by Elaine Dewar
She was an American, born and bred in New York City, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. Her private life was just that, though there were the usual rumours. One publishing person insisted that she was a descendant of the famous Seligman banking family, their business founded in the middle of the 19th Century by Joseph Seligman and his brothers, with offices in Frankfurt, London, and New York, and that she was connected by marriage to the Guggenheims.367 Was this true, or a good story? She told the Canadian Jewish News in 2001,368 just after her elevation to Vice-President and Fiction Publisher at M&S, that she came to Canada for romantic reasons. Whoever that romantic reason was, the man who became her lifelong partner was James Polk, the former husband of Margaret Atwood, whose life partner by then was the novelist and political activist Graeme Gibson. For years Polk was the editorial director of the House of Anansi where he, too, worked with the great and about-to-be great of CanLit. He too was an American who369 found his way to Canada after doing his doctorate at Harvard. He served on the RBC Taylor Prize jury in 2014, so a short biography of Polk can be found on its website. It mentions that when Polk was an advisor to the Ontario Ministry of Culture, he developed the Ontario Book Publishing tax credit, only available to Canadian-owned and controlled companies. The officials of the Ontario Media Development Corporation had told me that “Canadian controlled” is in part defined for the tax credit’s purposes by reference to the federal Income Tax Act. But when I looked for the Income Tax Act’s definition of control, I learned that it is not defined in that statute, but it has instead been interpreted in various ways through various court decisions. Usually, control means 51% ownership of the voting equity of a company, but the courts have ruled that non-arm’s length relationships can transform even 25% ownership into control, as can significant levels of debt.370 Had Polk discussed with the Ministry of Culture that its book tax credit rules might not accommodate the ambiguities of McClelland & Stewart, when it was de facto controlled by Random House, though 75% of its shares were held by the U of T? Had his partner, a leading figure at M&S, made these complexities known to him? I can’t answer these questions because neither Seligman nor Polk responded to my emails requesting an interview. The one I sent to Polk was forwarded to him by Martha Sharpe, a former Publisher of Anansi and a friend of Ellen Seligman’s.
Seligman had a private funeral, but her former employer, Penguin Random House Canada, announced it would hold a memorial in her honour. Normally, memorials for celebrated persons are open to the public. This one was by invitation. The invitations were sent out by email with instructions to RSVP to Canada@penguinrandomhouse.ca. I did not get one, but a source who did sent me his. I decided I wanted to go.
Once, years ago, I called Seligman at the recommendation of another editor when I was starting to write fiction. I asked if I could show it to her. She’d responded in that nasal, monotone-yet-droll voice of hers, neither encouraging nor discouraging, neither enthusiastic nor the opposite: well, I guess, maybe, she’d said. Nowadays, no one in her position would take such a call let alone be open to reading the work of a stranger with no track record. But that wasn’t why I wanted to attend the memorial. In my mind, her death was entangled with the end of McClelland & Stewart. Her passing marked its termination more profoundly than any merger document or Minister’s decision upon review. It also marked the end of something more important than the absorption of one business by another, and that is the disappearance of the political belief, expressed in law and policy, that Canadian words will build this country. Does anyone in government still hold that there is a Canadian identity greater than the sum of us all which must be reflected in print in order to keep Canada becoming itself?
How strange, yet Canadian, that some of those most responsible for delivering our vital stories into the world were born and raised in the United States of America. Our cultural protectionism was supposed to save us from the overwhelming cultural energy of our Neighbour to the South, yet some of those imbued with it helped us become who we are—whoever that is.
So I thought of the memorial as a coda. Every book needs one.
Besides: in the middle of July, an announcement was sent around the email chain that Penguin Random House Canada had hired Jared Bland in “the newly created role of Publisher” of M&S, which entailed oversight of its profitability as well as taking charge of the in-house magazine, Hazlitt.371 No mention was made of former M&S Publisher and President Doug Pepper in the cover note, but the full announcement said Pepper had been assigned to run Signal, a non-fiction imprint, reporting to Bland. This was odd because Bland has a much shorter publishing resume than Pepper. Bland’s previous job was as the Arts Editor at the Globe and Mail. Born in Springfield, Illinois, Bland studied English literature at the University of Toronto and did graduate work there on Canadian poet Al Purdy. After interning at Walrus, Bland became its managing editor. Then there was a short stint as an editor at House of Anansi after which he joined the Globe.372 Pepper, by contrast, had been editing and publishing books for three decades. Bland had been made a Vice-President, thus no one could accuse Penguin Random House of sloughing another undertaking. It had promised the Minister of Canadian Heritage that those managing the remains of M&S would have the same level of autonomy as the leaders of Doubleday, Knopf, and Random House: those undertakings remained in force until December, 2016.373
The announcement tried very hard to purvey the notion that M&S still exists. It devoted several paragraphs to its great importance at Penguin Random House Canada. Apparently, it was even assigned a new Editor-in-Chief—the same woman who performs the same duties at Doubleday.374 So I was curious as to how M&S would be portrayed at Seligman’s memorial: alive or dead?
