The contrary optimist: James H. Gray painted the West in exuberant and contrasting colours.

How the West Was Written: The Life and Times of James H. Gray Brian Brennan Fifth House 226 pages, softcover ISBN 9781894856621

This is the only place in the world to which more than a million immigrants were herded in a single decade ... No provision of any importance was made by any government to house, feed, succour, clothe or support them ... Whether they lived in the cities, towns or on homesteads, their survival required that they help one another ... With such ancestors, it is no accident that Prairie people have long been leaders of movements for social reform, because social reform is only a high-blown synonym for helping one another.

--James Gray, 1974

James Gray had just taken a break from research and writing to travel from his home in Calgary back to Winnipeg, where he had grown up. He was going to receive an honorary degree from the University of Manitoba, having published five books of western history in eight years and written himself into the hearts of readers right across the country. His sixth would come out within the year. This would be remarkable for anyone, at any age; but his first book (The Winter Years, about the Depression) had been published when he was 60.

It was a labour of love, a memorial to those who had survived as well as those who had not. But it was tough love, and it was hard labour. He had written a first draft 20 years earlier, which was rejected by several publishers. He tinkered with it for the next decade or so (while he worked and raised a family), and then took it back to Macmillan (which had turned it down earlier). They asked him to expand it, which he did over the next couple of years; and then--any writer could predict this--they asked him to cut it back.

Gray was principled, but he was also practical. "The only thing a writer should ever do, because it is the only thing he can ever do: write," he once remarked. After another year of working with a series of editors to cut the manuscript from 130,000 to 90,000 words--burning off the righteous indignation, tempering the sentimentality and shaping the style so that his sardonic voice and sly intelligence came through--the book finally came out. Its title was taken from the 18th-century English poet William Cowper, who wrote that winter was "the ruler of the inverted year." During the 1930s, Gray noted, "all values were turned upside down."

Except the values of fortitude and faith. The reading public loved the book, and to Gray's perennially insecure delight, most professional historians did too. There were, of course, some complaints. Barry Broadfoot grumbled that "Gray has told his story as a city man. Some day, some farmer will sit down and tell his story"--and then Broadfoot made that happen, publishing a remarkable set of oral histories (including Ten Lost Years and The Pioneer Years) over the next couple of decades. But Gray was a writer, and he wanted to tell stories--especially other people's stories--in his own way. Besides, he was already at work on a book about those very same farmers, and about the scientists and engineers of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration and the prairie universities who worked with them to maintain farmland in the fertile belt called the Palliser Triangle. It was "the greatest Canadian success story since the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway," wrote Gray with characteristic understatement.

We hear a lot these days about living in a knowledge-based society. No society in the history of the world has been without knowledge; and one of the reasons Gray has such appeal is that he understood this, and insisted that respect was due to the men and women of the West not just for their courage and caring, their determination and dignity, but for their knowledge of how to live and what to do. Men Against the Desert was a tribute to the people of the prairie farmlands and to the way in which they used their knowledge of soil erosion and grain crops and grasslands and grasshoppers to live with forces that were ultimately beyond their control. Religion shows us how to surrender to such forces; science shows us we do not always have to. That is why, from time immemorial, religion and science have gone hand in hand on the prairies.

Macmillan was not sure about publishing another book on the West right away, so Gray, always ready to turn a page, took it to the farmer-owned Western Producer Prairie Books. He was not pleased with the look of the book, nor by its initial sales; but within a few years it was into its second printing, and Gray was into his fifth book, having written two more in the meantime.

The first of them was A Boy from Winnipeg, in which he exorcised some demons and described his early life. Brian Brennan picks up the portrait in his very readable biography, How the West Was Written: The Life and Times of James H. Gray, catching the complexity of a man who described himself at the end of his life as "a little bit of everyone I have ever met." It is a good story, and Brennan--a fellow traveller--recreates the illusion of transparency that distinguishes Gray's style so well that it is sometimes hard to tell who said what.

Gray's next book, Red Lights on the Prairies, became a classic of western history. It was about what he called "the first major industry of the Prairies," prostitution, and the "real pioneers," the prostitutes. This was what Jamaicans call "the half that's never been told," and Gray's telling is always filled with compassion and clear in its sympathies. Writing about the 1930s federal government relief camp program, he described the 20 cents a day paid to the workers as "just the right size to be insulting"--"it affronted human dignity as little else could have done."

He might have agreed with Oscar Wilde: "to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less." Then again, he might not have agreed. Gray believed in the Victorian virtues of industry and thrift, and hard work was an antidote to hard times. Furthermore, he embraced the ideology of the frontier, a place of both peril and possibility, and felt that its history of struggle was an inheritance to be cherished.

Here we come to another side of James Gray. For all his enthusiasm for people who did things, people who thought about them were even more important to him. He left school at 16 to go to work, and his serious engagement with ideas and books began ten years later when he was sent (in those ancient days before penicillin) to a tuberculosis sanatorium. There he met a man named Johnny Timchuk, who told him that "people like us, with tuberculosis or on relief, are living in Utopia ... For the first time in history, people like us can stop worrying about making our own living, because society is keeping us. Think of that! It is giving us a chance only the wealthy once enjoyed--to understand the world in which we live." It was an inspiring attitude; and Gray became very well read. He also became convinced that you had to be an optimist to live on the prairies. He was not religious, but he was a man of deep faith.

