All Tiff’s ‘children’ mourning his death

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This article was published 22/06/2002 (8764 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG bookseller Paul McNally has a touching memory about Toronto novelist Timothy Findley, who died Thursday.

It would have been 1995, when Findley was through town to promote his new novel at the time, The Piano Man’s Daughter.

Findley, or Tiff as he was known to probably thousands of friends and acquaintances, was giving his reading at the West End Cultural Centre. It was during the Words on Stage Festival, the precursor to the current Winnipeg International Writers Festival.

McNally had found an elderly pianist whose repertoire included several songs Findley mentioned in the novel and several more that McNally says “I am simply too young to recognize.”

The pianist played in to Findley’s reading and then out.

“Tiff was in raptures with this,” McNally recalls. “He literally wept with pleasure. He seemed to me a man who wore his emotions on his sleeve.”

Quite likely. Findley was famously insecure about his talent, first as a stage actor and then as a writer. His self-doubts often paralysed him at the keyboard, though it is hard imagine such a thing, given his productivity.

His lifelong partner, TV writer Bill Whitehead, was his rock. Many people have observed that without Whitehead, Findley could have ended up in one of the butterfly wards he so famously described in his books about madness and depression.

Whitehead spent decades as the chief writer for the long-running CBC series The Nature of Things. But he regularly interrupted his own work to go on book tours with Findley. Tiff was not the sort of person who travelled well alone.

In the last decade, he must have stopped in Winnipeg on five or six different occasions. Each time he had a new book, which rose to the top of Canadian bestseller lists.

Dozens of writers here knew him well enough to call him “Tiff,” and he was generous to all of them.

Is there a CanLit groupie from Vancouver to Prince Edward Island who was not invited to dinner by Tiff and Bill at Stone Orchard, their gentleman’s farm in Cannington, Ont., with the cats and the pool and the excellent wine cellar?

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Whether by design or accident, Tiff and Bill were at the vanguard of helping to normalize gay relationships in the eyes of the hetero world. They did this by example, as much as anything.

Findley did actually marry a woman, a Winnipegger no less, in the late ’50s, even though he had already declared himself a homosexual. The legal arrangement with Janet Reid, an actor he worked with in Toronto, last something like three months.

When Findley came through Winnipeg in 1999 to promote his novel Pilgrim, he did not look well. He was only 71 when he died, young by today’s standards. But a lifetime of drinking and smoking took their toll.

In this way, he was like Peter Gzowski and Mordecai Richler, two other Canadian writing legends who died relatively young after ignoring the advice of medical science.

Unlike Richler, Findley never achieved much recognition outside Canada. But he won all the big awards here, and his best known novels, The Wars, Famous Last Words, Not Wanted on the Voyage and Headhunter, stole into the hearts of a couple generation of CanLit buffs.

He was an imaginative storyteller more than a graceful stylist or great thinker. His hold on posterity as a writer of fiction may be tenuous. None of his books offered a character that entered into the wider public sphere, as did Hagar Shipley or Duddy Kravitz.

His true claim to fame may have been as a leader of the Canadian writing tribe. He inherited that mantle from Margaret Laurence, another novelist beset by personal demons yet possessed of an innate decency.

Manitoba Theatre Centre premiered the stage version of Not Wanted on the Voyage in 1992. MTC artistic director Steven Schipper recalls introducing Tiff to his young son and daughter.

“He was delighted to meet them,” Schipper says. “Whenever I ran into him after that, at Stratford or somewhere else, he asked about my children.”

Tiff once told an interviewer that one of his few regrets about being gay was that he had no kids of his own.

But, of course, that turned out not to be true. The legions of readers who have lost themselves in Findley’s fictional world, and the writers he loved, are all Tiff’s children.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca