LITERARY MAP OF THE CITY
Tales of fascinating people of the past come to life
In W.O. Mitchell’s 1988 novel Ladybug, Ladybug a psychotic kidnapper takes a little girl to a creepy cave he has carved out in an escarpment.
Exactly where this all happens is never specified in Mitchell’s novel. But there is convincing evidence in the book that the location was based on Roxboro in Calgary’s southwest, which also happens to be where Mitchell lived for 30 years until his 1998 death.
In fact, the retired professor at the heart of the novel lives in a house that seems patterned after Mitchell’s.
“You can still go to Roxboro, you can look at the house and imagine,” says Shaun Hunter, historian-in-residence for Calgary Heritage and the Calgary Public Library. “He was such a character. He had this amazing office he built in the backyard, this two-storey solarium where he grew tropical plants. His office was filled with rosewood salvaged from the Palliser Hotel.”
The Fairmont Palliser was also at the heart of another biographical nugget related to Mitchell. In 1946, he and his wife received word that a Canadian periodical would be publishing a digested version of what would become one of his most beloved novels, Who Has Seen the Wind. It came with a $5,000 cheque, a spectacularly substantial sum of money in 1946. To celebrate, Mitchell and his wife Myrna travelled from their then home in High River for a night on the town at the Palliser.
“They go down to the Saturday supper dances they used to hold there,” Hunter says. “Guess who is playing there that night? Oscar Peterson. This was a big night.”
Roxboro Park, Mitchell’s Calgary’s home and, of course, the Fairmont Palliser will all earn pins on Hunter’s literary map of Calgary, a work-in-progress that will highlight key buildings and structures that played a role in the city’s rich literary history.
With the public library closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the public consultations that are usually part of the historian-in-residence’s duties have been put on hold. This has given Hunter plenty of time for a deep dive into stories that make up Calgary’s literary landscape. There are famous names involved. The Fairmont, in fact, turns out to be a key location. In the 1920s, Agatha Christie stayed there, as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Rotary Park gets a pin because it’s where Rudyard Kipling stood in 1907 alongside an entourage of city officials and reporters and declared Calgary the “wonder city of Canada.”
“Kipling was a tried-and-true Victorian imperialist,” Hunter says. “So he loved the idea of the new world and loved the idea of the British Commonwealth expanding. He made six visits to Canada in his life. That one, in 1907, was his fourth pass through Calgary. He just loved British colonialism. So he stood on the hill and looked out at the city. It was early into the real-estate boom. It became a sandstone city. That was very much in evidence in 1907. If you’re walking down Stephen Avenue and squint you can get a sense of how amazing that would have been.”
Mapping Calgary’s literary connections has been a passion of Hunter’s for the past five years, although this is the first time she has set out to literally build a map. Her 2018 book Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers looked at 150 depictions of the city from various writers going back 200 years. Earlier this year, she oversaw Storied City: Early Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers at the Lougheed House, which imagined a fictional dinner party with figures such as satirist Bob Edwards, Nellie Mcclung and poet P.K. Page on the guest list.
Still, Hunter was pleased to learn that there were still a number of hidden figures to uncover when it came to Calgary’s literary history. Her research has been focused on the City of Calgary’s Inventory of Evaluated Historic Resources, which documents 800 buildings, structures and parks with historic and heritage value identified by Heritage Calgary.
It’s offered sturdy jumping-off points for Hunter, who has identified 100 of these buildings or places as having some sort of literary connection.
The map will eventually be exhibited at the Central Library as a physical artifact highlighting selected sites. But a more extensive digital map will also be featured, with each pin linking to a description and the library’s catalogue of related material.
Meanwhile, Hunter will post updates on her Twitter and Facebook accounts about her discoveries.
“I have my own catalogue of places in Calgary where writers have touched down either in their lives or in their stories and poetry,” Hunter says. “I want those to be part of the map as well.”
Kipling, Christie and Doyle — whose connections to Calgary are outlined in a recent blog Hunter wrote on the Heritage Calgary website — is “just a little taste of where this project is going.”
“This is what I’ve been doing,” she says. “I get up in the morning and I dive into one of these sites on the inventory. It connects and I tug on the thread and there’s more and more: Things I didn’t even know about, connections between different writers and places in the city. It’s been really interesting.”