Golden Phoenix in a Week: Fin (chapters 28-41)

I finished Golden Phoenix last week, but thought I'd let thoughts gel before writing anything more. No such luck. Nothing is gelling because the book never gels. I'm forgetting the details because it's forgettable. And so I rely on final notes:

• "The Munks have a coterie of rich and powerful friends."
• George Bush and Brian Mulroney are the world's most expensive errand boys.
• Golden Phoenix is the first of three Rohmer books to include his anecdote about George Bush almost joining the RCAF. It features twice in Generally Speaking, because a story that good bears repeating.
• Munk credits the United States with defeating the Nazis.
• Munk prides himself in not giving his children anything - other than lives of privilege, the occasional job and stock in Barrick Gold.

Somewhere near the end, Rohmer describes Munk as “a man who had at one time aspired to be prime minister”. Who knew? Nothing in the book indicates that he has the slightest interest in politics or public service.

In the end, I'm left wondering what it's all about. Not just making money, surely.

I'd say more, if it wasn't for this:

"I did, and he did."

In the summer of 1972, at a meeting with Jack McClelland (after the Royal Commission on Book Publishing was finished), I told him that I had a book I wanted to write on the Arctic. I gave him the basics. He said, "You write the book, and I'll publish it," I did, and he did. McClelland & Stewart published The Arctic Imperative in quality paperback in the spring of 1973.

— Richard Rohmer, Generally Speaking, p. 526 

Arctic Imperative is a chore. You start feeling like you'll know less at the end than you did at the beginning. The submarines and giant planes are the easy part. The eight identical chapters about who wants to lay pipe might as well be a baby slapping a keyboard with its hands.

— Chris Kelly, email to Stanley Whyte and Brian Busby, 6 June 2015

The Arctic Imperative is unlike any other book I’ve read. It repeats itself and it contradicts itself. It has no structure, yet moves forward with purpose. A failure, true, but it does intrigue. Just how did Rohmer do it?

Here’s my theory:

The Arctic Imperative is composed of information gleaned from press releases, newspaper clippings and the occasional note to self. This goes some way in explaining the curious formality. Richard Nixon is “Mr. Nixon”, Jean Chrétien is “Mr. Chretien [sic]” and the “Vancouver firm of F.F. Stanley and Co. Ltd.” work with “Tremblay, Heroux and Associates of Montreal, consulting engineers.”

See: The Globe and Mail Style Guide.

The reason that there’s no order is because clippings have no real order. Categorization is in the brain of the beholder and chronology becomes skewed because news isn’t always breaking. Consider how long “J.M. Douglas of Parry Sound, H.J. Kliener of Hamilton, and E.J. Smith of Burlington” worked on the X-Mac before it made the paper. Consider too the amusing Dennis the Menace strip that appeared in that same edition.

Dennis the Menace is set aside, but the clippings used as reference are given equal weight. Nothing is irrelevant and no detail is too small, which is how we learn of “a diplomatic note to the United States in 1971 on the instigation of David Anderson, member [sic] of Parliament for Esqumalt-Saanich. That note was delivered on August 18. 1971, and tabled in the House of Commons in April, 1972.”

How else do we explain The Arctic Imperative?

After his pitch, Rohmer had mere months to write the book.

It was imperative.

Three closing notes:

Where politicians are mentioned by name – “the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Stanfield”, for example – Pierre Trudeau is referred to only as “the Prime Minister”. His name never appears. I suggest this is no accident.

Rohmer’s “Canadian beaver” and ever-present “American eagle” appear here as the “Canadian mouse” and the “American elephant”. Republicans take note.

I was astonished – no exaggeration – to discover that my copy is a second printing.

Three Things Learned Through The Arctic Imperative

The Arctic Imperative, p. 65

1) If ever in the market for a polar icebreaker do not hire Oy Wartsila Ab. The firm has no concept of client confidentiality.

2) Richard Rohmer would've made a crummy spy.

3) There is no end to his self-plagiarism.

Generally Speaking, p. 360

I had to add one before we move on to EP

                                             Plus



Vice Admiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von Spee

                                                    Minus 

"Vice Admiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von"

                                                    Plus



 DON KING

                                                         MINUS
"DON"

                                                       EQUALS

                                           GENERALLY SPEAKING

Curiouser and Curiouser

Generally Speaking, p. 44.

Gator Osteen and Richard Rohmer,
No. 14 Service Flying Training School, Aylmer, Ontario,  1942

I raced through Sir John A.'s Crusade, but only because the copy I had was an inter-library loan and could not be renewed.

Here are a few things to look out for:

Bullshit
Rohmer imagines at least two characters – Robert Wilmot and George-Étienne Cartier – uttering the word. Fathers of Confederation both, I felt this was in poor taste, doubly so since its use can be traced back no further than 1915 America.

