The first time I met Farley Mowat was at his summer home on Cape Breton Island. I was with my father-in-law at the time, an ex-naval firefighter, and Farley welcomed us from the cramped engine room of the Happy Adventure, otherwise known as the Boat Who Wouldn't Float, where he was dismantling her engine and cleaning it with gasoline-soaked rags while smoking a cigarette. My father-in-law took one look and decided to wait out the rest of the visit in his car.
Otherwise
, by Farley Mowat, McClelland & Stewart, 309 pages, $32.99
People have been backing away from Farley's uninhibited enthusiasm for decades, usually out of concern for their own safety. As he acknowledges in Otherwise, this powerful revisiting of the key episodes in the writer's life during his most controversial years - 1937 to 1948, when he conducted the research that led to People of the Deer and Never Cry Wolf - his dedication to getting at the reality of something, as distinct from the mere measurable facts of it, has been landing him in trouble all his life.
In 1938 and '39, he convinced three friends to accompany him on field expeditions to conduct what he called the "Faunal Survey of Saskatchewan." The friends on the first trip were Andy Lawrie and Frank Banfield. Mowat and Banfield, "a rather oleaginous Toronto youth" who was studying biology, seem to have fallen out, possibly over the need to kill animals in order to study them. Mowat became uneasy at this "slaughter of the innocents," preferring to work "as an observer of rather than as nemesis of the Others." Banfield was not present on the 1939 trip.
The Second World War halted the survey. Mowat's reaction to that horrific conflict has been described in other books - notably And No Birds Sang and My Father's Son - and is barely mentioned in Otherwise (the Italian campaign, he laconically notes, was "not devoid of risks"), but its effect on his state of mind when he returned to Canada is carefully documented. He was, he writes, appalled at the destruction the war committed on animals, the "Others" with whom we share the planet. Bunker oil from torpedoed ships devastated "tens of millions" of birds; exploding ships killed fish for miles around; depth charges hit whales and porpoises.
Mowat ponders this on his return voyage. "No merely human nightmare," he writes, "could begin to encompass its catastrophic magnitude." He had spent the last months in Europe illicitly amassing a huge collection of German war technology - more than 900 tons of it, everything from Lugers to Panther tanks and even a top-secret V-2 rocket, which the Germans had developed to deliver atomic bombs - and was shipping them home as a gift to the Canadian War Museum. In Farley, his biography of Mowat, James King dedicates barely two paragraphs to this incredible story; Mowat expands greatly on it, because his reception in Ottawa foretells the kind of trouble he was to have with bureaucracy for the rest of his life.
No one in Ottawa wanted his collection: Most of it was sold for scrap or shipped to Halifax and dumped at sea. Like the returned soldiers themselves, Mowat's gift was an embarrassment to a government intent on putting the war behind it. Charles Ritchie referred to postwar Ottawa as being given over to "commonplace commonsense." Mowat's analysis is somewhat more colourful: "Ottawa, this grey-minded city of bureaucrats and bullshit." He spent much of his time there "darkly contemplating a clouded future," which he thought might include writing fiction.
