Clayton Derstine; Gadfly
Hyfler/Rosner
Rebellious writer returned from Paris and helped install
French in Toronto schools
Raised on the Sawdust Trail, he learned oratory from his
bishop father but strayed far from his religious roots
NOREEN SHANAHAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 30, 2008
TORONTO -- When Clayton Derstine was 9, he joined his father
on the Sawdust Trail, a trek across the Deep South made by
Christian evangelists during the Depression. C. F. Derstine,
a Mennonite bishop from Kitchener, Ont., headlined for Billy
Graham while his son ran errands inside the crowded tents.
Clay listened to his father preach to hardbitten farmers,
sometimes for up to five hours at a time, and learned some
of his oratory skills.
Years later, Mr. Derstine put those skills to work in a
campaign of his own - an effort to have French-language
education taught in Toronto's public schools. In the
process, he discovered a style of proselytizing much more to
his liking.
Mr. Derstine helped create the first French public school in
Toronto. He also chaired the Toronto Board of Education's
French language advisory committee, was instrumental in
creating the Francophone Educational Planning Council for
the Toronto Region, and co-ordinated the Ontario Coalition
for Language Rights. The impact of his vision and the
breadth of his labour is still felt in several Toronto
communities.
Clayton Derstine was the oldest child born to Bishop
Derstine's Canadian family and Mary Elizabeth Kolb. It was
his father's second family - he had previously had three
children with a first wife in Pennsylvania. His mother kept
strictly to her tasks at the church but later in life was
sometimes seen loosening her kerchief and cruising down the
streets of Kitchener in a black car. Clayton was a bright
boy but couldn't keep his mind on his lessons. He slid into
all kinds of mischief - a rough beginning for a boy whose
father had penned well-thumbed sermons with the titles "The
path to noble manhood" and "Hell's playground: theatres and
movies."
During Bishop Derstine's revival meetings, one of Clay's
jobs was to lean across a five-foot wooden scroll and wind
it along, displaying the images as his father told the
Mennonite history of the world. After the meetings, devout
women who had stood in the hot sun all day prepared supper
for them, sometimes dripping sweat into the mashed potatoes.
Clay didn't like that too much - he politely asked for a
couple of boiled eggs and peeled the shells himself. A rebel
from the start, he continued on this path and later
exhibited some particularly curious eccentricities, drawing
him far from his rural, religious roots.
He was a football hero during high school, a force to be
feared on the field. But he was a bookish jock, preferring
Dickens and Descartes over retelling stories from the game.
His yearbook included comments about his tackling and
running, as well as how he tended to "sling around a mean
vocabulary."
In 1949, after graduating from Waterloo Lutheran University
(later Wilfred Laurier) with a degree in English literature,
he went to graduate school at the University of Toronto,
studying under Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. He spent
hours at the Royal York Hotel's King Cole Room, discussing
great shifts in intellectual thought with his mentors and
fellow protégés. These conversations became a launching pad
for him as a thinker and a writer. His problem was that his
intellect and ambition never quite met up with a solid body
of discipline. As a writer, he was often mired in esoteric
dreaming. He dropped out of school in 1951 and looked for
the cheapest route to Paris.
For the next seven years, he lived in a tiny top-floor
garret with a view of Notre Dame, no doubt aware of the
cliché but succumbing to its charms regardless. He
surrounded himself with Scotch, cigarettes and a steady
supply of black notebooks, in which he inked his impressions
of the city. If he wasn't in his room writing, he was in
cafés discovering the particular flavours of French society,
and sometimes sponging work off his new friends. He was an
office boy for UNESCO for a few years, then hired to do
translations. If the French words didn't come easily enough,
he'd pop into Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain to
swallow un petit jaune (pastis) and ask someone to help fill
in the blanks.
During this period, he dated Mariel Clarmont, a Parisian he
met in one of the cafés. She gave birth to their daughter,
Julie, just before he returned to Canada in 1958. Mr.
Derstine held Julie at birth but then did not see her again
until she turned 21, by agreement with Mariel.
In the meantime, Mr. Derstine returned home to life in the
basement of his parents' Kitchener home. It wasn't long
before he met and fell in love with Joyce Carter, a young
reporter at the Record newspaper. The couple moved to
Toronto, where Ms. Carter went to work for The Globe and
Mail. After they had lived together for a few years, they
were married by Bishop Derstine in their living room, his
hands shaking so much from Parkinson's disease that he could
hardly hold the Bible. His son reached out and took his
father's hand to steady it.
In 1965, their son Dirk was born and Mr. Derstine became a
stay-at-home father, a rarity then. He also worked as a
freelancer, consulting with the CBC on a series about
Mennonite history and writing book reviews for The Globe. He
also kept busy working on Treegodspace, a memoir loosely
based on his Paris notebooks.
"This book is written mostly either from a sofa just inside
the window, or from a canvas chaise, shuffled regularly to
follow the sun's patches across the lawn. If it's 3 p.m. I'm
beside the lilies," he wrote. In this dense, impressionistic
book, Mr. Derstine embarked on a journey to see where he
would wind up - as he put it, "To see the macrocosm in the
microcosm."
He was deeply committed to his writing project and
continued, season after season, pumping out the words,
certain that he'd eventually find an appreciative audience.
He once left the manuscript on Dennis Lee's doorstep, hoping
the Toronto writer would find it a good home. But after
repeated rejections from publishers, Mr. Derstine mourned
for a while, then bounced back with a new vigour for an old
passion: the French language.
Inspired by Pierre Trudeau's move toward bilingualism and
multiculturalism, Mr. Derstine also believed strongly in
Canadians speaking both official languages. But during the
late 1970s, Toronto students could immerse themselves in
French only at expensive private schools or through the
separate school system.
Mr. Derstine set about finding a more inclusive solution. In
1972, he helped create the first French public school in
Toronto, École Gabrielle-Roy, named after the Manitoba
writer. Five years later, Mr. Derstine was involved in
forming a French secondary-school module at Jarvis
Collegiate. Beginning in 1977, he served for eight years as
vice-chair and then chair of the French Language Advisory
Committee at the Toronto School Board.
"Clay was one of those unique individuals," said Tony
Silipo, a trustee on the Toronto School Board in the early
1990s and another member of the committee. "As an anglophone
parent, he was one of the most fervent proponents of
French-language education in the city. He lived it. He
believed in it so strongly."
According to Pat Case, who also served on the board, Mr.
Derstine was a strong proponent of multiculturalism who
threw in his lot with the other minority communities seeking
recognition to "come in from the margins." French wasn't
just for Quebeckers, he understood, but for immigrants from
countries such as Haiti, Senegal and the Ivory Coast.
In the late 1980s, the paradigm shifted. French school
boards replaced the advisory board; Mr. Derstine served on
the new body until he was defeated at the polls in 1992.
From that point on, his world mostly consisted of life in a
West Toronto neighbourhood, where neighbours would spot him
reading the morning paper on his front porch or walking his
dog with a crusty baguette tucked under his arm.
CLAYTON DERSTINE
Clayton Derstine was born July 1, 1928, in Kitchener, Ont.
He died March 21, 2008, in Toronto after a stroke. He was
79. He is survived by wife, Joyce Carter, and children Dirk
Derstine, of Toronto, and Julie Saavedra, of Paris.