When I read that the Oak Leaf Steam Baths was about to be demolished, I got in my car and drove over to Bathurst Street to take a final look. One of my favorite parts of Michael Ondaatje’s classic novel, In the Skin of a Lion, is set in the baths. It’s just a scene, a couple of pages written about everyday life, and it’s wonderful.

Ondaatje writes that after they clock off, the workers from a west-end Toronto tannery walk north on Bathurst to Queen Street, about thirty of them. They have a beer, then they walk a few blocks further north to the Oak Leaf baths, where they each pay their quarter and take a towel, a sheet, a padlock and a canvas bag. They strip and lock their clothes and paycheques into the bag and put the key to the padlock on a cord around their necks. This is an ordinary Saturday in the early 1930s as experienced by Patrick Lewis, a worker who is in love with a revolutionary-minded actress named Alice.

“In the whitewashed rooms they sat naked within the steam, brushing a scab, considering a scar on the shoulder. Someone (Patrick) had never spoken to caught his eye and both of them were so tired they could not turn away their gaze, just watched the other bluntly…

“The wet heat focused the exhaustion and under the cold shower the last of the tension fell to his feet. For the last hour they lay on the green bunks, a radio on the windowsill transmitting the Saturday afternoon opera, with a sign above it in three languages insisting that no one change the station. 

“He lay there, not wanting translation, letting the emotion of the music fall on him. Soon this arm would become the arm Alice kissed.”

In fact, the Oak Leaf Steam Baths only opened in 1941. In the Skin of the Lion begins with a disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction and certain liberties have at times been taken with some dates and locales.” 

I wonder if what we’re reading here isn’t fiction so much as myth. Ondaatje writes about real places and people in ways that not only didn’t happen, but couldn’t have, and it feels true. The facts aren’t as important as the emotions, the conflicts, the sense he conveys through his simple yet weighted language that this is what it was like. He makes early 20^thcentury Toronto into a legendary place, and sends Patrick on a years-long odyssey around it. 

In the Skin of the Lion was originally published in 1987, and I first read it sometime during the 1990s. What made me read it again was seeing it mentioned repeatedly in two recent non-fiction books about Toronto. When I told a friend I was re-reading Ondaatje’s novel, she asked nervously, “Does it hold up?” 

Yes, it does, and I think part of the reason is that Ondaatje writes particularly well about everyday doings as well as historic events, the great and small lapping against one another. Here’s another bathing scene, in this case from Homer’s Odyssey, in its recent thoroughly enjoyable translation by Emily Wilson:

The girls brought out the laundry to the cart,
and brought it to the washing pools and trod it,
competing with each other. When the dirt
was gone, they spread the clothes along the shore,
where salt sea washes pebbles to the beach.
They bathed and rubbed themselves with olive oil.
Then they sat on the riverbank and ate,
and waited for the sun to dry the clothes.
But when they finished eating, they took off
their headscarves to play ball.

The goddess Athena is secretly among the girls, and Odysseus is about to appear, needing guidance on his voyage home from the Trojan War. In recounting the story of a soldier’s return from a foreign war, the 2,800-year-old The Odyssey tells a tale that couldn’t be more common throughout human history, or more relevant today.

The story Ondaatje tells is equally timeless: the epic fight of the poor against the rich. Or maybe I should say, the rich against the poor. The novel is hard to summarize, but probably the easiest way to describe it is through Patrick’s odyssey. 

We first meet him in the northern Ontario bush where his father works clearing logjams, setting dynamite charges to blast through piles of logs that have been sent down rivers and got jammed into bottlenecks. Patrick learns his father’s trade and brings it to Toronto, where one of his many jobs takes him deep under Lake Ontario. He’s at work blasting out a tunnel that will channel lake water into the city’s magnificent treatment plant, then under construction. One night, he slips into the construction site to attend illicit performances by left-wing artists, and stumbles across Alice Gull. 

