PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Mr. Jim Martell, 11 June 1945. MS-2-202 44.8.
Subject HeadingsAs he listens to the provincial general election returns come in, T. H. Raddall pens a letter to his good friend, the archivist Dr. James Martell. Raddall comments that he admired the local Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) candidate's belief in the rights of the poor but totally disagreed with his uncritical support of trade unions and the way he had represented the management of the Mersey Paper Company. Turning from current politics, Raddall discusses possible story ideas and tells Martell he has finally decided to do a story on Nova Scotia privateers. Unable to do personal research in the Caribbean, Raddall asks Martell for possible printed sources and consoles himself that many classics had been based on secondary sources. Raddall notes another recently published novel about privateers was second rate and would not pose serious competition for his proposed work. Raddall concludes by mentioning he would do a book on Halifax after he had finished the novel in response to the urging of his American publisher, Doubleday Doran.
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June 11th, 1945. Dear Jim, Election Night, and it is pouring rain and pouring (9 p.m.) Liberal votes. I found our friend J.W.A.'s card under my door one evening when Edith and I returned from Milton, otherwise I have seen and heard nothing of him1 during the campaign. I do admire his courage and his profound belief in the rights of the poor, but I couldn't admire his party. I worked during a good part of my life for capitalistic corporations, and retired with a full know- ledge of the evils thereof, seen from within. Not the least of these evils is the power of the trade unions. Does that sound strange? It is the truth. And since organised labor has adopted the CCF as a political weapon,2 it follows that a government by the CCF would mean a government by labor unions. And the attitude of the labor unions during this war has shown very clearly what that would mean to the great body of the people -- naked exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few, exactly what the people suffer under capitalism. In other words, the CCf proposes simply that we change masters. And my observation of labor unions at close range over a period of 16 years taught me that organised labor and organised capital are alike in their greed and their indifference to the common man. Right now, taking advantage of the wartime fuel shortage, the miners of Cape Breton are demanding still higher wages, to be paid out of a new subsidy from the government, in other words, to be wrung out of the whole population in the form of taxes. They admit that the companies cannot pay them any more; they have bled their own industry white and now they propose to fasten themselves upon the people as a whole. That is precisely the aim and object of the louse, an unloved beast. J.W.A. talked a good deal here about the Mersey Paper Company,3 and the profits it had made out of the workers. Well, I know all about that. I joined the treasurer's staff of the company when the mill was being built, and for nine years every cent received and disbursed by the industry passed through my hands -- including the millions it borrowed from the bank. Those were the famous Depression Years, beloved by the CCF orators. During all that time the Mersey mill managed to run fill time, day and night, by cutting its price to meet the competition in the U.S. market and elsewhere, and by cutting down expenses wherever possible at home. During all that time the top-drawer executives continued to pay themselves fat salaries and expense accounts. During all that time the organised labor demanded and got a steadily increasing rate of wages. The papermakers in particular got $150 a month in the lowest paid jobs to $350 in the highest; they averaged something between $200 and $300 a month for an 8-hour day. And where did the money come from? Not from the customers, who paid nothing more than the world market rate for paper. It had to be screwed out of the ordinary white-collar workers (I was one, remember); out of the lumberjacks who cut the wood; out of the sailors who carried the paper to market; and finally (because in spite of all these economies the mill went into the red) it had to be taken from the shareholders -- the several hundred people scattered all over Canada and Great Britain who had invested money in the concern. The shareholders got no dividends of any sort for nine years, and shortly after I left the company in 1938 the shareholders had to submit to a reduction of their investment by something like half, in order to put the industry on an even keel. I used to tell J.W.A. all this but it made no impression. He preferred to believe the red-hot union men who were backing the local CCF movement. Today I had a letter from Doubleday Doran4 pointing out that it's time I started another novel for publication in 1946. I was well aware of this, and as you know for the past year I've been turning various themes in my mind. I made an intensive study of the Sir John Wentworth period,5 but somehow that all-important little bell wouldn't ring. Then I turned to the Joe Howe period6 and studied it carefully all last winter. Again no bell. Something wrong with me, undoubtedly, for there is fine material in both. Some day the bell will ring -- thank God I have the memory of an elephant and the study is not lost. In the meantime I must get on with another book, and since I've long felt that I should do a story on the Nova Scotia privateers7 -- and I seem to hear the jingle of the bell -- that is what I propose to write. The particular period will be somewhere between 1793 and 1803, when the Liverpool privateers were having a fine time in the Caribbean. Much of the action necessarily will take place there. As you pointed out, this will oblige me to break my rule of writing only about scenes I have seen. But there is no help for it; I must remedy my lack of local observation -- I've seen Bermuda and that's all -- with careful study. Anything you have or can dig up on the Jamaica, St. Kitts, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Venezuela of the period would be most useful. I have some here. Charles Kingsley8 wrote "Westward Ho" on the strength of a travel book; Stevenson9 wrote "Treasure Island" on the strength of an old American Coast Pilot10 published in Newburyport (I have one at my elbow now, formerly the property of a Liverpool privateersman, and the description of the Dead Man's Chest is lovely); and Conrad wrote "Nostromo"11 on the strength of a single brief touch at a central American port in his youth plus a study of books on the country. All these are classics. Surely I can write a half-decent novel by the same means; and the Nova Scotia end of things will be right out of the native rock. Indeed the Caribbean end of things won't be entirely dreamed out of a book, for I've talked for years with old sailors hereabout who went to those ports and islands in sailing ships in the good old fish and lumber days. The connection between Liverpool and the West Indies has been very close always. With all this in mind, I was a bit shocked the other day to read a review of a book called "Ask No Quarter",12 which purported to be the tale of a Connecticut privateer operating in the Caribbean. It looked as if someone had stolen my thunder before I got a chance to rumble at all. However I got a copy of the thing and heaved a sigh of relief. A poor thing, truly, pitched in the 1600's, with characters talking in a form of speech never heard in God's world, doing things quite unsupported by the history books for chapters on end, and barely touching on the Caribbean at all. I suspect that the author had been reading one or two of Robert Chambers' old novels13 and suffered a sort of literary hangover. Doubleday Doran reminded me also about the proposed book on Halifax, but they want me to do the novel first. This is all to the good, because (as I pointed out to them before) Halifax has undergone a vast change during this war, and a vast experience as well, and all that can be written only when the censors and other don't-you-touch-'ems have withdrawn from the scene. Love to Olga. See you in July -- unless you come down here first! |
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4. Doubleday, Doran & Co. were THR's American publishers from 1942 to 1947.
12. THR is referring to Ask No Quarter by George Tracy Marsh (New York: W. Morrow & Co., 1945).