Grey owl, dark horse
Colin Wilson
Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl Lovat Dickson (Macmillan £3.95)
How would you describe a man who spent most of his adult life living-out a fantasy that he was a Red Indian, and lying to everyone — even his wife — about his background? The straightforward answer would seem to be: either a crook, a madman or a hopeless weakling. The strange paradox is that Archie Belaney was none of these things: he was a, courageous man, an idealist, and something 0; a visionary. Although less complex — ano neurotic — than Lawrence of Arabia, there are obvious, basic resemblances. Lilt! Lawrence, Belaney had 'parent problems'; his father was the black sheep of a respectable Scottish family, who was more-or-less ordered to leave England. He married — and then promptly deserted a fifteen year old pregnant barmaid, then ran away to America with another girl and her thirteen year old sister, the girl bore him a child and died, whereupon he married the thirteen year year old. He soon deserted her too, leaving behind one of hts sons — Archie — with respectable aunts In Hastings. At the age of eighteen, the dreaMY, romantic Archie — a tall, hatchet-faced youth who looked rather Indian (occultists are bound to suspect reincarnation) — managed to get out to Canada, and entered immediatelY into the strange, lifelong dream of being an Indian. He apprenticed himself to an OjibviaY band, and learned the art of trapping. And he became Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin, He Who Flies 13Y Night, or Grey Owl. Like his father, he had 8 number of women in his life. The last was a beautiful Iroquois girl called Anahareo, whose love of animals turned Grey Owl from 8 trapper into an animal protectionist. By now he was in his forties. At which point, the author of this bocat enters the story — Lovat Dickson, a young Canadian who had set up in London as 3 publisher. Grey Owl sent him a manuscrIP1 called Pilgrims of the Wild, telling the storY his flight across Canada with Anahareo. The book made Grey Owl famous and Mr Dickson rich. Grey Owl came to England and gavAe immensely successful lectures. There ha`,.. been nothing like it since Buffalo Bill brougly" his circus to England. The tall 'Indian' In buckskins raised his hand towards t11,e audience and said "How Kola! I come, peace," then went on to speak, in a thrilltnps baritone voice, about life in the great volt' and the animals he loved. Unfortunately, the success was brief. TW,n years later, another lecture tour in Englan`"
followed by one in America, killed him at the age of fifty. Then the newspapers discovered the maiden aunts in Hastings, who declared
that Grey Owl was not the product of a Mexican Indian mother and a Scottish father
named McNeill, but a decent English boy who had spent his whole life playing cowboys and Indians.
In fact, this story was more romantic and exciting than the Grey Owl myth. If Belaney had had the sense to tell the truth from the beginning, he would probably have become a symbol of the craving of civilised man to es cape to a simpler, healthier existence. It is no more to his discredit that he was not an Indian than it was to Lawrence's that he wasn't an Arab. On the contrary, by showing that he
could become an Indian, he was proving to the Poor devil stuck in a dreary office that if he
didn't like his life he could change it. Unfor tunately, some touch of weakness or dishonesty in Archie Belaney prevented him from seeing this; and so, like Lawrence, he Was committed to living with a 'guilty secret' Which, like a splinter, would slowly fester. The kindly Lovat Dickson argues that this wasn't Archie's fault; he says that a Canadian newspaper, describing Grey Owls debut as a lecturer, referred to him as "a full-blooded Indian," and that from then on, Belaney was stuck with it.
But when one considers the romantic story of Grey Owl's courtship of Anahareo, his dishonesty seems incredible. Her real name was Gertrude Bernard. When Belaney met her, she was nineteen, he thirty-six; he was
also married — twice. Apparently it was real love at first sight for both of them. When Archie had some minor brush with the law, they fled together across Canada, and he continued to be a trapper — in spite of her Pleas — until they found two beaver kittens, and Grey Owl suddenly became an animal Protector. Yet, in spite of all this, Belaney told her he was half-Indian, who knew England Slightly because he had been there in the war. (He had, in fact, been a soldier, and had bigamously married an English girl after the war.) Yet Belaney kept up his pretence even With Anahareo. "From then on," says Mr blckson, "his life changed . . . He became a man with a mission." But also, like Lawrence, a showman who thoroughly enjoyed the Publicity. "His honesty was above suspicion," says a historian to quote Mr Dickson. But he falls to get down to the fascinating task of analysing how an honest man could indulge in lifelong 'double-think.'
The Grey Owl books brought Archie fame -and also led to his parting from Anahareo. He greatly embarrassed his now successful PUblisher, Lovat Dickson, by proposing to Marry a French Canadian girl. On his second English tour, says Mr Dickson, "I could not help noticing [he] behaved more like a successful dramatic impresario than a man with a mission." He was introduced to the King, Whom he saluted with his arm upraised and a gutteral: "How Kola," followed by a stream of Indian dialect. "That means I come in peace, brother" explained Grey Owl. He was now married to the French girl, whom he called Silver Moon. When he died a few months later, after his American lecture tour, the post Tortern revealed nothing wrong with him. The cause of death was exhaustion . • ," but exhaustion of his will to live, rather than of his body. In fact, like Lawrence, he had made such a mess of his life that there wasn't all that much to live for. How long would it have !)een before some newspaper denounced the Grey Owl hoax' and made more books imPossible? Without fully intending to, Mr bickson has written a strange moral fable, and also, I suspect, a minor classic on the strange labyrinth of the human soul.
Colin Wilson's study, The Occult, has recently been issued in paperback.
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