Ian Hunter and the Art of the Literary Essay
“Intimations of sunset are visible well before darkness falls. It is in the fading twilight that one appreciates just how beautiful the preceding day has been. For me the splendour of life is always most readily revealed by words: words written, words spoken, words lived. One reason that reading – and to a rather feeble extant writing – biography appeals to me is that it is through reading the lives of others that one comes to understand one’s own.” -Ian Hunter
Readers of The London Yodeller (as well as lesser publications like The Globe & Mail and The National Post) may be interested to learn that one of our more elegant occasional contributors, Ian Hunter, has a new collection of essays out this fall from Elmwood press. Telling Lives has been conceived as a sort of companion volume to his first Elmwood collection of essays, 1999’s Brief Lives: Heroes, Mountebanks and Lawyers, and, like its forbear presents ten substantive biographical essays, ranging in length from eight pages to almost 30. In his introduction, the now 70 year old Hunter strikes a decidedly elegiac note:
“Intimations of sunset are visible well before darkness falls. It is in the fading twilight that one appreciates just how beautiful the preceding day has been. For me the splendour of life is always most readily revealed by words: words written, words spoken, words lived. One reason that reading – and to a rather feeble extant writing – biography appeals to me is that it is through reading the lives of others that one comes to understand one’s own.”
And in terms of the subjects covered here, one can indeed trace the trajectory of Hunter’s life and career. The single longest essay, In My Father’s House, recounts the life story of his own father. The Scottish-born James Hogg Hunter (1890-1982) was 55 years old when Ian was born at the end of the Second World War; meaning, Hunter writes, that much of his father’s life was over before the son had “attained what might be called biographical consciousness.” Luckily the word (and ‘Word’)-besotted father was not only a ravenous and wide-ranging reader who could recite entire works by William Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Alfred Tennyson and Robert Burns as well as large sections of the Bible (a biblio-holic condition fatally passed on to his son) he worked all his life as a journalist, author and editor and left a prodigious paper trail.
In addition to penning now largely forgotten bestsellers like the Buchanesque thrillers The Mystery of Mar Saba and Banners of Blood, Hunter Sr. was a mainstay for almost 40 years at The Evangelical Christian, a national, non-denominational monthly with a paid circulation of 17,000 at its peak which coincided with Hunter’s editorship. Finally locating an archive of the magazine’s entire run and immersing himself month by month by month in these musings of his father, helped Ian to write this portrait. Non-denominational The Evangelical Christian may have been in the Protestant sense, but the publication and its editor were virulently anti-Catholic. The same year as Ian was born, his father published a collection of his ‘Rome-as-the-whore-of-Babylon’ scribblings entitled, The Great Deception; a tome which – by dint of its existence if not its contentions – constituted a significant obstacle six decades later when Ian was summoning up his courage to dive headlong into the Tiber and paddle his way to the other side. But that long pondered leap was not an act of paternal betrayal but honour. This moving essay makes clear that it was no small part of the father’s gifts to his son – as surely as his love of books – that he should take religion seriously and strive to act on his deepest convictions.
Another dominant theme in the author’s life is the law. Holding degrees in political science and law from the University of Toronto, Hunter was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, taught law at UWO from 1974-96 and still practices as an arbitrator and mediator today. I believe that his published 1995 lecture series, Three Faces of the Law, may be his most important single work, drawing attention to the ruinous impact of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the practice of law in Canada. In this collection two pieces, Jesus: The Evidence (in which he examines what can be reliably deduced about the divinity of Jesus Christ) and Dr. Johnson and the Law (wherein is traced the great Samuel Johnson’s regard for and intuitive grasp of legal principles) rewardingly employ Hunter’s specialized knowledge.
Hunter’s first book published in 1980 was Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life, the first-ever biography of one of the most important journalists of the 20th century. In the new essay Malcolm Muggeridge: The Biographer’s Dilemma, Hunter summons his lawyer’s acumen to look at one key incident – a war time suicide attempt at Lourenco Marques on the Costa da Sol while Muggeridge was acting as a spy for MI-6 – that is differently described in an early Muggeridge novel and his later autobiography as well as in Hunter’s biography and two subsequent Muggeridge biographies by Richard Ingrams and Gregory Wolfe. Hunter sorts through the contradictory accounts and suggests whose – if anyone’s – we should believe.
Hunter’s second book was Nothing to Repent, a 1987 biography of Muggeridge’s good friend, biographer Hesketh Pearson. Not widely regarded today, Pearson wrote an astonishing 24 full length biographies and half a dozen collections of shorter pieces in a career that didn’t really get underway until his 42nd year when, frustrated by an acting career that had never really taken off, he decided to focus on something else. With apologies to Michael Holroyd who dragged his 1980s/90s opus on George Bernard Shaw out to four bloated volumes, Pearson’s one volume jobbie from 1942, GBS: A Full Length Portrait, is quite definitive enough and all that anybody needs. (I also revere his lives of Sydney Smith, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Charles II, Sir Walter Scott, Erasmus Darwin and William Hazlitt.) Hunter’s new essay here describes Pearson’s modus operandi for writing a life and also highlights the man’s remarkable bellicosity and independence – essential qualities to accomplish so much in a career that only ran for 33 years.
My only quibble with this collection is that it reprints Wayward Genius: Catherine Carswell and Robert Burns which previously appeared in Hunter’s 2005 Elmwood collection, Robert Burns: A Tribute. It’s a worthy essay about the opprobrium dumped on a courageous author – and a woman, no less – who dared to rescue Scotland’s national poet from the mythologists and sentimentalizers by writing the first full and accurate biography of Burns. As I say, it’s fascinating stuff but I’ve already got a copy of that.
All is forgiven however for Hunter’s ten page meditation on – a mythic character this time – Shakespeare’s King Lear. After a lifetime of reading and watching dozens of productions of what he considers “the supreme achievement in English literature,” Hunter tells us what he finds there – the sublime poetic insight, the human understanding, the religious affirmation. It’s a thundering great read.
Oh look, I’m out of space. If you want to know Hunter’s take on Gavin Maxwell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Richard John Neuhaus, then you’re going to have to buy your own copy of Telling Lives, exclusively available (for now at least) at faithfulYodeller advertiser, Cardinal Books, located in beautiful downtown Birr.