by Anna Porter
The assistant editor was a transplanted Englishman called Peter. The “editor” was somewhere in New York: he had no interest in supervising our work in Canada. Peter found the whole notion of adding a u to or words such as harbor, changing sidewalk to pavement, eliminating all signs of gotten, and demanding changes in drawings of policemen and mailmen (different uniforms) utterly amusing. He encouraged me to insert the occasional shall just for the hell of it, though he was sure some “committee” would object on the grounds that certain words had fallen out of usage here. Peter had never met a member of any “committee” but thought of them as groups of exceedingly pretentious retired schoolteachers with British aspirations.
Wide-shouldered, pot-bellied, pink-cheeked, he was glad to be rid of the “old country” and its fusty ways. But he still had a lingering fondness for pubs with warmish beer and pianos they let him play. He was quite a virtuoso, singing along to tunes he remembered from his youth. He knew fine versions of “We’ll Meet Again” and “The White Cliffs of Dover” and played a toe-tapping, irresistibly tinkly “Greensleeves.” Late afternoons he would announce that we needed to do urgent research, so we went on pub crawls that included the Jolly Miller, the Black Bull, and sometimes the Brunswick House. Peter’s idea of a great pub was one teeming with people, bad bar food of the Scotch egg variety, and a piano. I knew all the words to “Farewell to Nova Scotia” long before I had any idea where Nova Scotia was.
Strangely, I had a formal letter of introduction to a Canadian journalist from a British character actor who had distinguished himself playing a Dalek in Doctor Who.V My actor friend, ironically, was a very tall, hefty guy with sandy hair and a mellifluous voice. He was optimistic that a part more interesting than a Dalek was bound to come along soon.
The Canadian journalist, David, another English expat, was a slim, cheerful man with sandy hair that curled above his ears, a narrow face that creased all the way up when he smiled, and opinions on everything, including parking tickets, public transportation, and the quality of food in the eatery he had chosen. He talked of the current political fiasco—as he saw it—of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s over-the-top popularity, his suspiciously easy wit in two languages, his swift turns of phrase, his appeal to the ladies, and the certainty of his becoming Canada’s next prime minister.
As minister of justice in Lester Pearson’s Liberal government, Trudeau had introduced a bill in Parliament that decriminalized homosexuality. The papers, David said, had been full of Trudeau’s casual but clever statement that “there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” I started to read the local newspapers and listen to CBC radio.
Trudeau’s reception at public appearances was somewhat like that of the Beatles: adulation, some screaming and shouting, a few tears, all of this met by his self-deprecating smile that succeeded in making his opponents seem fuddy-duddy. He would run for the leadership of the Liberal Party in April 1968 and win easily. A large number of us gathered in David’s living room to watch the Liberal Party Convention. The others were all journalists, some with spouses, who knew everyone vying for the top political job in the country. Needless to say, I knew none of the candidates, but it was easy to see that Trudeau was the star. He was charmingly superior in interviews, physically attractive, and a verbal gymnast.
He became the most dashing, least long-winded, most talked-about prime minister not only in Canada but in the world. When I travelled back to New Zealand, everyone wanted to talk about his many lady friends, his famous shrugs, his talk of “the just society,” his Marshall McLuhan quotes, the rose in his lapel, his sandals, his self-possession, his “cool” demeanour. Even cynical David found “Trudeaumania” enjoyable, and he thought that Trudeau was the man to put an end to Quebec separatism. He was, after all, a fellow Quebecer; he knew all there was to know about the province. He understood it instinctively.
It was David who first explained to me how different Quebec felt from the rest of Canada, but it took much longer for me to understand the ideas driving Quebec’s desire to be a country, or the notion of two nations in one. The country where I was born has one language—Hungarian. New Zealanders have only one country; and while the South Island may bitch about the North, they both bitch in unison about Australia with a combination of superiority and envy not unlike, as I learned, how English Canadians feel about Americans.
