Snatching Minutes to Write in the Bush
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| I have not found any photos of Nan writing so this one will have to do. Jean Arthur in the movie The More the Merrier, 1943. Source | |
As this 1931 newspaper article points out, Nan had an ambition to be a writer. While she did collaborate with her husband Richard Morenus in the writing of radio scripts during the late 1930s, and while the 1940 US Census records her occupation as copy writer for an advertising agency, to my knowledge it would be another decade before any of her work was published.
Writing in the Bush
In 1941, when Nan and Richard gave up city life and moved to an island complete with a log cabin in Ontario bush country, a typewriter accompanied them. For the next six years both Nan and Richard wrote articles and radio scripts to finance their new wilderness life.
Several months before moving to the wilds of northern Ontario, Nan read Kathrene Pinkerton's fine book, Wilderness Wife (1939). She began corresponding with Pinkerton, seeking advice not only about bush life, but also about writing.
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| Kathrene Pinkerton's letter to Nan, Sept. 6 [1942], postmarked March 17, 1943.. Source: Darlene Studer, La Ronge, Saskatchewan. |
"Why don't you try writing juveniles," Pinkerton suggests in a letter to Nan dated September 6 [1942]. "You're living the material they want." Juvenile books could be lucrative. "I call the ones I'm piling up my old age insurance," Pinkerton continues. "The other evening Alfred Harcourt [of Harcourt Brace, a publishing company] said that he’d figured that six juveniles, especially if they
were a series about one set of characters, gave as good a yield as the
investment of eighty thousand dollars."
(I am grateful to Darlene Studor for sharing this and one other letter with me. I contacted the University of Oregon Archives where Pinkerton's papers are housed, but, to my great dismay, there were no letters from Nan to Kathrene in that collection.)
If Nan wrote any manuscripts or published any works for younger readers, I have not yet discovered them. She did, however, publish two articles in the Canadian magazine Maclean's during the latter half of the 1940s. Here is the first one.
"Jim Chief"
On October 15, 1946, Nan's first-ever magazine article "Jim Chief" was published in Maclean's. The editor wrote that it was "one of the best articles we have ever published by a beginner." She had finished writing this article sometime in January 1946. (See below.)
First page of Nan's article in Maclean's, October 15, 1946.
Nan wrote her article in "no set writing hours, due to the exigencies of bush life," she told the editor of Maclean's. (She would also have been competing for time on the typewriter with Richard, unless they had a second one.)
The piece, written last winter, took about four months of snatching minutes out of her routine of baking bread, snaring rabbits, driving a dog team to help haul wood, butchering venison, knitting socks and mitts, fishing through ice, washing fleece-lined underwear, and cooking four meals a day to keep her husband and herself fortified against those biting northern temperatures – as cold as 50 below zero. She says writing this article about Old Jim was always a joy, because he was her favorite bush character. - Source
Like other portrayals of Indigenous peoples during the 1940s, however, Nan’s story of Jim Chief – while sympathetic – contains racist, condescending, and patronizing language. This is clear from the opening paragraph. “Early November freeze-up was threatening when Jim Chief and his squaw paddled up to our island on their first official visit. Jim was our nearest neighbor on our northern lake—a tattered, aged Ojibway we were soon to know as a reprobate and a rascal, and so charming that it was impossible not to like him.”
Nan and her husband Richard became friends with Jim Chief, who “came by the Island regularly, exhibiting a wistful, almost pitiful need to chat,” Nan writes. “He would sit in a corner of the cabin an hour or more until, having talked himself out, he would rise abruptly and shuffle out the door with a vague backward gesture of farewell.”
Nan knew how to tell a story. For example, once, when Richard was away in New York on business connected to their fiction and radio writing, Jim Chief helped Nan get out of a rather sticky situation. Three intoxicated white men showed up at the island. “There was an ugliness to their drunkenness that made me uneasy,” Nan writes. Fortunately, Jim Chief, who paddled by the island every day to check on Nan, chose that moment to show up. Nan signaled to him. She describes what happened next:
I glanced behind me. All three men were sprawled on the cabin steps and demanding that I join them. [Jim Chief] sat motionless in the [canoe] in an attitude of watchful waiting. His jaws clamped hard shut in that stolid, implacable manner of a primitive. With his wide-brimmed, battered old hat jammed low on his brow, the droop of that left eyelid somehow managed a sinister look. And better still, the barrel of his venerable rifle protruded over the bow of the canoe. … Innocently slung there, it now presented unexpected menace by pointing directly at my three unwelcome guests. Minutes went by, and then the scene sank in. Gradually the drinking party on my cabin steps dissolved. The men filed by me, keeping a weather eye on the ominous character in the canoe gazing so steadily at them from behind the well-armed bow. In a remarkably short time the loaded skiff was offshore, the faulty motor resumed its half-hearted, intermittent putt-putting up the river, and the men were out of sight.
Eventually Jim Chief grew ill and his visits to the Morenuses stopped. “To our surprise we missed him greatly,” Nan writes. “Life in the bush without Jim Chief appearing with his gossip, his schemes, his primordial guile left a hole in our existence as gaping as the loss of one of the seasons.”
The editor's note at the end of Nan's article states that just as the story was going to press Maclean's received a hurried note from Nan. "Old Jim," she wrote, "was found dead in his wigwam some six weeks following my completion of his story. And now the lakes and bush are empty indeed."
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| Winnipeg Tribune, March 13, 1946 |
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