Calgary author Brian Brennan, an acclaimed chronicler of western Canadian history himself, has turned his attention to one of his literary forefathers, James H. Gray. It’s a welcome book because Brennan whetted our appetite for western Canadian achievers in two previous volumes, but they were collections of brief biographies with the genre’s typical space limitations.
In How the West Was Written, Brennan is able to chronicle close to a century in the life of a man well-known to many grey-haired readers but until now a virtually ignored entity among the young. This despite the fact that James Gray spent much of his later years attempting to persuade educators to inject more western history into the school curricula. (With one exception, as Brennan notes: students at Calgary’s Vincent Massey Junior High created a James H. Gray website in 2005.)
Gray, the author of Red Lights on the Prairies (1971), Booze (1972), The Roar of the Twenties (1975) and several other books drawn from his own experiences and observations, was remarkable largely for being unremarkable — at least, early on. Gray grew up in relative poverty, joined the workforce too soon to permit much formal education and was stricken with tuberculosis just in time for the Depression. Not an auspicious start to a writing career.
Gray soon developed a hunger for self-education and storytelling, and talked his way into the newspaper business after more than a year spent on welfare, or “relief,” as it was known in the ’30s. He joined the staff of the Winnipeg Free Press and learned his craft while living among and interviewing ordinary folks in an extraordinary time, as trade unions fought for better wages and working conditions. Then came the Second World War and “Jimmie” Gray’s transfer to the paper’s editorial board. He and his wife Kay later moved to Calgary, where Jimmie wrote for an oil-and-gas industry paper.
He would have retired in this city and sunk into obscurity with almost every other Prairie journalist of his era, except for one thing: at age 60, he began writing books. With encouragement, guidance and discipline from the publishing house of Macmillan, Gray went on to achieve national recognition for a string of books about the West.
Brennan does a superb job of revealing Gray the man, and has uncovered much previously unknown material from archived correspondence, such as the story of how Canada’s Bronfman family was displeased about Booze. Without a doubt, this will remain the definitive biography of a major Canadian popular historian.
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