Not Wilkie, but it might have been: hand composition in the age of metal type.

He was a tall and rather distinguished-looking man, grey-haired in all the years I knew him, with the remnants of a Scottish burr in his locution and the kind of congenial social graces that make all comers feel comfortable. He had apprenticed in Scotland as a printer’s compositor, which is to say that he had worked in a printing plant in the age of metal type, and consequently he had a fine, critical eye not just for typographical errors, but also for more exotic infelicities involving kerning and letter spacing. He was scrupulous, too, in checking running heads, which, before computers automated page setup, were apt to go awry in second pages and beyond. And, yes, in addition to his other duties, Bob liked nothing better than to relax by proofing pages before they went to press.

He once had worked for Robert Maxwell, the Czech-born entrepreneur who became a minor British press baron in the late 1980s, owner of the London Daily Mirror, among other titles. He was controversial even then: attacked by the press and frequently attacking them in turn, famous for his litigiousness. Later, it emerged, that he was a large-scale crook who bilked the Mirror Group employee pension fund of some ₤440 million in an attempt to cover debts of more than ₤1 billion. Maxwell disappeared mysteriously from his yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean in 1991. Bob, however, had nothing but fond memories of Maxwell, whom he remembered as an amusing raconteur and generous employer. I wish I could remember the stories Bob told to reinforce the portrait, but, of course, too many years have passed and I can’t.

Bob was known for his memos, which often were characterized either by wry humour or, on occasion, exasperation. He hated messiness and was apt to be cross about the condition of the kitchen. Inevitably, given the frequently straitened condition of the company’s finances, he kept a close eye on office expenses. The profligate use of couriers was a recurrent topic of his circulars. He was responsible, too, for office machinery. One memo begins with the now quaint pronouncement: “I was amazed in my survey to find how many of you were not even aware that we had a Telex in the office.” (I, as it happened, was one who knew: on my first days in the company I was given, in lieu of an office, a confined space between cardboard boxes in the windowless storeroom where the Telex machine was located. Its intermittent chatter was just one of the annoyances I endured.) Bob’s memo outlined how Telex messages would thenceforward be routed through a third-party after he had disposed of it. Change comes so suddenly now, I doubt that the machine was missed for long.

I do, however, miss Bob. Key Porter was a crazy place to work in those years, when Anna was the imperious buccaneer of Canadian book publishing, and Phyllis Bruce, editorial director, her exquisite, diligent foil. The company was chronically understaffed but enormously productive. Somehow we churned out as many as fifty titles a year and yet, with no backlist to speak of, and constantly borrowing against next year’s bestseller (too often next year’s remainder), we laboured always with the subliminal suspicion that the bailiff at any moment would batter down the door.

Those Friday afternoons in the boardroom, when Bob Wilkie broke out the wine and settled contentedly in the chair at the head of the table, were an essential interlude of cheerful serenity. They rarely became bitching sessions. We just talked. And, for a few moments, listening to Bob’s stories, we could pretend that book publishing was the civilized occupation we all had imagined it would be.

David Frum at the TPL

It’s the night the race for the White House finally ends. (The temptation to add “thank god” is irresistible. Done.) Early returns suggest that Obama might take Florida but it’s too early to call. I’m leafing through notes I made back in September when David Frum made an appearance at the Toronto Public Library. He was there to pitch his novel, Patriots, to a packed house. Alison Smith, the CBC correspondent, introduced him. She called him thoughtful, provocative and gentlemanly. As it turned out, she was right.

He was on a book tour but a good part of the audience was less interested in his novel than in his political insights. Frum, after all, was one of George W’s speechwriters, infamous author of the phrase “axis of evil,” and a defrocked high priest of the Republican Party (forced to resign from right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute). He knows a thing or two about the American right. Indeed, the novel comes (metaphorically speaking) as a kind of bitter Dear John letter at the end of a long and loving correspondence with his former Republican Party-girl paramour, now tragically besotted with a ruthless libertarian hedge fund magnate. Or something like that. Not that Frum described the book in precisely those terms.

