A speech by Sharon Butala for the 75th anniversary celebration of the publication of Who Has Seen the Wind, November 29, 2022, Calgary Public Library.
Good evening, everyone. I am so honoured to be speaking to you tonight about that shining star of Canadian fiction, the quietly brilliant, seminal novel of the Canadian West, W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind.
Many of you here tonight will have known W.O. well. My only encounter with him happened maybe 35 years ago at a post-reading reception in the Swift Current, Saskatchewan, library. Peter and I had driven the hundred miles north strictly to lay eyes on him, to hear his actual voice. A country man through and through, my husband had come because of Jake and the Kid. Trying to teach myself to be a writer, I was there for Who Has Seen the Wind; I was there to stare at this icon of Canadian literature in wonder, hoping the sight of him, the sound of his voice, the way he moved and his fleeting expressions would tell me… whatever it was I needed to know to do what he had done.
After his reading the chairs were rearranged against the walls, and sandwiches and tea were served. When he turned away from the tea table, he saw an empty chair, headed for it and sat in it—right beside me. When I recovered, I knew I should speak to him, but every time I thought of something to say, turned my head to him, opened my mouth, no sound would emerge, and I would turn my head away again, while he sat there, teacup in hand, looking straight ahead in a not-unfriendly way, chewing on something that, although he claimed not to chew tobacco, was probably tobacco, and saying not one word. Thus we sat, squeezed in side by side, for a half hour, I in misery, and he… rest…fully. Then it was over, and cringing with shame, I slunk away. All these years later, now knowing his reputation, I realize he had been playing a game with me.
The book is sprinkled with intense beauty, the language chosen with a poet’s precision and originality.
But when you think of it, what do you say to the man who wrote a masterpiece about your own world? The very world you, a novice writer, are trying to find a way to see—whole—past the harsh facts of a rural agricultural person’s daily life, and at the same time, to the glistening, otherworldly mirages, to the omnipresent wind, to days the air is so hot you have to push your way through it, or so cold that in the icy, frost-ridden stillness you can hear voices speaking from miles away, while all around you the sky leans down on you or soars away, and the grass whispers to you. The prairie being so much more, it turns out, than “the skeleton requirements, simply, of land and sky.” All of these giving you hints, clues, intimations of the Great Mystery inherent in it that the boy, Brian Sean MacMurray O’Connal, seized by it, over and over again, comes to a halt in wonder, puzzlement and yearning.
Up to the publication of Who Has Seen the Wind, most fiction set on the Saskatchewan prairie tended to be “realist” recountings of pioneer life. Macmillan, on receiving the manuscript, must have seen that it had a Canadian classic on its hands, that it was privileged to publish a novel of such rare sensitivity, and especially authenticity, and, wonder of wonders, set in and about the heretofore “boring” Canadian prairie West, and yet, not to be classified as “prairie realism.” Even though Mitchell broke that mould with Who Has Seen the Wind, for many years after that too many prairie writers—myself included—kept on writing realistic fiction, for the most part, unable to find a way to do what Mitchell had done.
Who Has Seen the Wind was first published in February 1947, and in what is still a coup, simultaneously by Macmillan in Canada and Atlantic Little Brown in the USA (although the American edition cut about 7,000 words). It didn’t initially sell particularly well, but as time passed sales began to improve until by the 1960s it was a steady seller, as its fame and the recognition of its true worth grew. Cumulatively, to this day, it approaches sales of up to a million copies, and it keeps on selling, it keeps on being read, taught and admired by writers and readers of all ages, although Mitchell insisted this was not a children’s book.
It has been said by who knows how many writers, scholars and statesmen-and-women that a place does not exist until a writer writes about it. From Catherine McLay’s 1986 essay:
“Robert Kroetsch remarked to Margaret Laurence, ‘As Western Canadian writers [we] are involved in making a new literature out of a new experience…. In a sense we haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real.’”
W.O. Mitchell, in Who Has Seen the Wind, created the Western Canadian prairie, and all we writers of the prairie West since have paid homage to him, fought against him, argued with him in our prose, trying hard to find another way to write about it, or trying to write of the same world but through the eyes of adults, not children, or of women, not boys and men, or of farm or ranch kids, not town kids as Mitchell was, or, especially, of those not so privileged as he had the good fortune to be. The privileged had, in that era, childhoods of both a freedom to play and to wander as Brian did, and, at the same time, of the certainty of their ultimate safety. Those less privileged far too often slaved away their childhoods on the farms, or had already had trampled out of them the ability to see the magic on the land that surrounded them. Maybe W.O.’s success in describing that child’s world with such warmth, humour and wonder came not only out of his inborn artistry but out of his childhood’s very security and freedom. For many readers and writers who grew up on the prairie in those more difficult times, Who Has Seen the Wind returned to them, or helped them to see for the first time, the magic that was always there and that was theirs too.
