An interview with JIM ARNETT: US-CANADA two historical novels

James Arnett takes us from a 1922 Prohibition Era murder to deadly guerrilla warfare during the American Revolution

Occasionally, I will interview other people about what they are doing and what they are thinking. My first foray into this field is with author and lawyer Jim Arnett.

Eminent lawyer and leading businessman Jim Arnett has recently published two timely thrilling historical novels.

They center on US-Canada relations, a hot topic, the centre of national attention.

Jim's two novels start off from true but little-known events, and they focus, in very different ways, on the contrasting histories and mentalities of the United States and Canada – Bean Fate is a story from the 1920s prohibition era on the Canada-US border and The Monmouth Manifesto is a story of Royalists, potential future Canadians, desperately fighting the "Rebels" in New Jersey during the American Revolution. Both books can be purchased directly from Jim Arnett’s website: JAMES ARNETT

Below: Brief descriptions of the novels, then a brief bio of Jim Arnett, then an interview with Jim Arnett:

Bean Fate

Bean Fate, set in 1922 Saskatchewan, is a raw, violent prohibition-era saga of the building of the west, of immigration, of racism, of virtue destroyed, of corruption in high places, of the birth of a vast fortune – the legendary Bronfman-Seagram Empire – and of a USA–Canada clash of systems and values.

Jack Ross, an idealistic, naïve, traumatized veteran of WW-I and the Battle of Vimy Ridge, is posted in the spring of 1922 as the lone police constable to Bienfait - pronounced "Bean Fate" by the locals – a dusty forlorn village on the US-Canadian border. Bienfait has one thing going for it. It is on the road to booming, liquor-starved, gang-dominated prohibition era Chicago, and so it becomes the transit point for – illicit – liquor exports to the USA. In Bienfait, naive, idealistic Jack – he comes from a strict Methodist background – discovers a contrast between the US and Canada and a liquor-powered chain of big money, extortion, corruption, violence, and murder that unites the two countries and reaches right to the top of the political pyramid.

The Monmouth Manifesto

The American Revolution was, in fact, America’s first Civil War. John Adams, second president of the United States (1797-1801), made a rough estimate in 1815 that during the Revolution (1775 - 1783) one-third of the population supported Britain, one third supported the Revolution, and one-third was nervously neutral. For Loyalists – who supported the British Crown – the self-styled “Patriots” were traitorous Rebels. The Monmouth Manifesto takes us into this seldom-seen Loyalist world. Two New Jersey farmers – Richard Lippincott, a modest Quaker, and James Moody, an alpha Anglican, become unlikely friends in a Loyalist regiment in the British Army. They engage in multiple forms of action against the Patriots, from pitched battles and guerilla warfare, to high-jackings and kidnappings. And there are reprisals, extrajudicial hangings of both Loyalists and, fatefully, Patriots. Lippincott's and Moody's daring deeds draw the wrath of General George Washington, whose famous stoic calm is shattered by his explosive anger, leading to an international incident – the Asgill Affair –that deeply embarrasses Washington's key ally, the King of France himself. As Lippincott and Moody come to pay the price for their courage on the wrong side of history – their families and loved ones suffer too –the loss of their farms, broken homes, brutal prison confinements, a murder trial and the ultimate humiliation of becoming homeless refugees.

JIM ARNETT

Originally from Manitoba, Jim Arnett has a deep knowledge of both the United States and Canada. He was a partner in Davies, Ward & Beck (a forerunner of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg) in Toronto and then a senior partner in the Toronto and Washington, DC, offices of Stikeman, Elliott, a major Canadian law firm. He was appointed a Queen’s Counsel, served on the Council of the Section of Business Law of the International Bar Association, as a Governor of the Washington Foreign Law Society, and as Ontario editor of the Canadian Bar Review. He subsequently served as CEO of The Molson Companies Limited (now merged into Molson Coors), Chairman of Club de Hockey Canadien Inc., and as Chair of Hydro One Inc., an Ontario utility. He has acted as an adviser to the governments of Canada and the Province of Ontario. He was Chair of Toronto East General Hospital (now Michael Garron Hospital) and Chair of Canada’s National History Society. He is a member of the Council of the International Commission of Jurists (Canada). He and his wife, Alix, have four adult children and live in Toronto.