What he said was that some stuff is too strange for fiction and some stuff is too true for journalism. Only satire would suffice.

Florida, as I write, is still leaning slightly to Obama. This would be a coup. Virginia appears to be going the other way.

Alison Smith called Frum gentlemanly: he was

How could Romney be doing so well? Frum’s comments on the Mittster were hardly flattering. Romney’s virtue, according to Frum, was his competence. He recalled Rudolf Giuliani’s backhanded compliment, that Romney would have made the greatest secretary of transportation of all time. But Romney wanted desperately to be president. (This was obvious.) Frum lamented that Romney had capitulated to the Tea Party—he had been “remoulded and remade” by the forces of the radical right. “The feeling out there that he is inauthentic,” said Frum, “is true.”

“It takes an enormous amount of presence of mind to be consciously hypocritical,” he added. Energy, one supposes, that might have been put to better use.

Frum had intriguing things to say about the women’s vote. (Intriguing, that is, as a reflection of Republican thinking.) He said that women are uninterested in the part of politics that is a substitute for the NFL. Women, he said, don’t watch the news shows; they don’t like the conflict style of politics;they prefer a consensus approach. Too bad for the Republicans who are so enamoured of conflict. He also noted that married and unmarried women were different from each other. Republicans depend on the support of married women because they are less dependent on the state.

Meanwhile, as I write, more than 80 per cent of the vote having been counted in Florida, the two candidates are separated by a statistical hair. Wolf Blitzer is thrilled.

At the end of his talk at the Toronto Public Library, Frum declared that he would still vote for Romney. Something about the business of America being business and Obama having no sympathy for entrepreneurs. For a lover spurned, Frum showed admirable devotion to his first love. Perhaps when the votes all have been counted, they can be reconciled.

The Globe‘s lead review is given over to Johnson’s Life of London by Boris Johnson, mayor of that city, and an undoubted character. The reviewer is one Ashley Prime, identified as Deputy Consul-General of the British Consulate-General in Toronto – “and a native Londoner.” So: a British book by a British writer, reviewed by a temporarily transplanted British diplomat. And this is how Canada’s purported paper of record serves its constituency? Gosh, ma! We might almost be sitting in London reading a real newspaper!

And there, on the same page of the book section with adorable, mop-haired Boris, sits a tiny two-sentence review by H.J. Kirchhoff of Sheila Heti’s new novel, How Should a Person Be? The second sentence is particularly mystifying. Kirchhoff writes: “Heti’s book is creating enormous buzz in Canada and abroad.”

Eh, what?

Absolutely no indication is offered by the G&M as to why, in its view, the buzz has erupted. No opinion on whether we should regard this “enormous buzz” with approval or detestation. There’s something a bit sniffy in the phrasing though. Is the implication that we’ve become so used to Canadian novelists generating buzz that the Globe can look on with condescending indifference when others make a fuss? Or is it, perhaps, beneath the dignity of the Globe to get caught up in the conversation? Heti is not, after all, the mayor of London.

I’m not even going to get into the fact that a full page in the four-page book section is devoted to publication of another of L.M. Montgomery’s journals. (Can you bear the excitement?) If I were Sheila Heti, I’d be pissed.

He’ll talk to just about anybody. He has interviewed doctors who worked among the Montagnards in the Central Highlands. He has interviewed pilots who flew secret missions for the CIA. He has interviewed the helicopter jockeys who gave Nixon his last ride from the White House to San Clemente. He has interviewed Pat Sajak, the “Wheel of Fortune” MC, who turns out to have been a real-life counterpart of the Robin Williams character in the film, Good Morning, Vietnam! He has interviewed Vietnamese veterans who fought for the communists. He has even interviewed some of the Canadians – by his conservative estimate there were ten thousand of them – who fought in the war for Uncle Sam.

Yablonka also has sought the company of the reporters and photographers who covered the war. Perhaps he feels a bond with them because he’s a journalist and photographer himself. In his conversations with Nick Ut and Catherine Leroy, for example, the reader senses affection as well as respect.