Patrick is forced to keep changing jobs in the arduous economy of the period, always working with his hands alongside mainly immigrant laborers. He soon falls in with a group of left-wing activists centred around his girlfriend, Alice. The workers in the novel are shown to be both imaginative and exploited, and some of them are granted almost supernatural abilities. Patrick gets to know a daredevil bridge worker named Nicholas Temelcoff who helped build that architectural wonder, the Bloor Street Viaduct. Temelcoff saved the life of a nun tumbled by strong winds over the side of the viaduct, a young woman who subsequently cut her habit into something like ordinary clothing and disappeared. 

Patrick’s left-wing violence eventually lands him in prison, where he falls in with a set of thieves who are both ingenious and punitive, with their own grudges against the rich. These grudges and Patrick’s politics will lead to the climax of the novel. Yet the pair of elite characters he confronts—or tries to—aren’t pictured as one-dimensional villains. Both are also based on real people. 

One is Ambrose Small, a millionaire businessmen who owned a chain of movie theatres across Ontario during the early years of the 20^th century. One day in 1919, he sold them for $1 million, put the money in the bank and disappeared. He was never seen again—except in Ondaatje’s novel. The other is city engineer Rowland Harris, after whom the water treatment plant is now named. Before he oversaw its construction, Harris was the man who got the Bloor Street Viaduct built, and he’s the one Patrick confronts at the climax of the novel. In essence, Harris is the god who created modern Toronto, and the novel asks whether Patrick will kill the god or be granted forgiveness for what he believes are his sins.

After re-reading In the Skin of the Lion, I went on a small odyssey of my own, starting with my visit to the Oak Leafs Bath House. I’ve never been inside. It was a man’s sauna, and sometimes served as a gay men’s hangout during the 1980s. Online I learned that it had closed in 2015 because of a dispute between two owners, and has recently been sold for development. 

Parking on Bathurst, I found a Canadian urban vista. Across the street, on a grassy area outside the Scadding Court Community Centre, homeless people had pitched their tents. To their north, a Zamboni was clearing the outdoor ice rink. When the driver was done, a lone man began skating around it in circles. Getting out of the car, I walked behind two hockey players carrying sticks over their shoulders who turned down the alley beside the bathhouse. 

Following them, I saw that the demolition seems to be happening from back to front. Returning to Bathurst, I found one resident had been ingenious about anchoring a handrail. A couple of blocks further north, I went into the local McDonald’s wanting a hot drink—it was an excruciatingly cold day—and had to order fries instead because of what the woman called an equipment failure.

After I drove on to park near the Viaduct, the 21^st century barrier kept the powerfully cold wind from blowing me over the side. I found they’d put up a plaque honoring In the Skin of the Lion at the eastern end of the bridge. After reading it, and watching a runner cross the viaduct in his shorts, I drove further east to the Beach neighbourhood. In the novel, Ondaatje mentions that Rowland Harris lived near the water treatment plant on Neville Park Boulevard. I’d never been there, but knew it as the street name written on the front of most Queen Street streetcars. It marks the eastern end of the route. 

My husband looked it up in a 1928 city directory: Harris had lived at number 10, south of Queen, not far from the lake. I pulled up across from a handsome house, and as I got out to photograph it, a woman came out the front door and called to me as she got in her car. I couldn’t tell if she was saying, “You’re the first one today,” because people sometimes came to gawk at Harris’s house, or if she’d said, “It’s a cold one today.” In any case, I agreed. 

At the foot of the street were stairs leading down to the beach, where a man hunched over his cellphone as he walked his dog. The wind was punishing here as well, but near shore the lake was a turquoise colour I associate with the tropics. It was just possible to see a jetty jutting out from what is now the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, where several construction trailers were parked. 

I’d looked up Nicholas Temelcoff online after reading in one of the non-fiction books that he was a real worker on the viaduct whose story Ondaatje had stumbled across in an archive. All I found online was a joke Facebook page someone had put up in Temelcoff’s name. The joke Temelcoff’s friends include Patrick Lewis and Alice Gull, and there are a couple of posts. “A very weird day at work. A nun fell off a bridge and I had to grab her. My arm’s very sore, and I’ll be a few days off work.”

