by Anna Porter
I went on to Frederick Philip Grove (not one of his favourites and I could see why), Morley Callaghan, Thomas Haliburton, Sinclair Ross, Charles G. D. Roberts, Stephen Leacock, Ralph Connor, Mazo de la Roche (didn’t do much for me), Ernest Buckler (loved him), A. M. Klein, and Mordecai Richler’s Cocksure (funny, sardonic, takes a whack at swinging London), which was not in the New Canadian Library but Jack thought it would be a relief from Grove. I read about thirty books and enjoyed myself. I had never considered reading to be a chore.
A week later I arrived for work at 25 Hollinger Road, a grim stretch of warehouses in a quasi-industrial part of the city east of the Don Valley. Marge Hodgeman, Jack’s long-time secretary, walked me to a small office with a desk and a window overlooking the parking lot, and mentioned that this was where Jack had placed me. It was just outside the editorial compound, where there were no windows and only plywood partitions defining each person’s area. You could hear every cough and sniffle, throw paper darts over the partitions, share bits of manuscript, left-over sandwiches. There was the steady drone of manual typewriters. Editor Charis Wahl, who started her M&S stint in 1975, dubbed it the “Franz Kafka Memorial Suite.”
The first person to emerge from the compound to greet me was Pamela Fry. Speaking with the remnants of an English accent, she told me that she herself had written a couple of British-style mysteries. She had short dark-red hair and wore long, loose dresses and shawls. Her specialty was fiction, but she also worked on children’s books. She was the oldest among the editorial staff, most of whom were my age or younger. A few years after she left, she was replaced by Lily Poritz Miller, small, feisty, opinionated, and usually right. Unlike Pamela, whose general approach to Jack was to humour him, Lily engaged him in written debates, some of which she even won. She worked with some of our most interesting and most challenging authors—Leonard Cohen, Sylvia Fraser, Michael Ondaatje, Alistair MacLeod, to mention a few. In 1975–76 she edited Alistair’s The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and, ten years later, his As Birds Bring Forth the Sun.
Peter Smith, thin, serious, bespectacled, was the senior non-fiction editor.II Sam Totten, who had the office next to mine, was the formidable head of education, a balding older man who wore tailored suits and spoke with great deliberation about “juveniles” and ministries of education. When I hired Linda McKnight as “education editor” I had to seek Sam’s approval. Linda managed to impress him with her very precise diction and her ability to listen without interrupting. She would rise through the ranks to director of publishing and president. She was the best and brightest at a time when we were all at our best and brightest.
Once, while looking for a pencil sharpener in Sam’s desk, I discovered a well-thumbed copy of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, a book then still considered scandalous, though no longer banned. After that, I was no longer terrified of him.
It took me a while to figure out what everybody did and how they all felt about my sudden appearance. One person I know was pleased was the overworked reader of “the slush pile,” manuscripts that arrived unbidden at the rate of about eight or nine per day. It was a job held by a long succession of people, most of whom couldn’t take it for longer than a year. Philip Marchand, who had the job at the time, was sure that no matter what other duties I had, I would share his reading burden. Clearly, he needed help. Phil went on to be the book columnist at the Toronto Star.
Frank Newfeld’s art department was at the end of the long corridor leading to the warehouse. It was Frank who came up with the title of “production editor” for me. He had a fierce temper, unlike Jack, whose usual mode of expressing displeasure was sarcasm. I didn’t know that most of the walls in the building were plywood until Frank put his fist through a wall of my office in the middle of an argument about a book cover he had designed. Frank felt compelled to show me how strongly he felt about the original design. That may have been the first inkling I had that an art director was a powerful figure at a publishing house. As time went on, I learned that Frank was the king of book designers and that he picked his fights carefully and usually won.
Bob Wilkie, a distinguished Scot with a pleasant burr who ran marathons, was production manager. He was a bit surprised by my appointment as production editor but, unlike Frank, he was easygoing and didn’t mind. A few weeks later, perhaps inadvertently while dictating a letter to someone he wanted to fob off on another person, Jack made me “managing editor.”
Scott McIntyre was head of advertising, promotion, and publicity. A cheerful guy with light brown locks and a ready smile, he had been at M&S for a couple of years already and seemed very much part of the high-voltage excitement of the place. Scott left midway through 1969 to join Jimmy Douglas’s firm selling our books in the West, but our paths would intertwine for years.
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I. Frank won more than 170 international awards during his long career. His fascinating memoir, Drawing on Type, was published by Porcupine’s Quill in 2009.
II. Peter ended up working for the National Gallery and the federal government after leaving M&S. Many M&S graduates went on to prestigious jobs in the arts.
The Rosedale Radical
ONE OF MY first jobs at M&S was printing multiple copies of Scott Symons’s Civic Square, a manuscript typed on the wax paper of a Gestetner duplicating machine. It’s hard to explain how the damned thing worked: there were inked rollers that sometimes relieved themselves of superfluous ink, making the paper copies messy and virtually unreadable, so that each sheet had to be inspected and replaced if necessary. My hands and arms all the way to the elbows were covered in ink. Scott Symons was there for part of the arduous process but kept himself away from the infernal Gestetner.
He was about my height with muscular shoulders and arms, a tanned face with intense brown eyes that he would focus, squinting to make sure I knew he was serious—very serious, even when he appeared to be kidding about some parts of his personal story. He talked about growing up in a big house in Rosedale, a Red Tory, grandson of Perkins Bull, a famous bulwark, he said, of Toronto society; as expected of him, he had married into the upper class. His wedding, he told me, had been a disaster. Since then, I have heard various versions of the event, but irrespective of who made the nastiest speech and who shouted “Shame, shame!” it was Scott who was at the centre of this story, a rebel among the respectable, loathsome Protestant gentry of his day. By the time of Civic Square, he had left his wife and son to begin his journey of self-discovery.
