And how she grew, and grew, and... SUPPOSE I should have been delighted: in the autumn of1990, a book of mine hit the front pages of eight Canadiandailies. "All crossed up - first female MP poses as a man," declared the MontrealGazette, andothers across the country echoed this story. It concerned my"biography" of John White, a Tory backbencher from 1871 to 1887. White, I had meticulously detailed in At Face Value (McGill-Queen`s University Press, 1990), actually was oneEliza McCormack, a Donegal-born immigrant woman, whilom prostitute, andsuccessfill cross-dresser. So, in this light, the first woman to sitin the parliament of the Dominion of Canada was not Agnes Campbell Macphail,and that was a bit tough on the Queens Printer, who was just then delivering anew postage stamp in honour of our first female MR Trouble is, I was dealingwith the Southam News syndicate, and that`s a bit like trying to discuss neurosurgery with a bunch ofaxe murderers. Subtlety loses out. The syndicate reporter missed a Pretty Obvious fact, namely that what was on trial here was notheavy history, but rather a Canadian rewriting of Moll Flanders. Theclues to that are clearly set out. The main character, Eliza McCormack, istitillated (in several ways) by Defoe-, writings on female pirates, mannish asthey are, sensual, active, and I little constrained by conventions. And just incase anyone missed the tie to Defoe, two revealing (but tasteful) engravingsfrom his writings about female pirates were included. Of course this was Moll Flanders with a difference. Mybrief - self-assigned to be sure - was to rewrite Moll in the persona of apolitically informed, progressive, and (God help us) correct late-20th-centuryhistorian. I thought that the best way to do this was to set the story in19th-century Canada andassume that any literate reader would recogruzze thel8th century subtext. The task became engrossing: what kind ofwoman would Mott have been in that setting? What sort of a voice would she usefor her own narration! Why, that of a setf-empowering female: robust,Subversive, but, being Canadian, secretive in her anarchy. And, inevitably, inequal parts Tory and transvestite.NOW, I must confess to another self-assigned brief,and this was the harder one: I decided not to cheat, that is, not to fake therecords. The trick was to find a real 19th-century Canadian male whosedocumented life made as much, or more, sense if one assumes that he was afemale. That had both a serious and a frivolous purpose. The serious one was toillustrate that gender prejudice is not only rampant, but damned silly, andthat the assumptions we make about human beings when we pin a gender label onthem are so big that we never thereafter have an open mind about his, her, ortheir life. The frivolous part was that in refusingto cheat I intentionally made the job as difficult as possible. Anyone who hasdone the double acrostic at the back of Books in Canada knows there is a lot offun in doing difficult puzzles. And to find just the right robust 19thcenturyCanadian male, and to explain convincingly his whole life as if he wereanything but that, is the sort of exercise that helps to break the boredom ofbeing a writer and especially a writer of history. (I once wrote a small bookbeginning with the index and working backwards, as it were. Try it, it`sdemanding but fun.) That I might run into audience problemsshould have been clear when the freelance copy editor assigned to the volumeattempted to change a reference to Pope`s Essay on Man to Essay on Person, andto alter the words "he" and "she" as they referred to mydarling transvestite to "s/he" or "it." Really. (In herdefence, I should mention that this person was an American, trained by one ofthe major US university presses. This perhaps explains why she attemptedto rewrite a quotation from the Bookof Common Prayer of 1662 into house styleand why she altered all references to "Canada West," meaning Ontario,to "the Canadian West," where the buffalo roam.) What I should havelearned right then is that the line between language that is gender- inflectedand that which is gender- inflicted is a fine one indeed. One person who understood fully what wasgoing on in the book was Philip Cercone, executive director of McGill-Queen`sUniversity Press and one of the brighter stars in the fragile Canadianpublishing industry. He is trained as a historian, but unlike most of myprofessional colleagues in the history business, he actually reads fiction andpoetry as well. Not because he has to: he reads with a gusto that stems fromhis childhood in a small village in the Abruzzi region of Italy, where theystill know how to tell stories and how to listen. Philip understood that apostmodernist speculation about gender issues was an appropriate product for auniversity press. We`re trying to make people think, he said. He got the story. On the other hand, researchers for"The Dini Petty Show" did not. A marvellously adenoidal young manpleaded with me for 20 minutes on the phone to go on the show. He loved thebook and it would go really great, me and some other guests, really great. Theother guests he had in mind were two Toronto lawyers, whose personal sidebarwas to cross-dress, and a madam who rented out her apartment to them so theycould get their makeup on straight and avoid runs in their stockings. "Andyou`d be perfect," he assured me. "You`re an expert." When Iobjected that I had written a book about the empowerment of one 19th-century femalesolicitor and did not want to become involved in the possible disbarment of two20th-century male solicitors of a slightly different sort, he gave up hisstruggle; he saw the point. Quite a few of my professional colleaguesin the history trade did not see any point to the exercise at all. I treasurethe basilisklike review published in Canadian Forum by the former presidentof the Canadian Association of Archivists. He affirmed that "five hundredyears of historical practice and of thinking about history in the western worldsince 1500 have been aimed at getting those writing history to put recordedfact and solid evidence behind what they write." He concluded that"blushing would be appropriate on the part of those responsible for thisbeing offered to the Canadian public as historical biography." He hadn`tread Moll Flanders. Nor, apparently, had the Globe and Mail`s reviewer,who wondered "is it true, or is this feminist revisionism?" (Thebelief that truth and feminist revisionism are incompatible categories isperhaps explicable by the reviewer`s having previously been the author of alife of Malcolm Muggeridge.) And a benumbed professor from Ontario`slowest-rated university (who has spent most of his professional career studyingthe history of divorce in various countries and consequently appearsperpetually stunned) complained that "Akenson`s case is built on shreds ofill-defined evidence, tenuously linked by conjecture and fiction. He hasinterpreted his sparse evidence in favour of his thesis without bothering, itseems, to examine it carefully or to consider other interpretations." PoorMoll, poor Eliza. Who did get it were old pros, tough youngshitheads, lots of feminists, and many of the CanLit people. Doug Fisher (Toronto Sun), grizzledbut still keen, knew what he was reading, and so did Curtis Fahey (Quill & Quire). GeoffHeinrich in Frank mentionedit alongside the works of Brian O`Nolan (whose novel At Swim-TwoBirds, publishedunder the pen name of "Flann O`Brien," is the single most accuratepiece of 20th-century Irish history, if you have a knowledgeable eye). And, ina burst of relevance, he made an oblique, but unmistakable, reference to afamous cross-dressing senator in our modem parliament. Among the feministsthere were lots of shrewd readers, Joanne Page, Mariana Valverde, Pat Johnsonamong them. And the CanLit people - a bunch who actually read outside their ownfield, bless them - did well. Not only did George Woodcock in Canadian Literature immediately pickup the "Defoelike narrative," but he generously added that"rarely have I seen a better exemplification of the relationship betweenreal fiction and the necessary fictions of history. The ancients in theirwisdom had only a single muse for prose, Clio, the goddess of the historicalimagination." Finally, Eliza was introduced to theproper sort of company. Her "biography" was short-listed forOntario`s Trillium award, along with works by Alice Munro, Diane Schoemperlen,and Gabrielle Poulin. Eliza was in classy company at last. The career of my Tory transvestite is farfrom over. The veteran screen writer Kate Philips has just signed on to do thefilm script. Kate is marvellous: you may remember her first screenplay. It wasSteve McQueen`s first movie too: The Blob, a classic. I think my Tory transvestite is going tokeep on growing.