April 16, 2001 These writers deserve better It's a shame Montreal's Blue Metropolis festival is so badly executed Noah Richler National PostMarie-France Coallier, The Gazette Normal Mailler with his wife, Norris, at the Blue Metropolis literary festival.Under the awnings of the hotels on Sherbrooke Stre ...
4/16/01
Scott Griffin and wife Krystyne: As a symbol for their adventurous life ahead, Griffin climbed out on to a gargoyle on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and from this precarious perch professed his love.
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Scott Griffin
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The yellow and white Cessna 180, a diminutive plane even among the small planes flitting in and out of Toronto's Island airport, taxis in from the runway on to the tarmac. As the plane approaches the terminal, the pilot executes a fast 90-degree turn, neatly whipping the plane's tail to its final resting place. It's a show-offy move, the kind an 18-year-old in a Camaro might make on a city street. But the man who emerges from the cockpit is a 61-year-old Toronto businessman, and the newest hero in Canada's literary firmament.
Scott Griffin surprised everyone this week when he announced the creation of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, one of the richest poetry prizes in the world. It is an astonishing sum -- $80,000 annually -- so much cash that a Maclean's reporter called Griffin's publicist to point out the typo on the invitation announcing the award. And for poetry, yet, certainly the least popular of the literary arts. Finally, there was the question that most riveted the literary cognoscenti: Who the hell is Scott Griffin? Like Jack Rabinovitch was when he founded the Giller Prize for fiction six years ago, Griffin is, frankly, a nobody in literary circles. Until now. Now he is a very big somebody.
Twenty minutes later, sitting in the pilot's lounge (he's flown in from the family's compound on Balsam Lake, two hours northeast of Toronto) Scott Griffin, in chinos, Topsiders and a pastel plaid shirt, looks like the scion of White Anglo Toronto he is. He is a compact man, about five feet nine, who occasionally sweeps his hair back in a gesture reminiscent of Hugh Grant. His long hair is streaked with grey, and he badly needs a haircut, not the image of the millionaire businessman most of us have. But he is a businessman (he struck it rich as a venture capitalist and is today owner of a highly sophisticated shock-absorber concern). And like any good businessman, he stays very much "on message." And the message today is to talk about the Griffin Trust. And, more personally, his deep and abiding love of poetry.
It began with his father, Griffin explains. "Whenever we did some kind of misdemeanor, my father would use poetry as a punishment. We had to learn a poem -- one of our choice -- and then recite it that evening in front of the family." For many kids, that would have killed any incipient interest in the subject. Not Griffin. "It made us fall in love with poetry. I believe that you don't truly understand a poem until you've memorized it."
Griffin's $80,000 will be divided into two prizes, one for a Canadian poet, one for an international poet, both writing in English. The only poetry prize larger than the Griffin is the Tanning Prize, worth US$100,000, a lifetime achievement award given to an American poet. The Griffin rewards working poets regardless of nationality, and a publisher can submit up to three books published within that year.
Griffin thought about creating a poetry prize for a long time, although, he notes wryly, "there wasn't a Saul at the crossroads" moment. By last January though, he was ready to try it out on others. He and his wife, Krystyne, invited novelist Michael Ondaatje and playwright David Young on Jan. 21 to a dinner party at their Rosedale house, an exotic environment of Turkish carpets, aubergine walls and lacquered ceilings.
"Scott took us aside, into the living room, and tried the idea out," Young recalls. "We were just blown away. It was as thrilling a moment as I've had in my life. He said, 'Don't tell anyone about it, and we need to talk.' "
Plans proceeded quickly. Ondaatje and Young lined up a group of credible trustees: Margaret Atwood, former U.S. poet laureate Robert Haas and renowned British poet Robin Robertson.
Setting up a major literary award in seven months is a huge undertaking, but Griffin has that kind of energy and speed. Even as a kid, he concedes, he was hyperactive. "Today, he'd probably have been put on Ritalin," laughs his younger brother Tim. Then, the solution was to ship him off to Sedbergh, a boarding school north of Montebello in Quebec. "It was the best thing for me," Griffin acknowledges. "There were only 59 boys there. You skied out to huts on the weekend and you were on your own, you had to cook for yourself and make your own fires. It was exactly the sort of thing I needed. And I loved it."
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The spartan school further fostered Griffin's interest in poetry. "[The school] was run by an Englishman, a sort of Victorian Mr. Chips," Griffin recalls. "But he had a tremendous love of poetry. He would come into a class and would read out a long poem and suddenly slam the desk and say, 'Listen to this! Listen!' and he would recite it with tremendous emphasis. It captured your imagination. Here was somebody who was a rather formidable figure to a young boy, reciting poetry."
Later, at Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Que., the attraction to poetry was cemented by Arthur Moyter, his English professor. "He was a very sensitive person, the exact opposite of our headmaster. He was very emotional. He adored poetry. He held a course where there were only five of us. And afterwards he would sit down and write us a letter about the points we had made or not made, and we would reply in a letter. It was quite a unique experience. So that really laid a pretty firm ground."
Scott Griffin was spawned in a rarified Upper-Canadian gene pool. His great-grandfather was Sir William MacKenzie, who made much of his fortune building railways and, as Griffin offhandedly wrote in a recent e-mail, "owned TTC, Ont. Hydro ... etc." That "etc." covers a lot of unspoken assumptions about wealth. His father, Tony, was the youngest captain in the Canadian navy during the Second World War, and later joined the Lester Pearson-run external affairs department before founding his own investment firm. Griffin's mother, Kitty, was sister to Walter Gordon, the federal finance minister in the Pearson government.
