Crosbie book gives the dry heaves

The Reading List for 15 Sep 23

Photo: Coles - Avalon Mall/Facebook

“Jane Crosbie provides a candid, never-before-seen glimpse at a family viewed by many as Newfoundland royalty—from children to charity work to political involvement, from Jane’s unwavering support of her husband, to her anger at those who challenged him.”

Better.

Better get a bucket.

This isn’t really Jane Crosbie’s book. Jerry Cranford and the editorial crowd at Flanker cobbled it together with some help from Ches Crosbie, Jane’s son. This book has no obvious point or purpose except to make a buck flogging the head-up-arse private notes John Crosbie’s wife made for 17 years during their long marriage.

None of the years chosen - 1963 to 1980 - are the ones most people would remember, namely the ones when John was a federal cabinet minister. And in the bit of the saga where there might be some political intrigue to make things interesting - 1968-69, for example - there’s not a lot of insight into what happened when Crosbie challenged Smallwood for the Liberal leadership.

The very first diary entry is for September 10, 1963. “Arrived at the Taft around 5 p.m. The hotel Taft is a dump. Hope to move tomorrow. Good trip up from St. John’s. Went to the Strollers Theatre Club and saw Establishment. Not bad. I almost fell asleep.”

This will be you reading the book. It’s a dump. You hope to move to a better bit but find out that the Establishment - a ludicrous thing like Newfie royalty as made out by Jerry Cranford and his tribe - doesn’t get any better. This isn’t the Waldorf.

It’s not bad: it’s hideous and not falling asleep is the least of your worries. Losing IQ points or smashing your glasses when your head hits the desk are definitely among the fears you should have trolling through the endless entries about life-lint like shopping for clothes for young Ches. And when she isn’t taking Ches for a new pair of pants, Jane and John are off for drinks with this or that or another of the local hoi-polloi or Jane makes a mention of the kids going to the movies, something else on at The Capitol (it was on Henry Street) or going for a feed of Chinese at the Kenmount.

Page 171.

Jan 1 1970. Quite a few callers

Jan 5: Ches Returned to School.

Jan 6: To Marge Murphy’s for a lovely party. Got home 3:00 AM.

These are not edited versions of the book. These are first three entries, in full mind you, on a page chosen randomly.

At the bottom of the page there’s mention of Bill Marshall who wanted John to lead the party. “First time I paid any attention to him,” Jane wrote. “He seems to be a very reasonable person.”

If this were really Jane’s depth, then we can forget every hoary old trope about she who stands behind every supposedly Great Man. One suspects that Cranford and the other butchers who edited this garbage have left out all the meat. The clue is in two appendices, which begs the question of why they are appendices at all. A real writer or editor would have made them the stars of the show with the stuff about logging Ches’ bowel movements getting the heave rather than leaving it in to give the dry heaves to for the fools who bought the book.

One gem appendix is about the Liberal leadership convention. Only three and a half pages and printed for some inscrutable reason in a typeface smaller than the one used for most of the book. There is no context for this bit except that it was written “soon after” the events. And another about a trip to China, both in different fonts, for a completely inscrutable reason.

The thing is this book does not represent Jane’s depth, which is what makes this book not merely disappointing but offensive. You can get some hints of that depth and the complexity of their relationship in Anthony Germaine’s interview with Jane. There is clearly a deeply human story in the relationship between John and Jane that begs to be told and Jane seems still able to tell it. It’s a shame she hasn’t been given the support to do so.

We can only hope that Jane will turn over to the provincial archives or the university’s archive division the full text of the diaries along with other papers she and John had. That will make then available to researchers with everything in them, subject only to the sorts of reasonable limits on use of the information that archives can and do apply until long after the people in them are dead and gone.

If you want to look at worthwhile collections of letters done by friends and family, look at more recent offerings of diaries and correspondence like Alan Rickman’s diary or David Cornwell’s (John Le Carre) letters as examples. There are tedious bits in Rickman’s diary but they are outweighed by the many more sensitive and thoughtful and quirky observations. Cornwell’s letters come with notes by his son who edited them that help the reader with context and detail. They include letters about an affair Cornwell had had with a friend’s wife as well as letters to his publisher and to people involved with turning some of his books into movies or television series. The work is monumental in itself and sadly, Cornwell’s editor-son died the day he’d finished the final edits on the thing before publishing. The Crosbie book cannot hold a candle to either although the subject(s) deserve better than what they - Jane in particular - got.

There are few books, especially local books that I would suggest you not buy. One is a pair of scribbles by Bill Rowe on Premiers. Buy the second one of the pair, if you must, if only because Rowe was so utterly annoyed off by the shit-knocking he’s gotten from me over the years and especially in the review of his first Premier’s book that he devoted four and a half pages of the second book on the best and worst Premiers to your humble e-scribbler.

This Jane Crosbie book does such a disservice to her and her late husband that Flanker and her son Ches should send the entire press run off to a recycling company rather than let any others get out to general circulation. Since that is unlikely to happen, then do your part and leave it on the shelf to discourage Flanker from doing anything like this ever again.

Onward to the reading list…