December 15, 1925 – June 23, 2011
Widely respected as a professor, playwright and author, Arthur Motyer was an inspirational teacher and mentor who had a remarkable talent for uncovering the best in people.
Motyer had a genius for making connections—among people, feelings and ideas—and touched and enriched the lives of a vast network of people. As one former student put it, “he saw in me what I had not seen in myself.”
His death on June 23, 2011 led to an outpouring of love and appreciation from those who benefited from his guidance, including author Michael Ondaatje, co-winner of the Booker Prize in 1992 for the novel The English Patient, which was later adapted for film, winning an Academy Award® in 1997. Ondaatje studied under Motyer at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec. The tall, bearded English teacher from Bermuda changed his life.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” Ondaatje told The Globe and Mail newspaper. “He taught poetry, and directed plays at Bishop’s. I wanted to do both, but I was useless in remembering my lines and so the parts he gave me got smaller and smaller. He persuaded me to write more and act less.”
Motyer often ended his classes at Bishop’s by reciting a Robert Browning poem. He would time it so that he read the last line of the poem just as the bell rang.
Another student who was inspired by Motyer’s example was future philanthropist Scott Griffin. In 2000, Griffin established the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, awarding Canadian and international poets with the world’s largest prize for a first-edition single collection of poetry written in English.
“What Arthur conveyed for me was the incredible range of English literature, that it was a window into our humanity and the reaches of our soul,” Griffin told The Globe and Mail. “He was prepared to reveal his innermost thoughts and feelings to his students, and that made all those under his spell privileged indeed.”
Motyer was born in Hamilton on December 15, 1925 to father W. Ernest P. Motyer, a building contractor and land developer, and mother Edith (nee Brunning). He attended Saltus Grammar School, graduating at the age of 15. He left Bermuda to study at Mount Allison University (1942-45) in Sackville, New Brunswick, the school his sister, Jocelyn, and uncle, Arthur—for whom he was named—attended. Arthur, who was killed in 1916 during the First World War, had been Bermuda’s Rhodes Scholar in 1905.
While at Mount Allison, Motyer was required to participate in the Canadian Officers Training Corps, marching and learning how to fire and clean weapons. He trained as an officer cadet after graduation in 1945, traveling to Camp Sussex in New Brunswick and Camp Vernon in British Columbia, but the Second World War ended soon afterwards and he did not serve overseas.
He was an exceptional student, delivering the valedictory address when he received his Bachelor of Arts, Honours in English. He also directed plays as an undergraduate, and edited the university yearbook.
Motyer attended graduate school at the University of Toronto before a Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford for further studies in English. Upon completion, he returned to Canada where he taught English and Drama at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg (1948-50) and at Bishop’s (1950-70).
While at Bishop’s, he led the development and realisation of the Centennial Theatre, widely regarded as the finest university theatrical facility in the country at that time.
Motyer returned to Sackville in 1970 because William Purvis—the founder of Bermuda’s Purvis Ltd.—decided to endow a chair in the name of his father, Rev. William Purvis (Mount Allison, Class of 1905). The well-regarded Motyer was a natural choice. He became the first Purvis Chair in English as well as Associate Dean of Faculty. Two years later, he became a full Dean and then Academic Vice-President.
He also immersed himself in the cultural life of campus and community, serving as both Chair of the Performing Arts Committee and as Chair of the classical concert touring organisation, Debut Atlantic. He founded, and was the first director, of Windsor Theatre, founded the Mount Allison drama programme, and was mentor and Founding Chair of Live Bait Theatre.
Motyer retired from Mount Allison University in 1993, but stayed busy. In his retirement, he wrote two distinguished books, the novel What’s Remembered—his former Bishop’s student, Scott Griffin, helped him to find a publisher—and The Staircase Letters: An Extraordinary Friendship at the End of Life.
His novel What’s Remembered, which was published in 2004, blended fiction with the facts of his own life. The book, a finalist for the Amazon.ca Books in Canada First Novel Award and winner of a Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia prize for first fiction, tells the story of a closeted gay academic who struggles with secrecy, shame and desire.
For while Motyer married Janet Speid in 1955 and they had two children, Michael and Gillian, he had experienced his first gay love affair while at Oxford in 1950. Motyer met musician and composer Alasdair MacLean in 1978 when the latter played a minor role in the play, Little Murders, at the Windsor Theatre. He soon split up with Speid, and he and MacLean remained together for 33 years.
Before meeting MacLean, a terrified Motyer had twice rebuffed blackmail attempts after letters were left in his faculty mailbox from someone with knowledge of his secret life.
Motyer’s second book was collaboration with another of his protégés, Canadian literacy educator Elma Gerwin. In 2001, Gerwin was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Forty years after studying under Motyer, she asked her former teacher to guide her during the last months of her life. He agreed, as did her friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Carol Shields (The Stone Diaries, 1993), who was also battling cancer. What resulted was a three-way e-mail conversation between Gerwin, Motyer and Shields. In the book, Motyer linked the letters, interspersing them with literary references and poetry. The book has been hailed as a moving and profound story of friendship and facing the end of life. Gerwin died in 2002, while Shields passed away in 2003. The book was published in 2007.
Of his primary career as a teacher, Motyer was characteristically modest. “I had no method unless it was to care,” he once wrote. “I had no philosophy or formal structure of ideas, unless it was to make a teacher different from a book.”
In 1993, he was made Professor Emeritus of English at Mount Allison. In addition to being honoured, posthumously, with the Bermuda Arts Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, Motyer was a member of the Order of New Brunswick. He was inducted into the Order in 2006 in recognition of his dedication as a teacher, his willingness to serve others, and his contribution to the artistic and cultural life of New Brunswick. He was also named to Sackville’s Arts Wall in 2010.
Motyer passed away of gallbladder cancer on June 23, 2011, leaving Alasdair MacLean, children Michael and Gillian, former spouse Janet, and five grandchildren. He was predeceased by his sister, Jocelyn Motyer Raymond-Read (1930-2007), a social and author of Saturday’s Children, A Journey from Darkness into Light, Bermuda 1850.
