It has not been three years since journalist, novelist and screenwriter IAN ADAMS (1937-2021) left us behind. From obituaries published following his November death, it’s possible to perceive a strong love from colleagues and audience, in part for his defiance in character and script. This was a strong, confident writer. That same independence that won him these admirers also brought opposition who didn’t similarly appreciate the critical expression.

Susan Ferrier MacKay and Rick Salutin, authoring Globe & Mail and Toronto Star memorials, remind us that not only did Adams’ journalism and nonfiction encounter resistance, but his fiction as well. Some disciples of this editorial iconoclasm have likely gone to the Adams library to prepare their own careers in social journalism. Or maybe they should. See the boundaries, young Jedi. (Serious investigators may want to refer to contemporary reviews.) This Art & Commodity review is necessarily historical, and has no direct bearing on today’s battles because it regards the successful evaluation and then governmental rejection (i.e. censorship) that the 1970 THE POVERTY WALL [available on Internet Archive] received as it coursed through Bill Davis’ Ministry of Education. Of course poverty, and housing, remain existential crises for large swaths of Canada.

Publisher McLelland & Stewart submitted multiple copies to provincial government. Known as “THE CANADIAN PUBLISHERS,” M&S has since been consolidated as one of 19 imprints under the Penguin Random House Canada subsidiary of a NY-headquartered company. Their delivery to Education’s Mowat Block took advantage of Ontario’s decade old innovation to evaluate even unsolicited books for their applicability to public and Catholic systems. This industry free-for-all was introduced under Minister John Robarts. From what I’ve seen and read, Minister and Premier Robarts was comparatively innovative.  Books that were going to make it K to OAC were listed in the Circular 14 catalogue. (We then schooled to grade thirteen.) Ontario’s list of authorized textbooks, and other “learning media,” was distributed around the province and across Canada.

Ian Adams’ first 154 page creation sold well, especially looking back from today. People who know refer to his writing as characteristically lean. My 1977 copy, with Don Fernely’s cover design and John DeVisser’s photography, was released from the printer’s eighth run. All those copies of a sociological general reader suggests that this paperback belonged to a different Canadian era, a time gone by. We’d even read stories of unsettling circumstances.

How do we know this should be true? The learning media wasn’t as varied as it is today. We read often. There were books and newspapers. Radio and television were also popular in households where larger family units gathered and listened and watched more regularly, together.

Maybe you remember mom or dad, or other family, reading to everyone else at home, or playing their instruments.¹ THE POVERTY WALL may have entertained and informed families in this manner.

The popular, informative book from an already established journalist wasn’t however going to enrich classrooms. Officially this was because of its profanity. Yes other profane books found approval in Ontario. If we are being really clear about what happened at the ministry to Ian Adams’ debut title, from another perspective it WAS recommended. The people consented. The four subject expert reviewers hired had affirmed its relevance (two for reference). It was only two assigned civil servant panelists, the system saviours, forming a minority who rejected its use. But then neither the subject manager responsible for texts like this nor his boss, the bureau section manager, approved. At the end of the process that was what mattered. Not people, only certain people.²

One reviewer who had approved because “it is easy to understand and presents … interesting descriptions of the Canadian poor” thought there was also “an axe to grind.” He called on the department to judge accordingly. Was there an axe? Globe biographer MacKay had Adams’ son claiming his dad “never editorialized” while making reference to an unrelated and commonly held wound. Missionary parents had enrolled three year old Ian at Tanzanian boarding schools and then ran off to join the British Army.

Parental resentment didn’t taint this journalist’s objectivity, IMHO, if that’s what was being suggested. That would be ludicrous. Had dispossession sparked Adams, turning him into an honest literary hero to the deprived? So be it. They needed it.

THE POVERTY WALL was completed closer to the beginning of a career that also included photojournalism—so many talents—than to its end. The list of employers Adams would eventually publish with, as at MUCK RACK, is long and varied. Back then he was in his early thirties, and already “a mighty media force” wrote Salutin. From start to finish the subject matter was a political hot potato, diced into disruptive french fries. If the text was censored for profanity, likely there was even more rationale.

EVALUATION SUMMARY of THE POVERTY WALL

4 FOR (2 for reference) versus 2 AGAINST

What is impoverishment and how is it defined in Canada? Statistically it’s not today what it was in the 1970s. Numbers defining poverty’s character and its population totals have shifted. Inflation played a roll in that as did “baskets” of items and the economy’s character. Otherwise the phenomenon remains surprisingly consistent. What a colourful illustration was offered.

…poverty is in reality a small world, its boundaries defined by day-to-day confrontations with frustrations, bitterness, and deprivation. These encounters are the daily reminders to the poor of the barriers between them and the larger world of affluence. And because there are no leaders for the poor, because there is no brotherhood of the poor, because the poor have no consciousness of themselves as a class, poverty is really thousands, millions of small worlds clustered around and upon each other like the cells of festering tissue, each cell inhabited by one of the poor – a man, a woman, or a child.³

Today people are warning that our culture wars could be holding us back from a more equal society.

Following Chapter 1’s introduction “Small Worlds of Poverty,” eight more chapters discuss multiple facets of poverty. People outside Canada will see us and think, “well yes but that’s first world poverty,” which Adams clears up for you. The country he discusses is highly stratified. Don’t necessarily believe the hype. Peaceful place for some. Chapter 2 features Chanie “Charlie” Wenjack,⁴ the 12-year old who starved and froze to death after running away from a Northern Ontario residential school. The chapter benefitted from Adams’ 1967 research and writing as a Maclean’s Magazine writer.

More quickly—if ever there were a book worth reading…—Chapter 3 visits skid row in Toronto’s Allan Gardens, Bay and Dundas Terminal and Parkdale. It checks out the Union Station’s public baths and then it’s off to “Winterpeg.” In Chapter 4 readers come to know more about single mothers and their deprived kids and their absent fathers, while Chapter 5 regards mining Newfoundlanders. Adams even writes about Newfoundland.

Chapter 6 divides Saskatchewan between haves and have-nots. There are many more have-nots. Then taken together Chapters 7 and 8 claims to instruct readers on how to keep people poor, and also how the rich stay rich. Could there be subjects more instructively useful, and thus unfit textbook for grade school? Finally Chapter 9 tells us what we all are intelligent enough to understand in “Time is Running Out.” That is what M&S and Adams titled the final chapter. From our place in the twenty-second century, as mentioned, that time lapsed. Readers therefore wind up with even more quality Generation X history.

[1] This scene could have appeared at either of my grandparents’ houses, in the Owen Sound area, in the time before my 1974 birth, and for a short while afterwards.

[2] Evaluation record of THE POVERTY WALL, February 19, 1971, B145049, RG 2-243-4, AO.

[3] Ian Adams, THE POVERTY WALL (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1970), 15.

[4] The largest lecture hall at Peterborough, Ontario’s Trent University (when I attended) was Wenjack Theatre. At one time it was proposed there be a college named in memory of the Ojibway boy. Ian Adams also spent his final years in the city. If recently you’ve heard of Charlie Wenjack, it may have been because after Gord Downie found his story, and until his own 2017 death, The Tragically Hip lead singer become involved in related philanthropy.