One of the things that tested Gray's faith in the future of the country was an attitude that had considerable currency in the corridors of federal and financial power back east--that the West of Canada was there to provide food, fuel and raw material to the East, which could then sell it back at a profit. It was embodied in the iniquitous Crow Rates, the freight tariff system that made it more expensive to ship supplies from Calgary to Edmonton than Calgary to Toronto, and the ways in which the East underdeveloped the West were a regular grumble there when I was growing up--and Gray was gathering steam--during the 1940s and '50s. Transfer payments to provide a minimum level of social, medical and educational services across the country--recommended by the 1940 Rowell-Sirois Report--offered some hope, and so did the oil discovered at Leduc in 1947. But for Gray, the only real solution was education: understanding the world in which we live.

So at an age when many of us are contemplating retirement, he dedicated himself to writing books that would explain the West both to westerners themselves and to the rest of the country: a dozen of them over 25 years, the last--a major biography of R.B. Bennett--when he was 85. They all reflected Gray's perennial optimism and his pride in being Canadian. In Brian Brennan's words, "when he talked about the impact of the Great Depression on the farmers of the Prairies, he portrayed it not as the conventional saga of unrelieved poverty, drought, and misery, but as a great opportunity that presented itself when scientists and farmers got together to fight the destructive forces of nature and develop new agricultural techniques. And when he talked about the aftermath of the Depression, instead of echoing the standard line of western provincial politicians who blamed the eastern banks for destroying the western economy, he opted instead to look at the positive and praise the federal government for introducing such beneficial social programs as family allowances, unemployment insurance, and improved old-age pensions." And then Gray's legendary contrariness would kick in, as he described how people lived through the 1920s and '30s without help from "the esoteric hallucinations of Socialism, Fascism or Social Credit."

The contrary and the contradictory were at the heart of Gray's work, and they make it continually fascinating. Professionally researched, his books parade their popular appeal; antagonistic to many forms of government regulation and union control, they celebrate collective enterprise and progressive social policies, and consistently complicate our notion of both progress and community. His book Booze, which followed Red Lights on the Prairies, chronicled the extravagances that went along with drinking in the West, but it also showed that prohibition (which had wide popular support in its early years on the prairies) really worked: the crime rate was halved, bank savings doubled, jails were closed and domestic violence sharply diminished. There is no doubt that Gray's own childhood as the son of an alcoholic father influenced the passion he brought to bear on this subject; but there is also no doubt, as Michael Bliss noted when the book came out, that this was "one of the most important insights that any historian ever had about prohibition."

When he finally made some money, Gray bought a small farm near Calgary. He called it Grasmere, after the village in the Lake District where Wordsworth made his home. There was romanticism there, to be sure. But there was also a fellow feeling with Wordsworth, who was not merely an imperial icon but a man (like Gray) living on the margins of a country divided into the haves and the have-nots, which in the English geography of the time translated into north and south rather than west and east. And Wordsworth wrote about his northern people--including its beggars and gypsies and leech gatherers and mad mothers and idiot boys--in ways that went beyond their poverty and deprivation to their dignity and hard-won wisdom. Wordsworth was Gray's kind of writer.

But there was another side to Gray, which some might call postmodern. In fact it was older than the hills, and it confirmed him in the company of tellers of tales around the world from time immemorial. "It could have happened. It should have happened. A great many people believe it did happen," Gray wrote about one incident he included in Red Lights on the Prairies. And again, about The Winter Years, "more lies have probably been told about the weather of the Dirty Thirties than any other subject except sex; yet most of the lies could have been true." He framed a letter he got from H.L. Mencken about a piece of investigative reporting that he had written for the Winnipeg Free Press. "Your story of the Winnipeg uproar is magnificent. In fact, it seems almost too good to be true." Good stories are always ceremonies of belief, often in the unbelievable.

Like all good storytellers, and all good historians, James Gray was a believer first and a skeptic afterward. He specialized in taking anecdotes and making them into parables, putting imagined events side by side with real ones in order to make a point. When the imagined events actually happened, that made it history. His subjects were popular--whoring and boozing, the weather and politics--but his method was professional. And so was his apprenticeship; he wrote more than 200,000 unpublished words before he ever sold a story.

But his dedication to the written word came at a price. He does not take up the oral traditions of the settlers, nor their music, and although he was sympathetic to their situation, aboriginal peoples appear mostly in passing--which is just how they appeared to many of the settlers. Their oral histories, which are just now coming to be appreciated for the disciplined and diverse historical record they provide, hardly figure at all in his account. And for someone who loved horses as much as he did--and as I do--he says surprisingly little about them at a time when they still held a place in the hearts and on the homesteads of the people of the prairies. But you can't expect everything, not even from Jimmie Gray.

Which brings us back to Johnny Timchuck in the TB sanatorium. At the end of the day, Gray will be remembered most of all for his abiding sense of hope and possibility. It is not a small thing, then or now. Instead of lamenting the nation, Gray sang a praise song to its prairie people and, instead of writing off its future, he talked about the "New Canada" and of the place of mavericks in its history. In many ways, he was one of them, and he inspired others: "a jaunty slender man who could write like hell and was afraid of no one," recalled Scott Young, writing as a columnist for The Globe and Mail. (He had been an 18-year-old editorial assistant at the Winnipeg Free Press when Gray was in the newsroom there.) Young continued: James Gray "writes with wit and a feeling for anecdote; but he also sees events against the big background of the nation. It is quite a combination." It is indeed. And it is a tribute to Brennan's book that he makes us want to go back and read Gray himself.

J. Edward Chamberlin is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His latest book, Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations, was published by Bluebridge in 2006.