An absorbing account of writer’s journey to ‘ a literary life’
George Fetherling has led a peripatetic life, having variously called Toronto, London, England, and ( of late) Vancouver “home.” He has travelled to and through many of the globe’s most distant corners — China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma — and has written and published extensively during the more than four decades that he has made writing his full- time profession. The result of this varied life — at least the literary result — is a shelf’s worth of published work: poetry, essay, travel narrative, memoir, biography, social history; in a 1996 memoir Fetherling notes, almost wearily, that “for a dozen years I never knew the luxury of an unexpressed thought.”
When Travels by Night first appeared in 1994 it received accolades from many quarters, and won a place on several year- end “Top 10” lists. The subtitle of that first edition was “A Memoir of the Sixties,” which tended to focus attention on Fetherling’s expatriate life in the bohemian Toronto of the late 1960s ( with occasional forays to bohemian Vancouver), and to his role as an active participant in, and perceptive observer of the ferment that was then transforming the Canadian publishing industry. Travels by Night was deservedly hailed as an insider’s account of an era when Canada Council grants were helping to establish a vibrant new generation of Canadian publishers, a time when many now wellestablished Canadian writers — Margaret Atwood and Dennis Lee among them — were just getting their start.
The subtitle of this new edition is simply “A Memoir,” a change that makes it easier to see the overall narrative arc of Fetherling’s tale, which is, in fact, a classic coming of age story: the central figure born into grim circumstances, but still managing — against great odds — to make a success of himself. In an afterword to this new edition Fetherling describes Travels by Night as “an account of a young fellow trying to find his true home, one that happened not to be the place where he was born.” This summary is true as far as it goes, but does not do justice to this absorbing account of “a bookish sort of loner” in search of what one might call “a literary life.”
Travels by Night begins in Wheeling, W. Va., where Fetherling was born ( in 1949) to parents who were patently unsuited to each other: a hostile mother from the lower classes, and a father from the upper middle classes, the latest in a long line of Fetherlings who were “steadily miscellaneous in character,” a man filled with self- loathing at his circumstances. It was, as Fetherling describes it, “like the plot of a Victorian melodrama, ( and) anger born of class tension became the dominant element of my childhood.” At that time Wheeling was essentially a mob- run town, peopled by Damon Runyonesque figures such as Walleye, “a small- time fence and freelance bookie,” and dominated by “the local crime lord” Big Bill Lias, a former bootlegger and numbers runner, proprietor of a string of nightclubs and casinos: “He employed a hundred armed men but his payroll was much bigger than that suggests, what with cops, judges, congressmen and the like.”
Wheeling is where Fetherling first began to write, with poetry “published in the type of semi- professional literary magazine often associated with out- of- the- way colleges and universities,” and where he got his first taste of journalism, covering local sports and ( eventually) writing obituaries for the Wheeling Intelligencer.
In 1967, at age 18, Fetherling turned his back on America to begin a new stage of his life in Toronto.
There he bunked down on a cot in the furnace room of House of Anansi press, eventually becoming their first fulltime employee. From there, Fetherling could begin to build and work his “trapline” of professional contacts in search of writing assignments. And the rest, as they say, is history.
This 20th- anniversary edition of Fetherling’s memoir provides a glimpse into the freelance trenches, and what we learn from a close reading of this book is that there are more similarities than many would like to acknowledge between the “literary life” and outright poverty.
Travels by Night documents an important period in our cultural history — but it is the human, rather than the historic, elements of Fetherling’s story which linger longest in the reader’s memory, and which will help to ensure that Travels by Night is still being read 20 years from now.