The 1970 October Crisis—the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte by the FLQ and the murder of Laporte—would harden relations for years.
* * *
SOMETIME DURING MY first several months of Canadianizing American textbooks, I decided to look for another job. I am not sure where I learned about an opening for a researcher at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but I suspect it may have been David who first mentioned it. Since I had no experience in television or research, my application must have been a work of art, because they offered me an interview.
I was interviewed by Moses Znaimer, a young man about my age, with longish dark, curly hair; soft brown eyes; and a fleeting, somewhat lopsided smile. He spoke so quietly you had to lean in to hear him. Thin, with stylish clothes, he was so laid-back that at one point I wondered whether he had stopped the interview and was thinking about something much more interesting. He seemed to have a short attention span; later he told me he had a low boredom threshold. As I went on about my education, I was sure I was losing him. He mentioned that he too spoke five languages, but unlike me, I assume he did so without resorting to a dictionary. One of them, luckily, was Russian. He had been born to Eastern European Jewish parents in Tajikistan; like me, he had been a refugee. Having come to Canada via Shanghai without much luggage, he had worked as a stevedore before getting a gig with the CBC.VI
He was working at that time for a show called Take 30, which I had not yet seen, but I swore it would become my constant study from that day on, if only he considered me suitable for a job.
He said that he was thinking about what television could and should be. He wanted a different way to use the new technology, one that would attract rather than repel viewers. He thought that most TV on offer in Canada was dull and that the CBC was particularly moribund.
We had tea in a Japanese tea place on Queen Street West where the waitress made a great fuss over tea pouring and even more fuss over Moses. It seemed like an odd ending to an interview, but I thought it best not to comment on it. After the tea, Moses drove me home in his Jaguar.
He said he’d let me know about the job.
I didn’t hear from Moses until much later. By then, I had resigned from Collier Macmillan; been to Mexico with my roommate, Lou; flown to Lima to visit an old boyfriend from London who had taken over managing his father’s liquor import business; gone up to Cuzco and Machu Picchu; contracted typhus; and flown home to Christchurch, New Zealand, to recover. Moses’s telegram to Christchurch suggested that there might be a job for me, but I was too ill to come back for another interview.
We stayed sporadically in touch after he left the CBC, while he was making plans for his new television channel.VIII
Launched in 1972, Citytv soon became the most innovative, most talked about, most imitated kind of television in the country. Moses went on to launch MuchMusic, CityPulse24, Bravo!, FashionTelevision, and MusiquePlus. Then he took over VisionTV, CARP, and Zoomer magazine and eventually incorporated ZoomerMedia. As his early media ventures had been aimed at boomers in their youth, the new venture aims at the same people, now older. Moses calls them “Zoomers” (Boomers with Zip). Marketing magazine named him one of the Top 10 Canadian Media Moguls of the Past 100 Years. His website features a tuxedoed Moses and, my favourite, a barefoot Moses with closed eyes and ponytail, meditating.
He never mentioned a job to me again and I had become so enmeshed in publishing that, except for a passing thought in 1978, I didn’t ask. But I sometimes wondered how life would have played out had I worked at Citytv. How long would it have taken before I sto
pped acting as if I had an abiding interest in television and applied again for work in publishing?
Some years after our first lunch, my journalist friend David invested a bit of his hard-earned dosh in a new board game invented by a couple of his equally impecunious fellow journalists. It was called Trivial Pursuit and it has a brilliant history of its own.
* * *
I. After he retired as president of Collier Macmillan International, Fred went on to work for the Frankfurt Book Fair. At last count, he had attended fifty-six Frankfurt Book Fairs, consecutively.
II. My book The Storyteller: Memory, Secrets, Magic and Lies is about Vili and his profound influence on my life.
III. The second time was in late 1956 when we spent two nights in jail.
IV. My mother, though she had married again after my father left, didn’t have any more children because of the political turmoil. Her second husband was a Communist engineer who arranged Vili’s release.
