Free Eastern Passage by Farley Mowat Page B

postponement was hard enough to bear. Worse followed in the next paragraph, where Dudley firmly scotched my hopes for co-publication with a Canadian company. Little, Brown, he wrote, “was adamantly opposed to relinquishing any portion of its exclusive North American rights.” It intended to distribute the book in Canada under its own imprint, possibly but not necessarily through McClelland & Stewart. Furthermore, if I insisted on a Canadian imprint, Little, Brown could be expected to suspend publication “indefinitely.”
    Dudley refrained from telling me to shut up and back off but Max had no such compunctions. When he heard about this contretemps he wrote:
    “If you insist on being difficult you had better find yourself another agent.”
    Something else was on his mind too. Both he and Dudley had been trying to interest me in writing an “action
novel”
about the north. “That,” Max insisted, “would be as good as finding gold up there, could actually
be
about finding gold and could result in all of us finding a useful chunk of gold down here.”
    I now began to pull in my horns and wrote to Dudley.
    Dear Dudley:                       May 12, 1951
    I guess your decisions about timing and about Canadian publication must prevail. Hell’s bells, what do I know about the publishing business? And what could I do if I did?
    One thing I do agree with is that the name
, River of Men,
won’t do. There have been too damn many Rivers published recently, but here is the best I can offer as an alternative
.
    The Desperate People
    Inuit Ku (River of Men in Eskimo)
    People of the Deer
    Plains of Kaila
    Blood of the Barrens (Zane Grey would like that one)
.
    I have a number of small corrections to make on the setting copy for What’s Its Name. However, there will no doubt be plenty of time to do that before Little, Brown publishes the book – if and when…
.
    Communications between Dudley and me that summer were suc cinct and infrequent. In mid-summer I wrote:
    Working on a novel. Max holds what’s left of the advance from River and doles it out parsimoniously. I’ll bet you’d love to give me another advance on the next book? I’ll bet!
    And again, in September:
    Dear Dudley:
    It is to weep!
    Corn borers, potato weevils, cabbage maggots, flea beetles, tomato worms, and grasshoppers are not enough for me to deal with? You want me to write some children’s books, a novel, and – yuck – another book about the arctic too?
    Yuck is what my Eskimo pal Ohoto always said when things got too much to bear
.
    Well, the novel is progressing – about 200 pages in rough draft – but still pretty nebulous
.
    It is set in Brochet – a small and very isolated northern community peopled by two Indian races, mixed-breeds of every degree, and a small group of whites including missionaries, free traders, H.B.C. traders, white trappers, and renegades
.
    The general theme is what happens to the taut balance between these groups when a small group of Canadian soldiers is dumped in by air in 1946 to establish a weather station and spy outpost
.
    Where does it go from here? God alone knows. When the first half dozen chapters are in better shape I’ll send them along and you can draw your own conclusions
.
    I have considered your suggestion (or was it not mine?) of a boys’ book. A book for young minds might do more to disseminate the truth about what has been going on in the north than can be dealt with by old and warty minds. So I will shortly send you an outline for a boys’ book
.
    We took our annual holiday last week. Two days in Toronto. A movie, a Chinese dinner, and a ride on a streetcar. Fran, by the by, will be
teaching at S.S. No. 12 this winter. It’s a one-room schoolhouse on a lonely side road a couple of miles from us and will have something between five and eight students, mostly kids from the Catholic Children’s Aid in Toronto who have been farmed out – literally – to impoverished local