Shine on, Master Gatherer
Or, just one more thing on Colombo
To avoid defeat at a cocktail party, all you need is 6,000 three-by-five index cards and a lifetime of concentration.
That’s what I learned in writing the profile of John Robert Colombo that appeared in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail. I tracked down the 86-year-old Canadian writer after coming across one of his many, many books in a Little Free Library, and was pleased to discover that he remains as sharp as a hockey skate.
Colombo is best known for compiling Colombo’s Canadian Quotations, the 1974 reference book that launched his literary career and spawned seven sequels. With digressions into poetry, history, indigenous lore, and the paranormal, he’s written more than 200 books.
He hopped through publishers as fast as Canada could create them: Hurtig, Penguin, Dundurn, General, and Douglas & McIntyre. Now, he self-publishes, a practice he calls not vanity but sanity publishing. There’s a reason the book about putting out books in this country is called The Perilous Trade.
In our conversations over email and in his backyard, Colombo sounded a few melancholy notes about money. He accurately observed that he’d made a career overestimating the curiosity of the Canadian people, a quip I used as my opener. He gratefully acknowledged that his wife Ruth, for many years a professor at Centennial College, “contributed mightily.”
Of course, no one asked for this volume of volumes. “If there were a Canadian appetite for ‘quote books,’ there would be half a dozen Canadian writers producing them,” he told me. “I defined a need.”
Whose need, though? If all Colombo’s quotation books are out of print and the financial success of his books was less than overwhelming, how should his success be measured? I asked him that question and didn’t get a direct answer, at least not immediately.
Colombo gathered many honorifics in his career, the most badass clearly being “Canada’s Master Gatherer,” bestowed upon him by the poet Robin Skelton. When I pitched the profile to the Globe, I couldn’t resist billing it as “Twilight of the Master Gatherer,” a headline that sounds like a Tolkien quest.
After the piece appeared, Colombo mentioned in passing that many old friends had contacted him and that “All of them liked it though two of them disputed the word ‘twilight’ in the title.”
Sure, he’s beat the life expectancy of a man born in 1936 by more than 20 years, but I see the point. Colombo continues to gather quotations “against the fall of night,” as he writes, quoting the A.E. Housman poem “Smooth Between Sea and Land,” which likens all human achievement to writing words in the sand.
To what end? I think of the Addison line: “Why should we do anything for posterity when posterity has never done anything for us?” And this terrific Tshimshan proverb I found in Colombo’s Canadian Quotations:
“A deer, although toothless, may accomplish something.”
In his ninth decade, John Robert Colombo is a case study in what neurologists call cognitive resilience. His coat of arms features the word “alert” in three languages, and it’s correct in all of them. He may well live on in the hearts and speeches of Canadians but he’s definitely living on in a tidy split-level house in North York. That’s the answer to my question about his success, then, and a correction to my suggested headline: The Master Gatherer continues to shine.
Quick quips; lightning:
All Colombo edition
“Canada could have enjoyed English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with English know-how, French government, and American culture.”
— John Robert Colombo, originally published as the poem ‘O Canada’ in 1965
“I would renounce, therefore, the attempt to create heaven on earth and would focus instead on reducing the hell.”
— Alan Borovoy, founder of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association
“English was good enough for Jesus Christ.”
— Ralph Melnyk, Saskatchewan farmer, expressing his displeasure with official bilingualism in a 1963 interview with Time magazine
“The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.”
— Jan Morris
“I’m world-famous,” Dr. Parks said, “all over Canada.”
— Mordecai Richler
“Life. Consider the alternative.”
— Marshall McLuhan
Speaking of…
Prolific Canadians
Get Wit Quick No. 157 was as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances but hopefully not a worthwhile Canadian initiative. According to this enjoyable B.D. McClay essay in Gawker, the only writer anyone will remember in 200 years is Sheila Heti. A Canadian! We did it! I solved the riddle of posterity by printing my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting on nuclear pasta, the strongest material in the universe, according to a Canadian! Of course, a tap on the ❤️ below also helps.