V. Daleks were the ubiquitous squat robots with mechanized voices proliferating in Doctor Who episodes.
VI. Moses also had many degrees, including an MA from Harvard.
VIII. Moses worked for a while for Ben Webster, an imaginative entrepreneur who believed in animal communication, holistic medicine, and the spirit world. Ben became a friend of mine and a millionaire.
Welcome to CanLit
I AM NOT entirely sure why I didn’t love New Zealand. Though it was suspicious of outsiders, it had been kind enough to take me in when I was a refugee in 1957; it taught me English; it provided me with an education; it provided a very credible third husband for my mother, who had been without one for a few years. It had given a home to my beloved grandfather, though he believed he was only in exile, ready to return to Hungary as soon as the Soviets left. It had offered me two lifelong friends and taught me how to cook lamb; to serve oysters, crayfish, and beer; to do the haka; to appreciate rugby and the All Blacks, who were the best in the world. Its generosity extended to a free university education and a chance to be co-editor of Canta, the Canterbury University student newspaper. Despite all that, I had found the country insular, static, and lacking in curiosity. I couldn’t wait to leave the first time and now, again, I was eager to get back to Canada.
My roommate, Lou, had suspected I would be back and kept my bedroom and Morty Mint’s sheets and pillows more or less unoccupied on Broadway Avenue.
While job-hunting, I heard about an opening at McClelland & Stewart from a senior guy at an educational publishing house who had interviewed me and thought I was singularly unqualified for educational publishing. Jack’s publishing house, he told me, was much more likely to hire someone with my enthusiasm and lack of appropriate experience. Besides, it was an exciting place to be. The 1967 Centennial, he said, had produced a whole new wave of Canadian nationalism and a slew of Canadian books. Jack McClelland was at the centre of all that activity. As it happened, he explained, Canadians were even starting to like their own literature.
To make sure I got a foot in the door, he called Frank Newfeld,I M&S’s vice president and art director, and assured him I would be worth an interview. Frank (thick black hair with bits of white, trimmed moustache, a military gait, very serious face) had an office at the far end of the low-slung, tin-roofed, warehouse-style building in an industrial hinterland of East Toronto where I would spend the next ten years of my life. I suspect Frank, in turn, recommended me to Jack McClelland because I spoke passable German, some French, reasonable Russian, and had an unpronounceable Hungarian name (Szigethy, my father’s only legacy). Frank mentioned that he was from Czechoslovakia. After the Second World War he had served in the Israeli army, was wounded in action in 1949, and eventually ended up in Canada. He looked like a man with a sense of fashion, with his well-cut vest, flared jacket.
Jack interviewed me in the dining room of the Westbury Hotel on Yonge Street, his usual lunchtime hangout in the sixties and early seventies. He had a corner table that, I discovered, was reserved for him whether he was there or not. It was a dark room with hovering waiters, white tablecloths, flowers in slender vases centred on each table—the perfect setting for a Second World War hero on his second martini and an ambitious refugee with a desperate need for a job.
He was tall and broad-shouldered with longish, floppy blond-white hair, blond eyebrows, light-blue eyes, and freckles; even his hands were freckled. He had a tanned face with white laugh lines, a rumpled grey suit, white shirt, blue tie, and great manners that spoke of English family traditions. He stood when I came to the table. There were four cigarette butts in the ashtray already and he was lighting a new cigarette. There was a pile of paper in front of him, several hundred typed pages that he had been reading before I arrived.
“Quite an outfit,” he said, appraising my London garb. “What will you have to drink?”
I said I’d have what he was having, which seemed to be the perfect answer, except that I had not known he was drinking a martini, not something I was used to at the time, though only a few months later, I could take two without losing consciousness. In London and Christchurch, I used to drink beer. It was cheaper. In Budapest I was too young to be drinking anything alcoholic.