I didn’t have to go anywhere to look for traces of Alice, either. Ondaatje dedicates the book in part to Sharon Stevenson, whom I first met at UBC when we both worked on the student newspaper. Writers create characters from bits and bobs: memories, insights, ourselves, the demands of the story and glimpses into other lives. I see what I take to be traces of Sharon in the character of the revolutionary actress Alice Gull.  Sharon was a poet, not an actress, and she was eight or nine years older than me. That means we weren’t close, even though I saw her almost daily for several years. She was far to the left politically, and kind, troubled, brilliant—luminous is the word that comes to mind—and she came from a background we all knew about. Her father was Ray Stevenson, a famous labour organizer and leader of the Mine Mill union in Kirkland Lake. He was also a member of the Communist Party of Canada, which made Sharon what we called a red-diaper baby. 

At the time Sharon was married to Charlie Boylan, who died in 2017, so maybe I can say now that Boylan was one of the few people I have ever loathed. He was tall and good-looking, and some found him charismatic. I thought of him as a small-time cult leader. He was himself a red-diaper baby and by then a big deal in an even smaller and further-left iteration, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). 

Boylan remained a high-level member of the CPC (ML) all his life and repeatedly ran as their candidate in federal elections. In the 1970s, he would send party members into the UBC student newspaper to try to take it over. There were only three or four of them, so they were never a real threat, especially since Sharon was one of the four and she agreed the idea was ludicrous. She would also periodically show up with bruises on her face and hands, a swollen lip, a hurt back that made her wince when she turned quickly. When I tried to talk to her once about a black eye, she said she’d walked into a door. She actually said that, then stared me down.

Eventually Sharon left Boylan and moved to Toronto. Friends there said she was doing well, had found a community of poets—Ondaatje’s name was mentioned—and we were happy for her. Then she died by suicide, aged only 31. I know the details and they’re horrific. Frantic, self-punishing. In Ondaatje’s novel, and I should probably issue a spoiler alert, Alice Gull is killed when she picks up the wrong suitcase, which carries a ticking clock bomb. Patrick learns she’s got the suitcase and that she’s walking with it toward a leftist demonstration at the centre of town. He races through the city trying to find her, and finally hears the suitcase explode not far away. He’s got close but hasn’t managed to save her. 

Speaking of elevating life into myth.

A final thing I found online: an illuminating interview with Ondaatje done in 2007 by novelist Tom Barbash in The Believer. Ondaatje’s novel Divasadero has just been published but they’re talking about all his books. In one section, Ondaatje speaks of how he began to write In the Skin of a Lion.

“MO: There were lots of false starts with that one. I began with the story about Ambrose Small first of all, but after writing a hundred pages he bored the hell out of me. So I went back and started again with a character called Patrick. But I didn’t know where I was going with it. I knew nothing about Toronto in 1910, which is when the book took place. 

“TB: Was there any great text of Toronto in that period?

“MO: Nothing. And that was a gift in a way. If there was a major book about the sewers or the tunnels I would have swallowed it up but then thought, well, we already know that. I’ve always been annoyed when there’s a huge empty space where I need some information about something I’m writing about, but in fact it’s always valuable to me to have that emptiness so I can then invent. There’s a danger of having too much research.

“TB: But clearly you have done some research for quite a few of your novels, especially about processes, like bomb disposal, or gambling in the new book, or the beauty of the desert.

“MO: For me the research is much better when it’s accidental. I tend to write and research simultaneously, or almost simultaneously. It’s like building a bridge and writing about the bridge being built. I don’t do that much research, to be honest. Often I’m inventing a very technical detail, or an archival situation that may not be there. But oftentimes these turn out to be true. The stuff about the tunnels underwater in fact is true, but I sort of imagined it before I discovered they had existed.”

In the Skin of the Lion couldn’t be more relevant today, speaking of the fight between rich and poor. It’s taken such a strange direction lately. But as Karl Marx wrote, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. It’s hard to tell which phase we’re living through. But maybe it’s time to re-read Ondaatje’s book.

I was going to write about the self-mythologizing alligator wrestler Tuffy Truesdell as well, but that’s enough for now.

Next time.