Alastair was constantly writing—movie scripts and essays, short stories and articles, and always a stream of letters and emails to the people he loved. He wrote to share his thoughts about a piece from the latest New York Review of Books or to describe the details of a perfect day in Kyoto. He wrote to work out big thoughts about evolution or the state of filmmaking, or when he wanted to alert his children to a particularly amusing episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. And he wrote about his life. Over the years, across dozens of literate, thoughtful, loving messages, he told his life story in his own words.
- Nick

On growing up in Ireland, from a 2013 Email:

Bernice and I have been watching all the Downton Abbey series and it does bring back memories of my childhood in Coollattin. My father Wallace was the agent, very similar to the minor character in the third series who was insulted by the new plans to modernize. The estate was owned by a Lord Tom Fitzwilliam in distant England and only Lady Olive—the rather sad wife of the once romantic Peter Fitzwilliam who had run away with President Kennedy’s oldest sister—lived in the large house with a compliment of servants.

Without a Lord at Coollattin everybody on the estate, including all the staff, the butler, cook, lady’s maids, game keepers, chauffeurs, builders, gardeners, etc, were employed by Wallace, as were the many shepherds, laborers, carpenters, foresters, and other workers who managed the estate. Once the estate had been 85,000 acres, now it was about 20,000 acres—still a vast, almost self-sufficient, enterprise.

The estate looked terrible when we moved in, yet quickly the fields were greener, the hedges clipped, the farm buildings renovated, the gates painted, the large flocks of sheep and herds of cattle healthier. Wallace was a fine farmer and manager, and quickly the men on the estate came to be proud of the estate once again. I can remember coming home from English boarding school and being thrilled at just how beautiful the estate and surrounding countryside was.

For us kids the estate was a magical and strange playground. Ginny and I in particular had a good time as Lady Olive was only too happy having us at the Big House, pleased to have young people to live through. Often Ginny and I, both still young teenagers, sat in the huge, gloomy dinning room, flanked by the butler and servers, eating a four-course dinner with three different wines while Lady Olive finished off a bottle of Scotch and talked of her youth as a flapper. Wallace disapproved but could hardly forbid us. In fact, I think Wallace disapproved of much of this world he ran—the shenanigans at the Big House, the influence of the Catholic Church on the poor, drunken Lady Olive, the fact that grown men were still willing to work in service, the poverty of all of Ireland at that time.

But unfair or not it was lovely for a child. Every day I would go for walks past Victorian walled kitchen gardens and stables, a glorious formal park with brilliant walks of rhododendrons and azaleas, a private salmon river, magnificent oak forests dating from the fourteenth century, a private golf course on which only David, I and a few locals used to play, a cricket field where once a year the house had a match with the village, abandoned houses, one with a ballroom, which Ginny and I explored, and everywhere overgrown signs of walls, drives, and abandoned gardens from eras when the estate had been even grander. And in the distance always lovely hills and fields. The estate had many horses including racing foals who would frolic and gallop in the field before our house; its own fox hunt; a weekly shoot with gamekeepers and beaters that in season attracted a dodgy raft of nostalgic refugees from England’s shrinking Empire, and every year our own point-to-point horse races. Like the TV series, we seemed to be forever living on the edge of history and ruin.

An email from New Orleans, 2013

We could have flown to New Orleans, but I wanted to see and speak to the America I had once fallen in love with so many years ago, so we drove. I am glad we did.

At eighteen I was tired of my privileged life. First the wealth of the Fens and then the faded elegance of the Irish estate were wonderful places to grown up, but now I chafed at this old world. My smug Public School primarily existed to mould young men to fit into the ancient class system, and I could see years at Cambridge, or any other grand British University, as just more of the same. History had advised, “Go West Young Man,” so I did.

When I got to New York, with very little money but a work address in my pocket, a sense of adventure almost overwhelmed me. In a moment I had stopped being a child and suddenly a thrilling adult life stretched before me. Because our flight had been delayed we were put up in a Sixth Avenue hotel, but I was too excited to sleep and roamed Manhattan streets for the rest of the night. I had escaped my velvet prison.

