by Anna Porter
CONTENTS
Epigraph
PART ONE
Becoming Canadian
A Soft Landing
Welcome to CanLit
The Rosedale Radical
The Unfortunate Incident of Ted’s Name
Assembling a Book on the Linoleum Floor
All Those Glorious Manuscripts
Roblin Lake and After
The Happy Hungry Man
The Amazing Ms. Atwood
The Master Storyteller
Tough Times
Finding Home
The Very Young Matt
National Dreaming, or The Berton Extravaganza
How Pierre Berton Is Responsible for My Marriage
1972, a Year to Remember
For the Love of Words
Meetings with the Messiah
A Land of Poets
Peter’s Establishment
A Northern Nation
The Best and the Brightest
The Disinherited
The Greatest Gift
Escaping the City
That Great, Always Recognizable Voice
Marian’s Way
A Whole Lot Larger than Life
The Establishment Man
The Uneasy Balancing Act
Intermission
Talking about Feminism
Rebel Daughter
In Search of My Father
PART TWO
No Rose Garden
Looking for a New Gig
Sealing
The Challenge of Being Julian
Sylvia’s Magic
Trying to Heal the World with Graeme and John and Monte
The First Lady
Michael’s World
Finding the Key
Farewell to the Seventies
Taking a Leap in the Dark
Inviting the World to Love Canada
Dudley and Malak
Our Spanking New Premises
1984
Journalists and Politicians
Looking for Trouble
I’ve Always Told Stories
My Candidate
The Right Honourable Jean
The End of an Era
Saying Goodbye to Margaret
Imagining Canadian Literature
The Doubleday Gamble
From Mortal Sins to The Bookfair Murders
Five Years of Struggle to Come to Terms with an Illusion
Saving the World, One Book at a Time
Growing Pains
New Challenges
Basil Johnston’s Ojibway Heritage
The Canadian Way of Death and of Living
The Witness
“Money-Grubbing Has Become Respectable”
The Last Decade of the Last Century
Farley: The Next Chapter
The Last Berton Party
The Incomparable Dalton Camp
PART THREE
Passages
Memory, Secrets, and Magic
Key Porter’s Twentieth Birthday
The End of M&S
Welcome to the Twenty-first Century
Endings
From Publisher to Writer
Europe’s Ghosts
Keep the Promise
A Footnote to Canadian Publishing History
The Inimitable Jack Rabinovitch
For the Love of Books
Photographs
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Index
Permissions and Credits
For the two Jacks—McClelland and Rabinovitch
When home is not where you are born, nothing is predetermined.
MASHA GESSEN
PART ONE
Becoming Canadian
A Soft Landing
MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Canada was the highway from the airport to Toronto, early-winter grey, barren, treeless, with squat industrial buildings. It was gloomy even for an outsider with no plans to stay. The turbaned driver tried jolly small talk about his busier friends in Montreal and, when he heard where I’d come from, sang a bit of “England Swings (Like a Pendulum Do).” Unlike the suspicious customs woman, he made no comments about the battered blue suitcase with no handle that contained all my worldly possessions. He deposited it in front of a gold-braided doorman outside the Royal York Hotel and accepted a meagre tip in shillings. I had nothing left for the doorman but he liked my outfit so much he didn’t care. Nor did the next chap in a less fancy uniform who hefted the suitcase onto his shoulder with one hand. He had come from Munich, via Zurich and London. Like me, he wasn’t sure where he would go next.
I had arrived after Expo madness, after Canada’s Centennial celebrations, just before the end of the sixties. I came from swinging London: Beatlemania, Bee Gees, Wimpy bars, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Trafalgar Square happenings, hippies and free love, weed parties, “mod” counterculture, and late nights on the King’s Road.
