| Chrestomathy!? Who’s he when he’s at home, you might well ask after digesting the title Irresponsible Freaks, Highball Guzzlers and Unabashed Grafters: A Bob Edwards Chrestomathy.
Well, the term chrestomathy simply denotes "a collection of literary passages." Which is just what editor James Martin has assembled here: nearly 250 pages of writing by Bob Edwards who, as you may already know, published a newspaper called The Eye Opener in Calgary between 1904 and 1922, during which time he fearlessly excoriated local politicians, clergy and social notables while fighting a public battle with his own alcoholism.
A chrestomathy is also, quite significantly, what H.L. Mencken called his own "selection of his choicest writing" back in 1949. So, is Martin subtly positioning Eye Opener Bob as a sort of western Canadian Mencken? Kind of, with qualifications and important distinctions, sure. But the most important of these necessary distinctions, as Martin points out in his entertaining introduction, is that social critic Mencken has continued to be read, quoted and debated, while Bob Edwards, early Calgary’s Scottish expat afflicter of the comfortable, has not.
Hence the need to bring his writing back into print, hence not only Irresponsible Freaks, but also its companion volume, Grant MacEwan’s Eye Opener Bob: The Story of Bob Edwards, now republished by Brindle and Glass with a preface by Will Ferguson.
A little bit of synchronicity helped Edwards’ re-emergence into print, former Calgary writer (and Fast Forward Mr. Smutty columnist) Martin explains by telephone from his new home in Montreal. "I had just pitched the idea to another publisher, who rejected it. And then just after that I heard from Lee Shedden (of Brindle and Glass), who had the same idea."
Martin’s discovery of Edwards grew out of the research for his 1999 book Calgary: Secrets of the City. It took a little while, he recalls, but after reading a certain amount of Edwards’ work, the revelation struck: "Bob Edwards is cool." What makes Edwards attractive to Martin is the way he fits "right in line with The Onion today. He plays with the conventions of the news column a lot. And I like his little stage directions, inviting readers to applaud." Like The Onion, The Eye Opener assumed its readers already had quite a bellyful of standard news items. As Martin says, "you have to have read quite a few straight headlines to get the joke headline."
It’s not just his media-conscious satiric style that gives Edwards a contemporary quality. Reading some of his anti-Liberal Party diatribes could make you think he’s been following today’s current sponsorship scandal. And then there’s (yawn) apparently already futile talk of electoral reform. Edwards writes, in May 1916: "We have forgotten what we were going to write this paragraph about, but have an idea that it was something about proportional representation. However, let it go." (What a mercy.) Edwards’ comment on the wars of his own time – "Every war is a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight" – meshes exactly with one of the points of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
Martin also enjoyed Edwards’ creation of a "larger-than-life, Hunter S. Thompson-type, two-fisted, hard-drinking persona." That written voice may not have reflected the real, apparently shy, Edwards. But it helped him to "push a lot of buttons" among both loyal readers and a few vehement, even litigious, antagonists. The collection includes some energetic attacks on Edwards, and some of his own staunch refusals to apologize or recant.
But what about Edwards’ inconsistencies, like arguing both for and against Prohibition?
"You can look at it as a negative," says Martin. "But I see it as just evidence of the fact that he was thinking." Martin attaches dates to each excerpt, partly so that readers can see how Edwards sometimes changes views because "he sees it isn’t working and modifies his position."
Talking to Martin about his research for the book reveals just how much scholarly sleuthing went into getting Edwards back into print. Along with sessions at the Glenbow Museum, savvy Internet use led to some genuine discoveries.
"I’m sure he’ll always remain an enigma," says Martin, "but there are these threads and, when you pull them, they yield surprising results." Web access to local registries in Edinburgh helped Martin discover Edwards’ birth certificate, for one thing. Learning his real age (Edwards made himself out to be four years younger than he was) helped Martin to recognize, in the British Library, copies of Edwards’ early European paper The Channel, which had languished for the past 125 years. Excerpts now appear in Irresponsible Freaks.
As a result, readers not only have a brand new chrestomathy, but also a much clearer picture of the man behind Alberta Theatre Projects’ annual Bob Edwards Award and Luncheon, and the name of both a junior high school in Marlborough and the local CBC Radio morning show. Divided into thematic sections, with a foreword by Allan Fotheringham, Irresponsible Freaks is set up for just the sort of thing Stephen Fry called "your perusalment and enjoyage." Thorough readers will even discover what it means to "rush the growler." |
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