Errors in calculation
Foul-mouthed Cartier pegs Macdonald's age at 52. In fact, he was 51.
     Macdonald describes the year in which all action takes place as the twenty-ninth in Victoria's reign. In fact, it is the thirtieth.

Exclamation marks
I'm certain that there are more here than in any other Rohmer novel.

Kelly
Rohmer likes to position himself as something of a seer.
     "Balls!" you say. "The man couldn't have been more wrong about the Soviet Union."
     "True enough," I reply, "but consider last week's events in Buffalo. One of the dead was found in a car covered by snow."
     As if further evidence was needed that Rohmer is in tune with Geller, I point out that Sir John A.'s Crusade features a villain with the very same surname as one of his future critics.

Resplendent
Reading Richard Rohmer, you begin to recognize common threads. Vodka and how to dull its effects is one example. Not everything is so obvious. It wasn't until Sir John A.'s Crusade that I first noticed "resplendent", a word I don't think I've ever used in my own writing.
     Going back, I see that it was there from the beginning. In Ultimatum we find members of the RCMP "resplendent in their traditional red-coated uniforms". It's used in describing Patton's garb in Patton's Gap. The word appears in Red Arctic and – spoiler – Rohmer's biography of E.P. Taylor. Resplendent is used four times in Generally Speaking. It also appears four times in Sir John A.'s Crusade. Which brings me, finally, to…

Fetishism
You'll not find so shameless a display of perversity as this passage from Sir John A.'s Crusade:

The Right Honorable Henry Wellesley, Earl Cowley, was resplendent in his ambassador's uniform. He wore a black jacket, with a high collar and epaulettes; the gold braid decorating it was enhanced with royal reds and blues. A crimson sash crossed from the right shoulder to the opposite hip; half a dozen medals on multi-coloured ribbons were pinned to the left side of the jacket, over the ambassador's chest. Below them sat thge star of his rank with which his Queen had vested him. His black trousers bore wide gold stripes down the outside seams. Those stripes disappeared into highly polished half-Wellington boots.
     A short ceremonial sword in an elaborately engraved and embossed scabbard hung from a broad gold-decorated belt that encircled Earl Cowley's considerable girth. On his head sat, foursquare, a large black cocked hat covered with more gold braids, its forward point jutting straight out from his wigless wide forehead. Across the hat's crest several white plumes…

There's more, but you get the picture.

Lest you wonder, I don't mention the "busby-capped soldiers of Her Majesty's Grenadier Guard" because "resplendent" is not used.

Yes, I am hurt.

$iegfried $a$$oon

Brian, I've been thinking about your point, that Rohmer said the only reason to write a book was to create a be$t $eller and then released this awful $lim volume of ver$e that no human being would ever voluntarily purcha$e.

Rohmer didn’t just chase sales by writing airport thrillers; we’ve found that he was also a master -- in a small-scale way -- of leveraging his name, to create plain old $eller$.  Brand-extenders, things like biographies and that Flight 007 book -- that wouldn't have $old at all without his increasing their value by branding them, like Humvee making a wrist watch, or fruit juice from V8. 

Or Separation 2.

So why did he use a pseudonym on this garbage?  The only imaginable way the publisher could have made their money back would have been by trading on the name.  And he denies them even that.  The work must stand on its own.  How did this happen? 

Can we even talk about this without considering Rohmer’s role – described in Generally Speaking -- as Canadian publishing’s bureaucratic sugar daddy?

What kind of twisted act of submission and dominance was Rohmer orchestrating by asking a small press to release this crap? For no one?

What was the advance? 

Did he make someone from the small press crawl across the floor towards him with the check in their teeth?

I wish the autobiography had talked about this transaction.  I guess we'll have to go to York and look at the papers.

The way I sometimes write about Richard Rohmer you’d be forgiven for thinking that I can’t stand the man. In fact, the opposite is true. Sure, we often disagree, but I like the guy as much as you can like anyone you’ve never met. Generally Speaking makes me like him all the more. Rohmer's story is remarkable, even if the book isn’t. He’s accomplished so very much, is famous in his own right, and yet so often becomes star-struck in the presence of fame. There’s something endearing in that trait, and the effort expended in reproducing grainy video and coffee mug images.

Generally Speaking reads like a self-published memoir written by an amateur and published by a service like My Family Memoirs. Heavy on the positive, light on the negative, Jack Rhind’s autobiography is a good example. You’ll remember the former Confederation Life CEO as one of the men who provided a blurb for Retaliation. What makes this all really interesting is that Rohmer is an old pro, and Dundurn is no vanity press.

