branta

When Akou Connell, Goose Lane’s managing editor, contacted me on September 9 about writing something for Branta about Beaverbrook, my first reaction was to tell her that it was impossible for me to even contemplate putting something together that day. I was consumed by the Beaverbrook story, but on behalf of another audience: the listeners, viewers and readers of CBC News, where I work, and where I’ve been reporting on the infamous art dispute for five years.

My reaction-”not today”-tells you something about the difference between writing news and writing books. September 9 was the day the Beaverbrook Art Gallery finally prevailed in the dispute at the heart of Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy. Despite a cold that had caused me to almost lose my voice, I was all over the airwaves that day, reporting on the decision for TV and radio. So when Akou e-mailed to ask for a blog entry, my reaction was that of a broadcast journalist for whom immediacy is always a priority: I figured she wanted something now. (Fortunately, I was wrong.)

I had learned of the decision, a ruling by an arbitration appeal panel of three retired judges, just before 8 a.m., when I turned on my CBC-issued BlackBerry and found an e-mail with the text of the ruling attached. I quickly phoned the newsroom to arrange to get the story on the next local newscast at 8:30 a.m. I turned on my laptop, skimmed the 134-page decision, and phoned in a report with time to spare. Then I posted the news to my Twitter feed.

It was an exciting day, and a strange one as well: here I was summarizing, in an 80-second radio story, a two-minute TV report and two 140-character tweets, the dénouement of a saga to which I had devoted six months and 88,000 words. There was no time to ponder J.M.W. Turner’s enduring appeal, or pore over Beaverbrook’s correspondence one more time, or ruminate on the colonial attitude that had permeated Fredericton in the 1950s. The overriding goal-no, the only one-was to gather the elements needed to sum up the basics (gallery wins, is happy; foundation loses, but is graceful). Accuracy is always the first imperative for a good daily reporter, with haste a close second. The author is able to entertain other notions: structure, pacing, narrative, character.

There was, however, something in the urgency of the day that reminded me of writing the book: at the time, the six months I had from contract to first-draft deadline seemed all too brief; I often felt it was a sprint, not a marathon.

I was relieved to reach the end of the day, when (after putting off Akou’s request) I was able to go on Shift, CBC Radio’s afternoon show in New Brunswick, and spend seven luxurious minutes talking to host Paul Castle about some of the details and implications of the decision. (In a nutshell, it upheld the earlier 2007 arbitration decision by retired Supreme Court Justice Peter Cory, who awarded 85 paintings, including the bulk of the important ones, to the gallery, and 48 to the Beaverbrook U.K. Foundation. Cory accepted the gallery’s argument: that Beaverbrook had meant the paintings as gifts, that he had then changed his mind sometime not long after the gallery’s 1959 opening, and that he had sought to conceal his original intentions. Also upheld was Cory’s ruling that the foundation should pay $4.8 million of the gallery’s legal costs.)

Daily journalism does have its weaknesses, of course. In the rush of that day, I never did go back and read the ruling in detail. So while I did notice the appeal panel’s description of the foundation’s case as a “tsunami of written and oral submissions,” I failed to spot another significant passage. To uphold Cory’s decision, the panel didn’t have to find that his 2007 decision was correct, only that he had come to a reasonable conclusion based on the evidence, and that he had made no legal errors. But the panel did, in fact, endorse the finding. They wrote that Beaverbrook’s “validation” of the foundation’s ownership was “specious” and “perpetuated a 44-year reign of error,” a conclusion similar to Cory’s, and to my own.

On the other hand, daily news is a work in progress, a constantly evolving account of the story-”history on the run,” as Thomas Griffith put it. As new information comes to light, the reporter can incorporate it into follow-up stories, coming ever closer to something resembling truth. Without subsequent editions, however, a book is immutable.

Fortunately, I had the fortune to update Beaverbrook for the autumn 2008 paperback. This was relatively straightforward: the appeal had been officially launched, and there was updated information about the U.K. foundation’s finances, but little of significance had changed. (We also eliminated several typos.) Certainly there was nothing that would lead me to revisit my conclusion that Beaverbrook, for all his achievements, was a flawed man who was ultimately responsible for the messy dispute that erupted four decades after his death. This was a generally safe conclusion that, I reasoned, would stand the test of time. Even if the foundation had won on appeal, it would be possible to argue that both sides could have been spared the ordeal of the dispute if the old man hadn’t behaved so badly. But the conclusion clearly resonated more powerfully with a gallery victory, and now it has been validated by three eminent retired judges.

The story continues to move forward in other ways, however. The gallery is still embroiled in a second dispute with the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation over another group of paintings. The appeal decision may hasten a settlement there, or it may not, but either way, it’ll be as a reporter, not an author, that I tell that part of the story. More central to the theme of the book, and perhaps of less interest to a New Brunswick news audience, will be the fate of the U.K. foundation itself and its most prized asset, Beaverbrook’s former home at Cherkley Court. I speculated about this in the final pages of the book, and since then, more information has come to light: the foundation borrowed against the property to pay its legal bills, and should it be ordered to pay the gallery’s appeal costs (on top of the $4.8 million it must pay from the original hearing), Cherkley may have to be put up for sale.  As I wrote, “had Maxwell and Timothy, in laying claim to one part of their grandfather’s legacy, gambled another?”

I feel a touch elegiac that it won’t be possible to answer that question in my book, which I still want to be a complete account. It is so Shakespearean, this tale, so rich. One could argue the richness of stories like this is we have books. But their constant, inevitable movement forward is why we have journalism.