Biographical note to this

Maclean's magazine TV columns:

Michael Enright hired me to be the television critic for Maclean's magazine in the fall of 1978 when I was living in Vancouver, working as a producer for Daryl Duke and Norman Klenman at CKVU-TV, and also working as the television editor for The Vancouver Courier, a short-lived attempt to start a third daily newspaper in the great city. The Courier folded after a gallant try. The try was gallant; the people who financed the paper were not. They did not pay all they owed to their employees. The Courier still owes me $ 600.00 at 1978 rates and with interest.

I wrote television review pieces for Maclean's magazine for a year or so.

Business note: it is surprising how many writers think that they have to seek permission to reprint their magazine work and beg for the cringing little tag line "reprinted by permission of. . ." In fact, if you sold the magazine only first magazine rights, you own every word you ever wrote—as I do.

Consequently you may do with your words whatsoever you wish to do. You don't have to ask ANY magazine that has purchased only first magazine rights for permission because they do not own your work. If the bully magazine thugs get shirty (and they do) , consult a copyright lawyer. Of course, if you have been treated with professional courtesy by a magazine it may behoove you to return that courtesy by crediting the first appearance of your work in a magazine. Writers will know precisely how often Canadian magazines treat them with courtesy.

As you may have surmised, I don't have to do magazine work any more. So they can't fire me. They can't bar the door to me. They can't shout, as one sodden alcoholic lump of an editor once did, "You'll never sell another magazine piece in this country, Casselman!" The shouter did Canada a favour shortly thereafter by dying of booze and apoplexy. One year after I danced a jig on the day of that editor's funeral, I had a pleasant three-year run in Canadian Geographic magazine as a columnist and writer of magazine feature pieces. So don't quail at slobbered threats from big-desk bullies. They count on your being timid. Surprise them and kick them right in their fat patooties—by knowing what you own. They can be dealt with too. And don't ever sell them copyright of your work. Sell them the narrowest rights the law permits.

Maclean's magazine column of May 7, 1979 (page 60)            

The photographs did NOT appear in Maclean's.

....................................................................................................

The Peter and Paul Cathedral on the Neva in St. Petersburg backlit by an autumn sunset

 

Ustinov's tour guide through Leningrad

(now Saint Petersburg) is his - and only his.

By William Casselman

"I wasn't born here. But my parents met here and I have it on the best authority that I was conceived in Leningrad," says Peter. In some ways this jolly raconteur is the perfect tour guide; in other ways Ustinov is not an apt choice. But it's a merry spin he gives us 'round the city founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as Sankt Petersburg. In 1914 the Russians naturally despised the name as too Germanic—it became Petrograd. In 1924 Lenin thought of something cuter—Leningrad.

Sauntering down Nevsky Prospekt, the city's most renowned street, Ustinov is summery and playful. "How do pigeons know they're Russian pigeons?" he wonders. In a streetcar of stony faces he mugs awhile and gets the small triumph of a smile from one trouty tovarich.

Leningrad is a Slavic trove of art, beautifully filmed by Canadian cinematographer Harry Makin. His camera swoons over vast gilt mosaics, burnished and filigreed altars, richly lacquered icons, all in St. Isaac's Cathedral. Again and again throughout the hour-long travelogue we return to one shot: the camera gliding past that delirium of symmetry, the Winter Palace, oranged at sunset beside the Neva River. Then mighty Minsk creams Leningrad in a soccer match. Ustinov trots out his comic antipathy to sport. He visits the proper tombs and graveyards. Here lies Catherine the Great. Here in a mass grave lie 600,000 citizens who died during the 900-day siege of Leningrad by the Nazis. "Versailles was much like the atomic bomb," says Ustinov. "Every country had to have one." He shows us Peter the Great's version, with rudely spurting fountains and bad statuary, the rococo cuckooland of Petrodvorets.

Petrodvorets, literally 'Peter's Forest,' as the serried rows of trees attest.

Then Lenin's yawp, "Now or Never." We stand at the Finland Station, where Lenin returned from exile to proclaim that a socialist revolution was possible in Russia. Ustinov asks himself how the revolution has affected the people and finds it "hard to say." He contemplates the faces of old people in the street, "the triumph of whose lives is survival. They are grateful for the absence of war and the infinite luxury of still being alive." Peter Ustinov's tour is humane and suave. And, after all, how much history may we demand in 50 TV minutes? A touch more than he gives. For Leningrad is also a city of death, its history a glum borscht of purge and murder.

Under fiat of Peter the Great, forced labourers urged the burg out of granite in the swampy delta of the Neva. Thousands fell dead. And the great modernizer of Russia had a few quirks. Peter the Great personally tortured his own son, Alexis. He caught his wife philandering, had her lover's head sawed off and pickled in a jar of alcohol. For years she had to sleep beside the mummifying head, its eyes sewn open.

Is this Ustinov's sunny city? Of a famine in 1815, Turgenev later wrote: "Within a stone's throw of the Winter Palace, at the city hall, human flesh was being put up for sale with permission of the authorities." Let the serfs eat serfs. Lenin's October Revolution is skirted over with a brief montage of still photos. Nowhere in the program are Stalin's famines and pogroms.

The most offensive omission given Peter Ustinov's abiding public charity, is people. We meet no citizen of Leningrad, no worker, no muzhik in from the farm to gawk. And there are workers. Although in time St. Petersburg became the great northern port of the Imperial Russian Navy, it also boasted industrial strength with armament and railway works. To the west and south of the old port sprawled suburbs where workers lived in filth and mud. After the revolution, new quarters were built. Bombed flat in World War II, they had to be rebuilt again. Today Leningrad is the base for much Soviet scientific and historical research. It's home port for atomic-powered icebreakers and the Soviet Merchant Marine. At the giant Elektrosila works they assembled the first Sputnik. Was Ustinov's crew barred from certain places? Here too, Dostoyevsky sent Raskolnikov out walking from his closet-like room on Stoliarny Place, brooding on the murder that is the vortex of Crime and Punishment. So accurate was Dostoyevsky that one can follow the story from street to street in Leningrad, pilgrimaging as Joyce fanatics do along the Liffey in Dublin. Ustinov merely tosses in one mention of the great novelist's tomb.

Exactly why his bonhomie muffles the city's horror may be found in Peter Ustinov's opinions about television. In his autobiography Dear Me, he writes, "Television has imposed special demands on the orator...As a medium, it is a kind of lie detector, which ferrets out insincerity...There is nothing more extraordinary than television's ability to outstare a politician, and say to him 'convince me.' To the experienced eye, every reticence... every joke, helps to build a pattern of the man's true state of mind." So also for a TV host. This is the first of a new series called "Cities," produced entirely by two independent Canadian TV houses, John McGreevy Productions and Nielsen-Ferns International. Next fall we'll see Anthony Burgess's Rome, R.D. Laing's Glasgow, Elie Wiesel's Jerusalem and George Plimpton's New York, among others. The title is bang on. This is the Leningrad of Peter Ustinov. Not mine, not yours perhaps, but his alone—quirky, flawed, riveting.

PETER USTINOV'S LENINGRAD
CBC, May 2, 8.30 p.m.

(end of Maclean's magazine column published in 1979)

 

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copyright © 2008 William Gordon Casselman