When I read for pleasure, I look for a good story," says W.P. (William Patrick) Kinsella—author of more than 20 books, including The Fencepost Chronicles, for which he won the Stephen Leacock award for humour, and Shoeless Joe, the basis of the movie Field of Dreams. The 62-year-old Alberta native adds that stories can be found anywhere, gleaned from conversations and news clippings, as well as the author's own experience; witness his recently published short story "Lonesome Polecat in Love," a snapshot of his tempestuous 1995-97 affair with Vancouver writer Evelyn Lau.

The 26-year-old Ms. Lau, on the other hand, has built her career almost exclusively on autobiography. She is best known for her 1989 work Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid that relates in pornographic detail her years as a teenaged cocaine-addicted prostitute. She has continued to recycle her years on the street in her subsequent novels, short stories and poems.

Consistent with her previous literary offerings, in the October 1997 issue of Vancouver magazine Ms. Lau published an unsparing account of her relationship with Mr. Kinsella. "Kinsella was old," she wrote, "strange looking—the light through my living-room window illuminated his yellow teeth, his jowls, his thin, straggling hair." Nor was she above criticizing her older lover's waning powers. She pronounced herself "disgusted" by their lovemaking: "He had the body of an old man."

Last month Mr. Kinsella, who with long-time companion Barbara Turner has fled the Lower Mainland's madding crowds to live in Chilliwack, struck back with a lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court. Ms. Lau's article was libelous, his suit claimed. Furthermore, it constituted an invasion of his privacy and was designed to damage his private, public and professional career. "The publication of said article," states the suit, "has tended to publicly render [Mr. Kinsella] a figure of scorn, ridicule and contempt, and has caused him embarrassment and emotional suffering."

Ms. Lau's article, entitled "W.P. & Me," relates how she first met Mr. Kinsella when a friend took the then-21-year-old to his White Rock home for a Christmas party in 1992. Mr. Kinsella, who, she says, "had trouble meeting my eyes," was then living with his third wife, Ann Knight, to Ms. Lau "a big woman in a voluminous caftan pinned with butterflies." At a subsequent get-together Ms. Knight followed Ms. Lau to the washroom and "told me far more than I wanted to know about Kinsella's romantic history." Ms. Knight followed the history lesson with a boast. "But it all stopped with me," she reportedly said. "I'm woman enough for him."

Unbeknownst to Ms. Knight, her marriage to Mr. Kinsella was already in its final stages. A few months later he divorced her and began living with artist Barbara Turner in a White Rock condominium. Over the next three years he showed a growing interest in the young Chinese-Canadian author whose self-described "bravado in tackling taboo subjects" he so admired. They grew closer through handwritten notes and occasional telephone calls.

Ms. Lau did not respond to B.C. Report's attempts to contact her, but in a March 6 interview in the Ubyssey, the University of British Columbia's student newspaper, she spoke of her attraction to older men. "When I was very young I had a very close relationship with my father," she said. "I don't have any relationship with him anymore...I look for father figures all the time in older men. It's a big problem." Perhaps so, but in the summer of 1995, she accepted Mr. Kinsella's offer of a date. He had already let her know his relationship with Ms. Turner was on the rocks. "After several glasses of wine," she wrote, "then whiskey at a downtown sports bar, I began flirting shamelessly. 'I can't believe you're 60,' I cooed. 'Can I touch your hair? It feels like candy floss!' He tilted his face up at me eagerly, and to anyone watching, he would have looked a foolish old man."

Experience as a prostitute had damaged her understanding of men, Ms. Lau confessed. "I didn't know what it was to 'date,' to be part of a couple—to go to dinner and movies and walk around the seawall, hand in hand. What I knew of sex and relationships was drunken trysts with married men, $100 bills pressed into my palm, scenes of domination and submission acted out upon request." But tales of her damaged psyche did not put off Mr. Kinsella. Later, she realized, he was "drawn to it." "I told him terrible stories of my life as a prostitute," she wrote, "hoping to frighten him away, but they did not. I flaunted my insecurities, warned him that I was self-obsessed, screwed up, unlovable. Still, he persevered."

