MY LIFE AS A DAME
The Personal and the Political in the Writings of Christina McCall
Edited by Stephen Clarkson
Anansi, 384 pages, $32.95
My Life as a Dame is a book divided: Call it a split between what might have been and what is instead. The collection begins with the last pages Christina McCall produced before her death, at 70, of cancer and its complications. She had intended to write a memoir of her iconoclastic life in journalism; she didn't get further than two chapters, one on her final year as an undergraduate, and one on her start as an editorial secretary for Maclean's. The rest of the anthology is filled with a selection of McCall's exquisite and prodigious prose, drawn from, among others, the annals of Chatelaine and Saturday Night. Curated by her second husband, Stephen Clarkson, the articles are sorted into sections on the media, society, women's rights and the political community.
These divisions are a shame twice over. The tantalizing autobiographical chapters show a writer still brimming with wit and vitality; the completed memoir would have been a formidable one. But Clarkson does his wife a disservice by slotting her printed legacy into distinct topics, because in every respect, McCall transcended such tidy categorizations. A woman in a man's world, she proved capable of tackling with equal acuity the softer subjects assigned to journalists of her gender and the serious issues thought beyond her scope. The personal and the political wove together seamlessly in her writing, each informing and elevating the other.
McCall longed to be "substantial and stylish to boot," and no one could dispute her success: she was a thinker and a looker, a policy wonk in a wide-brimmed hat. It's frustrating to find McCall's work dissected so clumsily, and in sacrificing chronological order, Clarkson robs us of an opportunity to see the development of her craft.
But perhaps that's unnecessary. As a 20-year-old student at the University of Toronto, McCall seemed already to have a firm grasp on the type of material she wanted to cover and the type of writer she wanted to be. She describes a hot summer spent composing an essay for a college prize. Forgoing the canonical British playwrights and poets, she chose to argue for Morley Callaghan, an author who shared several traits with McCall's later subjects: Canadian, complex, outspoken and cranky. (Doesn't that sound a tad like Pierre Trudeau?)
Nor was she particularly concerned with "unassailable scholarly secondary sources," instead hinging the paper on "Callaghan's fiction, his letters, his reviews" - that is, relying on his own voice to shape her portrait. McCall's writing, as this collection attests, never was done from a distance.
Her essay didn't win the prize. But when its subject was treated scornfully, McCall countered with a spirited defence in her college journal. Setting aside the courage needed to reprint any first publication - my own undergraduate papers, with their ponderous titles and tortured puns, won't again see the light of day - McCall gives readers a valuable lesson in what she considered, even then, successful prose. Callaghan's writing is praised for its economy and control, though "his language is never tight or strained. He writes with casual clarity about casual people, yet he manages to give his prose and his people a depth of feeling." Where he falls short, McCall concedes, is in a certain "moral flabbiness."
To read her work through this lens is to appreciate how completely she learned that lesson. Spend a little time with Some Awkward Truths the Royal Commission Missed, which ran in Chatelaine in the spring of 1979. McCall's objection to the report on the Status of Women largely comes down to its sacrifice of individual stories for general statistics, resulting in a dreary and toothless document. Absent are the women with "real problems of poverty, alienation, loneliness, and prejudice" who spoke at the hearings. And absent is the report's ability to rouse "those who couldn't attend and hear for themselves ... something of the eloquence and tears" of the testifying "waitresses or barristers."
McCall's articles are marked by this democratic spirit. She's after an examination of all levels of society, and she treats her subjects with the same interest and respect, whether they are prime ministers on Parliament Hill or miners' wives in an Atlantic town. But her egalitarianism means McCall is willing to speak uncomfortable or unpopular truths even to those whom she champions. In an address to women of the middle class, she writes: "Unless we ourselves get off our plump behinds, stop undermining each other's ambitions, cease whining about our burdens, and start working toward equality for women, that happy state is never going to be achieved in this or any other century." No one could accuse her of moral flabbiness.
In an article published in 1995, McCall mentions how prodigiously hard she worked to overcome the disadvantages of her "gender and a literary rather than a social-scientific education." It might be said that her writing had a feminine grace, but that quality is better termed a novelist's sensibility. Her keen eye observed the quiet moments and telling gestures that thoroughly capture a scene and its players. These observations, and the immediacy they lend her prose, save even the articles on a forgotten MP or a defunct oil line from feeling dated. (In fact, not much here feels dated. Read, for instance, McCall's 1972 article The New Machismo, keeping in mind the image of President George W. Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in a green flight suit to declare "mission accomplished" in Iraq.)
And it is her novelist's sensibility I find most exciting. That's my luxury. As a female writer a few generations removed from the ground she broke and the revolution she belonged to, I am able to appreciate her work above all for the tradition of literary quality it advanced. Today, journalism's cultural battle is no longer between men and women; it's between the high and the ever-dwindling low. Let us rally once again around Christina McCall.
Danielle Groen is an assistant editor at Chatelaine magazine, where she writes the monthly books column.