The Interview: A Talk with Jim Arnett

GILBERT: When did the “epiphany” or moment come when you thought, "I'm going to write a novel!”?

BEAN FATE: ORIGINS: GRANDFATHER’S NOVEL

JIM: It's kind of a long story. I’ll try to make it short. Basically, what happened was that after I had finally retired the second time, in 2015 or thereabouts, the question I faced was this: What to do? Then I remembered that I had a manuscript of a novel that my grandfather Arnett had written in the 1920s—an unpublished manuscript that my grandmother had given me decades ago. She had asked me to see if I could do something with it and, of course, then I was too busy to think about that sort of thing. So, I did nothing with it for decades.

THE UNSOLVED MURDER & THE BRONFMAN STORY
JIM: But then I thought, well, I'm pulling it up, have a look at it, and see whether I could get it published. The long and the short of it was that I couldn't, but along the way, two things happened. One was that I moved into trying to develop a treatment of the story for a movie, and that effort also failed because the essential plot wasn't compelling enough. But the setting was compelling, which was rum-running in Saskatchewan in the 1920s. I had done some research in connection with this, and I hit upon this incredible story: that a member of the famous Bronfman family had been murdered in 1922 in a tiny border village, Bienfait, and the murder was never solved.

JIM: So then I thought, well, I've got the setting—maybe I could come up with a better plot than my grandfather had, and I'll have my fictional cop solve the murder. Now, my idea at that point was still to develop something for a movie, and I worked up a treatment.

JIM: And I worked up a treatment, and I was working on it, and I had an introduction to Noel Baker through the Canadian Film Centre because I knew somebody there, and Noel helped me with the treatment. I ended up showing the treatment around to a few people in the film industry as best I could. I didn't have an agent and, in the end, I couldn't find anybody that was interested or prepared to take it further.

FROM TREATMENT TO NOVEL

JIM: And so, I was sitting around with Noel Baker, and I was a little disappointed at this point. I had invested quite a bit of time and energy in this project, and it was going nowhere. I thought, is it all for naught? And Baker said to me, “Why, you could always turn it into a novel.” This astonished me. “Oh my God, that's a whole different kettle of fish!” That involves really creative writing, but what was the alternative? I thought, well, I'll give it a shot. At least I had the outline of a novel, which was the treatment.

JIM: So I used the treatment as an outline and then just started filling it in. The big issue, of course, in my mind at the outset was dialogue— that's the big issue. And by Jove, I found I could do dialogue, which surprised me, but I found that I could, at least to my satisfaction. So I came up with a novel called Bean Fate, which was the way the locals pronounced and pronounce “Bienfait” and that was based upon true facts and was an historical novel, but it had a lot of creative fiction elements in it.

MORAL DILEMMA – THE CORRUPTION OF PURITAN VIRTUE

GILBERT: There's a moral dilemma in both of your novels between men of great virtue— of Methodist background in Bean Fate and of Quaker background in The Monmouth Manifesto – men who are transformed by circumstance into something different, rather the opposite of what they originally were. Where does that moral contradiction come from?

JIM: It comes from the story, really the two separate stories. I don't know that I set out to do that exactly, illustrate those ethical dilemmas and that evolution of a character, and having done it, if you like, in the first book, where a rather naïve WWI veteran faces moral dilemmas when working as a local cop inside a corrupt political system. I didn’t set out to portray a moral dilemma of that kind in the second book. I was forced by the story, by historical facts that I didn't have to come up with it – two contrasting characters, one a Quaker with a pacifist background, and the other an Anglican Tory, and both are on the same side, the royalist side, in the American Revolution.