Nick Ut’s story is a dramatic one. His brother was on assignment for the Saigon bureau of the Associated Press when he was killed in a firefight in the Mekong Delta. His sister-in-law urged Horst Faas, the AP photo chief, to hire Nick in her husband’s place: the family desperately needed the income. Faas balked at the idea. Nick was in his mid-teens, too young to be exposed to the risks assumed by reporters. Faas did, however, agree to employ the boy in the darkroom – where he thrived.

Marc Yablonka. Photo by Camille Tran-Yablonka

“I had never been a photographer before,” Ut told Yablonka, “but the darkroom was so easy. Nothing to learn but loading the film and developing. I learned everything in three minutes … and loved it.” He was taught by a master: Faas, too, had started his career in the darkroom, not with AP, but with the Keystone agency in Berlin. Faas always claimed that he learned what made a good picture from the professionals whose film he processed. He saw the many shots that came in and he saw the few that were sent out over the wires. He noticed what made them different. Ut, like Faas, was an apt student. Before long, he, too, had a camera in his hands.

He is known now as the photographer who took what may have been the most powerful image of the war – the picture of the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl, her body seared by napalm, running naked from her just-bombed village. What’s less well known is that the photographer saved the girl’s life. It was he who gathered her up in a blanket and drove her to a hospital where he insisted to indifferent medical staff that her injuries be taken care of. The two of them still keep in touch.

Catherine Leroy’s story, too, is poignant in its way. She was a tiny, fearless French photographer who somehow wrangled permission to jump with the 173^rd Parachute Brigade in Operation Junction City in February 1967. The wings they pinned to her battledress commanded respect from troops who, often enough, had been impressed already by her fierce command of colorful language. She took remarkable photographs, including the first pictures taken behind enemy lines of North Vietnamese troops fighting in the South. One of these made the cover of Life magazine.

War has a way of staying with the people who are marked by it. Years after the war, Leroy told Yablonka, she was visiting the Pentagon when she was accosted by an American secret service agent. “Excuse me, Catherine,” he said. “I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I’ll never forget you.” It turned out he had been wounded and was stepping off a helicopter just as Leroy was boarding it at a firebase somewhere in Vietnam. As they passed, she tossed him a can of Coke, and the casual kindness of the gesture touched him. That’s war,” she told Yablonka. “You meet someone for a few seconds and you remember it for all your life.”

Leroy later asked Yablonka for advice on selling her war photographs, and those of some of her colleagues. The market for them had died.

Yablonka’s book, Distant War: Recollections of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, (San Diego, CA: Navigator Books) brings together an astonishing array of voices from the conflict. The terrible rancor the war engendered can be heard in the occasional comment, but, for the most part, his subjects are either philosophical or filled only with sadness. “We all left a bit of our souls in Southeast Asia,” Tim Page, another veteran photographer, told the writer. “We don’t want to lose that.”

Hundreds of students pour out of the Westjet Stage at Harbourfront in Toronto yesterday. Few voted for me.

My book. Nice try.

My book for young readers, Canada’s Wars: An Illustrated History, didn’t win the Ontario Library Association’s White Pine Award on Tuesday. It was nominated. Nice things were said about it. Didn’t win.

The OLA’s program, Forest of Reading, assigns a tree to each age group, ranging from tykes to teens. White Pine is for the oldest group, 11 to 14, I think. Volunteer librarians and teachers read through piles of newly published books and come up with a shortlist for each age group. Actually, two shortlists: one for fiction, the other for non. When the lists are announced, teachers across the province encourage their students to read the books selected for their age group and then vote for their favorite, which gets the award. It’s a genius program.

My stalwart standard bearer, Dragana Mirkovic, and the brilliant young woman who introduced me, Nicole Silson.

For the students, part of the incentive to participate is a day off school. The OLA takes over Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, buses in kids by the thousand and encourages them to rub shoulders with the writers whose books they have been reading. Some authors hold workshops. All are given the opportunity to do signings. And for each award there’s a ceremony at the Westjet Stage where the authors are marched in beneath a banner, introduced by a young person, and generally feted and cheered. Then the winners, fiction and non, are announced.

