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of art: New Yorker covers, Mandelbrot photographs, Inuit sculpture and drawings by her friend Hedda Sterne, Saul Steinberg’s widow. On the deck is a working bathtub, because, when it’s warm enough, Iglauer likes to soak outside. After her divorce, Iglauer had come to Vancouver to visit a friend she had met at Columbia, who introduced her to Daly. He took her out and they went to see a performance by some Ukrainian dancers. They had dinner at the Lotus restaurant and he missed the last ferry, so he spent the night on the couch in the living room with his feet hanging about that far off the end of the couch. She started going out with him all the time, and then she came to live with him. First she experimented. She went on his boat, the MoreKelp, to see if she liked it. She didn’t get seasick and she loved it on the boat. And then she went out on the boat for one month that year and then she came back and stayed. Tight spaces—the MoreKelp, or the trailer that was her living space while she travelled the ice road with John Denison’s crew—don’t bother her. She was very well trained, she says, from having been at the shack with her father. It was a small cabin with no electricity and when they first went there was no running water, nothing. She was used to the outhouse out back, very well trained about going to the bathroom, she says, which is vital anyplace. And she wasn’t allowed to complain, so she just got used to following people around, doing whatever they were doing. She got to profile Trudeau by making a deal that if he would let her accompany him on a cross-Canada trip, she wouldn’t ask for personal interviews with him except for one. She watched him for eight days and got a brilliant profile out of it, and (judging from a subsequent piece she wrote for Geist about his unexpectedly taking her up on a dinner invitation) some affection from her subject as well. John English, in his 2009 biography Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau,
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1968–2000, says Iglauer’s profile “remains the best portrait of Trudeau as he took power and shaped his private self to the new demands of public life.” Iglauer made notes on the Erickson piece on the boat, and when she got underway with the writing, she kept taking sections of it to William Shawn, her editor at The New Yorker. Each time, his response was, “Keep going.” Iglauer revered Shawn, as did many who worked with him during his thirty-five-year tenure at the magazine. In Friends Talking in the Night, Philip Hamburger writes: “To Shawn, words meant thought, civilization, decency. Words were the linchpins of a just and orderly society. He approached words with caution and deep respect . . . Somehow, by encouraging his writers to feel free, to be bold and truthful, he brought them to the peak of their powers.” Shawn was known for his generosity with writers, providing them with offices and salaries even when they weren’t producing, as well as unprecedented leeway in pursuing the subjects that interested them. Shawn also made himself available to his writers for however long it took them to complete their pieces. Hamburger quotes Shawn as saying, of the time it takes to write a good profile, “It takes as long as it takes.” In Iglauer’s case, this could be years: “Seven Stones,” the Arthur Erickson piece, took three years; “The Ice Road” (eventually Denison’s Ice Road) took six. Of Fishing with John Iglauer writes, “On my first regular fishing trip with John, in 1974, while he was delivering our first load of fish to Seafood Products in Port Hardy, I ran upstairs to the cannery office and called Bill at The New Yorker. ‘I have the most wonderful story!’ I said.” Shawn went on to edit the entire book, which was published in 1988, fourteen years after that initial inspiration. Fishing with John displays another signal influence of The New Yorker on Iglauer’s writing style: the absence of pictures. Until Tina Brown
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