For the next months I fell in love with Manhattan; fell in love with those liberal, worldly Jews who had invented much of the American culture I so admired and in fact had created the idealistic summer camp I was to work in; and I fell in love with Terry, a daughter of one of these enlightened camp founders. Later I was to be thrilled by the American road and a sense of freedom that for the rest of those summer months allowed me to work in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and again in New York.

Eventually my parents persuaded me to return to Britain and university but I would rush back to American at every opportunity, and by the time I had graduated and got my first serious film job in New York I had traveled and worked all over the States. American exuberance and energy somehow let me ignore the fact that so many Americans I met on my travels were arrogant, racist, and willfully ignorant of anything but self-interest.

In a very real sense, the end of my affair with Terry ended my American romance. At last in America permanently, or so I thought, I could now see that we were both much too young to marry. Sweet and poetic Terry and her family did not agree, and soon after I moved out of her parent’s basement apartment and into a East Side slum flat I am sure her powerful and protective Uncle Mel, who had wrangled the special visa that allowed me to work in New York in the first place, made sure that I received an invite from the US Government to fight in Vietnam. I was more in love than ever with America, but even so this wrong war seemed too high a price to pay for second-hand patriotism. I ignored the summons for as long as I dared and when eventually I presented myself at the US border I was told I could not return to the States for five years.

I came back to London as England was enjoying the Golden Sixties. My first film company and then the BBC were in the middle of the celebrations, but I was mostly indifferent, still sulking at my expulsion from my American paradise. By the time I once again fled England and arrived in Canada I was tired of falling in love with nations. Only a few years earlier I had been hungry to get to know yet another American city, but once in Canada it took me over a year to remember that Toronto was on a lake, and even today I have yet to visit whole swaths of this country and feel quite content to realize that perhaps I will never see these distant cities and provinces. There are so many more exciting and interesting parts of the world yet to see before I die.

In 2005, Alastair wrote an essay for The Walrus magazine about falling in love with cinema. 

After the cultural wasteland of this summer’s Hollywood releases the oasis of the Canadian film festival season is upon us, and I will be there, once again excited by movies despite all odds. As well as the celebrations in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, hundreds of other film festivals are held annually around the world. It is a growth industry often more akin to reality-TV weddings and celebrity trials than the enjoyment of thoughtful movies. But among the glitterati and the young seeking glimpses of the stars, you can still find my generation, greying and bleary-eyed, mingling nostalgia with incurable optimism. Cinephilia can be controlled but never cured.

In the early 1990s, I stopped telling my students that film was the art of the twentieth century. These children of Blockbuster Video were eager to get industry jobs, not indulge in extravagant dreams. It even seemed cruel to suggest to them that the shelf life of cinema as an art form had been less than a hundred years and they had missed it. Besides, it was faintly embarrassing to recall that for some of us, long ago, cinema had been all-consuming.

READ MORE: https://thewalrus.ca/2005-09-film/  

An email from 2015:

With so much talk about spinsterhood and the joys of being childless, I have been wondering about having children. One aspect of parenthood rarely spoken of is fear. Until Nicholas was born I was never brave but also never fearful—no doubt the result of a happy childhood. A child changed all that.

It starts when the hospital orders you to bring the car around and you realize that in an instant the authority and comforting medical uniforms are to be swept away and you are henceforth on your own with this alien creature. And so starts a life of complex fears. Fear that a small rash is no doubt a precursor to Ebola or worse; that somehow the squirming baby will escape and drown in the few inches of bathwater (and to hell with all those documentaries of happy babies swimming underwater); fear of statistically shrinking but newly celebrity pedophiles; fear of runaway strollers, swallowed worms, and the gap between the elevator and the twenty-second floor; fear of the unfashionable, or over-cute uniforms you force your protesting child into; fear of them being too smart or not smart enough for their class; fear that they will be lonely at parties or be led into a life of drugs by their friends’ parents; fear of the reported bicycle accident near Julia’s home or the Nepalese disaster Nicholas had just missed; fear that they will fall in love with the wrong person, or worse, fail to fall for the right person.

But mostly fear that they will die before you. Joan Didion wrote that when we talk of mortality we are talking about our children.

