Authors: John Irving
On December 6, 1917, two ships collided in the Narrows—a mile-long channel, only five hundred yards wide, that connects Bedford Basin with Halifax Harbor and the open sea. A French freighter, the
Mont Blanc,
was bound for Bordeaux, loaded with munitions for the war effort. A Norwegian vessel, the
Imo,
had arrived in Halifax from Rotterdam and was sailing to New York. The
Mont Blanc
’s cargo included more than two thousand tons of picric acid and two hundred tons of TNT.
Upon impact, the
Mont Blanc
caught fire; less than an hour later, the ship’s lethal cargo blew up. People were watching the burning ship from almost everywhere in town; they didn’t know they were about to be blown up, too. Almost two thousand people were killed, nine thousand injured, and two hundred blinded.
The explosion leveled the North End of the city, which Bird describes as “a wilderness, a vast burning scrap yard.” Hundreds of children were killed. There was incalculable damage to other ships in the harbor, and to the piers and dockyards and the Naval College—in addition to the Wellington Barracks and the Dartmouth side of the Narrows, where the captain and crew of the
Mont Blanc
had swum ashore.
Jack thought that the character of the French captain, Aimé Le Medec, was the most challenging for an actor. Bird describes him as “not more than 5 feet 4 inches in height but well built, with a neatly trimmed black beard to add authority to his somewhat youthful face.” A contemporary of Le Medec called the captain “a likeable but moody man, at times inclined to be truculent,” and “a competent, rather than a brilliant, sailor.”
Jack Burns wasn’t
that
short, but—as an actor—even Le Medec’s physique appealed to him, and Jack was good at accents.
In the inquiry following the disaster, much was made of the fact that the
Mont Blanc
’s pilot, Frank Mackey, didn’t speak French. Le Medec, who spoke English, was disinclined to speak the language because he didn’t like it when people misunderstood him. Mackey and Le Medec had communicated with hand signals.
Jack liked everything he read about this “truculent” French captain. In Jack’s view, that was the role he should have been offered. (And the screenplay should have stuck to the facts, which were interesting enough without creating fictional characters to coexist with the historical figures.)
The Canadian authorities in Halifax found Captain Le Medec and his pilot, Frank Mackey, responsible for the collision in the Narrows. The Supreme Court of Canada later found that both ships were to blame—they were equally liable. But Le Medec and his crew were French; in the eyes of many English-speaking Canadians, not just Nova Scotians, the French were to blame for everything.
The French director Cornelia Lebrun took the view that Le Medec deserved only half the blame. (The French government would take no action against Le Medec, who didn’t retire from the sea until 1931—whereafter he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.) But this didn’t explain Madame Lebrun’s attachment to Doug McSwiney’s script, in which Le Medec is a minor character and the Halifax Explosion itself is given merely a supporting role.
McSwiney had an eye for the periphery. Following the disaster, Bird comments in passing, many Halifax prostitutes moved to Toronto or Montreal—“to return later when conditions had improved.” As for those prostitutes who never left town, “business was brisk.”
Perhaps it was from this small mention of the life of prostitutes in Halifax that Doug McSwiney invented his peripheral story. At some Water Street location (this is given scant mention in Bird’s book), a prostitute watches a customer—“a merchant seaman”—leaving her door and going off in the direction of the waterfront. It’s early morning; the
Mont Blanc
is about to explode.
In McSwiney’s screenplay, this prostitute (or someone based on her) breathes in the cold morning air a little too long. The blast rips the whore’s clothes off, detaches her wig, and hurls her into the air—revealing to the audience that the prostitute, now naked and burning, is a
man
! Jack Burns, of course—who else?
While devastation reigns, the amnesiac transvestite prostitute is taken to a hospital. Pitiful sights abound. As Bird writes: “Two hundred children, the matron and every other member of the staff, died under the fallen roof and walls of the Protestant Orphanage on Campbell Road. Those who were not killed outright were slowly burned to death.”
