Mitchell: The Life of W.O. Mitchell: the Years of Fame, 1948-1998 (review)

Ormond and Barbara Mitchell have resumed their highly successful multiple voices approach in the second and final volume of their biography of W.O. Mitchell, which began with the 1999 publication of W.O.: The Life of W.O. Mitchell: Beginnings to Who Has Seen the Wind, 1914–1947. In Mitchell: The Life of W.O. Mitchell: The Years of Fame, we view Mitchell through the voices of his critics, his wife, brother, children, friends, and acquaintances; through the memoir voice of the biographers' remembered experiences (defined in italics); through Mitchell's own words excerpted from over sixty hours of taped interviews as well as from autobiographical bits gleaned from his fiction and drama. What makes this biography unusual is that it combines elements of two genres: as the work of two English professors who are also the son and daughter-in-law of W.O., it is primarily a work of scholarship – a critical biography of a writer – but it also includes aspects of a family memoir. Its intimate details are characterized by the type of embarrassing anecdotes a family will share around the kitchen table: Mitchell driving over six parking meters on route to a stage production of his Black Bonspiel of Wullie McCrimmon; Mitchell lathering his face with a sunscreen of milk of magnesia and shocking Hawaiian hotel guests with slapstick springboard high-dives for his grandchildren ('the old fool's going to kill himself'). Such stories for most of us rarely translate effectively beyond the family circle, but they are entirely appropriate when the subject is not only a writer but also a public performer like Mark Twain, Stephen Leacock, and W.O. Mitchell. Their family stories are well told, with the comic's timing and the dramatist's insight.

Another aspect of this biography that benefits from the family perspective is the financial side of the writer's life. Writing as a business is a recurrent theme that belies the theme of fame signalled in the subtitle of this second volume. Mitchell's business worries and negotiations provide a case study of the heroic role of the Canadian writer in the mid-twentieth century. Despite the critical success of his first novel, Mitchell had to devote much of his time to editorial work for Maclean's and to radio scripts for the cbc in order to support his young family, leaving him with little energy for writing serious fiction. Not until the 1980s was there at last a viable commercial market for Canadian authors to make an adequate living. Hence, the last fifteen years of his life were his most prolific because his publisher no longer found it necessary to negotiate for foreign co-publication.

On the other hand, there followed a reversal of fortune as Mitchell's financial success with his literary bestsellers was accompanied by a loss of the control he once had over the media adaptations of his work. In contrast to the control he enjoyed with his cbc radio scripts in the 1950s, by the 1990s he was angry over the Nelvana television productions of Jake and the Kid. Nelvana pursued 'slickness, not authenticity,' preferring pretty farmyards and polite church suppers over Mitchell's characteristic spicy humour and poignant satire of Prairie pride and racial prejudice. Mitchell's obsession with what his editor, Douglas Gibson, called 'the Hollywood Grail' invariably met with failure. But Mitchell's enduring contribution to Canadian literature and culture is substantial, as Orm and Barbara Mitchell show so well in their discussions of its reception over six decades and in their own critical assessment of his work.