You sit, silent, radiating awe. Then, later, and for all your life, you dream of writing such a book yourself.
Who, of all our many writers now, has written so beautiful a description as this:
“Shadows lengthen; the sunlight fades from cloud to cloud, kindling their torn edges as it dies from softness to softness down the prairie sky. A lone farmhouse window briefly blazes; the prairie bathes in mellower, yellower light, and the sinking sun becomes a low and golden glowing, splendid on the prairie’s edge.”
Although this is the most often quoted passage to illustrate his lyricism, in fact the entire text is sprinkled with phrases and clauses of intense beauty, the language chosen with a poet’s precision and originality. The book lifts us into myth and, with heartbreaking intensity, uses the prairie to illustrate the human struggle—in this case incarnate in a small child—between the knowledge gained through the senses and that of his soul, that comes from where he doesn’t know, but that begs for answers, or cries to touch something that might be God. I, a long-time writer, remain stunned by Mitchell’s achievement.
I am struck too by his literary inventiveness, even daring, in finding ways to solve the problems all we writers wrestle with: the death scene, two lovers parting, a young boy’s reaction to his father’s death, the many funny yet non-trivial dialogues.
For instance, this reading, my third or fourth, was the first time that I paid close attention to Mitchell’s “old-lady-near-death” scene, in which his character both speaks aloud and thinks, she herself no longer knowing a difference:
“–when the sound of the grinding is low.” The curtains flapped and were sucked from the room as though the window had drawn its breath. “–or even the silver cord be loosed.” The curved sides of the chamber-pot caught and held the afternoon light in pearly gleams. “– or the golden bowl be broken –” The gilt framed picture of John MacMurray stared unseeing from the wall. “–shall the dust return –” “Ticket-a-roo – ticket-a-roo,” said the pigeon under the window.
I hadn’t read two lines before I heard echoes of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf: the mixture of quotes from Ecclesiastes, the author’s voice, the voice of the natural world. Throughout this novel that seems, deceptively, the simplest of books, you’ll find evidence as well of Mitchell’s considerable scholarship.
As is too often the case with the best books, the ones that last, like Who Has Seen the Wind, the juries of major literary prizes did not honour this book when it first came out (other than the IODE prize), but the rest of the country gradually saw its worth and continues to do so: Mitchell was awarded the Order of Canada in 1973; in 1992 he became an Honourable Member of the Privy Council, the highest of civilian honours, for his contribution to our national story and national art; our universities gave him, I think, nine honourary degrees. Most extraordinary of all is that when he died in 1998, across the country the Canadian flag was flown at half-mast.
Finally, tonight I get to say to him, wherever he is, what I could not say that endless, mortifying afternoon many years ago. I am still struggling, though, to find those words, which would then have been, and to this day remain, about how he wrote, how he found the place inside himself, so deep, so profound, and that he then put on the page as the story of a child on the prairie, and what the prairie taught him, and how it formed him. I found it so true a book that it required no comment: truth blown on the wind for prairie children to hear, the prairie’s capacity to drive the vulnerable mad, and the biggest truth of all: death, and how it comes to all things, from archbishops to gophers, and even—defying understanding—to a boy’s beloved father.
Do you comment on the weather, or the afternoon’s turnout? Do you kiss his hand, or kneel at his feet? No. You sit in silence, radiating awe. And then, later, and for all your writing life, you dream of writing such a book yourself.
To prepare for tonight, I read the novel again. If this time I started out my reading as a dubious old woman, I finished it in that state that with the best books all readers reach—of an inner hush, not recognizing where I sat—and when I rose and gazed out at the muted glitter of the snow falling, cone-shaped, under the streetlights, for a moment, in the achievement all novelists dream of creating with their work, Who Has Seen the Wind had reawakened me and I saw the world with new eyes.
Sharon Butala is the author of 21 books of fiction and nonfiction, numerous essays and articles, some poetry and five plays.
____________________________________________