So did Ms. Turner, described by Ms. Lau as "plump, big-boned, with a dour countenance" but with the red hair that Mr. Kinsella usually preferred. Ms. Turner made a point of attending the launching of Ms. Lau's novel, Other Women, where she told her rival that "she understood my book, she knew all about married men." She also flaunted her residency, inviting Ms. Lau to "come for dinner sometime."

The relationship changed in the fall of 1995. Mr. Kinsella took Ms. Lau to Palm Springs, telling Ms. Turner she could spend the winter in his apartment and then leave, taking the furniture and one of the cars. However, he still did not tell her about his relationship with Ms. Lau.

That winter the two writers were alone together for the first time, but it was not an idyllic experience. From the beginning Ms. Lau was annoyed by her companion's health complaints, many of which stemmed from his diabetes. His appearance, particularly his Buffalo Bill mustache, also repelled her. And there were deeper problems. "Physically, I was not attracted to him," she writes, "and our sex life was circumscribed by his age and illness." The two subsequently travelled to Bermuda, Florida and the American South. But telephone calls from her consort's former wife and girlfriend depressed Ms. Lau, especially because Mr. Kinsella refused to tell his former companions about his new relationship. And when the two returned to Vancouver Ms. Turner not only balked at vacating Mr. Kinsella's apartment, she demanded monthly support payments and a settlement. In a fateful move, Mr. Kinsella agreed to leave her in the apartment for another two years.

By the spring of 1996, Ms. Lau's relationship with Mr. Kinsella had hit rock bottom. "You know, I've come to think that I don't have a good idea what love is," he said to her." "My heart sank," she wrote. "Then what of all the times he'd told me he loved me? Did they mean nothing?" In that low moment she "committed a violation." She read his diaries and discovered he was seeing Ms. Turner again.

Ms. Lau left immediately. But in the fall she wrote to Mr. Kinsella, ostensibly to "be fair in the way I hadn't been in my quick escape." He issued new declarations of love and promised to tell Ms. Turner about their relationship. This he did, but he did not make her leave his apartment. Still, Ms. Lau was convinced that "this time it was real." She was reassured by his willingness to be seen with her in public. It did not matter, she wrote, that Jan Wong, in her "Lunch With" column in the Globe and Mail, referred to her as Mr. Kinsella's "sex toy." He mailed out "hundreds of Christmas letters announcing that we were a couple." He also introduced Ms. Lau to his daughters, Erin and Shannon.

In February 1997 Mr. Kinsella leased a Vancouver apartment four blocks away from Ms. Lau's downtown suite. But happiness still eluded the May-December couple. The man who throughout his long career has boasted he has no "belief in the supernatural whatsoever," began to suffer from a guilty conscience. The first night they spent in his new apartment, she wrote, he dreamed that "a masked stranger burst into the bedroom where we were sleeping, brandishing a laser and demanding, 'Who is supposed to be here tonight?' and he sat up in a panic, saying, 'Who? Ann? Is it [third wife] Ann who's supposed to be here?'"

Furthermore, the nature of their relationship changed as one of Ms. Lau's neuroses began to assert itself. "I don't know how this started," she wrote, "but one day it did and then it became a factor in our daily lives—I became more a child. He would tickle me on his knee, sing lullabies to me before I went to sleep....Subtly, our relationship changed, so much so that he became more my father, my family with whom I'd had no contact since my adolescence. He indulged my sulks and pouts, bought candy necklaces for me from the corner store."

Not surprisingly, a relationship that emphasized the couple's already disparate ages quickly lost its thrill. Ms. Lau learned that she was being constantly compared, usually negatively, to previous wives and lovers; she felt that at 25 she was losing ground to the memories of a man whose history was more than twice as long as hers. Even as they spoke of marriage and discussed purchasing a ring, she "did not trust him. I couldn't bear many of his habits and had never wanted to live with him." She worried about "being coerced into the role of artist's wife—servant to his talent." She was particularly horrified by thoughts of nursing him after he grew infirm. He reciprocated with complaints that for the first time in his life he felt truly lonely.