It's all vaguely Kennedyesque. It is a large, toothsome, athletic, outdoorsy, Catholic clan, which regularly gathers for family events at the Balsam Lake compound. The original estate, which came to encompass seven summer homes, a garage, an ice house and a riding stable, was built by Sir William, who acquired a mile of shoreline early in his career, and who built a private branch of his railroad to reach it. And, like the Kennedys, they're a competitive bunch. The eldest of five, Griffin has three brothers. There's Ian, a Calgary stockbroker, Peter, a high-school principal, and Tim, the former head of RT Capital. And sister Anne is an artist. Even today, they regularly battle it out on the tennis court, or on the lake.
"When you go up to the cottage they all want to slaughter you at tennis," says long-time family friend and art collector Bruce Bailey. And if they're not trying to wallop you on the court, they find more imaginative ways to do it. "They play a game called Ball on the Roof: everyone divides into teams and tries to hit the ball over the roof of the main house. I prefer a gin and tonic on the dock with Scott's wife, Krystyne."
You cannot write about Griffin and not mention Krystyne, his second wife. (A first marriage produced three children; Scott and Krystyne have a daughter.) Krystyne Griffin is a powerhouse in her own right, the doyenne of the Canadian fashion industry. Tall, aristocratic, "she gives Scott sanction," says one close friend, alluding to his appetite for living adventurously. She knew this early on: In the mid-'70s, Griffin climbed out on to a gargoyle on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and from his precarious perch told her he loved her.
"It's the marriage which has allowed him to move forward, to achieve his success," observes Bailey. "She's rock solid. They are the sort of people who, if they lost everything financially, could be quite happy sleeping in a tent -- if they were together." She is his Rose, Jackie and Ethel all rolled into one.
Of course, you can't stretch the Kennedy analogy too far. Griffin does share, though, a sense of public service. "I believe you have to return some of your winnings back to society some way or other. And I think it's always better to put it back into things that are of interest to you. So, poetry was a bit of a natural."
Despite the deep establishment roots, Griffin is a self-made millionaire. Since his great-grandfather MacKenzie lost most of his fortune in the '20s, and since his parents are still alive, there have been no lavish inheritances.
So after Bishops, where he got his degree in English and philosophy, Griffin went to work. He started his career in the mailroom at British Petroleum, eventually working his way up to a marketing job. He got seconded to the company's London office, returned to Montreal to run one of the Pop Shoppe franchises, then bounced to Toronto, where he formed a venture capital firm, Meridian Technology, with Bruce Westwood, who is now a literary agent.
"[Meridian] wandered about in the desert exploring solar energy, satellite television, computers and software," Griffin says, "and eventually settled on manufacturing -- magnesium die-casting for the automotive industry." When that company -- it eventually became the largest consumer of magnesium ingots in the world -- was bought by Fiat, Griffin bought Meridian's shock-absorber subsidiary. He built that firm up, as he says, "from a very small company to a very profitable company" that specializes in sophisticated shock absorbers for high-speed rail and buildings designed to withstand earthquakes. So, poets can say a little prayer of thanks every time they see a bullet train; it is directly responsible for the Griffin Prize.
"There's something wonderfully perverse," Griffin says with a laugh, "about translating shock absorbers into poetry. It amuses a funny bone way back there, that all this machinery for the auto industry is making its way into poetry."
In an earlier age, Griffin would have been an adventurer, not a businessman. Perhaps he'd have carved a better-than-successful living as a pirate or from exploring remotest Africa, or from trading with natives on the South China Sea. But the real thrill would have been the journey.
But since the call for explorer-adventurers is limited these days, Griffin satisfies this taste elsewhere. As a member of the board of directors for the Canadian Executive Services Overseas, for example, he has overseen projects in Romania and Africa. He's also a director of the African Medical and Research Foundation, and spent 18 months in Africa reorganizing its flying-doctors service.
He even took his own plane over, flying from St. John's to the Azores over the course of 14 hours. The Azores are a mere speck on the map, and it's hard to imagine trying to find them after flying for 14 hours in a teeny Cessna. "You don't have a lot of room for error," Griffin says, aware of the understatement. "If you get to the 13 1/2 hour mark and can't pick up the signal, you have two choices: turn left or right and hope you've picked correctly. You've got another nine or 10 hours flying to get to Portugal or Africa and you haven't got that fuel, so you go down."
Not your average poetry-loving aesthete.
"He's a little high-strung, maybe energetic is a better way to describe it," says brother Tim. "Very competitive, but then so am I, so we get along really well. He has always been a little hyper ... there is a cliff-hanger side to him.
"This prize, though, is also a little risky," he adds thoughtfully. "It involves a lot of money and though he's done well, he's no Bill Gates or Ken Thomson. And there are risks associated with how it will be perceived, whether it will generate controversy, whether it will achieve what he wants it to achieve."
Griffin is well aware he won't accomplish everything he wants to do in the first year. But he will have done something few other benefactors have achieved: opened the Canadian scene up to the world by making his prize international.
"I think it's very important to make it international," Griffin says, "because it will bring Canadian poets into the international arena and vice versa. I think a lot of Canadian prizes are parochial in the sense that they are very important in the Canadian scene, but they don't lift Canadians out into the international scene."
And once he's done that?
"Well," he adds with a laugh, "if shock absorbers keep selling, who knows?"
Krystyne Romer Griffin
Scott Griffin
My Heart is Africa --Allen
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