Part of the brilliance of the concept is the way books are selected: there’s something for everyone. Among the contenders for the White Pine non-fiction award this year were a graphic memoir, a hockey book, the biography of an addict, the autobiography of a comedian (Russell Peters), a polemic about the environment, a collection of true-adventure stories, an upbeat self-help manual and a collection of inspirational vignettes drawn from everyday life.

All tastes are catered to, from celebrity follower to sports fan to science nerd and everyone else. And that, clearly, is the point. The OLA’s motivation is not to give a boost to authors’ egos. (Though it’s entirely possible that they get a kick out of watching authors bask in all that manufactured adulation.) The real point is to get as many kids as possible to pick up and read a book. And, from the evidence at Harbourfront, they’re succeeding admirably.

At the other end of the stage from where I was sitting, someone won the award for fiction. I was sitting beside the ultimate winner of the non-fiction prize. Neil Pasricha, author of The Book of Awesome, is a charming guy who had the audience roaring their appreciation for the young woman who introduced his book. You have to admire a man who can manage a crowd like that. The rest of us cheered too.

I didn’t win. But did.

Neil Pasricha. Winner.

At their best, too, the newspaper columns had an edge to them, while McLean’s tales tend to be treacly.

In the Lautens newspaper genre, the narrator-protagonist typically is a middle-aged man—the columnist—and the main characters are members of his immediate family. He’s a bit of a doofus but good-hearted. His spouse is smart, practical and long-suffering. Their kids get up to all kinds of hijinks, but nothing that can’t be sorted out with help from mom, a friend or a local elder. It is essential, however, that the dad be flawed: if he can’t laugh at himself (and invite the reader to join in his laughter) then the column gets swamped by unendurable smugness. There’s almost nothing more irritating than someone else’s adorable family.

In the case of Almost There, the family-hijinks genre is melded into another, less esoteric branch of commercial journalism: Gillespie is a travel writer. The book is at its most appealing when he invites the reader to join him on one of his family’s holiday adventures.

Gillespie: inept dad and family hijinks. Photo by Blue Fish Studios

The first he takes us on is a remarkably brave excursion organized by his parents in the early 1970s when they piled their six kids into the car and drove from Calgary to Mexico City and back again. His parents appear to have been quite sensationally strong-minded and eccentric, though we’re not given much insight into what made them that way, or how they functioned. Nothing Gillespie and his partner have embarked on with their two daughters compares to this first road trip for pure chutzpah. They lived for a season in Paris, and then they lived in Scotland, the subject of a different book; neither stint really qualifies as a vacation. They have gone to Disneyland on a number of occasions. They have been on a Caribbean cruise, spent a week at an all-inclusive Jamaican resort and undertaken an RV-tour of southern Australia. These outings form kind of a meh list, on the face of it, but they’re the kind of outings most of us go on.

Things did get interesting when, in Australia, the family went up in a hot-air balloon and almost crashed on a highway. To their two girls, this was pretty awesome.

Gillespie has thrown a bit of research into the mix, some history and sundry thoughts about the significance of vacation time in knitting families together. The balloon incident, for example, illustrates a recurring question about our willingness to place ourselves and our children in unfamiliar and potentially dangerous situations. Some of his other thoughts are more anodyne. It will surprise few readers to learn that cruise ships tend to create a barrier between passengers and the places they visit. It’s not news that Disney’s theme parks are attractive and seductively well-ordered. When he admits that it made him uncomfortable to swim off a beach in Haiti (while on the Caribbean cruise), knowing that some of the most desperately poor people in the world struggled for life just over the hill, the observation seems strangely inconclusive. He swam anyway.

The Lautens tradition is a strong and surprisingly durable one. Collections of his columns remained in print for years after his passing. Gillespie sometimes crafts vignettes with Lautens-like appeal, with himself in the role of an inept dad attempting to guide his brood through tricky foreign cultures. There is some awkwardness, however, in the elements with which the family hijinks are overlaid. The history is light and the contemplative bits unexceptional. I remain seriously intrigued, however, by the wildly audacious enterprise of his parents.