And all the while, Ms. Turner was still ensconced in the White Rock condo, by Ms. Lau's reckoning, "the third person in the relationship, present by her very absence." The end of the affair came on Ms. Lau's 26th birthday, which, she noted, was Mr. Kinsella's age reversed. An expensive, but miserable birthday dinner at Quattro on Fourth in Vancouver was followed by a return to Mr. Kinsella's apartment; there he turned on a baseball game. She asked if he preferred to be alone and he indicated he did. Ms. Lau walked back to her apartment, only to find a message from Ms. Turner on the answering machine, "Bill and I have been seeing each other again. He tells me that it's over between the two of you."

Ms. Lau realized then it was time to call it a day. "There comes a time when a writer north of 60 would like nothing more than a meal on the table, a swept room and the adoring eyes of a woman who asks nothing but security in return," she learned. "There comes a time when the woman in her 20s is not ready for bed at 10 p.m. every night, when she doesn't want to bring someone who is like her grandfather to meet her friends at dinner parties."

Thus ends Ms. Lau's account. In his suit, Mr. Kinsella claims that the Vancouver piece's references to his state of physical health and infirmities, his sexual performance, the dress, taste and physical appearance of his female companions, the revelation of private conversations, especially his "manifestations of affection for the Defendant Lau," and disclosure of the plaintiff's private financial affairs, were "demeaning, humiliating and embarrassing."

Furthermore, the suit, which is also against the magazine's editors, claims that a drawing accompanying Ms. Lau's article, which portrayed Mr. Kinsella with a cigarette when she knew him to be a non-smoker and an anti-smoker, as well as her implications by innuendo that he, a teetotaler, consumed alcohol and that his career and profits were diminishing with time were defamatory. Mr. Kinsella is asking for unspecified damages and a permanent injunction restraining Ms. Lau from writing about their relationship.

Mr. Kinsella seems less distraught over the possibility that he was libelled than he is over his former lover's lack of chivalry. "Nothing really bothers me," he says in an interview. "But when you're wronged, you have to defend yourself." His sense of injustice is exacerbated by the knowledge that he treated his former lover more gently in "Lonesome Polecat," a short story just published in the winter 1998 edition of Canadian Author. "He stared at her beautiful peach-coloured skin, her small, delicate Asian eyes, and was overwhelmed with love," he wrote. Mr. Kinsella sought Ms. Lau's approval before submitting the story.

Ms. Lau told the Vancouver Sun that in the midst of their relationship, she and Mr. Kinsella had signed a written agreement giving each other permission to write about their affair. "She can say whatever she wants," growls Mr. Kinsella when asked about the agreement. "But anything we might have discussed applied only to fiction writing." He argues that fiction "may bear certain resemblances to little bits of life." But, "you have to tone them down, or tone them up to make a story."

In "Lonesome Polecat" Mr. Kinsella has toned up his own image. "Lloyd [the Kinsella character] was a handsome man, tall, with piercing blue eyes, a year-round tan and a thatch of silvered hair that made would-be investors trust him implicitly." But Min, Lloyd's love interest, sounds remarkably like the girl who wrote Runaway. She is presented as leaving her ethnic family (Vietnamese in the story) because they have no appreciation for her art. And Min's description of the scars on her earlobe, which Lloyd sentimentally dubs "Lonesome Polecat," is close in tone to Ms. Lau's autobiography. "I was a teenager. I was drunk and stoned....A trip to emergency. Three stitches. I joked with the doctor all the time he was stitching me up. I offered to trade him sex for his services. I was insulted when he refused," Mr. Kinsella wrote.

But in light of Mr. Kinsella's suit, it is ironic that his own story implies by innuendo, in precisely the same way as Ms. Lau's Vancouver piece, that he drinks. "They were whiling away the afternoon [in Bermuda], as lovers do, curled on the king-size bed, partially clothed, a sweating pitcher of margaritas, three-quarters empty, on the bedside table."

