William Faulkner Drunk in the Cockpit of a Biplane
Plus: a Toronto folk music legend, an extraordinary new discovery, and more.
William Faulkner liked to drink. A lot. He once claimed all he needed to write was paper, food, tobacco and whisky — emphasis on the whisky. When famous director Howard Hawks asked the author to write the screenplay for a movie called Road To Glory, Faulkner showed up to the script meeting with a brown paper bag under his arm. As they got down to work, he pulled a bottle of bourbon out of the bag and sliced his finger open trying to unscrew the cap. Then, as he bled all over the place, instead of, oh say, taking a break, he just dragged a wastepaper basket next to his chair so he could bleed into it while he kept drinking. And the reason Faulkner was into that kind of ridiculous, performative masculinity seems to have something to do with the time he spent in Toronto during the final days of the First World War.
Faulkner was still a teenager growing up in Mississippi when the United States entered the war. He watched his brother head off to fight in the trenches of France and wanted to follow his lead. So he dropped out of school and tried to enlist in the army. But Faulkner wasn't a tall man, only about 5'5", so he was rejected.
For a while, he kicked around, not quite sure what he'd do. But then he ended up at a party where he met a Canadian officer who had an idea. He figured Faulkner could sneak into the Royal Flying Corps by pretending to be British.
Now, it's probably safe to assume Faulkner was pretty drunk at that party, but this kind of scheme was right up his alley anyway. He loved pranks. He and a friend used to get a kick out of sending famous poems into magazines so they could collect the rejection slips. They got notes from editors who were unimpressed with iconic works like "Kubla Khan," sending responses like, "We like your poem, Mr. Coleridge, but we don't think it gets anywhere much." And so, Faulkner eagerly threw himself into his new challenge: teaching himself how to pretend to be British.
He worked with a tutor for weeks on end, turning his iconic Mississippi drawl into an English accent. He grew a moustache because he thought moustaches looked English, changed his name from "Falkner" to "Faulkner" because he thought the “u” would make the spelling look more English, and even invented a fictional English vicar named Mr. Edward Twimberly-Thorndyke who sent glowing letters of recommendation to the British Consulate in New York City.
So, when Faulkner turned up at the consulate with his English accent and his English moustache and his English letter "u", they signed him up right away. Although to be honest, they may not have been particularly motivated to see through his disguise. The British had been in the war from the beginning; they’d fighting for years by that point. They were desperate for new recruits, willing to take just about anyone who wasn't already dead yet.
That's how William Faulkner ended up in Toronto. Our city had been transformed by the war. It was now a major military hub, especially for the Royal Flying Corps. Toronto had been home to the first airfield in Canada (built in Etobicoke down by the lake) and many others had now joined it: there was one at Leaside, another near Wilson & Avenue Road, a third at the Exhibition Grounds… A big chunk of the University of Toronto had been turned into an aeronautics school. Colleges became sleeping quarters for recruits. Tents were pitched on the lawns. Biplanes buzzed overhead. It was an exciting time for flying in Toronto. Ontario’s own Billy Bishop was celebrated as one of the greatest fighter pilots in the world, facing off against the Red Baron and shooting down more German planes than just about anyone else. As I wrote about in the newsletter last year, Amelia Earhart was in Toronto at the time, serving as a nurse at a military hospital; it was because she was so inspired by all the flying she saw here that she decided to become a pilot herself.
It must have all been pretty thrilling to a young man like Faulkner, who soon arrived for his training. It had only been about fifteen years since the Wright Brothers' first flight; you had to be pretty brave to climb into one of those rickety biplanes on a peaceful day, never mind when Germans were trying to shoot you out of the sky. The average lifespan for a pilot during the war was something like eleven days. For Faulkner, it must have seemed like the perfect opportunity to prove his courage.
In Toronto, he studied hard, became popular with the other recruits — regaling them with limericks so dirty that even on the internet every source I find says they're "unprintable" — and looked forward to the day he'd get to fight in Europe.
But that day never came.
On November 11, 1918, while Faulkner was still in training, the war ended — or as he put it: "The war quit on us before we could do anything about it."
The news arrived in the dead of the night and as Toronto awoke to discover peace had come, the city burst into a spontaneous celebration. People poured into the streets. Songs broke out. Horns and whistles blew. Church bells rang out. The mayor announced a ticker-tape parade. Floats marched down King Street; people threw paper and talcum powder into the air. A car was parked on the lawn outside Queen's Park so a tank could crush it in an act of jubilation. And at U of T, all the recruits at the aeronautics school were given the rest of the day off.
Which for William Faulkner, of course, meant drinking.
...and flying. He packed the cockpit of a biplane full of bourbon, climbed in, and took off. A lot of historians seem to think that it was the first time he had ever flown alone in his entire life. But that didn’t stop him from doing tricks. Sweeping 180 degree arcs. The challenging Immelmann turn, so dangerous that the German ace it was named after, Max Immelmann, died while doing an Immelmann turn. And then, finally, a huge upside down loop which, according to Faulkner, would have been perfect — except that right at the bottom, a hanger got in the way.