I sent a query to the RSVP address saying I would like to come to the memorial: would that be okay? No response. No matter, go anyway, I thought. Bearing witness is one of the things reporters must do, though witness is a fancy word for the reality. The reality is that at important events, invited or not, we lurk. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. Reporters today are much better behaved than they used to be. My elders, at Maclean’s, used to regale me with stories of the good old days when they worked for Canada’s great newspapers. They were often sent out to get photos of a newsworthy person who had just died. If need be, they were expected to break into that person’s house and steal a picture right off the wall so it could appear in the paper. Some of them got really good at it.
Seligman’s memorial was held on the last day of summer, 2016. The morning started out grey. I listened to the radio news in a state of free-floating anxiety that soon affixed itself to an item about the vicious bombing of Red Crescent relief trucks carrying food and medicine to the starving and the wounded near Aleppo, Syria. Our Prime Minister, Mr. Sunny Ways, had been to China and had agreed to consider an extradition treaty with China. To show its gratitude, the Chinese had at last deported home a Canadian missionary who they’d jailed as a spy.375 There was also talk of a free trade deal between Canada and China. The civil rights folks were nervous about the proposed extradition treaty, and the trade people were edgy about a free trade deal.
I got in the car and drove downtown feeling thoroughly unsettled, though the sun had come out and the heat was rising and that sort of weather usually makes me happy. I figured out in the parking lot that I was nervous about going to this event, so nervous it was as if I had never before gone somewhere uninvited with my notebook and pen in hand. What was there to be afraid of? I reminded myself that we in Canada are almost immune to the horrors destroying lives elsewhere in the world. I told myself that I should be grateful for the fact that I live in a country of laws, though this M&S story demonstrated that our laws are played by lawyers the way Rostropovich handles a cello, and if you have friends on the Hill, things turn out better than if you don’t. I told myself I should weep with joy that we consider that sort of thing to be a problem.
I told myself I should keep things in proper perspective
. So what if I got thrown out?
Koerner Hall is reached through a spectacular structure of glass and steel affixed to two 19th Century buildings housing the Royal Conservatory of Music. Once upon a time, I took my children there for their piano lessons. Back then, the rooms were dowdy and the floors were as brittle as dried bird bones: there was an awful little snack bar full of sugary things my children wanted to eat right by the parking lot door. But there was music everywhere, a mad symphony of glorious (and inglorious) sound pouring from this studio and that one, and especially from the master classrooms where the finer points of performance were taught. Just to sit and wait as a child took her lesson was to be lifted up.
The new entryway has an echo, but no music could be heard. The snack bar has disappeared. A ramp goes down to an elegant food court and up to the Hall. Young women in chic dresses guarded the ramp going up. But they didn’t ask if I had been invited, they just waved me on my way.
Upstairs, outside the hall’s main doors, my past and present were enjoying a conversation. Julian Porter, Q.C., who guided me and Toronto Life through the Reichmann libel case, was talking to Arlene Perly Rae, former director of M&S. She was leaning on a cane. She seemed to have forgotten our phone conversation. She explained to me, as if I didn’t know, that she had once served on the M&S board. Brad Martin, standing off to the side, gave me a funny look. I scurried inside and found a seat before someone called security.
Koerner Hall has velvet-draped walls and an intricate, wooden, acoustically tunable ceiling. It seats 1,135 people. There is a stage that is neither large nor small, which sported two large displays of flowers and two lecterns where people would speak. An agent friend sat down beside me. I had grabbed an aisle seat, the better to see people coming in. Two writers walked down the opposite aisle and leaned in to graze cheeks. They both looked stricken. I knew this was not about Seligman’s death, because that was old news, but about the demise of another writer and friend who had died suddenly only two days before. John Bentley Mays was an art and architecture critic of very wide intellect and insatiable curiosity, yet another former American who helped us discover ourselves.
I waited for the music to begin, but there was none. (At Bentley Mays’ memorial Mass, by contrast, the music would be so beautiful.) This memorial began instead with a speech given by a young colleague of Seligman’s who cried as she recounted what it was like to work for her, to be mentored by her. She provided a long list of Seligman’s quirks, peculiarities, oddities, which were attested to over and over by the other speakers who followed her. Seligman was a fanatic about temperature control in the office, she wore elegant clothes, she was absolutely relentless in her quest for perfection, all forms of perfection, she was fun, she was funny, she was fierce, she was girly, she was everyone’s Dear Reader. The books she’d edited had won an inordinate number of big prizes. Anne Michaels, Michael Helm, Michael Ondaatje, Jane Urquhart, Elizabeth Hay, Linda Spalding all told similar stories about working with her. (Rohinton Mistry read from Tagore.) They described the joys and the terrors, even the horror, as one writer expressed it, of realizing that Seligman’s evisceration of her novel, one that she had been so sure was wonderful, was warranted. When Seligman asked how she was feeling, she’d replied that she was in a panic. Seligman had said that was good, an arrogant writer is a poor writer. Michael Helm told the story of how she called him to say she had acquired his novel, that it was spectacularly good, a gift to literature, and how he then spent month upon month upon month in endless conversations with her that led him to change just about everything in it (except its sense and meaning).