---

2013:

There is a lovely moment at the start of Before Midnight when the father asks his son, who is about to fly back to his mother in America, “What are you going to do first when you get home?” The boy just shrugs as he hurries off through customs to the next chapter of his life. I am sure Wallace asked me that a hundred times and I you. Innocent interest, the everlasting wish to protect a child, the knowledge that your son’s life is, or is to be henceforth, always more interesting than yours, the sad truth that you will never share in that moment with a being and a life that for a time was so inextricably entwined with yours—all mingled in an innocent and wistful question.

Somebody wrote of “the inevitable tragedy of family.” A bit exaggerated I think. I would like more to believe in Manley Hopkins’s, “No wonder of It, sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine and blue back embers, ah my dear, fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.”

I found a young man to help me with at least the first part of the sun-room and will be away the weekend of the 1st. So Happy Birthday.

A beautiful essay, never published:

When my wife became pregnant with our second child I decided to build a cottage. I was driven by a jumble of emotions, but above all by the fear that adoration of wife and child, love of maple syrup and dislike of hockey was not identity enough—that a man with two children had to choose a country to belong to. Of course my wife had no idea I did not already see myself as one of her people, Canadians. 

I had immigrated to Toronto as a young man but for well over a decade I had ignored the complex matter of belonging. Like the characters in Wim Wender’s movie, An American Friend, I saw no need to state an allegiance. In that film the hero moves between interchangeable cities so that the audience is never sure in which country or even on which continent the story is taking place. For years, Toronto had been my anonymous location. I admired the decency of my chosen home while ignoring the bland architecture and unattractive streetscapes of the city.  While working in other countries I missed the respectful diversity of Toronto, but back in Canada wondered if this mix of cultures had not also created a brittle reserve. I always felt lonelier back home than in other great cities. To international friends I tried to explain this city of negative virtues. None felt tempted to visit.

Like many modern immigrants, I had been drawn to a distant city by curiosity and work, not a wish to embrace a new nation. That Canada was so polite in its request for loyalty only encouraged this selfishness. Nothing had forced me to immigrate so I felt neither bereft nor liberated by the move, nor did I seek to explain my decisions by historic or economic events. Riding in Toronto taxicabs I would listen to the often over-educated, immigrant cabbies describing the national disasters that had contributed to their flight before asking them, “Why you and not your brother? Why did they stay while you left?”

While we waited for our first child I had raised the roof of our city home to build an airy and private studio. This time I knew that renovation would be not enough to quell my panic. With a single child, a couple is still portable. This would be different. No longer would I be able to hurry through customs with son underarm, tuck him into a hotel room booked for two, or wander foreign markets with a tiny hand balancing the week’s groceries. We were to be a real family, and Canadian families dream of cottages.

So that summer, as my wife gently grew rounder, we spent weekends driving across southern Ontario looking at country properties. At the end of the summer we bought the first land we had been shown, hilly fields once cleared but now slowly being reclaimed by nature beside a river that flowed briskly out of the Haliburton Highland. A maple bush and beaver dam on the land made it all seem suspiciously archetypical, while a provincial forest across the river and un-navigable rapids both up and down stream gave us privacy.  Our nearest neighbours were a mile away. It seemed like paradise—a questionable recommendation for one so easily bored by even the idea of paradise.

With my new enthusiasm for identity I had looked for properties that evoked some sort of heritage, used local materials or at least had been influenced by the environment, but we looked in vain. Apart from the proudly crafted homes of the Loyalists and other settlers, the field was as barren of vernacular building as it was of regional cuisine. At least I would be free from upsetting local tastes. There seemed to be none.  

 But we had not been paying attention. Before building their farmhouses the pioneers had built magnificent barns that now often stood alone on hillsides or in monastic clusters, heroic and medieval, elegant and functional. Stopping on the way to appointments with realtors we would explore these giants. The dappled light’s dramatic contrast between low stalls and soaring main hall was thrilling. I stared at the simple joints that tied the huge beams together and began to wonder if perhaps I too could do that. As the summer progressed we stopped filling appointments to inspect yet another shapeless ranch house or vinyl covered lakeside property. Limited in money, short of skills but full of brave ambition, we would build a small barn in the field above the river. Not a retreat for quiet contemplation but rather a place of long tables full of dishes and noisy friends.

