22. Richard Writes a Book - Part 2

Wolves, Forest Fires, Romance, and the Ojibway 

 

Book cover from first printing in 1952.

“Particularly in the second half of the book we wish that he would forego the easy work of telling us about the evil spirits known as wendigos, philosophical French Canadians, remittance men, and similar stock characters of the fake bush, and given us more of the keen observation and sensitivity which he shows in his earlier descriptions.” 

    - Robertson Davies, “A Bushman by Choice,” review of Crazy White Man for the New York Times, October 26, 1952.

  

Richard Morenus filled dozens of pocket-sized notebooks with stories he had heard about life in the northern Ontario bush. Once he ran out of material about his own adventures, he turned to those notebooks to fill approximately half of his book, Crazy White Man (1952). 

 

 

Illustration by William Lackey

 

Richard writes some disturbingly exaggerated things about wolves which he calls “the bush’s most cunningly treacherous killers” that will kill “solely to satisfy their lust for murder.” He tells the story of the brave Anna Olsen who, in the 1920s or 1930s, saved herself and her two babies from certain death in a forest fire while her husband Ed was away working. “Her one chance was the lake. But Ed had taken the canoe, their sole craft. Again she looked at the axe in her hands and then at the pile of logs by the shore. The logs. The lake. The axe.” He tells the story of a romance between trapper Charlie Blaine, “one of the lonesomest men I have ever seen,” and Pearl, a Winnipeg bakery worker who, on the “wildest impulse,” had inserted her name and address into a box of saltine crackers that ended up at the trapper’s shack. And, he wrote in a condescending and racist manner about the region’s Indigenous peoples.

 

About a week after Richard and Nan arrived at their island home, Richard wrote a long letter to his former boss Lewis Titterton, manager of NBC’s Script Division. In that letter he describes his first impressions of the Ojibway people of northern Ontario:

 

Canoes filled with Indians are passing the island every day. They are busy now trading in their furs for their supplies for the summer. When these give out (the supplies) they’ll go hungry until the next fur season. I went up the other day to one of the little trading posts some miles up the river and watched the Indians do their buying. They are utterly shiftless and thoroughly impractical. They were buying great quantities of cheap candy, bright colored cloth, and things they would never possibly use. The candy they’d eat before they got back to their camp, and the other goods would be kicked around in the filth of their teepees until it is past all usage. Thus is the sturdy race of the aborigine. – Letter from Richard Morenus to Lewis Titterton, May 15, 1941. (Source: Wisconsin Historical Society, National Broadcasting Company Records, 1921-1976: Central Files, 1921-1976, Subseries: Correspondence, 1921-1942, Box 85, Folder 35, Richard Morenus, script writer.)

 

Over the course of the next six years, during which he spent a great deal of time among the Ojibway, trading with them, learning their language, Richard’s opinion of the Indigenous people evolved. Throughout his book Crazy White Man he leaves no doubt that, while he continued to believe that Indigenous peoples were inferior to white men, his understanding of them had grown. 

 

Richard was initially uncomfortable around the Ojibway. When he was a child he had read stories in which, he recalls, “the villainous red man was portrayed as a liar, a cheat, a thief, and a killer.” The people paddling by the island in their canoes, however, did not look particularly bloodthirsty. Still, he found himself imagining that the Ojibway people he encountered on his trips to Sioux Lookout were staring at him and talking about him in “uncomplimentary terms.” He decided to overcome his paranoia by learning more about the Indians themselves, including their language.

 

Illustration by William Lackey

In Crazy White Man, Richard uses terminology commonly used in the 1940s and 1950s that is jarring to today’s readers – words like “squaw” and “buck” and “savage.” One can, however, discern a softening of Morenus’ views of his Indigenous neighbours. His relationship with the old Ojibway chief Wa-she-ga or Jim Chief, the man who Nan wrote about in her article for Maclean’s [Click HERE], likely facilitated his change of attitude. He (and Nan) eventually befriended the old chief and his wife, visiting them in their wigwam on at least one occasion. “Over the years that I knew them I became very fond of the old Wa-she-ga and his tiny squaw,” Morenus writes in his book. “I hoped I might be able to express [in his writing] the sincerity of my respect for this fascinating yet pitiful old reprobate and his indestructible wife.”

Morenus’ portrayal of the Ojibway people remains racist and patronizing throughout the book. On intermarriage he writes, “No, the lone white man living on an equal basis will not raise the squaw to his level, but the squaw, with passive aboriginal certainty, will inevitably reduce him to hers.” He did research into the traditions of the Ojibway which he called superstitions, saying these were being combated through the “process of evangelizing” in residential schools under the joint control of church and government. He attempted to acquire some understanding of their language which he called a “confusing collection of grunts, groans, wails, and hisses.” 

 

Richard concludes: “In a sense it is the utter simplicity of the Indian that makes him difficult for the white man to understand. The white man, dealing with his own kind, looks for complexities in thought and reasoning. I found none of this existing in the Indian. He is of single thought and purpose. There is nothing involved about his mental processes. Whatever has been acquired by him of this nature he has certainly learned from the white man. On his own, deep in the bush, the Indian is simplicity itself.”  

 

 

NEXT: Richard Writes a Book - Part 3: What is Missing - Click HERE

 

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©Joan Champ. All rights reserved.

16. Nan the Writer - Part 1: "Jim Chief"

Snatching Minutes to Write in the Bush

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two letters written to Nan were discovered tucked inside the pages a book by a woman in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. As I attempt to piece together Nan's fractured history, these shards of her memory are like gems to me. The first of the two letters is featured in a previous post.. The second is shown below. 

 

She is a marvelous cook, and when not reading over new recipes she is plowing through biography, for she considers reading of biographies of the utmost help to a writer. Aha! that gives it away. Yes, she spends much of her spare time writing stories, which some day, she says, are going to be sent to magazines. (She’s still a little timid about sending them in.) 

- "Versatile Nan Dorland Cooks, Swims, and Acts," in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 18, 1931.

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. 

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."

Winnipeg Tribune, March 13, 1946

 

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