http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/acclaimed-canadian-author-farley-mowat-dead-at-92/article18511064/Farley Mowat, one of the elder statesmen of Canadian literature, has died five days short of his 93rd birthday, a publishing industry source confirmed.
Mr. Mowat was a trickster, a ferocious imp with a silver pen, an ardent environmentalist who opened up the idea of the North to curious southerners, a public clown who hid his shyness behind flamboyant rum-swigging and kilt-flipping, and a passionate polemicist who blurred the lines between fiction and facts to dramatize his cause. Above all, he was a bestselling and prolific writer who kept generations of children (and their parents) spellbound by tales of adventures with wolves that were friendlier than people, whales in need of rescue, dogs who refused to cower, owls roosting in the rafters and boats that wouldn’t float.
In a 50-plus-year career as a freelance writer, he wrote more than 40 books including several memoirs, and won many prizes and honours including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Order of Canada and several honorary degrees. Even as recently as July, 2009, Nicholas D. Kristof, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, listed Mr. Mowat’s The Dog who Wouldn’t Be (first published in 1957) as one of the best children’s books of all time.
A lonely, only child, he turned to animals for friendship as a boy. Like many young men, he eagerly marched off to fight for King and Country in the Second World War, but the atrocities he witnessed and the killings he himself committed in the brutal Italian campaign so traumatized him that he turned again to his animal friends, if only in his imagination. It was in Ortona, Italy, against the backdrop of German guns, that he drafted early versions of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be and Owls in the Family. “It was my salvation,” he said in November, 2009, about writing drafts of the books that would later make his legacy. For the rest of his life he preferred the company of The Others to members of his own species, as he disdainfully called human beings.
Back in Canada, he went on a scientific expedition to the Arctic in the late 1940s as a battle-scarred veteran in psychic despair. “I didn’t like the human goddamn race,” he told The Globe in 2005. “I had seen enough of its real naked horror during the war to convince me that we weren’t worth the powder to blow us to hell.” He went north “desperate to find” a “Shangri La” – however frigid – inhabited by people who could reassure him that “it was worthwhile belonging to the human race.”
Instead of a paradise, he found starving Inuit and, at least in his eyes, evidence of a callous government, which had corrupted the Natives’ traditional lifestyle, abused them sexually and morally and then abandoned them. While he was in the North, he received another emotional blow when his wife Fran, depressed by his absence, wrote him a letter, threatening to end their marriage. He quit the expedition, went south, and returned to his disaffected wife, thereby saving a troubled marriage, but thwarting his career as a scientific researcher.