I wore my white vinyl knee-high boots, a mauve minidress, a short bunny-fur coat, ironed-straight long blond hair—all perfectly acceptable in London—and I thought I looked professional enough to rate being hired by the Canadian branch plant of the American publisher Collier Macmillan as a copy editor. I had worked for their London office as a college sales rep for a couple of years, travelling all over the UK and Northern Europe—none of which qualified me for copy-editing. Still, my erstwhile boss, the indomitable Fred KobrakI at Collier Macmillan International’s UK office, figured if I could pass for a college rep in Scandinavia, I could pass as a copy editor in Canada. He advised me to look earnest, not one of my obvious attributes, and try to fit in. If it didn’t work out, he said, he would arrange for an interview at the New York office, and if that too failed, I could go back to Scandinavia and sell more copies of Samuelson’s Economics.
Prior to Collier Macmillan I had put in a few months pretending to proofread at Cassell’s on Red Lion Square, while they pretended to pay me. I suspect the reason I had taken the proofreading job was that Cassell’s published Robert Graves, whose poetry and fiction had served me well during sleepless nights. Needless to say, he did not frequent the proofreading department, though I did see him once in the lift (elevator). He was tall, wore a rumpled raincoat under a rumpled face framed by wispy white hair, and like everyone else, was staring into elevator space. I was so excited I could barely mutter that I had been a fan for many years. He looked at me briefly and said, “Really?” Just one word from the great literary giant and a missed opportunity for this memoir.
My New Zealand passport listed my name as Anna Szigethy and place of birth as Hungary, where my family had lived for several hundred years, though some of our homes had found themselves in other countries after the First World War. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon had distributed more than half the country among its neighbours, leaving many former Hungarians feeling like emigrants or exiles. Though there were plenty of other traumas to talk about when I was a child, the tragedy of Trianon—a mere sideshow to the Versailles Treaty that ended the war—was still mentioned in tones of heavy mourning. It had been Hungary’s punishment for having allied itself with the Kaiser’s Germany.
As most of the beneficiaries of Hungary’s Trianon losses (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and so on) became our fellow Socialist Republics after the Second World War, my grandfather Vili was careful not to mention the unfairness of the treaty unless we were outside our apartment. Inside, as he never tired of warning me, “the walls have ears.” He explained that in the late 1930s, our country had gone somewhat crazy and joined Nazi Germany in yet another world war. That’s why we were invaded in 1945 by the Soviets, who then stayed.
In keeping with our conquered state, Hungarian schools taught Russian from about grade one on, and children were i
ll advised to skip those classes, particularly those youngsters with politically suspect backgrounds, such as mine. Soviet-trained Communists, who were in charge after 1946, were bent on reversing the old social order and kept a wary eye on everyone who had owned anything in prior years. Vili had been a magazine and book publisher and had dabbled in liberal politics. My missing father had owned some sort of factory (I still have no idea what). He had been scooped up in 1945 by a gang of Soviet soldiers with orders to fill quotas for Hungarians to work in Siberia. We rarely talked about him.
Vili was my childhood hero. He was a tireless and inventive storyteller, an amateur magician, a former champion sprinter, a wrestler, and one of the best sword duelers in Hungary. He was so strong, he could lift two of his daughters at once, holding only one leg of each chair they were seated on. He had no trouble winning every race he ever invented for me, though he gave me ample handicaps.
Vili taught me to listen to stories, to love hearing them and, later, reading them.II
Stories became my passion. I had started to read soon after I started to walk. Fantastic folktales about witches and dragons (my grandfather had insisted that there was a particularly fiery dragon still living in Transylvania, where our family came from); wily Turks and heroic Hungarians; then books by Karl May, Zsigmond Móricz, Vörösmarty, Arany, Jules Verne, Flaubert, Balzac, Molnár (I was particularly fond of The Boys of Paul Street), Stendahl (after defeating an army of janissaries, I planned to become a musketeer); and, from the top shelves of my mother’s library, Maupassant. In time, my Russian and English, German and French education would add to the growing lists of books I loved.