During the autumn we would sit on the floor of my wife’s studio building cottages with our son’s blocks. That the most pleasing models always turned out to have multiple floors made us wonder if the sprawling lake-side cottages or mean bungalows that we that been shown all summer were just due to an inability to stack children’s toys. At night beside my sleeping wife I would read Gaston Bachelard’s fine essays on space and light and stare at photos of the work of my favourite architects. But mostly I studied construction manuals, building codes and articles on insulation, for secretly I was dreaming of becoming a builder that coming summer.

I came from a society that was proud of its lack of practical skills. My Father would ring for an electrician if a light broke. Yet almost immediately on arriving in Toronto I had bought a shabby Victorian house in the city core. I had lived in too many expensive cities not to see the opportunity this relatively new town offered. With a Canadian girlfriend’s help I drew a circle that marked easy walking distance from the restaurants, theatres and bars of downtown and went house hunting. With my first serious job I bought an old house near the University. I justified the purchase to myself, if not to my friend, as an investment that would allow me to live anywhere in the world should I choose.          

On the other hand I now had little money and a shabby house that demanded that I mend sash-windows, master the secrets of three-way switches and the need to sand oak floors with the grain. If I was guilty of treating Canada as a favourite hotel for the next ten years, expecting the country to always welcome me while giving back little in return, I at least cared for my own room. My parents visited and were amazed by my new practicality. The girlfriend, who had bargained for a filmmaker not a renovator, had departed long ago.

A decade later I and a carpenter friend, who had recently returned from working in Japan, visited a fabled wood yard at the edge of the Ottawa Valley. The huge pick-a-stick piles of rough cut oak and maple, pine and fir delighted us both. The next spring we returned and picked out great beams of yellow pine for my future cottage. The untreated timbers were fragrant and beautiful. The owners of the yard seemed as enthusiastic as we were, stressing the forgiveness of wood. “You think the settlers never made mistakes!”

John had decided to spend the summer at his family cottage and would drive over to supervise construction of the cottage and over the summer his Japanese training slowly began to influence my simple plans. But as we planned to build a two-and-a-half story house and the largest beams we had chosen would take a team to man-handle, we needed help. 

At night, when John went back to his wife, I dined alone in the local café. Like much of rural Ontario the village was slowly dying and like the Lower East Side of New York or the Californian desert was full of the ghosts of a richer past. There was little work here and in the evenings I would watch young men burn off their frustration by leaping from the high bridge into the river that flowed past my land. One evening I joined the fun and later invited the four most fearless divers to work on the cottage. For the rest of the hot summer the young men laboured cheerfully on the hundred and one exhausting tasks necessary to build even a small house. I worked beside them, if less stoically.

My wife drove up from the city, and as baby and son played happily in the wood shavings, I wondered if I was doing all this for them. The critic Vincent Scully had written, “A building is also a conversation between generations.” Perhaps, before my children could argue back, I just wanted to get in the first words

Like settlers before me I was drawn to those simple forms I could master, but like any builder I hoped that my house would also communicate hopes and values that were not limited by my competence. It was fine for my beloved Bachelard to write “a house shelters day dreaming,” but try to build that house yourself and the dreams are pretty quickly tempered by reality. I wanted to build a house that was both solid and beautiful. More important than any statement that my steep Japanese roof might make in the landscape was the fact that it should never leak. It never has.

I spend too much time with books not to be insecure of my physical skills and would intently listen to locals who would drive up to comment and advice. They all seemed so sure, all so manly. Only later did I think to ask if they had ever built a house from the ground up. Of course few had.

We started with a field beside a river and slowly made our mark. Sweating in the hot sunshine I wanted to prove to myself that I possessed the pragmatism as well as the optimism of my chosen country.  Gravity and the elements are measly enemies unless you are armed only with a spirit level, builder’s square and inadequate muscle. Not introspective by nature, I filled the exhausting days of building muttering the cynical thoughts of others. George Nathan’s “patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles” came to mind.

