David Helwig : April 5, 1938 – October 16, 2018

Sad to hear that Canadian writer David Helwig died this past Tuesday, after a brief stay in palliative care. It was good to know, at least, that he was able to see and appreciate Ingrid Ruthig’s work editing David Helwig: Essays on His Works, a book that managed to appear mere weeks before his death. My own small contribution to such, solicited by the editor, was the “12 or 20 questions” interview I did with him, way back in December, 2009.

I moved through a number of Helwig works during my twenties, and he was even good enough to read for me at one point, somewhere in the early 1990s, when I was running poetry events as benefits for the Ottawa Food Bank. The collections of essays he edited, The Human Elements (two volumes), were important books for my young self. And he was always both kind and attentive those few times we did interact. During a trip to London with Stephen Brockwell back in 2006, I actually brought his then-new memoir with me to read [see my review of such here], and sat afternoons in a park by Westminster Abbey, moving slowly through his adventures in Kingston, in both writing and theatre circles.

Condolences to his friends and family.

Further biographical information can be found on him here, with a more extensive bibliography at his own website.

12 or 20 questions: with David Helwig

David Helwig was born in Toronto in 1938 and lived there for most of his first ten years, then moved with his parents to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario where his father ran a small business repairing and refinishing furniture and buying and selling antiques. He attended the University of Toronto and the University of Liverpool. His first daughter was born in England and the second in Kingston where he taught at Queen's University. He published his first stories, in Canadian Forum and The Montrealer, while still an undergraduate. For two summers he worked in summer stock with the Straw Hat Players, mostly as a business manager and technician, working with such actors as Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs, William B. Davis and Timothy Findley.

While he taught at Queen's University, he did some informal teaching in Collins Bay Penitentiary and he wrote A Book about Billie with a former inmate. In 1974, John Hirsch hired him as literary manager of CBC television drama, and he spent two years in this position, supervising the work of story editors and the department's relations with writers. From 1976 to 1980, he taught part time at Queen's while doing a great deal of freelance work, and in 1980, he gave up teaching and became a full-time freelance writer.

He has from the beginning written both fiction and poetry as well as a wide range of radio, television and journalism.

One of his daughters is a writer and political activist. The other is a chemist and art conservator. He has three grandchildren.

Vocal music was for many years his avocation. After abandoning this for some years, he returned to it in his forties and sang with a number of choirs in Kingston, Montreal and Charlottetown. He appeared as bass soloist in Handel's Messiah, Bach's St Matthew Passion, and Mozart's Requiem.

He currently lives in an old house in the village of Eldon in Prince Edward Island.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Did my first book change my life? Yes, I suppose it gave me an increased sense that it was possible to be a writer. I was thirty years old, not young for a first book, but it was a period when Canadian poetry was fashionable, and the book sold quite a few copies. It included three plays, and I suppose it encouraged me to be inclusive, not rigourously selective.

As to the difference of my new work, well the poetry is more often written in fairly strict rhymed forms. I began with strict forms, then moved into free verse, but my own free verse and that of most other mostly bores me now. Perhaps I lack the urgency felt by the young and need the struggle of tight forms to lift the level of energy.

What I've just written applies, of course, mostly to poetry. As to fiction it has on the whole grown "louder, faster and funnier" to quote the old theatrical joke. Douglas Glover pointed out that I am loudest, fastest and funniest in the (imaginary) first person.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I didn't come to poetry first. I started out in high school trying to write both poems and stories. For a while in the Sixties I found it easier to publish poetry than fiction, and that led me to write more poetry. Still, at the time my first poetry book was accepted I also won a Belmont Award for a short story that appeared in Saturday Night magazine.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I believe, in general, that especially in fiction I write best when I write fastest. Once an idea has taken on some life (how does this happen? who knows?) things move on very quickly. I take some notes, but sometimes they turn out to be only modestly relevant to what creates itself on the page. As an example I have notes from the spring of 1968, notes begun in Paris, for something that meant to be a novel taking place perhaps in the nineteenth century, with some relation to the history of art. But missing from the notes is the leap by which the supposed novel became a set of lectures in the novella The Stand-In. Once I am in flight the final shape is usually there, though much detail may get revised.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Fiction most commonly begins with a voice. Or maybe more voices than one. I don't writes bits and pieces. I write stories, the narrative impulse and the voice somehow coming together. Poetry begins in overexcitement, often visual.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Public readings have nothing to do with creation. I have done a bit of acting and a lot of singing and I have some natural impulse to perform, but it has little to do with the invention of stories or the creation of poems.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I am allergic to generalizations.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

See above. A writer is a citizen, but mostly in his time off. Though there was a time when I suppose I thought it was my duty to create, alongside others, a Canadian verbal reality.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I have had some useful connections with editors, though mostly at a word by word level. Punctuation. I always greatly enjoyed collaborative work, in theatre, radio, television, but that it a joint project from the beginning.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

"We are in a whorehouse here, and people are getting fucked, and you can't just sit and listen to the blind piano player."