Faulkner's plane smashed through the roof and got lodged in the rafters. For years afterward, the writer would walk with a limp. He'd have a crook in his nose for the rest of his life. But as he hung there upside down in the cockpit, Faulkner was unfazed. He just pulled out some more bourbon and kept drinking.
MY MOST POPULAR ONLINE HISTORY COURSE STARTS VERY SOON!
The story of William Faulkner on Armistice Day is just one of the tales we cover in the biggest and most popular of all my online Toronto history courses. And in case you missed the news last week, I’m kicking off 2023 by bringing it back. From Hogtown To Downtown: The History of Toronto in 10 Weeks is an overview of the whole history of the city in ten weekly lectures pack full of fascinating stories.
It will begin on the night of Sunday, January 22 — that’s next Sunday! And if you’re interested but concerned you might have to miss some classes, don’t worry — all the lectures will be recorded and posted to a private YouTube playlist so you can watch them whenever you like.
It should be a fun way to spend some Sunday nights during the coldest time of the year. Hope some of you can join us!
REMEMBERING TORONTO’S COWBOY FOLK SINGER
Last week, I wrote about Michael Snow’s death. But he wasn’t the only cultural icon Toronto lost over the last few weeks. Ian Tyson passed away at the age of 89, having been one of the giants of the 1960s Yorkville music scene.
It all started with a bucking bronco. Ian Tyson had been born in Victoria and went to art school in Vancouver; he would eventually move to Toronto to work as a commercial artist. But it wasn’t his art that would make him famous, it was his music. And that started with the horse.
Tyson was a rodeo rider in his youth. And when a bronco in Calgary threw him off its back and stepped on his ankle, it sent the young man into surgery, his leg pieced back together with pins. He was forced to spend two weeks recovering in a hospital ward, looking for ways to pass the time. “The kid in the bed next to me had a guitar,” he later told The Globe, “and I started to learn this song I kept hearing on the radio. The singer was an Arkansas-born guy, about my age, whose name was Johnny Cash.” Those two weeks would change his life.
Tyson soon hitchhiked his way to Toronto, arriving in the late 1950s, a time when the city’s music folk music scene was about to explode. The coffeehouses of Yorkville — and the low rents demanded by the neighbourhood’s crumbling old Victorian houses — were beginning to attract artist, writers and musicians from all over the continent. Joni Mitchell. Neil Young. Gordon Lightfoot. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Zal Yanovsky and The Mama & The Papas’ Denny Doherty. The list goes on and on…
Tyson began playing those coffehouses as a solo artist, spending his nights on stage at the Village Corner (on Avenue Road, just north of Davenport). But he soon received an exciting phonecall. A friend was at a party where a young woman had begun to sing; Sylvia Fricker was still a teenager, freshly arrived from Chatham. The friend was so blown away by her voice, he immediately called Tyson and got him to listen to her performance. The next day, Tyson and Fricker met up and decided to become a double-act. A few years later, they’d get married.
By then, Ian & Sylvia had skyrocketed to fame, becoming one of the most popular folk acts in the country. They had the same manager as Bob Dylan, performed with legendary artists at the Newport Folk Festival, played on the famous Festival Express tour, and eventually helped pioneer the genre of country rock. They’ve been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. And the “Four Strong Winds” is widely considered to be one of the greatest in Canadian history — picked as the greatest by CBC Radio listeners back in 2005.
Before we continue, just a very quick reminder that The Toronto History Weekly will only survive if enough of you are willing to switch to a paid subscription. Only about 5% of readers have made the switch so far, which basically means that by offering a few dollars a month you’ll be giving the gift of Toronto history to 20 other people. You can make the switch by clicking here:
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
LITHUANIAN LOST TREATIES NEWS — An extraordinary discovery was recently made in a Toronto garbage can: the lost Lithuanian Treaties, which had been missing for nearly a century, play a foundational role in the history of the Lithuanian nation and feature “Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s official stamp. Vladimir Lenin’s scrawl. The signatures of King George V, Pope Pius XI, U.S. presidents Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, among others.” Read more.
STUFF THE BRITISH STOLE NEWS — One of my very favourite podcasts is Stuff The British Stole, which has recently been turned into a TV show you can stream on CBC Gem. And one of the new episodes has a little Toronto connection: an interview with a Torontonian descendent of the Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, who wanted Queen Victoria to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Watch a clip.
GOOD NEWS FOR CARTOGRAPHY NERDS NEWS — A new account has popped up on Twitter, dedicated to sharing maps from Toronto history, including this neat one of our city’s first Chinatown:
THREATENED MANSION NEWS — I’ve been writing a lot recently about the Ford government’s changes to Ontario’s heritage laws. Michael Schmee reports on some of the fallout that’s already being fell, with staff scrambling over the future of a 137 year-old house. Read more.