Though he doesn’t appear in Generally Speaking, I think Jack Rhind and Richard Rohmer were friends. I’m mentioning this only because it points to one of the more amusing quirks of the book. Friends and good friends populate its pages, they often appear out of nowhere and, once mentioned, usually disappear. This is exactly what happens with “friend King Michael of Rumania” – who comes and goes within a sentence. You want to put on the breaks, and ask Rohmer for more. An editor would do this, but I don’t see one in evidence. It's worth noting that Dundurn routinely credits editors on its copyright pages, but here lists only a copy-editor.

Is this part of a pattern he set with Ultimatum? The book doesn’t say. Having come to the man through his novels – as opposed to, say, his legal work for Bramalea – I found the most disappointing aspect of the biography to be how little attention is paid to his writing career. A few asides aside, it comes late – page 525 – and has to share a chapter – number 78 - with some unrelated stuff about George H.W. Bush and Brian Mulroney.

Generally Speaking numbers 590 pages, but I found myself wanting more. Too often things skim along the surface. You come away wondering why he quit the Progressive Conservatives or how, in late middle-age, he came to see E.P. Taylor as a “father figure”.

There’s a really good biography to be written about Richard Rohmer. He'd be the first to appreciate the amount of work involved.

Speaking generally...

About Generally Speaking, I'd say Chris is right - overall, he has led an interesting life and comes across as pretty likeable.  But that said, his aversion to editors is (once again) his undoing.  There's a pretty good 300-page book in here about someone who lived through interesting times and had a hand in a lot of historically significant events.  The problem is, of course, that the book is 581 pages long (counting the appendices).

There are far too many chapters here about things that he was only marginally connected to, at the expense of his own story - the family anecdotes dwindle to almost nothing once he becomes a lawyer.   Chapter after chapter seems to exist because everything that crossed his sphere of influence deserved a part in the story.  Why?  Because he doesn't seem to want to let even the smallest story go by if it means he can mention the Reichmanns, Galen Weston, Conrad Black, etc, etc.  He's a tad star struck by these leading lights of Canadian business (wonder what he thinks of Conrad since his fall from grace?) - the fact they are rich means that any chance to mention them is taken.

A good example - there is the story of how he, Weston, Black and CUAW president Bob White ("as far to the left in things Canadian as Black and Weston, each a tycoon in his own right, are to the right") are all made Officers to the Order of Canada at the same time.  Seated alphabetically, Weston and White end up next to each other.  The result?  They chat amiably.

This is an anecdote?

The short shrift given to his family makes for some weird elliptical passages.  Out of the blue, we get this: "It was 1999.  Mary-O and I were visiting her mother figure, Elspeth Gormley, in England...".  Who?  We never heard of her before or after this cryptic reference.

I think what I found most disappointing was the small amount of space he devotes to his writing career.  There is next-to-nothing about the how and why of any of his novels - nothing much about why he bothers to write, what he gets out of it (except money), his reaction to critics, to readers, what inspires him, what other books he's read etc. etc.  All I got out of the chapter on his writing was the fact he fought to get Ultimatum published his way - without any of those interfering editors.  And if ever a book needed editing, it's Ultimatum...

I note that while he is proudly conservative, it isn't always with a capital C.  Mulroney is barely mentioned and he grudgingly admits to admiring Trudeau.  Sometimes he's off-putting (a throwaway reference to "so-called global warming"), but by and large it wasn't as painful as I'd feared.

 Advertisements for myself:  Not one, but two references to Ultimatum 2, the new novel he is working on.  Both references read like ad copy.

Generally Speaking is the book Richard Rohmer was born to write.  It explains all the useless side trips in the novels, for one thing. They’re in there because they happened to the author.  One time, he went to Kuwait looking for money. Another time, he flew a de Havilland Otter.  Another time he was in Buffalo. And it shows that the techno-thriller wasn’t the only genre that Rohmer undertook without first examining any other author’s examples.  He’s also never read an autobiography.

Does an autobiography need a theme? Of course not. Introspection? Discovery? A wistful sense of loss? A humble sense of gratitude? An awestruck sense of “Little did I know at the time…?” Anything? Nah.

This happened and then this happened.  And then I met Rosemary Clooney.

Although, you do like the guy.

And I gasped out loud when the premiere blew his brains out in the shower.  That was unexpected.  And seems to have had exactly the same effect on Rohmer as the time he wasn’t invited to the opening of the science museum.

Another thing it explains about his novels? The charming lack of characters.  Rohmer never seems to have asked himself why anyone does anything.  They do what they do for money. And a promotion. And a chance to meet Rosemary Clooney.