* * *
AFTER SOME YEARS as a slave labourer in the Soviet Gulag, my father was sent home. My memory of his return is a bit hazy but I do recall that he ruined my Christmas by interrupting what promised to be a lighthearted occasion. A complete stranger, he was shabbily dressed; he stank of stale tobacco and horse manure. He had yellow teeth and broken knuckles. I was surprised during the night to find a revolver under his pillow. He did not seem happy to see me.
I was relieved when he left a couple of days later. I was discouraged from talking about him even to my friends. Not only had he been in the Gulag, he would now manage to cross the border illegally into Austria. My mother, Puci, and I (I was only about five, too young to make my own decisions) attempted to join him, but we were caught, interrogated, and jailed in Szombathely. That was the first time I was arrested.III I was there for only a few weeks but they kept my mother for eight months. Trying to leave a Communist paradise was punishable by jail.
Since we had failed to follow him, my father sent divorce papers and vanished from our lives. My mother tended to forgive him—he was so much older than she was, he had suffered in the slave labour camp, he could never hope to come home, and so forth. I had no interest, then, in seeing him again.
With such a suspect family history it was obvious that I had to shine in Russian classes in Hungary. My family wanted me to be seen as a perfect example of Communist youth, white shirt, blue kerchief, and all. Sometimes I could even carry the flag with the hammer and sickle. I was honoured to be hanging giant banners of comrades Stalin, Lenin, and Rákosi, our very own Communist leader. None of them was pretty, but Rákosi with his bald, sloping, neckless head and forced smile outdid the other two.
In spite of all our efforts to conform, the state caught up with Vili in 1954, tried him on trumped-up charges, and condemned him to eighteen months of hard labour. Though he and my grandmother were allowed to leave the country a few months after his release, I had become seriously discouraged about our future in Hungary. In 1956 when the anti-Soviet demonstrations began, I spent a lot of time in the streets with protesters. At first the crowds were jubilant, but then the shooting began. I was at Kossuth Square when the secret police shot into the crowd, and I saw one of my friends die. I saw Soviet tanks roll over people. In a doorway where I had hidden, a Russian soldier held my hand as he died.
When our tiny flat took a direct hit, my motherIV decided it was time to leave. This time we crossed the border on foot to Austria successfully. New Zealand eventually accepted us as refugees, as we were sponsored by my mother’s oldest sister, Sari, who had also sponsored my grandparents. It was her brilliant idea that shortly after our arrival I should be incarcerated in a Catholic boarding school, where I would quickly learn English. She was right about the English, but I also learned that the Communists weren’t all wrong about religion. Vili answered my sad letters from school and sent me a few stories about very brave Hungarians who endured hardship in battle and were rewarded by kings. But there were no kings in New Zealand.
I decided it would have been far easier to be a freedom fighter than a refugee.
* * *
MY MOTHER SOON married a Dutch New Zealander, many years her senior, with three children of his own and no interest in more. Alfons was a handsome, charming, opinionated, argumentative presence. He had spent the war years as a Japanese prisoner and never recovered from the experience. Nor had his children. Later, after overcoming our mutual suspicions, his daughter Ines and I became friends and still are. She was vivacious, funny, warm, and adventurous, though she too had spent her early childhood hungry and afraid. She and her two brothers had been with their mother in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Java. She remembered scrounging for scraps of food in the garbage behind the guards’ quarters. They tolerated her because she was so tiny.
After surviving the Sacred Heart Convent School in Wanganui, New Zealand, I started university, supporting myself with a range of jobs. I took English literature from an indulgent professor at Canterbury University in Christchurch. He had been impressed with my morning job cleaning toilets at Princess Margaret Hospital and my afternoon job modelling clothes for department stores. I wasn’t particularly good at either job (my only experience of being fired was when the New Zealand Wool Board ended my modelling stint because of late-night carousing with a bunch of former ’56 Revolutionary Hungarian poets in my Wool Board–courtesy hotel room), but the jobs fed me while I struggled through Old English with Beowulf and Sir Gawain; discovered I could understand Chaucer and Shakespeare; and enjoyed Coleridge, Shelley, and other assorted Romantics, Austen, Thackeray, James, T. S. Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce. The truth is I loved them all. I took a few French and German courses because they were easy and, less enthusiastically, I took Russian as my minor because, unlike others in the class, I already had a good working knowledge of the language. At the end of my second year, I got a job stacking books in the large Whitcombe and Tombs warehouse and was promoted to also entering the retail price, giving change to customers, and wrapping.
