Henk Harren, bookseller, 1944 – 2011

Henk Harren, owner of Windsor’s The Book Mark, has died of a heart attack. He was 67.

Harren, a native of Holland, came to Canada at 18 to escape the military draft. He opened his downtown bookshop in 1973 and was at the helm until financial pressures forced its closure in 2007. From The Windsor Star:

After studying business at the University of Windsor and getting married, [Harren's daughter, Pauline] Pare said Harren in 1973 began what he knew since age five would be his eventual career — a bookstore proprietor.

[...]

After a long day of selling books, Harren liked to curl up at home in his green-vinyl easy chair, with his wooden pipe and a favourite read. “It was like a scene out of an old illustration,” said Pare.

Being the owner of a small independent bookstore certainly wasn’t about making money, but Pare said people wandering in off the street in need of a few dollars would find a generous businessman. The Book Mark was definitely a browser’s delight, with thousands of titles stacked in apparent randomness.

Douglas Lochhead, 1922-2011

Douglas Lochhead, the poet laureate of Sackville, New Brunswick, died Tuesday in a Westmorland-area nursing home. He was 88.

Lochhead was named the first-ever lifetime poet laureate for the town in 2002. From Lochhead’s obituary at Sackville’s official website:

Sackville is blessed to have had Douglas Lochhead as a resident, poet and friend. One of his works can be read in downtown Sackville. [Thirty-one] verses of “High Marsh Road” are displayed on panels on the town’s utility poles from the corner of Bridge and Main Street and continue toward the entrance of the Sackville Waterfowl Park.

In recognition of his work in letters, the poet and scholar was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1976, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry in 1981, and won the 2005 Carlo Betocchi International Poetry Prize and the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts. His final poetry collection, Looking Into Trees, was published in 2009 by Sybertooth.

Long before his first published book of poetry, Lochhead served in the Canadian Armed Forces during the Second World War. He also led a long and varied career in libraries, working his way through Victoria College (now University of Victoria), Cornell University, Dalhousie University, York University, and University of Toronto, and as a professor at York, U of T, and Mount Allison University, where he was the director of Canadian Studies. At the time of his retirement in 1990, Lochhead was writer-in-residence at Mount Allison.

A visitation will be held March 18th from 7-9 p.m. at Jones Funeral Home in Sackville and the funeral service will be March 19th at the Mount Allison University Chapel at 2 p.m., followed by a reception the university’s Owens Art Gallery.

Notes of condolence can be sent through the Jones Funeral Home.

J.D. Salinger dies at 91

J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey, has died at age 91 in his New Hampshire home. According to The New York Times, the author died of natural causes:

“Despite having broken his hip in May,” [his literary representative, Harold Ober Associates] said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”

The CBC offers further details on the famously reclusive author:

Salinger guarded his copyright and the integrity of his artistic output as fiercely as he guarded his privacy. He rejected numerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen. And his lawyers blocked a screening of the film Pari, by Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui and loosely adapted from Franny and Zooey, at the Lincoln Center in 1998.

Salinger, who took part in the Battle of Normandy during the Second World War, leaves behind his daughter Margaret, his son Matthew, and his wife, Colleen O’Neill.

In honour of St. Patrick’s Day…

The author as drunken lout is hardly groundbreaking, but it’s rare to unearth the sort of apology Edgar Allen Poe offered his publishers J. and H.G. Langley for his mint julep-fuelled behaviour in 1842:

Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behavior while in N-York? You must have conceived a queer idea of me – but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.

Naturally the apology was enclosed in a pitch – for an article on gardening.

John Updike dies

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and man of letters John Updike has died of lung cancer, at the age of 76. From the Associated Press:

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir Self-Consciousness and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.

An old-fashioned believer in hard work, he published more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and two National Book Awards.

Update: the New York Times obit.

Remembering those who passed

The year end is a time for remarking significant events of the past 12 months, and Quillblog would be remiss not to recall some of the major international literary figures who shuffled off this mortal coil in 2008.