JIM: Going back to the first book, which was Bean Fate, set within the 1920s, in a funny kind of way, I could connect or sympathize with the fictional protagonist, the kind of a guy that I could have known. I grew up in in Manitoba, as a small boy in the late '40s and then into the '50s, and I was surrounded by family, including grandparents, who had lived through the 1920s in Western Canada. So, I had kind of a feeling for the sorts of people like that, in Western Canada, like the guy that became the cop — the Jack Ross character – not that I knew anybody that had the specific issues that he had, but I had a feeling for the time and the characters and that's just the way it developed.

CANADA AND THE US IN CONTRAST

JIM: I might take a little further – there was an underlying idea there, in addition to the moral dilemma you mentioned. One thing I did do consciously was develop a comparison or contrast between Canadian and American cultures and ways of doing things. And that led me into — and I don't want to overdo it— but on the one hand, in America, is what Canadians see as kind of a vulgar, violent culture, to overstate it. And then, to overstate the Canadian side, a certain Canadian sanctimoniousness, particularly about the American situation. So I did consciously use that as an entrée into the protagonist's thinking, and I set him up to have to see that, and in a sense that played into his moral dilemma, because the American cop had a different idea about the way to deal with the problem of crime and violence than the Canadian cop and that leads the Canadian cop to question his own approach.

IS CANADA WORTH PRESERVING?

GILBERT: That raises an interesting question, just to go general: is the Canada project worth preserving?

JIM: I certainly think so. Don't get me wrong, I've always been pretty pro-American. I admire a lot about the United States, and there were times in my life when I thought semi-seriously about moving to the United States because of the great things about the United States. But the Canadian virtues--- peace, order, and good government, call them what you will — which are more communitarianism as opposed to more individualism, are a kind of subtle difference from the Americans, but I think it’s worth keeping. It'd be too bad if we lost it.

“CREATIVE” WRITING AND “NON-CREATIVE WRITING” – ENERGY AND CREATIVITY

GILBERT: You’ve done a lot of writing in your life, and you were doing the treatments for quite a while, but did you find the experience of writing fiction different from everything you've done before?

JIM: Yes, for one thing, it's harder. For example, what I found was, usually I wrote in the morning, not because I read that other people wrote in the morning. That's just the way it developed for me, and usually I found by about noon I was starting to fail a little bit in terms of creativity. Now, I could work in the afternoon doing editing, doing research—which, by the way, is more like the kinds of things that I've done in my other careers—but the creative stuff, generally speaking, I didn't do it in the afternoon. I don't know exactly--- whether it suggests it takes more mental energy.

DISCOVERING ONE’S INTERIOR LIFE – HEARING DIALOGUE

GILBERT: Did you discover things about yourself writing fiction that you didn't know? I mean, you're a pretty self-aware guy from the beginning, I would think.

JIM: Maybe what I discovered was that I have an interior life that I hadn't fully realized before that---memories of situations, people—I was drawing on memories of situations and people that I didn’t really know I had. Not necessarily specifically, but it would just come out. The thing that I did find interesting was in doing the dialogue---in one sense, it was kind of logical. I found that, if one character said this, then I could imagine that the other guy might say that in response, and then the first person might say that in response. And while, when I started off, I probably had a general idea of where I wanted it to go or end up, I didn't know how it would go till I went through it, and sometimes it didn't end up quite where I’d anticipated—and it forced me to change the narrative a little bit. But it was as if I could hear the two voices talking to each other. They were doing the talking. That was kind of interesting for me—they started to have a life of their own.

AN INVENTORY OF VOICES

JIM: And you know, I remember years ago—maybe more than on one occasion—when I'd seen or read about process of creative fiction, talking about how they did things and talking about their characters, and how their characters took on a life of their own, and so. At the time I thought, that sounds a little phony to me, but now I get it. It's like an inventory of voices in one’s head.

