This week’s Historicist column was about Toronto-born journalist and world traveller, Gordon Sinclair. As a travel-writer, his tales of adventure and intrigue in Asia and the South Pacific captured the imagination of his readers, and provided an escape from the mundane realities of the Great Depression. Andrew Cohen, writing a review of Scott Young’s brisk and workmanlike biography of Sinclair for a March 1989 issue of the Canadian Historical Review, touches on exactly what interests me most about Gordon Sinclair: his storyteller’s propensity for embellishment and self-creation. “The trouble with Sinclair’s stories is they were not always true,” Cohen writes. “His was more the journalism of the narcissist than the iconoclast. He was the product of the Age of Hyperbole, when entertainment mattered more than reportage.” I mention it in the column, but expand here on the level of truth and fiction in his stories.
Yet, perhaps Cohen and I overstated the amount of embellishment a bit. In Gordon Sinclair: A Life…And Then Some (1987), Young explains how it was Sinclair’s talent itself that made him a target:
With his career then approaching high gear, a whispering campaign began that followed him almost for life: that none of these things really happened, that he made them up as he went along. The truth is that some journalists could have travelled—some have travelled—the same route as Sinclair without possessing the instinct, the sheer curiosity about the human condition, to find what he found. He wasn’t exactly the good Samaritan type, but when something interesting presented itself, he never crossed to the other side of the road and hurried on. Some of it was fun and he wrote that as fun; when it was tragedy or something close to it, he had a very clearly sensed, open-eyed, often dispassionate way of relating precisely what happened, and what happened next, until his readers had the picture as he saw it and felt it. He often lucked in to his kind of story, large or small, wherever he went. (Young, 62)
In his 1975 autobiography, Will Gordon Sinclair Please Sit Down , Sinclair described the difficulty of defending himself against charges he’d invented his adventures:
I’d often been accused of faking stories of far-away places, and there was a simple explanation. There was no international air mail in those days, and since my stories were human interest yarns rather than hard news, I sent them home by mail, often getting back before they did! Yarns with exotic datelines (but no actual dates on them) appeared in the paper while I’d be visible on the street.
Fake! Fraud! Fiction!
I made the mistake of trying to explain it in print, by word of mouth and even by radio. Cries of fake grew louder. I showed hotel bills, letters of credit showing withdrawals as to time, place, and amount, passport entry and departure markings.
Many critics were not convinced. Even now, more than forty years after some of these events, I’m periodically accused by people who were no even born when I spied out the world’s far places, that I wrote it all in the pub or wine cellar. (Sinclair, 106)