CAUTIONARY CASTLE NEWS — Shawn Micallef looks back at the history of Casa Loma, using it as a warning for Doug Ford’s plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars turning a big chunk of Ontario Place’s public parkland into a monster of a private spa. Read more.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL FASCISM NEWS — Fascists have been known to use UFO conspiracy theories as a hook to get people thinking about much more disturbing lies. At TVO, Daniel Panneton talks about that history and the notorious Torontonian fascist who helped pioneer the practice. Read more.
PROPHETIC WITCH NEWS — Who wouldn’t want their weather reports to come from a tiny witch trapped inside a birdhouse?
NON-EXISTENT HIGHWAY NEWS — Gideon Forman of the David Suzuki Foundations remembers growing up next door to Jane Jacobs, looking back at her fight against the Spadina Expressway as the fight against Doug Ford’s new Greenbelt-paving highways plans heats up. Read more.
FLATIRON NEWS — The Gooderham Building has been standing in the triangular slot of land at Front, Church and Wellington since the late 1800s. Sabrina Gamrot heads inside to give us a peek. Read more.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
CURATOR’S TALK: LEONARD COHEN: EVERYBODY KNOWS
January 20 — 6pm — AGO
“Join exhibition curator and the AGO’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Julian Cox for a talk describing his research and exploring the themes of Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows, a landmark exhibition dedicated to the life and times of iconic Canadian artist Leonard Cohen.”
$10, or $5 for members
LIVING IN INTERESTING TIMES: TWO LOYALIST
January 23 — 7:30pm — Both online & at Lansing United Church — Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society
“While building out his family tree, Rick Hill was surprised to discover a 3rd great-grandmother who could have boasted that three of her four grandparents were United Empire Loyalists—and she had a Loyalist great-grandfather, too! During the American Revolutionary War, these UEL ancestors—Henry Dennis, his son John, John’s wife Martha (née Brown), and Lawrence Johnson—all fled Pennsylvania. Three of the four made it out of the future USA, first to Nova Scotia, and ultimately to York Township and the Town of York in Upper Canada. Their stories include the Battle of St. Lucia, the Quaker religion, losing a husband at sea, founding a settlement that banned slave masters, shipbuilding in Kingston, ill-starred actions in the War of 1812, a house at the corner of King & Yonge, a Methodist bishop, and the first customer of a new burial ground.”
Free, I believe!
HISTORY IN THE EVERYDAY LANDSCAPE: NEW FINDINGS, NEW INTERPRETATIONS
January 24 — 7pm — Online — The Beaches and East Toronto Historical Society
“Local historian and author Richard White has written fascinating stories about a number of little known historical locations in the Beach. He will be presenting an outline of these ‘Everyday Landscapes’ in an online illustrated talk.”
Free!
TORONTO MAYORS FROM MUDDY YORK TO MEGACITY
January 25 — 7pm — Online — North Toronto Historical Society
“Long-time NTHS member Frank Nicholson will take us on a tour of our city’s history from 1834 as seen through the eyes of around ten of our 65 chief magistrates. He will include William Lyon Mackenzie (our first mayor), W.H. Boulton (the last Family Compact mayor), Tommy Church (the ‘Father of the TTC’), Leslie Saunders (an Orange Order militant), Nathan Phillips (the ‘Mayor of All the People’) and David Crombie (our ‘Tiny Perfect Mayor’).”
Free, I believe!
THE LEGACY OF THE SLAVE TRADE IN CANADA
February 2 — 7pm — Gerrard/Ashdale Library
& Feburary 15 — 12:30pm — City Hall Library
“Author Andrew Hunter presents a reading and conversation about his new book "It Was Dark There All The Time: Sophia Burhen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada". Joining the author will be Karen Harkins (Toronto Culture Division), Adrienne Shadd (author; "The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto!") and Charmaine Lurch (artist/educator) as they discuss the book and provide an examination and reflection on the history of chattel slavery and its legacy of racism in Canada.”
Free! Registration is encouraged for the February 15 event.
BY THE LIGHT OF THE COAL LAMP: AUTHOR TALK WITH RUTH CAMERON-HOWARD
February 2 — 7pm — Toronto’s First Post Office
“Many people who reside in Toronto share the common experience of growing up in other parts of Canada before they moved to the big city. On the evening of February 2nd, join author Ruth Cameron-Howard in a virtual presentation of her book, “By the Light of the Coal Oil Lamp” as she recounts her experiences of growing up in a rural Saskatchewan town in the 1940s.”
CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES: RESOURCES FOR THE GENEALOGIST
February 27 — 7:30pm — Both online & at Lansing United Church — Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society
“Do you have family tree roots in Toronto? You can discover a lot about a person by researching where they lived. Jessica Algie, from the City of Toronto Archives, will demonstrate, step-by-step, how to find your ancestors in municipal archival records. We’ll start with online resources including maps, city directories and photos, before diving into local tax assessment rolls, which can be treasure troves of information.
“Finally, archivist John Dirks, will give you a sneak peek at an exciting, newly processed collection, Fonds 602, First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, now available for research at the City of Toronto Archives. This collection is of particular interest to genealogists as it includes vital statistics registers of marriages, child dedications and memorial services.”
Free, I believe!
Excellent, as always. Thank you.