Farley and Claire

August 14, 2023
In this penetrating outing, journalist Harris (Party of One) recounts the passionate love affair between Farley Mowat, a Canadian naturalist and popular environmental author, and Claire Wheeler, his second wife. Harris traces the couple’s relationship from their first meeting in 1960 through Mowat’s death in 2014. Mowat, Harris notes, had been married, albeit unhappily, for 13 years when he introduced himself to Claire, whom he found sketching a schooner in the harbor where his sailboat was docked on Saint-Pierre Island, off the coast of Newfoundland. The pair struck up a romance, but Mowat couldn’t get a divorce in Canada without the consent of his reluctant wife. In 1965, Mowat and Wheeler traveled to Mexico, where Mowat was granted a divorce (though Wheeler would continue to wonder about its legality), and he soon after married Wheeler in a Texas courthouse. Harris offers detailed portraits of both lovers, depicting Mowat as an adventurous romantic and Wheeler as a brilliant woman (she published several successful memoirs and novels starting in the 1980s) saddled with the burden of keeping secret her affair with a famous writer, and excerpts from newly unembargoed journals and letters provide intimate insight into their relationship (an explicit poem Mowat wrote for Wheeler divulges that they named each other’s genitals Georgie and Georgiana). It’s a revealing look inside a literary love affair.