Robert MacNeil never really left Halifax behind
I only met Robert MacNeil, the late broadcaster and writer, once, but it was in the right place — the lobby of the Lord Nelson Hotel — and at the right time, a publicity tour for "Burden of Desire," his novel about the Halifax explosion.
I say this because, as his obituaries pointed out last week, MacNeil, who died Friday at 93 in New York City, had one of those swashbuckling journalistic careers that hardly seem possible in this internet age.
A globetrotting foreign correspondent who was working in Dallas the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated and spent more than two decades co-hosting thoughtful PBS news shows, MacNeil also hosted television documentaries and wrote books about language and the relationships between politics and television, as well as memoirs and novels.
He was a journalistic giant with the world as his beat, but his feelings for Halifax, the city where he came of age, were profound and seemed to never waver.
In his 1989 book "Wordstruck," MacNeil, who was known for his sober and subdued broadcasting style, wrote about how he was “crazy about the sound of words, the look of words, the taste of words, the feeling for words on the tongue and in the mind.”
HALIFAX ROOTS
Most of the words that fed this obsession, by Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy and Eliot, were penned in England. “But the sensibility which absorbed them,” he wrote, “was formed in Halifax, and there I acquired a feeling for words.”
His grandfather’s Second World War dentistry practice was located across Spring Garden Road from where we sat and talked 11 years after "Wordstruck" hit the stores.
If he had looked out the Lord Nelson’s window, he might have seen where the Victorian house in which he, his parents and siblings had lived during the formative war years, once stood.
The house was long gone by then, replaced by an apartment complex where his mother lived during her last years.
“From her balcony, I can look down on a map of my boyhood 50 years ago,” MacNeil wrote 35 years ago. “Little has changed.”
Through the trees he recounted in "Wordstruck," he could see the route he took to Tower Road School, where on winter days the classrooms “smelt of snow-dampened wool” and misbehaviour was punished by “ten inches of some woven rubberized material, doubtless approved by the Halifax Board of Education,” and where, when air-raid sirens sounded, classes stopped as men in steel helmets raced up the wooden steps of the tower next to the school to man an anti-aircraft gun.
Down below, he could see the fences he used to climb to get into the well-tended south-end backyards and the fruit trees he and his friends plundered.
When he looked up, MacNeil could see “the great harbour, its mouth opening to the Atlantic,” through which the Royal Canadian Navy convoy escort ships his father commanded during the Second World War “came and went.”
If he craned his neck he might even have been able to catch a glimpse of the Wanderers Grounds, where in 1940, he and other Halifax school children “filled the bleachers and sang in our thousands of little voices the songs of the First World War,” and the Cathedral Church of All Saints, where, when he was forced to attend, “the air would become thick and unbreathable” and “the space in front of my eyes would dissolve into a greygreen mist that turned objects increasingly fuzzy.”
“Remembering the incidents of those years, I think this is where I was first struck by words,” he wrote. “This is where they made me more than a Canadian, an Englishman, or an American; or Scottish or Irish, or German — all the things my forebears were.”
RADIO RECRUIT
Halifax made him more than just a man of letters. During his undistinguished days at Dalhousie University, he was cast as Casio in Shakespeare’s "Othello," which he described as “an ample part for my small experience.”
On the night of the last performance, “a tall, gaunt, well-tailored man with a black moustache came back to see me.”
A producer with the CBC, Stephen Kerr Appleby had liked his performance and asked MacNeil if he was interested in acting on the radio. He was at the time a university freshman with a fleeting thought that he would someday tread the theatrical boards, rather than follow his father’s naval career path. How could he not?
The CBC in those days broadcast live dramas from a studio on top of the Nova Scotian Hotel, now the Westin Nova Scotia. MacNeil soon joined a small repertory company of actors performing such crowd-pleasers as "Treasure Island," 'The Count of Monte Cristo" and "Kidnapped."
PAVING THE WAY
This was no Hollywood studio. In "Wordstruck," MacNeil describes a sound effects man climbing steps, knocking on doors and walking on gravel to produce the sounds for their dramas, and how, by rocking gently in a rickety old office chair, the newest cast member simulated the creaking rigging of a pirate ship.
But it was paying work for a young man desperately short on funds. More than that, it was MacNeil’s introduction to broadcasting, where he would become a giant.
He found summer work as a replacement CBC radio announcer. Then, he was hired as an all-night disc jockey at commercial radio station CJCH, a job for which someone who “talked like a book,” was prone to playing classical music and, in the middle of the night, reading long narrative poems, seemed comically unsuited.
At CJCH, MacNeil did get to read hourly news bulletins. When he stepped out of the station, moreover, he walked streets still, in places, being rebuilt from the great 1917 Explosion, the subject of the book we spoke about that day in the hotel lobby.
I cannot find the story I wrote after our chat. But I liked "Burden of Desire," with its fine writing and mix of melodrama, social history and Freudian psychology.
And I know that somewhere along the line we talked about the city where he grew up and, no matter how far he travelled, had never completely left.