Yet the audience is supposed to feel sympathy for Jack’s character, an amnesiac transvestite prostitute? Despite the many burned women and children in the hospital, an attractive nurse feels especially sympathetic toward Jack’s character. The historical background of the film, which is given short shrift, is intercut with the amnesia victim’s slow recovery and the evolving love affair with his nurse.
The transvestite prostitute can’t remember who he is—not to mention what he was doing naked, flying, and burning in the air above Water Street at a little after 9:00
A.M.
on that fateful Thursday. When he is well enough to leave the hospital, the nurse takes him home with her.
There then comes the inevitable scene in which the amnesia victim recovers his memory. (Knowing Jack Burns, you can see this coming.) The nurse has gone off to work at the hospital, and Jack’s character wakes up in her bedroom. He spots one of her uniforms on a chair—her clothes from the day before. He puts them on, and when he sees himself in the mirror—well, you can imagine. Flashbacks galore! Unseemly behavior in female attire!
Thus the audience is treated to a
second
version of the Halifax Explosion. We get to see the disastrous life of a transvestite prostitute, leading up to that
other
disaster—the
real
one. As Bird observes: “In this moment of agony a greater number had been killed or injured in Halifax than ever were to be in any single air raid on London during the whole of World War II.” But what was Doug McSwiney
thinking
?
Jack hated those movie meetings where he went in knowing that he detested the script, but he liked the director and the idea behind the film. He knew he would be perceived as the interfering movie star who was trying to distort the material to better serve
himself.
Or in this case—in Doug McSwiney’s eyes, without a doubt—the Academy Award–winning screenwriter (talk about beginner’s luck!) who was trying to tell a writer of McSwiney’s vastly greater experience how to
write.
Aside from Halifax being his birthplace, Jack was beginning to wonder why he had come—this being well before he touched down in Nova Scotia, where he had last landed in utero thirty-six years before. Maybe this
would
set back his therapy, as Dr. García had warned.
Jack checked into The Prince George; he made a dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant called the Press Gang. The restaurant was virtually across the street from the corner of Prince and Barrington, where William Burns had once played the organ in St. Paul’s. Close by, on Argyle and Prince, was the St. Paul’s Parish House, where the Anglicans had put up Jack’s pregnant mother; it might even have been the building where Jack was born, no C-section required.
St. Paul’s was built with white wooden clapboards and shingles in 1750. In memory of the Halifax Explosion, the church had preserved an unfrosted second-story window—a broken window, facing Argyle Street. When the
Mont Blanc
exploded, a hole had been blown in the window in the shape of a human head. The face in profile, especially the nose and chin, reminded Jack of his mother’s.
The organ in St. Paul’s had been erected in memory of an organist who’d died in 1920. The organ pipes were blue and white, and there was a second commemoration of another organist.
T
O THE
G
LORY OF
G
OD
A
ND IN GRATEFUL MEMORY
O
F
N
ATALIE
L
ITTLER
1898–1963
O
RGANIST 1935–62
They must have needed a new organist in ’62. There was no commemoration of William Burns, who Jack hoped was still among the living. He’d come to Halifax to play the organ in St. Paul’s in 1964. (God knows how long William had stayed; there was no mention of his ever being there.)
Jack went outside the church and stood in the Old Burying Ground on Barrington Street, looking in the direction of Halifax Harbor. He was wondering what would have happened if he and his mother had stayed in Halifax—if they might have been happy there.
Jack knew that what was called “the explosion window” in St. Paul’s Church—that perfectly preserved head, in profile, which memorialized the 1917 disaster—was better material for a movie about the Halifax Explosion than that piece-of-crap screenplay Doug McSwiney had written. Jack was embarrassed to have come all this way for a meeting about a film he knew would never be made—not with Jack Burns as the amnesiac transvestite prostitute, anyway.
Furthermore, Jack didn’t
ever
want to meet Doug McSwiney. He decided he should just tell Cornelia Lebrun how he felt about the project, and leave it at that. (Jack knew there were a lot of movie meetings that could be avoided if people just told one another how they felt before they met.)