*

Curtis Gillespie, Almost There: The Family Vacation, Then and Now, A Memoir. (Thomas Allen, $24.95). Review copy supplied by the publisher.

Horst Faas. Photo by Jockel Finck

Horst Faas photographed a father cradling a child badly burned by napalm. And another of a father holding up a tiny corpse, either in supplication or in protest, while South Vietnamese soldiers impassively returned his gaze. He photographed a South Vietnamese officer, his expression savage, pushing the point of a knife into a prisoner’s abdomen. When the Vietcong caught a South Vietnamese battalion in an ambush at Binh Gia in December 1964, Faas was the only photographer to record the aftermath: one image shows a single South Vietnamese Ranger sitting amid the corpses of his comrades. It’s almost indescribably sad.

These were among the pictures he took that the Associated Press assessed as acceptable for distribution. Others were too grim to send out over the wire. And then there were the pictures that he didn’t take because they would have been too intrusive. Newsmen weren’t censored in Vietnam, he said, so sometimes they had to censor themselves.

Remarkably, for a man who knew far more than most of us do about man’s capacity for inhumanity, Faas seemed to me to be warm-hearted, generous and humane. When, two months ago, I sent him an email message by way of his French publisher, he responded instantly. “Of course I will help you with your project,” he wrote me. “Let me know if and when you would like to contact me.” What I didn’t know then was that he was desperately incapacitated: paralyzed almost from the neck down, able to move one hand just enough to peck at a keyboard. We skyped.

I wondered what it was that had driven him to take such risks and to take such pictures. He was a boy in Germany in the Second World War. He had been bombed. He had been a refugee fleeing from both the allies and the Russians in 1944 and ’45. “By the time I was twelve, thirteen years old,” he said, “I knew a lot about war and war-related events and I had seen quite a lot.”

He worked as a photographer in post-war Germany, but it bored him. “I spent five years covering Bonn and the Adenauer period. I was itching to get out.” Faas wanted more drama than the political scene afforded him. “I took the job of a journalist because it was exciting and attractive. And being a journalist meant going to areas of conflict…. I actually wanted a one-way ticket to the Congo at the time the Congo started erupting.” This was at the start of the 1960s when Belgium had abandoned its former colony and a secessionist movement tore the country apart. The rebel leader, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered. “I took, I think, the last picture of Lumumba alive.”

What became clear as I talked to him—it was a recurring theme—was the satisfaction Faas took in getting his pictures into the newspapers. Of the Congo, he said, “the best thing was, we were on the front page every day. It was the biggest story at the time.” His next stop, Algeria, where the French were attempting to crush a revolution, was a disappointment for essentially the same reason, but in reverse. “Algeria was much more dangerous and bloody than Vietnam … I thought. So many people died in Algeria every day, and it was much more difficult, and getting anything was really an achievement. But nobody gave a damn…. It was covered all right, but it wasn’t the main story.” He welcomed AP’s offer of a transfer to Vietnam.

For a time, he had the story almost to himself:

I came to Vietnam when the name of the country was hardly known. And what happened there, and especially in the [Mekong] Delta, was completely unknown. So it was one of those situations in which I could discover events … on my own. There was no race between photographers. There was just me and a couple of Vietnamese and the occasional visitor like [British photographer] Larry Burrows, who … had just completed the first major take-out for Life magazine, which was published in ’62 or ’63. Larry and I became good friends and he told me where he had been, so I just followed his track and made plans with local units. I showed up in the afternoon and said, “Anything doing?” and got up the next morning, and whatever helicopter I saw, I just made friends with the adviser and the Vietnamese commander, said, “Can you take me along?” and usually they said yes. They were interested in talking to a foreigner (I was a German, of course) and so I just jumped out of the helicopter, stayed two, three, four days with the Vietnamese troops and the American advisers, and then I returned to Saigon. I didn’t have to worry about deadlines since I was more or less exclusive with this kind of coverage. Other photographers who were hanging around Saigon or visiting went mainly on field trips after action and photographed what they were shown. Mostly corpses or burned villages or whatever. I made it a policy to walk with troops, supplying myself and taking care of myself.

