Elisabeth Harvor, provided by her son, Finn Harvor.Courtesy of family
In her fiction and poetry, Elisabeth Harvor caught something that was in the air. She was part of a cohort who reached maturity when no-fault divorce came into being in Canada in 1968 and extramarital sex, verified by private detectives, stopped being the requisite precondition for a married couple to dissolve their union. Prior to that time, Canada had no federal divorce law, and two provinces, Quebec and Newfoundland, had no provincial divorce law either. The legal change not only led to an increase in divorce, which was no longer shameful, but facilitated a search for personal freedom by women trapped in unhappy unions.
Ms. Harvor wrote sympathetically and without judgment of divorced women of her generation, tracing their search for happiness. In her 2004 novel, All Times Have Been Modern, the protagonist, Kay, tells her younger lover, Galbraith, about her former husband, attempting to explain why they had split up: “The nights we used to discuss divorce were our happiest times,” she says. “These were our most deeply married times, the times we would lie in bed late at night and whisper about divorce.”
Her three books of highly polished short stories, two novels, and three books of poetry inspired younger authors at a time when Canadian literature was coming into its own.
Novelist Katherine Govier recalled in an interview that she was just starting to write fiction when she bought Ms. Harvor’s first book of stories, Women and Children First (1973): “She was one of those super-realists who suddenly made it seem possible to write very personally and deeply about women, as a woman. The cover was iconic. She made a big impression at the time.”
Elisabeth Harvor died Oct. 8, aged 88, of dementia-related causes at Élisabeth-Bruyère Long-Term Care residence in Ottawa, the city she had made her home. The first signs of her illness had appeared in her early 70s.
Elisabeth Harvor was born Elisabeth Deichmann on June 26, 1936, in Saint John, N.B., the second of three children of the celebrated potters Kjeld and Erica (née Matthiessen) Deichmann who had come as adults from Denmark to settle on the Kingston Peninsula of New Brunswick, near Saint John. Here they bought and restored a ramshackle old house and set up their kiln, which attracted a stream of visitors interested in traditional pottery. In the 1990s, the National Gallery of Canada held a retrospective of their work, titled The Turning Point. Their work continues to attract collectors when it turns up at auction today.
Ms. Harvor described the Kingston Peninsula of her childhood in an interview for Books in Canada as an idyllic place, that was “romantically rural: no doctor, no paved roads, no electricity, no running water.” She and her siblings grew up drinking raw milk and running around barefoot.
Her parents were part of a dynamic visual arts milieu, a circle of artists based in Saint John that included Miller Brittain and Jack Humphrey, New Brunswick’s leading painters, but there was not much of a literary scene. The young girl read her parents’ New Yorker magazines and devoured novels.
She later had to sell the Brittain work that she inherited from her parents. “She had a number of paintings. She had to sell them at low prices to survive. She told me she regretted this,” recalled Ross Leckie, a poet and editor of Fiddlehead magazine and professor emeritus at the University of New Brunswick, who was a friend of Ms. Harvor.
At 18, having finished high school, she enrolled in nursing at Saint John General Hospital but later realized that she was not suited to be a nurse and dropped out a few months before she would have finished her training. Her experiences among the high-spirited nursing students, with their crushes on the younger doctors, however, later provided her with material for some of her most sparkling stories, such as The Age of Unreason and Invisible Target.
After dropping the nursing program, she met Stig Harvor, a young architect, at a house party given by her parents; the two married in 1958 and took off for Europe for the next two years. They bought a motorcycle in Dusseldorf and crisscrossed the continent before settling in Copenhagen, where she read novel after novel, preparing to be a writer.
It helped that she was now an ocean away from her mother, whose relentless drive to be the centre of attention (especially male attention) was a lifelong irritant in their relationship.
Her mother, Erica, was a beautiful and artistic woman, and Liz, as she was called throughout childhood, struggled in vain for her affection and approval. Characters based on Erica, pitilessly observed, make frequent appearances in Ms. Harvor’s fiction and poetry.
In her poem Cold Day in August she described her mother as:
Pretty woman who shone and shone
until there were no
scraps of leftover light
for her two daughters
After returning to Canada, the Harvors settled in Ottawa, and had two sons, Finn and Richard, before splitting up in the 1970s after 15 years of marriage. In her 20s, Ms. Harvor sent a steady stream of her stories to the New Yorker and was elated when the magazine finally bought her story Heart Trouble, which ran in March 1979. It was the encouragement she needed.
She had a great need for solitude, for being alone with her work, often staying up all night to make revisions. Her son Finn believes that this was a factor in his parents’ divorce. When Finn moved to Montreal for university, his mother decided to go, too, and obtained a master’s degree from Concordia in creative writing in 1986. The book of stories she wrote there was published two years later, titled If Only We Could Drive Like This Forever. She formed a close bond with Terence Byrnes, her teacher at Concordia and dedicated the book to him.
With her new credentials, she became a sought after teacher of creative writing, doing stints at York University in Toronto, University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, the Humber School of Writing and other places. Joseph Kertes, who was director of the Humber School then, recalled that Ms. Harvor was “a remarkable mentor and teacher to writing students. She knew just how to nurture them on their creative journey. Students raved about her.”
Mr. Kertes also recalled that she had been adamant that nobody should spell her name with a “z” nor compare her with the leading women writers of her day: Atwood, Shields, Munro.
Ms. Harvor began writing poetry in the 1990s to keep up with her students after she was asked to teach a course in poetry and prose at York. For Mr. Leckie, this was her forte and he included her in the anthology Coastlines: Poetry of Atlantic Canada, in 2002.
“Her sense of rhythm was very strong and she was a painterly poet who liked to get the reader to see things clearly. Her sense of rhythm was uncanny.” Two of her three poetry collections, Fortress of Chairs and The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring, won prizes. In 2003 when she won the Marian Engel Award for a mid-career fiction writer, the jury wrote that her stories were “fresh, uncomfortable, risky. … She has become a master at charting the ills of the body and soul and the movement from innocence to experience.”
With age, Ms. Harvor became more eccentric, more credulous about New Age therapies and health supplements, and the untimely death of her son Richard was a terrible blow.
“My brother died in 2013 and she became more manic and paranoid. He had been a talented poet but suffered from alcoholism, liver failure and malnutrition. She never accepted his death,” her elder son, Finn, said.
She was also predeceased by her brother, Henrik, a naturalist who worked for Parks Canada, and by her ex-husband, Stig, who died in June this year. She leaves her elder son, Finn; daughter-in-law, Suki; and her sister, Anneke.
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