Three things, and then the floor is yours, friends:

We learn, very late in the proceedings, that Rohmer not only dictates his books, but that this one is being dictated in the car.  It’s like learning that Cole Porter wrote “At Long Last Love” waiting for help to arrive after his horse fell on him. It explains a lot.

Princess Di is dicking with the major-general when she says his medal is falling off, and asks if she can have it, right?  I think he's too star-blind to understand that he’s being bullied by a mean girl.  Or am I reading too much into it?

Rohmer recalls meeting Colin Powell aboard the USS Intrepid, which Rohmer says was named after his friend, The Man Called. But the United States Navy has had ships named Intrepid for 200 years. I guess he’s joking.  But what’s the joke?

Because you, the fans, demanded it:

May 1970. Richard Rohmer goes to Leningrad to talk about icebreakers and arctic sovereignty.

“Vodka, of course, was on the table during these meetings, an element that appears in any of my novels that deal with Russia or the Soviet Union, including John A.’s Crusade…

Wait for it…

… in which Sir John A. is in Russia and eats a loaf of bread before a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Gorchakov.”

-- Generally Speaking, p. 364

This has got to be the weirdest 40-year running joke in Canadian literature.

Before Lexie graduates in May, we have to meet at the Royal York and toast the Major-General.  I have an idea for what we should eat and drink, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

(Because you, the fans, demanded it) Behind the Scenes at Reading Richard Rohmer

Thu, Sep 4, 2014 5:21 am

Red Arctic?

From Brian Busby

Are we done with this dog? Shall we move on to Massacre 747? Has the book arrived, Stan? What after that? The Green North? E.P. Taylor? Sir John A.? Death by Deficit? Caged Eagle?

​So many questions. Enquiring minds want to know!​

Thu, Sep 4, 2014 6:05 am

Re: Red Arctic?

From Stanley Whyte

I have nothing else to say about it, so let's move on.

I received the book last night - thanks - and read the intro and first chapter last night.  My heart sank when in the intro he mentioned two questions "open for informed judgment" that he would deal with in the last few pages of the book.

My money is on Monty being responsible.

After this, I'd vote for The Green North because we all have it and it looks like something I'd love to get over with.

Thu, 4 Sep 2014 11:43:26 -0400
Re: Red Arctic?

From Chris Kelly

I don't have The Green North, but I'll order it today.

Thu, Sep 4, 2014 9:29 am

Re: Red Arctic?

From Stanley Whyte

Wait then - what do we all have (access to)?

We can do it that way.

Thu, Sep 4, 2014 10:32 am

Re: Red Arctic?

From Brian Busby

From what I understand, there isn't a single title we all own or have access to except Death by Deficit - assuming Stan has access to the Montreal library system. Do you, Stan?

Fri, Sep 5, 2014 10:51 pm

Re: Red Arctic?

From Chris Kelly

I ordered Green North.  I've been slowly getting into Generally Speaking.  His best book by a mile.  He's not a great writer, but he's much better not writing dialogue or trying to punch his way out of a cardboard plot.  His own story?  It's sort of touching, you know?  Nineteen, on a convoy out of Halifax, sleeping in his lifejacket. It's easy to lose touch with that Rohmer, a little guy who did brave things, and loves Canada and airplanes.

Like it says in Angels in America:

"You can never make that crossing that she made, for such great voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives, the miles - that voyage from that place to this one - you cross. Every day! You understand me? In you, that journey is."

Sat, Sep 6, 2014 4:33 am

Re: Red Arctic?

From Stanley Whyte

I can believe that.  The problem I'm having with Massacre 747 is that he doesn't know how to stop telling you things that distract from the story.  "The flight crew punched in the navigation coordinates" becomes 2 paragraphs where each coordinate is named, its code number, the number of aeronautical miles till it was reached, the flying time, the altitude, etc, etc.

I'm looking forward to hearing him just tell his own story.

Sat, Sep 6, 2014 11:32 am

Re: Red Arctic?

From Chris Kelly

Seymour Hersh's book on Flight 007 is also full of people punching in coordinates but it's riveting.  I kid you zero percent.  Because Hersh is a journalist, and he's explaining how this fuck up happened.

He talked to lots of guys and made them explain it to him, and then he put their theories together, and now he'll explain it to you.

Whereas Rohmer is an honest businessman, at heart, and in his head he's just trying to get to the word count in his contract.  Which is honorable, too.  Especially if you never thought about "what's a book" any other way.

What's a book?  It's at least 160 pages and it ends with the president declaring war.

Generally Speaking contains the plans for the huge natural gas transporter plane.  It was something Rohmer asked Boeing to think about as a business idea, so it was on his desk anyway, so that's how it ended up in Ultimatum.

What's a book?  Anything interesting you've got lying around.