HOW IMPORTANT IS HISTORY

GILBERT: How important is history?

JIM: That's a very interesting question. I do think it's important. The more interesting question is whether it's a good thing or a bad thing—but I think it's important to our understanding of ourselves and our situation, to help us understand why we're in any particular situation that we're in. Secondly, while it's true history doesn't precisely repeat itself, there are patterns. Sort of like Arnold Toynbee’s ideas. There are kinds of patterns of past human behavior and past group behavior that can be helpful in analyzing what's going on today. And the fact of the matter is that people, to some extent, are creatures of their cultures, and their cultures derive from their historical experiences, and if you don't understand that it's harder to understand those other people's cultures – or even your own. But the other side of the coin is the abuses of history, the dwelling on past grievances, which is a big part of history and a big part of cultures, and I think that tends to be a negative thing like, for example, for the Palestinians.

GILBERT: I had a discussion with a young indigenous guy at one point and I said, I think making a cult out of trauma is a bad idea, and he thought about it for a bit and he said, “yeah, I think that's a bad idea, and a lot of people are doing it.”

JIM: Yes.

GILBERT: I guess it was Faulkner: "The past isn't dead, it's not even past," in the sense that peoples identities are really entangled with their past.

JIM: It’s true and we don't tend to realize it. You don't tend to realize why or how you picked up ideas as you were growing up.

JIM: Identity crises can be triggered, and then they turn into mass movements or some kind of plague. Of course anything can be abused by malign people. I mean, nationalism is one of them; religion is another one of them—not to say that religion is bad, as some people say, but it sure can be misused. And certainly, history can be.

GILBERT: I think we could go into depths on this.

JIM: Hitler’s rise was based upon grievances, personal and those of his countrymen. And there were, I guess, legitimate grievances there, so the question is whether you focus on the negative, concentrating on the grievances of the past, or on the positive, the possibilities offered by today and tomorrow.

GILBERT: And also, there's an interesting point—some of the most radical Nazis were actually out on the frontiers of German culture, and he was Austrian, not German.

JIM: Of course, at the end of the day, most highly successful people—certainly highly successful political leaders— it's just all about them, Hitler, any of those guys—they have a will to power, they have to satisfy their id. It's all about them. And you grab whatever levers there are. A Hitler sees this in the German populace, and it was there, all this sense of grievance—so he taps into it and uses it.

CREATIVE WRITING LATER IN LIFE

JIM: On a podcast the host asked me, "people like you that start doing something creative or artistic or something later in life after having had more conventional or humdrum or whatever careers, do you regret that you didn't get out of that earlier in your life, might it have been different?"

JIM: In my own case, it certainly would have been different, but I actually don't think I could have done it when I was much younger. You have to write about something, and when you're my age, if you've had a life, experiences—I have met a ton of people, I've done a ton of things, I've been to a ton of places--- it gives you a view of the world.

JIM: What always amazes me is how some of these writers come up with terrific stuff when they're in their 20s, and I wonder, how did they know that about people and of the world? I couldn't have done that.

JIM: And then of course, as I told you, I backed into it upon the genre, historical fiction, which works for me really well, partly because it's easier, in a sense, because it gives me the plot, or it gives—it gives me the outline, and it gives me a couple of characters. In the case of The Monmouth Manifesto, it gave me all my characters, but in the case of Bean Fate, it gave me a couple of core characters—not the protagonist, but many of the core characters—and then you kind of riff off that or try to bring them to life. And, because I'm interested in history, I enjoy doing the research. But I couldn't imagine having done this when I was 25 or 30. Maybe I wish I'd started10 or 15 years earlier.

JIM: Even novelists like Le Carré who had lots of life experience or Graham Greene. And even Evelyn Waugh, he wrote about the world of Oxford and all that in a very interesting, complicated society, but he also had experiences during the Second World War and so on, same as Ian Fleming who wrote the James Bond books. And those wre dramatic times. Most of us don't live or experience dramatic times in their own lives, particularly in this country. But now it's going to be perhaps an adventurous time.

