W.O. : The Life of W.O. Mitchell : Beginnings to Who Has Seen The Wind, 1914-1947

Book by Mitchell Ormond Mitchell Barbara

In the fall of 1979, Mitchell became writer-­in-­residence at the University of Windsor, “the sweetest university creative writing department I know of.” Of all his university attachments this was the most emotional, the longest (eight years), and the one during which he accomplished the most creative work (three novels). It was a different appointment in that, except for one year, he did no formal teaching, although he frequently met with individual students to discuss their writing. Because of the length of time he spent there, he and Merna became more socially involved in the university and in the community than they had during his other residencies. In particular they became friends with Alistair and Anita MacLeod. MacLeod taught creative writing and romantics in the English Department, and had recently published his first collection of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976), which Mitchell admired greatly.

MacLeod had suggested that Mitchell be considered as writer-­in-­residence when Joyce Carol Oates left in the spring of 1979. He had met Mitchell five years earlier:

The first time I remember being with him was when we brought him in for a reading. I was with him from about 10:00 until late afternoon. I was kind of in awe of him at the time because he was the legend that he was, and I was considerably younger. I remember saying, “Now we will go to the bookstore.” Then the bookstore would phone and ask where he was. And so on. The photographer called up. Bill would say, “What time is it? I guess we have time for a drink.” We got along well. Then I had the courage to tell him that we ­didn’t have time. What had happened was that his watch was on Calgary time so he had spent the whole day being late for every single thing. People would phone up and say, “You are supposed to be here at 2:00,” and I would tell him that and he would look at his watch and say, “Okay,” but his watch was reading 12:00. . . . I had a whole campus furious with me.

In September Merna and Bill found an apartment and settled in. Right from the start they both liked Windsor for its friendliness, its openness, its ethnic mix, and its core of blue-­collar workers who understood and cared about people when they were down and out. Bill remembered an incident with a young university graduate who was given a jacket on credit and loaned $200 on faith by a shopkeeper, which reminded him of his own experiences in Calgary during the Depression. Surprisingly, they did not find Windsor Americanized: “In fact, Windsor is much more intensely Canadian in our view than Calgary is.”

Mitchell was immediately at home in the English department. He could be heard banging away on the electric typewriter (he destroyed three typewriters at Windsor alone) from about eleven to four every day, including Saturdays and Sundays. Quite soon his office took on the Mitchell ambience of brown snuff and tea stains. Pungent eucalyptus scent and brown smudges permeated everything, including his manuscript pages and, to the amusement of the secretaries, every part of Mitchell himself — shirt fronts, fingers, moustache, and hair. When he had to look presentable for an interview, he would take off his turtleneck and put it on backwards, sporting a clean front. Beth Proctor, one of the English department secretaries, made him a bib, but that did not last long.

He made friends with a number of faculty members, and would burst from his office seeking the nearest colleague to read aloud a portion from his current novel. Tom Dilworth, professor of English and one of Bill’s frequent captives, described him as an Ancient Mariner monologist — dramatic and compelling, but very time-­demanding. He had a “huge ego,” not an offensive one, but “very healthy” because “built into this is a kind of generosity and consideration and benevolence which is really rare.”4 At times, though, Dilworth and others would see Bill coming down the hall and would close their doors, because a promised ten-­minute reading from him could easily turn into a two-­hour session. Bev Stahlbrand, assistant to the chair of English, was in charge of Mitchell’s secretarial and agenda needs. She nicknamed him “the human yo-­yo” because of his cross-­country book tours and reading schedules. As always, when he discovered someone he liked, professional boundaries disappeared. Bev became one of his most frequent listeners for whatever book he was working on, and she and her family became close friends with Merna and Bill.