The summer wore on and John invited another Kyoto trained carpenter to help with the final framing.  As the local young men discussed the relative merits of Coke versus Coke Classic and John and his friend chatted away in Japanese, I felt pangs of jealousy. Always the handmaiden I thought as I endlessly ferried supplies and materials from the local lumber yards.  Secretly I was glad when everybody departed leaving me alone with the unfinished building.  

But in fact I had never been so reliant on strangers. Before the work could start our taciturn neighbour had generously offered me sand and gravel from his pit to build up the track to the building site and a Toronto friend had loaned me a truck for the summer. Later the same friend ingeniously repaired the beautiful caste iron cooking range a colleague had found in Quebec and bought for us. A local builder who came in with a back-hoe to grade the road took time to dig and then explain the mysteries of a septic tank. A nearby farmer dropped of a cord of wood and then surgically removed an old pine that was threatening to flatten the outhouse. Along our concession road a family had scaffolding I could borrow, while another knew of a local craftsman who could split cedar shakes for the roof. For my birthday my wife had bought an efficient wood stove that would heat the whole house even in the midst of winter but it was the offer of an ice-box unearthed in her basement by a city neighbour that finally persuaded us we could manage without electricity. My suspicion of belonging was slowly being eroded and I was too tired to notice.  

It rarely rained that summer and by autumn the house was closed in. The toughest of our young builders, previously banished from his suburban home, arrived with parents to proudly show them what he had built. We all toasted the building in rather warm champagne.

That first winter my wife and I dragged our small children across the snowy fields to the small, Japanese barn. It was welcoming, dry and soon warm. At night I walked into the bush to stare back at the study silhouette of the house, its many windows glowing with lamp light. I was thrilled by the sight and remain so to this day. The image of a small house alone in the snowy woods is not only a Canadian icon but makes even the most inhospitable landscape seem voluptuous

When all else has faded, erased by age or tangles in the brain, I am sure all that will be left is topography. The surfaces of our family home, the hidden crannies of our first playground, the dangers and sudden vistas of our neighbourhood shape our brains with their geography. And now this hand-made house and small patch of land just below the Canadian Shield has entered my DNA, saying this is who I am and will always be.

That spring I had to fly to Australia to make a film. A dream job, but for once my mind was elsewhere.  For the very first time in my life I was homesick for my small family, but also for a handmade barn in rural Ontario. I joked to the Australian crew that it was the Canadian way. While Argentinean immigrants might have created tango and New York Jews invented Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, our Canadian pioneers, often fooled into slaving over marginal land, created good government and loyalty.  

I thought I was building a house that would change with its occupants; instead we changed to accommodate the building. Our children have grown up delightful Canadians more balanced than their Dad would ever be, partly thanks to happy years roaming the Ontario countryside with local kids building death defying toboggan runs, secret tree houses, and a boat the somehow incorporated our kitchen table. My wife and I had started with the dream of a Russian dacha, chaotic and full of angst, but had settled for a Canadian cottage, solid, communal and full of laughter.

Of course all has not changed. I am as suspicious of the recent fondness for national branding as I am of the older, Pollyanna-ish immigrant myths. I am still wary of the veneration of Walden Pond and the recent passion for the Group of Seven, and after a few days of country peace miss the sea of noise and scorn of the city. At night I sleep more deeply lulled by traffic than by the tree frogs chirping on the banks of the river, porcupines sharpening their teeth on the cottage foundations, or whippoorwills shouting their damn love songs from our roof top. But where once I would have agreed with George Santayana that “it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography,” now I am not so sure.

From a 2014 email called "Happiness":

I just spent a wonderful day visiting the very famous moss garden, Saiho-ji. It was literally breathtaking. Long bus ride home and getting off at our main corner I dropped in on our local convenience store to pick up ham and tomatoes in case Bernice wanted a snack (I had gone to the garden alone), crossed the road to buy two delicious cream cakes, walked down the path that runs beside a pretty canal, crossed in front of the huge and grand Heian Shrine, watched a few outs between two baseball teams already hard at it, slipped down a narrow alley and was home. There is little in life as satisfying as managing to create a graceful life in a new city.