Thinking back on my early New Zealand days now, I realize that the people I had most wanted to be with were all members of the large Ward clan. There were six blondish, fair-skinned siblings and a very motherly mother who worked two jobs to support them all. I used to spend hours drinking tea, eating biscuits, and talking with her when she returned from her night job. My best friends were Mary and Dunstan, but I loved the feeling of blending in to a large, functioning family.
It was Mary Ward who had found me the cleaning job on the mental ward of the Princess Margaret Hospital. She had an “in” because she also worked there while going to university. Her brother Dunstan introduced me to the works of e. e. cummings, Robert Graves, and Alice Munro. Dunstan lives in Paris now, teaching English literature, writing poetry and books about the work of Robert Graves—the man I met once in an elevator.
After graduation, Ines and I set out from New Zealand together to see if we could make it in London, which is where young Aussies and Kiwis went almost as a rite of passage to adulthood. My jobs at Cassell’s and at Collier Macmillan were stopgap measures, not career moves. As Ines remembered, the only reason we worked was so that we could eat, drink warm beer, and make friends.
I had now arrived in Canada with a New Zealand passport, a British work permit, and an American publisher’s gua
rantee of work in either Toronto or New York. I was full of the bravado that young people felt at the end of the sixties when the world seemed to offer us so many options.
* * *
AFTER A SLEEPLESS night surrounded by florid wallpaper and dim lights, I set out at seven a.m. to explore the area around the Royal York. The young trees along Front Street looked as forlorn as I felt with the sharp wind blowing about my legs, scrunched newspapers flying along the pavement, a few half-frozen birds hunched over the bare branches. There was a small triangular park near the hotel. A man in an army greatcoat spread out on one of its benches, humming to himself, offered to share his sandwich. “You’re gonna be mighty cold in that wee dress, young lady,” he said, and invited me to share his coat. He sounded Irish but told me he was from Newfoundland and trying to hustle up enough money to go home again.
Some years and many park changes later, he was still in Berczy Park—I have no idea why the city keeps remaking it—and still collecting bus fare for his return home. I had none to offer the first time we met but I used to give him money later. By then we had both stopped pretending it was for bus fare.
In no small part thanks to Fred Kobrak’s influence, Collier Macmillan decided to hire me despite my lack of experience. My beautifully printed degrees were not much help with adapting American children’s textbooks for use in Canadian classrooms, but they did need someone to do the job and, I assume, they figured I could learn. Sadly, my Russian was as useless as my knowledge of the Romantics.
I hadn’t the slightest idea what Canadian usage was, though replacing “as American as apple pie” with “as Canadian as maple syrup” was not very challenging. Such minor changes to an American reading series, I was told, would allow Collier Macmillan to submit the books for approval to departments of education in various provinces. If the selection committees liked the prototype, an “adoption” would follow. Adoptions meant that schools in an entire province would be obliged to buy the books, making the company a ton of money and providing bonuses all around.
As an assistant to the assistant editor I didn’t rate an interview with Vern, who ran the Canadian operation, but he did meet me on my way to the washroom one day and nodded acknowledgement that I had been successfully transferred. By then I had acquired sheets and pillowcases from a co-worker (Morty Mint, who years later would run Penguin Books Canada) and a small room in an apartment-to-share on Broadway Avenue across from North Toronto Collegiate, a high school celebrated for its vigorous sports and music programs. Even with my window closed, I rarely missed an evening practice.
