Craig Martin Doyle: “Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.”
In the fall of 1979, nearly 50 years ago, I was applying for a position in the publicity department of the educational book publisher, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, in Toronto’s west end.
After I was interviewed by a vice-president, she ushered me into the office of Craig Doyle, the production manager. It wasn’t clear why I was suddenly sitting opposite this tall, handsome, blue-eyed stranger, but later Craig told me she wanted to know his opinion of me.
As we chatted, I felt an instant rapport with this witty, articulate, older brother figure. I had just turned 29 and he was just turning 35; little did we know that it was the start of a free-flowing, 47 year long conversation. For years afterward, we would often recall that accidental, seminal moment and our simultaneous grasp of the ironic. As if we had already intuited a potential kinship; as if we were sensing we were going the distance. Which we did.
As I first got to know Craig, I learned that he was living in the Annex neighbourhood in something called a house group. One day, I dropped him off after work and as I watched him disappear into a three storey house, naturally I wondered: “What’s he doing in there?”
He was fairly quiet about this mysterious therapeutic community, founded during the 1960’s counterculture, but I kept watching him closely. Was this some kind of cult? A turning point came when, over lunch one day, he spoke about his breakup with his beautiful but cold American girlfriend. This was the first time in my life when an adult male of the species did not hide his emotional distress and vulnerability in his relationship with the so-called “weaker sex”, and as a survivor of 10 years at a macho, all-male school, I strongly related to his struggle.
When I broke up with my own girlfriend not long after, I asked him what phone number I should call. My leap into in-depth talk psychotherapy at age 33 changed the course of my life, releasing my writer’s block, and Craig was a prime mover. This brand of therapy wasn’t about the treatment of “mental illness” but a dynamic exploration of the unconscious self and the world, the interpretation of dreams, the earning of a kind of emotional and spiritual PhD that you won’t find in a school, or an educational book publisher.
Craig and I spent 10 years together in publishing and we had a ton of fun. We shared many of the same intellectual and cultural passions – books, movies, music, comedy, sports, politics, a consuming love of the arts and humanities. Every summer, our company played weekly, mixed softball games and then danced up a storm at the Jolly Miller Tavern. When we won the publishers’ league championship one year, our joy flew off the charts, as if we had won the World Series. Craig and I also played for a weekly pub trivia league team, The Acumen, revelling in the general banter, repartee and wordplay. We kept influencing each other, even when under the influence. “Humour”, he was fond of reminding me, “is a short cut to the truth.”
As our friendship deepened, I learned more of Craig’s backstory. I was struck by our genetic symmetry, both having elusive fathers of Irish blood and invasive mothers of Scots blood. He was raised a Mick, myself a Prod, but we preferred lobbing apercus and epigrams at each other rather than Molotov cocktails. At the precocious age of 16, he spent a year at Loyola College, embracing the rigourous academic challenges of the Jesuit priests; at one point, he wanted to emulate Thomas Merton and join a Catholic monastery. He delighted in churning out 5,000 word essays on weighty works like “The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill”, “The Prelude” by William Wordsworth, and “The Idea of a University” by John Henry Newman, all of which address the theme of education.
Not only was Craig a scholar, but an athlete. Also at age 16, he was invited to try out for the Montreal Junior Canadiens; watching Yvan “The Roadrunner” Cournoyer zoom past him, he quickly discovered his limitations and, needless to add, he failed to make the team.
Then the 1960s counterculture miraculously intervened and he quit both hockey and religion. After two miserable years at the “soulless factory” of the University of Toronto, in 1964 he enrolled in the newly formed Brock University – “Small is beautiful” -- where he thrived under a mentoring professor. Just a few months ago, he wrote a memoir piece on those fertile years, published in the alumni magazine, in which he quoted the Hart Crane line: “When rum was Plato to our heads.” He found learning intoxicating.
In 1967, at 23, he taught a grade 13 high school English class in St. Catharines and coached the Brock University hockey team. He loved it, then suddenly quit the following year, an act of self-thwarting that would he repeat at later points in his life and take time to fully understand. In the 1970s, he defaulted into book publishing, first working at House of Anansi with the likes of Margaret Atwood. But, like myself, this was a detour, not his true calling.
