |

“As if this were insufficient reward, he was also offered |
a percentage of the box office receipts, and minirnal ques-
tions from the studio’ about the progress of his screenplay. .
Under these immensely liberal circumstances, Chandler,
chose to write Playback, a film set, not in.the Los Angeles . |.
for which he was renowned (and where the studios
assumed he would set the new picture), but in Vancouver

— with a Canadian hero fightin
Gatenby, The Very Richness O

American villains.” Greg
That Past,1995

Making a film in Vancouver was an unheard-of idea at |
the time and the work was never produced. Long thought
to be lost, a draft of the screenplay was discovered in }

Universal’s archives in the 1980s.

Persian & Oriental Carpets
| To satisfy court demands for payments’
Assets of Long Established Persian & Oriental
- Carpet Company Will Be Dissolved by

PUBLIC AUCTION ~
PARTIAL LIST OF ORIENTAL CARPETS

Persian Royal Kirman, Master Weaves, Silk Prayer Rugs, Semi Antique Navahan, q
Pashima Wool Mauri Bokharas, High Quality Chinese, Tribal Chichako and:
Baluchies, Indo Kashan, Tabriz, Heriz, Good Quality Aubussons, Runness, Silk and
Kurk Wool and Silk Isfahan, Gabeh with natural dyes, Antique Arabil, Zanjan,
Khemseh and many, many more. Sizes range from 1'x1's to 12’x18'.

MONDAY, APRIL 8th, 1996 |
COACH HOUSE INN
700 OLD LILLOOET RD, NORTH VANCOUVER
1 PM SHARP- Public viewing from 12 neon

Terms 10% buyers’premiutn charge to be added, Cash, Bank Cheques, Visa, Masteredad & Asnex accepted