Once I recovered from my martini-induced coughing fit, I started into a long, eloquent, and largely fictitious list of all that I had accomplished in my previous jobs.
“What have you been reading?” he asked after I had finished talking. I drank more of my martini and waxed eloquent about the merits of Russian and British classics, while Jack ordered food.
I told him I had just read a book by Alice Munro and another by Margaret Laurence. I had also read a Mowat but didn’t realize he was Canadian.
Jack was charming and polite, though keen on the liberal use of four-letter words, a hangover, he explained, from his years in the navy. This explanation was followed by his observation “I can’t imagine why the fuck Frank recommended you for this job.”
“I guess he thought I would be really good at it. I already know a great deal about production . . .” I warbled on, singing my own praises, inflating my few years on the fringes of book publishing. I even included stacking books at Whitcombe and Tombs in Christchurch, my short stint inscribing Dewey Decimal designations on the spines of books at the Royal Geographic Society library in Wellington (I had escaped to Wellington when my mother married Alfons), stacking more books in the Canterbury University Bookstore. Naturally, I inflated my Collier Macmillan stint. The waiters hovered and Jack appeared to listen, head to one side, blond eyebrows knitted—a look he had perfected for long, one-sided conversations.
Later he told me he had been delighted with my résumé. I had listed years of employment with a variety of firms, where I might, indeed, have worked, but not for long and not as an editor. He thought that inventiveness was what he needed, with M&S’s finances sinking and no new money on the horizon. Besides, publishing was a young person’s game. Creativity, he said, declines as you age and you are no longer capable of new ideas.
Jack had also started young, in 1946, after captaining a motor torpedo boat that harassed German U-boats in the North Atlantic. His father owned M&S then, a firm mainly in the business of distributing American books in Canada, though it did publish a few authors such as Lucy Maud Montgomery. Jack had a dream of publishing great Canadian writers. It was a huge risk, but he was young. Such risks, as he never tired of telling me, are for the young.
After lunch he decided to inspect sailboats in Toronto Harbour and invited me to come along. He spent a good ten minutes examining a single-masted wooden yawl, gleaming white in the sunshine, its long prow bobbing gracefully in the water. He talked a bit about line and thrust or some such. At the time I thought Jack knew something about sailboats. It was not until a few months later that Farley Mowat disabused me of that notion.
I am not sure what all he said but I remember he was excited about that season’s authors, and about Canada in general. The second martini had claimed most of my ability to spe
ak.
He hired me after closely examining the second boat we had come to and deciding not to buy it. I didn’t care that he hadn’t mentioned exactly what the job was. I was ready to start any time. It seemed to me that being paid for reading was going to be an amazing gift from the gods.
The one condition of my showing up for work a week later was that I had to read all the books in M&S’s New Canadian Library. Jack thought my knowledge of Canada was deplorably minuscule and he was sure that the best way to learn about the country was reading Canadian writers. Of all his achievements, Jack said, he was proudest of the New Canadian Library. He had begun it in 1954 with the appointment of Malcolm Ross, a professor at Dalhousie University, as general editor. Ross had been Jack’s professor at a University of Toronto summer course.
Starting a series of paperback reprints of Canadian fiction was taking a leap into the dark, Jack explained. The initial public response had been cool. In the first year fewer than three hundred copies of each book were sold. But by the mid-sixties, with a new awareness of being Canadian and a new generation filled with self-confidence, the books had begun to sell.
I started with Gabrielle Roy, because Jack had said she was the most brilliant novelist, as well as the most beautiful woman in Canada, perhaps the world. He said he had been in love with her since the first time she looked into his eyes in Saint Boniface, Manitoba. “She was small, dainty, beautifully groomed, extremely bright and perceptive,” he said. Her first novel, The Tin Flute—Bonheur d’Occasion in the original French—had been awarded both the Governor General’s Award and the Prix Femina in France. It had sold about 700,000 copies in the United States alone, in large part owing to its wise selection by the Literary Guild book club.