GILBERT: You did that. I mean, you were at Harvard, you ran a big company, you litigated, I suppose, a lot of stuff.

JIM: I met a lot of people. I saw a lot of things— I was lucky. Not necessarily that it all goes into your books. One way or another, I dealt with some big personalities: Brian Dickson, who was the Chief Justice of Canada, Henry Kissinger, Premier John Robarts — a lot of people with big personalities. Growing up in my own family or their world, they were good people and successful enough, but they didn't tend to be huge personalities. Anyway, I couldn't imagine having written novels when I was 30.

GILBERT Yeah, I think we don't realize how much we know when we're living these experiences, too—a lot of stuff the mind is registering which we don't—

JIM: it's floating around in there, I don't think it's digital, but it's there.

GILBERT: sometimes I've had to write about works of art and so on, so I go to an exhibition, I look at stuff, you know, and then I go away and I say, OK, I'm going to write about this, and I start writing and I realized that there's a whole lot of stuff that I saw that I didn't know that I saw—and the same with people. And meetings that I've been in, and I have to write up the meeting afterwards, and I say, Oh yeah, so-and-so had that tic that reveals that he's nervous about the proposal. And you steal and rob from all that.

JIM: Well, there's that too. It's an interesting thing when you're doing fiction, the extent to which you draw upon people you’ve known. It's one thing to draw upon kinds of people or types of people, and quite another thing to draw upon particular people. For example, in Bean Fate, there's one fictional character who, for a variety of reasons, I thought I had to have this character filling this role—he wasn't the major character—and I seized upon, in my mind, a man that I’d known when I was younger, who had a different role in life, but as a character, even as to his physical attributes, I had this guy in my mind as I was writing up this fictional character somehow, and he came to life, filled out by this guy from my distant past. It was just the kernel of the idea, you know, but it was powerful. Now I don't think anybody would have recognized the original in the fictional product of the original, even if they'd been around the original guy, you know what I mean?

GILBERT: Oh, absolutely. I wrote a historical novel where—complicated story—but I needed a character who was the grand manipulator, a senator—this is the 16th century in Venice —

JIM: Yeah, I read the book, I read it.

GILBERT: I needed this senator who's pulling the strings—I robbed a few things from a guy, a friend of mine, who is totally different from the senator, but who has a sort of noblesse oblige attitude, and I have the senator say to an underling who works as a spy for him, "Oh, that's so very kind of you," you know, like someone who's very up in the society will say to somebody who's low, "Ah, that's so very kind of you." And from that phrase, and remembering how my friend would occasionally say it, I thought, "I've got the character."

JIM: Yes, that's right, floating around in the mind, there is a sort of catalogue of characters, and you go back, and you make a connection, and you cotton on to something and then you run with it.

COULD THE BRITISH HAVE CRUSHED THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION?

GILBERT: This is totally off base, but you really have done a ton of research, and you have great insight. Do you think the British could have won the Revolutionary War?

JIM: The answer is yes and no, because that's the lawyer in me, but the answer is, in fact, yes and no. Technically, they could have, at least in the short run. There were a couple of times when the British Commander-in-Chief General William Howe could have destroyed Washington’s Continental Army, and the classic case was—which I don't really deal with in the book — was the Battle of Brooklyn Heights. Washington had stationed his army on Brooklyn Heights on Long Island. Howe, who had his base camp on Staten Island, landed his army on Long Island and defeated Washington. But Howe didn't go for the kill. He allowed Washington’s army to escape across the East River to Manhattan. And even when that army was on Manhattan, Howe didn't go for the kill. The speculation has always been that—well, there are two possibilities: either William Howe was just inadequate as a general, or that deep down he and his brother, Admiral Richard Howe, thought that America shouldn't be defeated, and that they could be sort of conscripted, persuaded into coming back to being good fellows, you know, staying in the British Empire. So, it seems William Howe didn't have the heart, for whatever reason, to deliver a knockout blow. But that's in the short term. Even if Howe had gone in for the kill, even if he had defeated Washington —and that was 1776—even if he pulled that off, in the longer run—it doesn't have to be a hundred years, I mean, the longer run of a generation—the idea that the British Army, being serviced with supply lines across the Atlantic Ocean, could contain the growing population in North America, it was not possible; it was probably inevitable that the Americans would succeed, because their population was going to overtake the population of Great Britain, even if they stayed within the British Empire.