John Hirsch in a CBC Drama Department meeting. Maybe only the most memorable.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

By and large poetry, fiction and critical prose come as quite different kinds of approach or inspiration, different kinds of jobs, bringing their own techniques with them. A story that fails doesn't become a poem; it just remains a failed story. And vice versa.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I am mostly a morning writer. With age I'm slowing down a little, but traditionally I got up and set to work five mornings a week. This is particularly true with long forms, novellas, novels, or The Year One. Sometimes I go back later in the day, and afternoons, when I was doing more free-lance work, were for reviews and such things.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I used to sometimes run or swim, but mostly it doesn't get stalled. I stare out the window and go back to work. If it fails it fails.

13 - What do you really want?

To be read with pleasure by as many people as possible. Or maybe I only want to get up in the morning and make something out of words, something that persuades me and keeps my mind occupied.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Northrop Frye said the same thing. The answer is, as the joke goes, all of the above.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Many different ones at different times. Hemingway first, later Lawrence and Simenon, later still Nabokov. Jane Austen, John Donne. Maybe Hugh MacLennan.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I'd be happy just to keep going.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

In another world I might have been a singer (see The Year One, p 29). I can't imagine not being a writer. Aging and melodramatic I'm tempted to say I would have been mad without it. Though that probably isn't quite true.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It was what I wanted to do. It was what was there demanding to be done.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

As it happens I recently reread Great Expectations. That is an good as they come. Also recently translated some Chekhov. Same comment. Movies? Maybe L'avventura, or Bergman's Persona. Or Fanny and Alexander.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Something that might become a sequence of poems--three written. Reading around an idea for a novella, but it might or might not work. I've just finished a book of connected stories all in dialogue.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

David Helwig's The Names of Things

While in England a couple of weeks ago, I finished reading writer and editor David Helwig's memoir, The Names of Things (Erin ON: The Porcupine's Quill, Inc., 2006). A fascinating look at a writer's life, he moves through the University of Toronto in the 1950s, writing about Ed Lacey, Henry Beissel and John Robert Columbo, to theatre in Peterborough with Timothy Findley, Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs and Bill Davis, the infamous "cigarette smoking man" of the X-Files, to Kingston of the 1960s and the "world of little magazines with Tom Marshall and Michael Ondaatje," writing of his experiences with Don Bailey, as well as, eventually, Steven Heighton, Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen and a whole slew of others. He moves through his time in England, to Toronto, and points further, including a trip to China, before ending up on Prince Edward Island. The late poet John Newlove used to refer to himself as living "an accidental life," and parts of this memoir read about the same, where one circumstance leads into so many other things, whether his daughter, the writer Maggie Helwig being born in England instead of in Canada, to finding himself teaching at Queen's University, or later working for the CBC, or to ending up with his partner Judy on Prince Edward Island.

Almost always the second question any writer is asked is, where do the books come from? And Helwig answers these questions by not focusing on them, and working in other directions instead, coming to the writing only when it is necessary to come to the writing, moving instead through experiences and relationships he has had with others (and a fascinating lot they are, as Helwig writes them), while still including some of the sparks that led to his enormous productivity as a poet, fiction writer and editor. Still, through the memoir, Helwig sprinkles poems through the text here and there, very sparingly, when it seems appropriate; I have always preferred David Helwig the novelist to David Helwig the poet, but the poems do enlighten and enliven what is even an already engaging text, but more as interesting asides than anything that really push the text further. Some of the sections that are most engaging are the ones in which he writes about his family history, including a section he writes about his maternal grandmother, and learning about the circumstance of his mother's birth. As he writes:

My impression of my grandmother is still the one I developed in early childhood, a sense of kindness, of acceptance, of easy laughter. She was always a small woman, and as she got older, an inherited disease bent and bowed her legs and made her smaller, though she never had to struggle with the grotesque barrel staves on which some of her older brothers and sisters hobbled around. (It startles me now, in this world of modern nutrition and medicine that I took for granted that my mother's aunts and uncles should be half-crippled, distorted, dwarfish figures.)