He hit a crossroads in the late 1980s, now in his 40s, when he married the similarly charismatic, Irish-blooded Linda, shifted back into teaching, and re-claimed his gift. After his first week at Centennial College, he asked himself, “Why didn’t I do this 20 years ago?” He particularly loved teaching a cultural studies course he called “cult studs”, and from all accounts his students loved him back. The Greek word enthusiasm translates as “the divine essence of the inspired person” and at his best Craig radiated infectious enthusiasm and curiosity.
Speaking of the Greeks, Craig was entranced by the works of John Fowles, particularly the novel “The Magus”, the story of a confused young Englishman who leaves his girlfriend to teach on a Greek island. There he meets Conchis (a play on “Conscious”), a mysterious magician figure who draws him into a rocky labyrinthe of self-discovery. The book struck a deep chord, and I know Craig derived lasting satisfaction from his exchange of letters with Fowles.
I quit book publishing in 1989, a year after Craig, and moved back to magazine journalism and freelance writing. In the early 1990s, as I struggled to pull together my first book, an oral history on Upper Canada College, Craig was a steady supporter. When he quoted me a couplet by the 18th century poet Alexander Pope, I realized that he had given me the dedication for the book: “Men must be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown proposed as things forgot.” Here was a perfect analogy to the art of psychotherapy and “making the unconscious conscious.”
As a tag team of compulsive quote-aholics, I’m sure some people might have found Doyle and FitzGerald a tad pedantic at times. But I just went with the flow; whenever we got together, we’d range all over the map for hours at a time: from the Beats to the Beatitudes, David Byrne to David Lynch, Timothy Snyder to the Coen Brothers, J.D. Salinger to the history of World War II, Firesign Theatre to Monty Python, Bob Dylan to Guy Lafleur, Adam Phillips to Jimi Hendrix, Stanley Kubrick to Lewis Lapham, the Grateful Dead to Hunter S. Thompson; and of course his mad passion for The Who. True, there are not many women on the list; Craig would not shrink from accusations of white male elitism. But Maria Callas, “La Davina”, occupied a high place in his pantheon; in the end, it was all about embracing expressions of excellence.
In the countless hours we spent raking over the embers of our own personal histories, we invariably invoked the mysterious power of the therapeutic hour, both its benefits and its limitations, and the perpetual struggle to think for oneself. In our Irish bones, I think we saw ourselves as outsiders and “rogue scholars”, suspicious of subtle co-option by systems or groupthink. For all our reverence for our cultural heroes, including therapists, there was an inherent challenge attached: if you can’t be James Joyce or Jean Beliveau or Sigmund Freud, who will you be? As Oscar Wilde put it: “Be yourself – everybody else is taken.” And in being himself, of course Craig was no saint; he could be difficult, stubborn and mercurial, and the fallout of the painful dissolution of his marriage lingered for years. But he contained multitudes, and he never gave up fighting for his own integrity.
As part of my own ongoing self-explorations, I have taken many “roots” tours of Ireland. In 2019, as I was preparing my sixth trip with my brother, we invited Craig to come along. He had never visited the land of our forefathers, and when I asked him why, he said he was afraid he’d never come back, merging with the roaring boys of the Dublin pubs.
He flew over with us, but then split off on his own, exploring his ancestral village in County Wexford. On his return, he regaled me with his encounters with a host of archetypal Irish characters, storytellers not unlike himself, and his brushes with dream-like ripples of the uncanny. To the end, he played out the wisdom of Chaucer: “Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.”
Craig’s father James died in 1992, weeks apart from the death my own father Jack. For his own complex reasons, my father shut me out of the intimate process of his dying. That’s why I’ve never forgotten Craig’s story of how, as his father lay dying of esophageal cancer at age 81, they made a dramatic breakthrough.
Craig was able to say to his father: “You did your best. You were a good father and I love you.” His father was so astonished and grateful that he burst into tears.
For the funeral, Craig prepared a eulogy. But the priest told Craig that he would not be allowed to speak to the congregation as “people might get upset.” One person who was justifiably upset was, of course, Craig.
Coincidentally, Craig also succumbed to esophageal cancer at age 81. As he gradually lost his voice in his last days, I was privileged to sit with him at his bedside, and thank him for our 47 year conversation – one that rolls on unabated inside me.
In the time I have left on earth, I will continue to remember and enjoy the rich, varied legacy of my loyal friend, fellow searcher and kindred spirit. And I will, needless to say, allow myself to have all of my feelings.
Craig Martin Doyle, born in Belleville, Ontario, November 25, 1944, died in Toronto, September 4, 2026