GILBERT: That would have been a very different scenario. There would have been a continental United States instead of just the United States we have.

JIM: Well, that's right. There—and I've seen American writers speculate about that. It could have gone the way of the Americans in the British Commonwealth kind of an idea.

GILBERT: So, why did the split take place?

JIM: Well, at the end of the day, the core issue wasn't so much taxation. The core issue was, who's going to have the authority in London? And it was the growing population. The alternative way to do it would have been to start giving the colonists seats in the British House of Commons. Some people thought that should be done, some Brits thought that should be done; over time, that would keep the Americans in the British system. But that wouldn't work either, as the colonies with a bigger population would come to dominate the House of Commons –but the British ruling class wanted to rule.

GILBERT: But the success of the American Revolution and the departure of the colonies meant that scenario – an American majority in the House of Commons in London – did not come to pass.

JIM: Yes, and in a sense, the success of the revolution worked just fine for the British ruling class, because they got rid of all the pesky Americans, and they turned their attention to India, the jewel in the crown, and all these other places where people were a lot easier to subdue for one reason or another than the Americans. And the so-called second British Empire in the 19th century, that was the great thing for Britain—maybe not so much for the others who were governed by Britain, but for Britain and its ruling class that was great.

GILBERT: In the novel, you're rather hard on George Washington.

JIM: Yes, I am in the book because I'm writing it from the standpoint of a Loyalist, but in real terms I'm not really hard on Washington. I mean, I think he was a great man, a really great man, but from the standpoint of the Loyalist, he was a traitor, and he was upending their lives.

FILM OR TV SERIES: BEAN FATE versus THE MONMOUTH MANIFESTO

GILBERT: Do you have another project?

JIM: Yeah, the one that we've talked about many times – getting Bean Fate turned into a film. I think both Bean Fate and The Monmouth Manifesto, for very different reasons, would be very adaptable to film of one sort or another, but as you know, that's a tough row to hoe — and on top of that, I've never had an agent, so it's difficult.

GILBERT: Yeah, I worked quite a bit on Bean Fate, and I think it would make a fantastic miniseries, and I think the other book would be better as probably a feature film.

JIM: I would reverse that. My own belief is that Bean Fate would be better as a feature film because it could be contained, it has one protagonist and one crime and one mystery and a limited cast of characters and a clear set of themes, including the romantic, two rivals for the same girl, contrasting characters and cultures – the US and Canada. The Monmouth Manifesto is more sprawling – it's got a lot of exciting action scenes, a bigger canvas, many more characters and subplots. And it asks some big questions about history and justice and power – and military strategy – and the role of belief and religion in a time of crisis and civil war. Big questions, for example: Is what’s happening a civil war or is it a revolution? And how will the new order – the United States of America – work out?

GILBERT: You’re right. Just think of the spectacular battle scenes that you could have in the Monmouth. You could certainly have – so how many would you have in a series? In one season, a series would be four or six but there is fuel in The Monmouth Manifesto for several seasons at least. I mean, it is the history of the American Revolution but seen from the losing side.

JIM: You could have a whole episode just on the trial of Richard Lippincott for example. Yes, I think The Monmouth Manifesto could be a splendid series. Maybe one day it will be.