I thought of my grandmother as a small, kind, warm, rather plain woman. Yet in her wedding photograph, she looks very pretty. No doubt some of that is youth and happiness. That photograph is in an album of ancient pictures of members of her family, an album full of the flavour of Victorian England, where she was born and raised. There are photos entwined in a lithograph of English roses and decorated with a little scene of boats near the shore that might be an illustration to David Copperfield. Built into the back cover of the album is a music box that plays two little marches with a metallic carnival gaiety. Many of the figures are anonymous: an old woman in her bonnet and a long dress of a spotted material, sitting straight in the photographer's upholstered chair, her arm across a carved table; a young man in his best suit standing in front of a blank background, one hand on his hip, the other leaning on a small table where his bowler hat waits complacently. A few are labeled: Mr and Mrs Pickles, Mrs Maud Morris and Edgar, Vinnie, Uncle Will's first wife, died in childbirth. A pop-eyed little boy sits on a wooden horse. A blurred photograph of a young woman in mid-Victorian dress. On the back is the photographer's label, Smith, 33 Park Lane, Leeds. […]

It was one of those remarks in which a certain meanness of spirit has garbed itself in the robes of charity, and behind it lay a story my mother told me when I was seventeen or eighteen, one dark winter afternoon. What she told me was the story of her own illegitimate birth. The man I had always known as my grandfather wasn't my mother's father. My grandmother, in her teens, had fallen in love with a married man who wrote poetry and played the double bass and sometimes preached in the spiritualist chapel she attended. When she found herself pregnant, they went away together to Somerset, where my mother was born, in that house on Taunton Road I must assume. On the birth certificate, the man is described as a printer, the two of them as husband and wife. Later he went back to his wife and two sons, and my grandmother emigrated to Canada. My mother was five years old when my grandmother married David Abbott, who was younger than she was and had been her father's apprentice.

As potentially "shocking" as this might be, anyone working in genealogy already knows that these stories are far more common than people might think; the rarity for Helwig comes in the facts that he was told the story in the first place, was willing to do more research in the matter, and then write it down for the rest of us to read. Every family has an interesting series of stories, and I appreciate Helwig giving us his, along with what they mean to him, and the rest of his life. What makes this memoir is that Helwig writes of all of his selves, from lover, husband, father, son, grandson, writer, editor, carpenter, actor and what else makes up the whole of a life, instead of limiting it to stories of his "writing" life. This is the story of his life, so far, with so many writers and actors and others written about that there should have been an index at the back of the book. Another interesting insight Helwig shares is into Oberon Press's Michael Macklem, a publishing house that Helwig was involved with early on, and that has managed for decades to be extremely active and almost completely invisible at the same time (they currently have offices about three blocks away from where I write this):

Michael Macklem was, and is, a fiercely driven man, who has always approached the world as a battle in which every day a few inches may be gained or, more likely, lost. Comprehensible I suppose: when he was born, because an older brother had been found dead in his crib, the thymus gland swollen, Michael was given massive doses of x-rays to shrink the thymus gland, and these affected the thyroid nearby so that he was until adolescence, in his own words, 'a fat little porker'. (The doctors expected the therapy to make him impotent. It didn’t.) As a small boy, he was brutalized by bullies at Upper Canada College. His mother was a clever and formidable woman who, left a widow with two young sons, married a rather shy lawyer and, after the crib death, gave birth to one final son, Michael. While Michael was pleased to assert that his father, whose business included a lot of money-lending, never foreclosed a mortgage during the Depression, the man understood money and he made quite a lot of it – though I believe they were people of means even in earlier generations. This has allowed Michael to run Oberon for more than thirty-five years without ever paying himself or Anne a salary – that's a gift to Canadian writing, as I calculate it,
of well over a million dollars.

As an aside, later on, while continuing to write on Macklem, Helwig adds:

He was attacked by pirates on Lake Muskoka.

Only Michael could be attacked by pirates on Lake Muskoka.

So much of his life he chalks up to luck, downplaying his own skill and talent, but it's difficult to downplay the luck of geography and birth, and the opportunities that came through the explosions of Canadian Literature that he was not only there for, but an important part of. As he writes at the beginning of chapter six:

The smartest thing I ever did was to get myself born in 1938. What that meant was that I was just a few years ahead of the baby boom that came along after the war, my own more thinly populated generation catching most trends on the way up. I left high school in 1956 and only six years later I had a full-time teaching job at Queen's University. I had never intended to be an academic, or wished to, but I was married at twenty-one and a father at twenty-three, so when the job offers began to arrive – I was in England, with a wife and a child and no money – it was impossible to turn them down.

This is a highly compelling and highly satisfying memoir that gives as much information about Helwig as there probably is, much of it in the way of him deflecting the focus off himself and onto others. If I were to list the books that David Helwig has published, there would be little space for anything else; there is much for Helwig to be immodest about. Still, the strength of this three hundred page document comes from the fact that this is a memoir by a quiet, modest and engaged writer, with some sixty-odd years of experience behind him. Whether you care for his writing or not, I would almost call this essential reading; a "writing life" that focuses on the life.