Yet the most affecting description of this editing process was the one Steven Price described in various other places (the Globe and Mail, the Literary Review of Canada, Hazlitt) before or just after this event. His was the last book Seligman edited.
She never told him she was dying. She never told him she was ill. She called him almost every day, spending hours on the phone working through his novel from beginning to end, hour after hour of intense conversation as she made suggestions, and he considered them, and made some back. She listened to him type while he made changes on his computer, and read them aloud to her, hour after hour after hour of thinking about character, dialogue, setting, motivation, language, always hunting for the precise word, day after day, week after week. This is why the phrase ‘Ellen Seligman is on the phone’ filled her writers with dread and dismay, joy and exhilaration. Seven days before she died, she called and left him a message. It was clear she thought it was Friday, and only belatedly realized it was in fact Saturday and not a workday for most people, and said she’d call again on Monday. After she died, Price and his wife replayed the message over and over.
Having never worked with her, I had no idea she’d worked this way. I had not met anyone in the book business who worked this way. (My editor scrawled “Oh, yeah?” beside that sentence.) One speaker said she was sometimes called Canada’s Maxwell Perkins, after the legendary American editor who pulled wonderful works from his artists through a similarly laborious process. But in fact, she was the one and only Ellen Seligman. Though she’d had many offers to go and work at larger publishing houses in London or New York, she told those who asked that she stayed at M&S because of its independence.
The last speaker was Kristin Cochrane, Penguin Random House Canada’s President. She made it clear that this event had been brought to us by Seligman’s employer, that business was afoot here, as well as memory. She praised Seligman as a businesswoman, along with pointing out, yet again, her quirks and oddities. I couldn’t help but think that this was an attempt to rewrite Seligman’s work life, or life’s work, so that it made some sort of business sense. Because nothing described in this memorial made any sort of business sense. No publishing company can afford to employ as publisher, an editor who lavishes months and years of her own effort on one or two books. That behaviour is the antithesis of business, it is the behaviour of an artist whose medium is the writer. A rumour had reached my ears that Seligman kept her illness under wraps because she feared her employers would use it as an excuse to be rid of her. I discounted it from the moment her former junior began to speak of her with such passionate love and respect. Yet that rumour spoke another sort of truth, one in keeping with the economic reality of Canadian publishing: Seligman must have driven the bean counters at Bertelsmann to distraction because she didn’t work according to a normal schedule, yet they couldn’t remake her, and they couldn’t do without her either.
But now she is gone.
The Minister of Canadian Heritage, Mélanie Joly, is a very photogenic person. Blond, beautiful, her feelings show on her face and her body as she moves. The camera loves her. She seems the very embodiment of openness. As I would later learn, a Quebec publisher had brought out a book by Joly propounding her ideas on changing the rules of the political game just after the last federal election.376 Yet I had been trying for some time without success to find out more about her intention to reinvent the way Canadian culture is supported by the federal government, specifically publishing. On the one hand, as one of its first budget initiatives, the new Liberal government had offered $75 million more to the CBC, to be followed by $180 million every year for five years, and $40 million more to the Canada Council, with $150 million to come in 2020 (which is the next best thing to maybe).377 Yet, on the other hand, that phrase of hers, everything is on the table, sounded like surgery coming. Get ready.
In the summer of 2016, Canadian Heritage’s website invited Canadians to take part in an online/social media consultation process concerning what they called Canadian content in a digital world. This apparently was what was meant by everything is on the table. Many of the arts are now transmitted in digital form, according to Minister Joly and her Department, and Canada should aim to export its cultural content to a global audience. This is not the same aim as reflecting Canadians to themselves. This online consultation process, according to the
website, had unearthed several themes for the Department and the Minister to consider, including the idea that cultural content producers should aim at the export of democracy.
That seemed to me to be a dubious aspiration for those who write novels or poetry, or for those who are trying to report on the world through books and magazines and newspapers, but I tried to keep an open mind. I also worked hard to ignore the use of the word “content” to describe cultural endeavours. This is the information technologists’ notation for what artists create. It is an insulting word, an empty bag of a word for the always changing, always surprising gifts of human minds and hearts. It reflects the point of view of those who control the means of digital distribution.
The website referred to a series of “in-person” consultations to be led by the Minister, a process to be announced at the end of the summer. I thought I should attend the event scheduled for Toronto, the home of most of Canada’s English language cultural workers and many of its leading cultural institutions, as well as most of its English language publishers, because this consultation process was aimed at new beginnings, at a new policy for a new age. Perhaps it would lead to an answer about whether or not Canada should still protect publishers from foreign ownership, whether it should continue to support the reflection business at all, and if so, how.
Beginnings are always interesting. As Doug Gibson had put it when Bennett handed over M&S to Random House and the U of T, “the King is dead, long live the King.”
I filled out the online questionnaire and followed the instructions to check in with that website every now and again to see when the in-person events would be held.
Nothing new on this subject appeared there, except the announcement of the formation of an advisory group appointed by the Minister to help her figure out what the future should look like. No book publishers or book editors were in that group, although a magazine person was.