Faas would spend a decade in Vietnam. He stuck with the pattern he established from the beginning, spending as much time in the field as possible while taking the kind of calculated risks that yielded the most dramatic pictures and then getting out alive. He won his first Pulitzer for a sheaf of photographs taken when the story was mostly his alone.

These were the pictures of peasants whose children were the incidental victims of firefights and pictures of South Vietnamese soldiers torturing captured Vietcong. Faas was able to seize these images because they got used to him, forgot about him. Because he was always there:

When they were taking prisoners, they would take them along and then, come the evening … they would settle down and start questioning the poor guys. In most cases, they would chase you away, point a gun in your direction when you tried to take a picture. Other times, they just accepted it and didn’t do anything. I tried to photograph that, of course, because it was such a unique … feature of the war, and I managed to get pictures that were quite powerful in that respect. And very brutal, I must say.

Faas wasn’t against the war. In the beginning, he admired the Americans: “The American advisory effort was actually a good one. I thought it was important and they did a lot of good.” The truth seems to have been that he wasn’t political at all. He cared about getting the real story, even if it was painful. He cared about getting it right. And he cared about getting it into the papers. Preferably on the front page.

*

Horst Faas, legendary war photographer, passed away yesterday (May 11). Our conversations were conducted on March 5 and 9, 2012.

Ducks Unlimited is not exactly the kind of street-wise, banner-waving, left-leaning, activist organization that the Harperites want to shut down. Far from it. Ducks Unlimited is supported by prosperous, land-owning businessmen whose interest in duck-preservation reflects the pleasure they take in shooting them. They do good work – really – by buying up duck habitat and taking care of it. But they’re much more likely to be found exchanging pleasantries at the Albany Club than than chanting slogans in the street. And their voting inclination is almost certainly Conservative rather than NDP or Green. A bit of government-sponsored harassment should really piss them off.

But what the hey. You have your orders, auditors: Go to it!

Wong demonstrates her stand-up book-signing technique – on a paperback yet. (Closed course, professional writer.)

The event at Ben McNally’s bookstore on Tuesday (May 8) evening was billed as the media launch for Jan Wong’s new book, Out of the Blue. The public launch was held on Monday at the North York branch of the Toronto Public Library. Both were hosted by CBC personalities: the public event by Matt Galloway and Tuesday’s by Shelagh Rogers.

The central issue dealt with in the book is workplace depression. Wong’s experience and research have led her to believe that a huge number of people are afflicted by the condition, just as she was. The problem is serious and it’s made worse by a couple of factors. First, employers and, often, the insurance companies that handle their medical benefits, routinely either downplay or reject claims made for depression. (Wong was told in effect that she was malingering and her claim denied.) Second, in cases where companies have come to terms with employees who have fought for the benefits they are entitled to, legal gag orders invariably are attached to the settlement. The employee gets the compensation but can’t talk – or write – about what led to it. Wong says that, as far as she can tell, hers is the only book that addresses the issue head-on.

Wong was unable to work for two years because of her depression. The average duration of a major depressive episode is eight months. Wong reckons hers lasted as long as it did because her employer dragged out the legal battle with her. Of course, it might not have lasted that long had Wong been more compliant in the negotiations. But then Wong is not naturally compliant. She wanted an explicit acknowledgement that she had really been sick. And she refused to go along with the gag order. As she saw it, it was a freedom of speech issue. She’s a journalist, after all.

The response she has been getting from reviewers, and the large and enthusiastic media crowd at Ben McNally’s, suggest that a lot of journalists share her concerns. Shelagh Rogers, speaking of her own experience with unipolar depression, said that her employer was generous and supportive, but even so, she was asked to describe her condition publicly as “stress-related.” Apparently, any suggestion of mental disturbance is just too scary for public consumption. Rogers hailed Wong for tackling the taboo and for refusing to be silenced.

“Jan’s a beautiful writer,” Rogers said, “a wonderful researcher and the best journalist in Canada.”

Shelagh Rogers at the launch of Out of the Blue. Depression is a freedom of speech issue.