Graeme Gibson
Novelist and environmental activist who was a source of great support to his wife, Margaret Atwood
GRAEME GIBSON, the Canadian writer who has died aged 85, made his name with idiosyncratic and experimental novels, but spent the latter part of his life writing about the natural world and campaigning for environmental causes, a passion he shared with his partner of nearly half a century, the novelist Margaret Atwood.
Gibson was part of a trailblazing generation of novelists who showed that Canadian fiction, routinely dismissed as parochial and placid, was worthy of serious international attention. He was perhaps most widely known for his critical book Eleven Canadian Novelists (1973), which reproduced extensive interviews with Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler and others, and was seen as a manifesto for a new and self-consciously ambitious movement in Canadian literature.
In his own novels Gibson attempted, initially at least, to prove that a depiction of contemporary life in Canada – particularly his beloved Ontario – could be combined with emulation of the European Modernist movement. His first novel, Five Legs (1969), which took him nine years to write, was about the emotional struggles of an academic and one of his students, both tortured in different ways by guilt and a sense of failure, with their mental turmoil conveyed in a stream-of-consciousness style that made the reader work hard – and, in the view of some, not to fruitful ends.
Nevertheless other critics praised it – The Globe and Mail called it “the most interesting first novel by a Canadian … in many years” – and it was a success, selling more than 1,000 copies in its first week and securing the financial stability of its publisher, House of Anansi Press.
His second novel, Communion (1971), was written in much the same style, with the student from the first novel finding his vocation as a vet; the book was regarded by some as an attack on religions and their unsympathetic relationship with the natural world.
Gibson started and abandoned various novels and found his time increasingly taken up with cultural activism – “because of the desperate straits, it seems to me, that Canada was in at that time, in publishing, in writing and everything”. He helped to found the Writers’ Union of Canada, of which he was chairman in 1974-75, and the Writers’ Development Trust; many younger authors came to regard him as a father figure.
He returned to fiction with his most admired novel, Perpetual Motion (1982), about a 19th century farmer who tries to build a perpetual-motion machine; though written in a pastiche archaic style, it was more accessible than his earlier novels, and dealt with the theme of the harm done to the natural world as the result of the pursuit of “progress”.
One of the main character’s descendants, a novelist trying to come to terms with mortality, featured in Gibson’s fourth and final novel, Gentleman Death (1993).
He gave up novels because “I discovered I had nothing more to say as a novelist and I didn’t want to start chewing my cabbage all over again”. He found fulfilment working with the natural world, and for a time was a nature tour operator. He edited two anthologies, The Bedside Book of Birds (2005) and The Bedside Book of Beasts (2009), conceived as a counterblast against the tendency to “infantilise” animals and birds, and of which he was as proud as of any of his novels. With Margaret Atwood, he helped to found the Pelee Island Bird Sanctuary off Ontario.
Thomas Graeme Cameron Gibson was born in London, Ontario, on August 9 1934, to Brigadier Thomas Graeme Gibson and Mary (née Cameron). He took a BA at the University of Western Ontario, and then “failed my MA and rushed off to Europe”, studying at the University of Edinburgh.
He taught at the Ryerson Institute of Technology in Toronto and gained a reputation for radicalism at odds with his gentle manner; he received a great deal of press attention after scaling the statue of Egerton Ryerson and draping it in an American flag to protest against the sale of the Ryerson Press to an American company.
He met Margaret Atwood at a literary awards ceremony – each thought the other should have won the prize – and for many years they lived on a farm in rural Ontario. He supported her greatly, prompting one journalist to declare: “Every woman writer should be married to Graeme Gibson”, a phrase Margaret Atwood had printed on a T-shirt. “He’s pretty good – he mostly just keeps out of the way,” she told the Telegraph. Despite her steely public image, Gibson could often be seen reducing her to giggles. She survives him with their daughter and two other children from a previous marriage.
Graeme Gibson was President of PEN Canada from 1987 to 1989 and appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 1992. He died suddenly in London, where his wife was promoting her new novel, The Testaments.
Graeme Gibson, born August 9 1934, died September 18 2019