• Arthur C. Clarke
• Tony Hillerman
• Pat Kavanagh
• Alain Robbe-Grillet
• Studs Terkel
• David Foster Wallace
• Michael Crichton

American author Studs Terkel dead at 96

Continuing our sad Monday-morning ritual, there’s a significant literary death from over the weekend to mention. Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian and radio personality Studs Terkel died last Friday after a long illness. Terkel, whose adopted first name owes its provenance to James T. Farrell’s American classic, Studs Lonigan, was a tireless chronicler of working class and disenfranchised Americans.

A committed leftist, he was passionately dedicated to his work. From USA Today:

In November 2007, at the age of 95, Terkel published a memoir, Touch and Go, in which he wrote: “My curiosity keeps me going. My epitaph is all set: ‘Curiosity did not kill this cat.’ I took a vacation once — it involved a beach — and to tell you the truth, I had no idea what to do with myself. It was torture. Work is life. Without it, there is no life.”

Tony Hillerman dead at 83

In what is becoming a sad Monday ritual, news has broken about the death of a major literary figure over the weekend. Mystery writer Tony Hillerman, whose Navajo Tribal Police novels were perennial bestsellers, died of pulmonary failure on Sunday.

From The New York Times:

Mr. Hillerman’s evocative novels, which describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world, touched millions of readers, who made them best sellers. But although the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with a purpose, he often said, and that purpose was to instill in his readers a respect for Indian culture. The plots of his stories, while steeped in contemporary crime and its consequences, were invariably instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals for a soldier returned from a foreign war to incest taboos for a proper clan marriage.

Hillerman, a resident of Albuquerque, wrote 18 Navajo Tribal Police novels, beginning with 1970′s The Blessing Way. He won the Edgar Allan Poe award in 1973 for Dance Halls of the Dead, and his 1987 novel Skinwalkers won the Golden Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. In 1991 he won the Grandmaster Award, the highest honour from the Mystery Writers of America.

Legendary U.K. agent Pat Kavanagh dies

The Bookseller is reporting that Pat Kavanagh, the British agent and wife of novelist Julian Barnes, has died.

Kavanagh represented some heavy hitters in the literary world, including Joanna Trollope, John Irving, and William Trevor (not to mention her husband), but she was perhaps equally well known for the scandals that seemed to follow her throughout the upper echelons of the British writing and publishing community. In 1995, she was dropped by her most famous client, Martin Amis, in favour of Andrew Wylie, nicknamed “The Jackal,” who managed to secure the author a £500,000 advance for his novel The Information. The split with Kavanagh caused a very public falling out between Amis and Barnes, who had previously been close friends and snooker buddies.

Then last year, Kavanagh caused a stir once again by resigning from the British agency Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, and inciting a raft of other agents to follow her. Kavanagh’s departure and its attendent fallout caused the editorial director of one British publishing house to confess to the London Times that the sedate and sophisticated bonhomie of London’s literati is largely a façade: “On the surface we all get on brilliantly, but on a personal level we all f***ing loathe each other.”

The notice in The Bookseller is very brief, and gives no indication of the cause of death. The only direct quote in the piece is from a spokesperson for United Agents, the firm that Kavanagh helped establish after leaving PFD:

“Pat Kavanagh was an exceptional agent and a great friend. We all owe her a tremendous amount. She was an extraordinary presence who was much loved and will be greatly missed by her colleagues and her clients. All our thoughts are with Julian at this difficult time.”

Constance Rooke dead at age 65

Some sad news from over the weekend: Constance Rooke, editor, critic, and former president of PEN Canada, succumbed to ovarian cancer at age 65 on Saturday. Rooke, the wife of novelist Leon Rooke, was a professor at the University of Victoria for twenty years, and she was the founding chair of the Women’s Studies department there. She was also the founding director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Guelph University.

As a writer, Rooke authored several critical works, including Fear of the Open Heart: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Writing. She also edited several anthologies for PEN Canada, most recently 2006′s Writing Life.

Sandra Martin has a brief obituary in today’s Globe and Mail:

Born in New York City on Nov. 14, 1942, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 1964, a master’s degree from Tulane University two years later and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1973. By then, she had met and married short story writer and novelist Leon Rooke.

Together, they went to the University of Victoria in B.C. There she edited The Malahat Review and began her illustrious career as a literary critic and a champion of Canadian literature.

There will be a public celebration of Rooke’s life at a future date, yet to be determined.