Vancouver editor Jim Sutherland professes surprise at Mr. Kinsella's suit. "I didn't see anything in the story that was either actionable, or even very unflattering," he says. But he is prepared to meet Mr. Kinsella in court. "Not defending ourselves is not an option." Why did he publish the story? "A true story about a triangular relationship is always interesting," he says, "and even more so when it involves an older man and a younger woman."

And, of course, Mr. Kinsella is one of Canada's best-loved and best-selling authors. He is very much a North American writer, concentrating on Indians and baseball. While his wry tales of life on Alberta's Hobbema reserve may have a limited audience, his 1982 novel Shoeless Joe is a mythical work that has made Mr. Kinsella something of a mythical figure himself. Shoeless Joe, one of his half-dozen baseball books, has in the minds of its admirers, made the sport more American than apple pie. And the acclaimed 1989 movie based upon it was seen by millions and made Kevin Costner a superstar.

Academics may be cool to Mr. Kinsella's work, no one disputes his ability to touch the imagination of his readers. "Shoeless Joe, is one of the most successful books in North America in the last 20 years," says William Valgardson, professor of writing at the University of Victoria and Mr. Kinsella's teacher in 1973-74. Prof. Valgardson argues that the two expressions, "field of dreams" and "build it and he will come" have entered North American consciousness in ways few other sayings ever have. "By just paying attention to conversations and what was said in the media," he reports, "I counted 11 references to those two sayings in a single day."

Furthermore, says Prof. Valgardson, he personally knows people who have built baseball diamonds in homage to the message of hope Mr. Kinsella's book and movie contain.

Ms. Lau may not be as well known outside Canada, but Jerry Wasserman, professor of English and theatre at the University of B.C., says that does not mean her work is without significance. "Evelyn Lau is a legitimate author," he insists. "An anthology of standard works that I am considering for my first-year class includes three of her poems." Prof. Wasserman considers Ms. Lau a "literary exhibitionist" but "a powerful writer nonetheless. At her best she is very, very good. At worst, she is very bad." But then, he admits, the same can be said about Mr. Kinsella. Prof. Wasserman suggests that like her former lover there are ways in which Ms. Lau is unique. "Anais Nin and Henry Miller are also exhibitionists," he says. "But they tend to romanticize the sex. Lau never pretends to like it." Instead she presents it as truly ugly, something forced on her by economic necessity.

Beyond Ms. Lau's well-known predilection for confessional writing, it is natural to assume that her Vancouver piece was motivated at least in part by revenge. By her account Mr. Kinsella led her to believe he was serious about marrying her while holding on to a previous lover. Mr. Sutherland indicates the revenge motivation is not farfetched. She contacted Vancouver, he reveals, and offered her story after a profile of the two writers was canned when the couple broke up.

But why Mr. Kinsella would further sensationalize an already embarrassing story by filing suit is difficult to explain. "Vancouver has behaved unprofessionally and deserves to be punished," is Mr. Kinsella's somewhat cryptic justification. But those who know him suggest another motivation. "Kinsella is a bit of a publicity hound," says Prof. Wasserman. "If he belongs to the no-publicity-is-bad-publicity school this could be just another bit of self-promotion." Prof. Wasserman argues that Ms. Lau's insinuations aside, Mr. Kinsella's career is not in decline and he is not desperate for recognition. "I think it was damaged pride more than the desire to sell books that made him sue," he offers. "I doubt he wanted the world to know he doesn't live up to his advance notices."

If there is a lesson to be learned from the Kinsella-Lau story Ms. Lau has probably said it best. "I read somewhere once that the worst thing one can say to a man is, 'I told you so,'" she says in the concluding paragraph of the Vancouver confession, "while the worst thing one can say to a woman is, 'Don't be upset.' In the course of our relationship, and afterwards, both Kinsella and I have had to hear both, again and again."

—Shafer Parker Jr.

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