Biography of John Gray

I wasn’t always John MacLachlan Gray, in fact I was born John Howard Gray, for most of my life I called myself John Gray and remained content with that name until approximately 1995.

Then several things happened.

I wrote a few books. At readings in the suburbs I noticed a surprising number of women with full makeup and confused expressions. They had come to hear not me but “John Gray PhD”, the ex-monk who deals out reactionary sexual advice under the Venus and Mars brand.

Around that time I began writing columns for newspapers – where there lurked another John Gray, an eminence gris of Canadian journalism who wrote authoritative pieces on world events. There I was writing for the same paper: What was I to do, call myself the other John Gray?

And in 1995 my mother died. It seemed wrong that my name consisted of the first name of a World War II Spitfire pilot, the first name of my father, and the last name of my father as well. MacLachlan was my mother’s name. It felt right at the time.

Ok, fine. Here is probably more than you want to know about my so-called life:

1946

I was born in Ottawa, Canada, during demobilization following World War II. My father was a Flight Lieutenant with the RCAF. Mother a biologist doing research into the poison gas phosgene.

I was brought up in Truro, Nova Scotia, 40 miles from my father’s home village. I went to school for 12 years, during which I distinguished myself only by playing keyboards with an R&B band called The Lincolns. (I wrote a musical about it, sort of, called Rock and Roll. It became a feature-length video called The King Of Friday Night.)

1960

At school I had all the markers of attention deficit disorder – if indeed it is a disorder. Through day after day of skull-sucking ennui, I drifted through school with the mental clarity of a zombie. With six years of piano and a regular gig with a band, I managed to fail music.

1964

I attended Mount Allison University, a tiny liberal arts institution in New Brunswick. (With my high-school average I would never be admitted today.) At Mount A I kept up my standard as a thoroughly mediocre student. I continued to play with The Lincolns. I acted in a couple of plays. I graduated without distinction.

1968

I married. An unwise decision for a 21 year-old as you might imagine.

I attended the University of British Columbia Department of Theater in the directing program. There I met various theatre types with whom I would continue working for the rest of my so-called career.

I graduated, again without distinction.

1972

With the above theatre types I formed a troupe which, under various names, performed cutting-edge rip-offs of the New York and East European avant-garde.

My marriage, a bad idea in the first place, disintegrated.

(This period eventually found its way into a novel, Dazzled, which has been out of print for twenty years.)

I did the normal Canadian thing: I blew town. Off to Toronto, where I sponged off the actor Eric Peterson and wrote music with Theatre Passe Muraille, an English-Canadian theatre company despite its name, known for its populist-nationalist themes.

1976

This train of thought led me to write 2 musicals: 18 Wheels, about truck drivers, and Billy Bishop Goes to War, which I performed with Peterson for upwards of four years. We were in uniform a good deal longer than Bishop himself, albeit with less risk.

1980

Billy Bishop Goes to War took us across Canada and to Washington, Edinburgh and Los Angeles, where we succeeded, and to Broadway and the West End of London, where we failed. We were produced on Broadway by Mike Nichols and Lewis Allen. Heretofore we had performed in converted churches and IOOF halls and funeral parlours; now we were on the stage of the Morosco.

We lasted a week.

But failure on Broadway is often the best thing that can happen. For one thing, you get to see what’s on top of the mountain, and gently retreat in horror.

Meanwhile the play kept going, thanks to good reviews. Billy Bishop was the most produced show in America for four years. I will be one surprised dead man if I am remembered for anything other than that one show.

Meanwhile, I wrote Rock and Roll. Another hit, in Canada at least.

Around that time I met Beverlee, my wife. Unlike my first marriage, this was not a mistake - or if it was, the mistake is not yet apparent after twenty-four years, in which she has been my constant companion and my best friend and the mother of two handsome louts.

1984

I don’t think it possible to reach the age of 50 without having about 10 years you can’t quite account for.

Things get murky in the mid-1980s. My so-called career took… well, not exactly a dive, more like a series of sideways spirals.

I wrote pieces for magazines. I wrote screenplays for movies that hardly ever got made. I wrote bibles for TV series that never ever got made. And I wrote more musicals; but no matter how successful, they felt like a comedown from the glory days of Billy Bishop and Rock and Roll.

I did radio shows of various kinds and with varying enthusiasm. I was a pundit on TV, chattering my face off at six in the morning on a triple-ender out of Toronto on a subject I knew nothing about.

1988

A flurry of media activity happened before the bottom dropped out of the CBC’s budget. Billy Bishop Goes to War became a TV special. Rock and Roll became a feature-length video. I composed and performed about 65 satirical videos for The Journal, a national current affairs show – on 65 contracts. I performed Billy Bishop on German TV with Has-Peter Korf, in a translation by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

At the time I was all a-flutter with Canadian nationalist issues that seem quaint now. I gave speeches. God, did I give speeches.

Around 1995

my mother died, as I mentioned, and I became depressed. Nothing spectacular, nothing to inspire pity in anyone but myself, but depressed nonetheless.

Like failure on Broadway, this was not entirely a bad thing. I paid more attention to my sons, for instance.

And I started writing books. In a way this had something to do with re-staking my territory. A book is not a play or a screenplay. When you write a book, it is what it is. Even if nobody else reads it, it’s still a book. It’s not a blueprint for a book. It doesn’t need the permission of a producer for it to become itself.

I started with non-fiction – cultural storytelling of various kinds about Canada and tattooing, nothing radical, not a big stretch from journalism, with the voice of a columnist and the rhythm of a stage monologue.

Then I tackled a plot-based novel that turned out to be A Gift for the Little Master. Storytelling is all I’ve ever done, and fiction is nothing but found objects strung together into a continuous narrative. Of all literary forms, the thriller is the one book I open without that vague depression that I am about to undergo Art.

The learning curve took awhile. I wrote the book once, discovered I had made a fatal error, then took a year and wrote it again.

Then I got into Victoriana. Well, not really. The Fiend in Human and White Stone Day are like distressed denim – something new made to look old. Nothing happens that is not applicable today, to me at least. Besides, I was born into a Victorian household. My father sat at the head of the table. On Saturday night, dances were required to stop before midnight, to obey the Lord’s Day Act. And where would you find a more Victorian character than George W. Bush?

This sort of writing is a bit like a performance in a literary costume. There’s something theatrical about the approach that feels right. I think that’s why I write in the present tense – as in the theatre or a dream, it’s happening before your eyes, not as a fait accompli.

JMG