Jack knew that Cornelia Lebrun was staying at The Prince George, too, but he’d learned from Emma that it was better to express yourself
in writing—
especially if you’re pissed off about something. Before dinner, Jack had just enough time to go back to the hotel and write out what he should have told the French director in a simple phone call from Los Angeles.
He had a personal interest in spending a little time in Halifax, Jack explained to her, but he would not be associated with a film about the Halifax Explosion that trivialized the disaster. Jack wrote that he was attracted to the character of Le Medec, and wanted to know more about him. Jack pointed out to Cornelia Lebrun that his physique was suitable for the role of Le Medec, and that the sea captain’s reported moodiness and truculence were well within Jack’s range as an actor. (He mentioned his gift for accents, too.)
Another good role, among the
real
people involved in the historical disaster, was that of Frank Mackey, the pilot who didn’t speak French. And there was a third role of interest to any actor—that of C. J. Burchell, the counsel for the Norwegian shipping company. At that time, Burchell was the best-known maritime lawyer on the Eastern Seaboard. Representing the
Imo
’s owners, Burchell was—in Bird’s words—“capable of the most ruthless court-room tactics.” Given the judge’s bias in favor of the
Imo,
and how local opinion was stacked against the
Mont Blanc
(and the French), Burchell must have been further encouraged “to attack and browbeat witnesses.”
What need was there for a
fictional
story? Jack asked Cornelia Lebrun in his letter. With almost two thousand people killed and nine thousand injured—with nearly two hundred
blinded—
who
cared
about an amnesiac transvestite prostitute who gets burned a little and loses his (or her) clothes and his memory and his
wig
? Jack told the French director that McSwiney’s screenplay, in a word,
sucked.
(Dr. García would have cautioned Jack against this particular
interjection,
and—as things turned out—she would have been right. But that’s what he wrote in the heat of the moment.)
He apologized for wasting Madame Lebrun’s
and
Mr. McSwiney’s time by agreeing to a meeting in Halifax, which he now believed was pointless. Jack added that his one look at the so-called explosion window in St. Paul’s Church drove home to him how McSwiney had managed to write a disaster movie both
prurient
and
banal;
he’d made a sordid love story out of the Halifax Explosion.
Jack forgot to tell Cornelia Lebrun that he remained interested in working with her as a director, which of course had initially persuaded him that the meeting in Halifax was a good idea. He also forgot to tell her that he’d been involved in enough cross-dressing to satisfy whatever
slight
yearning he might have felt for transvestite roles; as an actor, Jack didn’t feel it was asking too much to be allowed to be a man.
Notwithstanding these omissions, he left a great mess of pages at the front desk of the hotel—a virtual ream of Prince George stationery, to be delivered to Madame Lebrun’s room. Then Jack went off to the Press Gang restaurant for a solitary dinner. When Jack returned to the hotel, he inquired at the front desk if Cornelia Lebrun had left a message for him; he was told she was in the bar.
Jack had only a dim idea of what the French director looked like. (A small woman in her sixties—about the same age as Miss Wurtz, he thought.) He spotted her easily. How many women in Halifax were likely to wear a suede pantsuit in lily-pad green?
“Cornelia?” Jack said to the little Frenchwoman, whose lipstick was a bold orange.
“Zzzhhhack Burns!” she cried, but before he could kiss her offered cheek, a large, hirsute man forced his way between them.
The man was bigger than any of his book-jacket photographs, and more hairy than a lumberjack. Jack had been unable to read the fur-faced author’s novels due to the persistence of the rugged outdoors on every page—a characteristic relentlessness in the prose. (Fir trees bent by the wind, the gray rock of the Canadian Shield, the pitiless sea—harsh weather and hard drinking.) Even the whisky on the author’s breath was bracing—Doug McSwiney, of course. Jack was reaching to shake his hand when McSwiney’s left hook caught him on the right temple. Jack never saw it coming.
“
Suck
on that!” McSwiney said, but Jack heard only the
suck;
he was out on his feet before he fell. He should have had the brains to expect a cheap shot from a writer insensitive enough to turn the Halifax Explosion into an unwholesome love story.