New at the Sun-Times: Troubleshooter or Troublemaker?
But what’s said in Canada, Atwood’s homeland, is that not entirely by happenstance Zenia also is sort of like Barbara Amiel. If you place the name it’s because you’ve seen reports that Amiel will soon be a frequent visitor to Chicago. She’ll be stopping by to polish up the Sun-Times, the American jewel in the worldwide string of newspapers collected by her third husband, Conrad Black.
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Like Zenia, Amiel tests plausibility. In December 1980 she and two companions were arrested as they were leaving Mozambique, either because border guards had carelessly neglected to stamp their Canadian passports when they entered (her version), or because they’d bribed their way across the border (Mozambique’s version).
This adventure has dogged her ever since, in part because Amiel’s account of it was so swiftly ridiculed, in part because she still walks it on a short leash. “In the hospital she tells us armed soldiers stood by laughing at her,” columnist Rick Salutin observed in May 1981 in This Magazine, a leftist Canadian journal. “But she doesn’t explain how she knew what they were laughing at, and she also says she was in an ‘intense malarial fever’ at the time. She spent a week in a hospital ‘hooked up to an intravenous unit with unsterilized needles and . . . forced to use the most primitive of sanitary facilities.’ It isn’t clear what this last prissy phrase means, or where Amiel in her delirium thought she was–the Cote d’Azur?”
“Not entirely. There’s been some wonderfully lunatic writing on her part in Maclean’s.”
Her Maclean’s column last May described getting word in England that Canada’s “left-lib intelligentsia,” gathered for a PEN International benefit, had greeted with “stamping of feet and applause” the jest that bad as prison is, writers such as herself could use a taste of it.
“Remember one thing,” he continues. “She was the editor of the [tabloid] Toronto Sun when it had 100,000 more circulation than it has today.”