From a 2017 email:

As I often did in the country, I woke last night in the middle of the night and read for a couple of hours. During our days at the cottage, once again as it had for decades while growing up, reading and books took on a major role in my life. With no television or other screens to fill my mind with mindless entertainment, books filed a hunger. Thanks to a surprisingly interesting pile of new books lent me by Kate next door, the use of my Goggle pad, and the Kinmount library ordering me books from their system I had a pretty good supply of new and great oldies to enjoy.

This hunger has been a mainstay of my life, and it was lovely to make the luxury once again central to my day, apart from the daily labour of building. Without the distraction of TV, Bernice and I would often read after supper until we just grew tired and bright stars and the moon filled the sky.

From 2013: 

Labour Day, the public holiday that historically has marked the end of summer’s closing of the cottage, has always been a large part of the Canadian psyche—a symbol and setting for ruined dreams, death, divorce, or other mournful dramas. Winter is almost upon us. Perhaps not by accident, autumn here is called The Fall. 

But then the cottage has always played a major role in Canadian culture. When I first came to Canada I was surprised at how dull were the gardens even of the rich. Only later, when girlfriends and colleagues invited me to their family cottages, did I understand that the well-off and established lavished their most loving care on their lake properties—those manicured islands, bays, promontories and elegant cottages where prosperous WASP families spend the few summer months away from the worries and pollution of the city.

As you know, our cottage lacks the breathtaking vistas of a lake, but instead offers endless quiet and untouched nature only hours from the city. This summer I laboured building a sun-room overlooking the river and whole weeks would go by without seeing a soul. On this last visit I finished making the sunroom at least weather-proof and sound against nature. As I left, three deer stood by the gate waiting for me to go. I have a friend called Vladimir who before he fled Bulgaria had been the head of the Government film agency. He loves the remoteness of our river and refers to it as Paradise. “In Russia you would have to be a big shot in the Politburo to own this.”

Previously I had never experienced the angst of the “cottage closure.” With noisy children and friends to tear away from a still warm river, and the knowledge that we would return often over the winter months, unlike the owners of classic cottages that have no insulation and so are useless for most of the Canadian year, the Labour Day ritual meant little to us. Indeed, while I was making films we would often miss whole summers without being able to go north. But since the spring I had planned and built the new addition to the cottage so this weekend, finishing the final caulking, dry-walling, etc, I did feel the poignancy of something coming to an end. That almost overnight the weather had turned from humid temperatures to nights dipping below freezing helped make the time seem even more final.

A new personal sense of mortality also added to the mood. I had decided to do most of the work myself, despite offers of help from much more competent friends such as Andre, partly because I wanted to see if my aging body and slowing mind could cope with the physical and mental demands of the project. How blindly confident I was when building the original cottage, now how unsure. At times I had four or five “how-to” books beside my bedside. But mixing concrete pillars for the foundations, building heavy frames, and alone shingling the steep roof takes a toil on an old body, and as the summer progressed I did feet older, even if lighter. (Climbing ladders all day does wonders to the waistline.) I had wondered if this would be my last such project, just as our proposed car trip to New Orleans might be our last really long drive. It is not that either of us are in any way unwell, but age must be considered. A sort of reverse bucket-list emerges—slowly tick off those things we hopefully will never do again, like mixing concrete, roofing, making a new resume, learning a new board game, or planning a trip that involves at least one day’s drive of almost 600 miles.

From 2019:

I got up this morning and before breakfast started tidying the old leaves from our backyard. I had almost forgotten how pleasurable working outside in the early morning can be—the air is clean, temperatures pleasant, sunshine golden and the whole day before one.

For the last two evenings I have been reading Martin Hagglund's book This Life. If I am clear, his basic idea is that we need death to give life any meaning or value, and the various religions’ promises of an afterlife are harmful to us all. At best eternity is incoherent or meaningless, at worse terrifying. Our life is not the means towards an end, and only the knowledge that it must end gives it meaning and pleasure. We all want more life, not an afterlife. Even grief is the desire for more life—more time with lost love, or more life given to the loved one. To be in some sort of emotionless aspic for perpetuity would be horrible for them as well as us left behind... the biblical cliche "to rest in peace" only truly means to be deprived of the capacity to care.

I hope I have captured at least some of the essence of the book, which is why I am writing this to see if I have made sense of it. What makes life meaningful is that it ends, but what gives it value is what we do with our time.