While he talked incessantly and with great passion about his life, we made three hundred sets of the 848-page beast, then stacked each one into a blue Birks-style box. (Birks was a very chic, expensive downtown Toronto jewellery store.) Scott personalized the top sheet of each set of pages with a red felt-tipped pen, drawing stylized testicles, penises, flowers, decorative curlicues, and signing his name. We then closed the boxes and wrapped a Birks-style white ribbon around each one. Civic Square was heavy-handedly anti-Toronto-establishment, so the packaging served to attract attention to the story inside. Scott was planning to deposit one of the blue boxes in an offering plate at St. James Cathedral, his father’s church.
Originally, Scott told me, the book was to be called The Smugly Fucklings but Jack had objected, as he objected to the overall length and repetitions in the manuscript, though he decided to publish it anyway. John Robert Colombo,I an experienced freelance editor Jack often entrusted with difficult manuscripts, had done his best with Civic Square, but it was never going to become a big seller.
Jack, Scott assured me, admired his flourishes of inimitable prose, his clear-eyed view of the milieu he had been born into, and his absolutely honest rejection of it. Scott loved Jack’s courage in publishing his first novel, Place d’Armes, in 1967, and now Civic Square. Place d’Armes had been a call to arms, he told me, a statement of such brilliance that Canada’s bloodless establishment quavered in its pristine sheets. While Jack was not the only person who recognized Scott’s brilliance, he was in a position
to publish and promote what Scott wanted to say about Canadian society’s stultifying, emasculating ways.
Since we had to spend many hours with the Gestetner and the boxes, I came to know Scott reasonably well. Trinity College School in Port Hope, he assured me, had failed to break his spirit, though it had broken his body. Scott had been a brilliant gymnast: gymnastics suited his solitary ways, he said. He had practiced every day to keep his muscles tuned. One day he flew off the high bar, fell, and broke his back. That was not the only reason he had hated Trinity. Despite its appreciation of his intellectual abilities, despite the scholarships and suggestions he should go to Cambridge, he saw it as a hidebound place where future elite leaders learned their limp ways. At the University of Toronto he became a stellar member of the Zeta Psi fraternity—the erudite, wild boys—who thought they had a chance to discomfort the comfortable.
Scott went on to study at the Sorbonne, was appointed a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, and enjoyed occasional bouts as a journalist. His first love, he told me, had not even been his wife (I never understood why he had married) but a fellow male student with whom he had stopped short of enjoying sex. He was still too much infected by “the disease of society’s mores.”
His best friend (not a lover) since early school days was Charles Taylor, a brilliant journalist who would later manage the considerable estate, including thoroughbred racehorses left by his father, E. P. Taylor.II Charles’s 1982 book Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada would look back at the ideas of Scott and other Red Tories, including philosopher George Grant and poet Al Purdy. Charles’s definition of a Red Tory: “a conservative with a conscience.”
Charles saw Civic Square as a kind of testament: Scott’s break with conventional society and a rejection of all its comforts and traditions. Charles admired his courage.
When I met him, Charles had already published a book about China, based on his experiences as The Globe and Mail’s man in Beijing. We became friends over my trying and failing to persuade him to write another, about thoroughbred racing. As far as I could tell, horses and horse breeding were the only things Charles liked about his father’s activities. He looked splendid in his formal Kentucky Derby garb. His Windfields Farm had been the birthplace of Northern Dancer, one of the most famous thoroughbreds in racing history.
Scott absconded with a seventeen-year-old boy to Mexico, where he was chased by federales determined to return young John to his distinguished family in Montreal. John’s parents had charged Scott with inducing a minor into immoral acts.
After they returned from Mexico, Scott and his lover used to visit our apartment in the late evening, when he was sure no one had followed them. They made quite the pair: John, with long legs and red hair, sleek as a young colt; Scott in his trademark soiled black sweatshirt and his large silver medallion on a silver chain. Scott would be whispering stories about narrow escapes from the federales, his attempts to keep writing in impossible circumstances, assuring me that he was still—as far as Canadian society was concerned—“a very dangerous man,” a revolutionary who could change the world. He fulminated about the “death-dealing puritanism that lies at the base of the Canadian identity.”
I tried to like Civic Square because I liked Scott, but I found it wearying, shrill in tone, and, as Jack had told Scott, unrelentingly repetitious. Given that the late sixties were still anxious about sex, that there were banned books and homosexual behaviour was just being decriminalized, Scott was brave to have written his books, and Jack was brave to have published them. But I didn’t think they were good books. Still don’t. Yet, looking back, I admire Scott’s courage to challenge society, and his belief that words can be dangerous: that’s why tyrants are always eager to imprison or kill writers who confront them with words.
* * *
I WOULD WORK with Scott again in 1971. This time, it was a huge book called Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture. He knew his subject well and loved each piece he described. His only problem was that he couldn’t bring himself to sit and type, so we developed a working pattern where Scott marched about my small office glaring at the parking lot, talking, and I typed. Then I edited what he had said and read it to him. I remember Scott pacing, smoking his pipe, dribbling ash down his black sweatshirt, standing still for a moment, starting again, never missing the continuity of his words, though he did stop now and then to tell me about his love for “the boy” and how he had been liberated at last from the stultifying social strictures of this country, a country he had loved enough to try to change.
In the finished book each chunk of copy, except for the introduction, is accompanied by one of John de Visser’s stunning photographs.III Despite the strange way we produced it, I think Heritage is Scott’s best writing.
We stayed in touch while he was in BC with his lover, doing odd jobs for a living. When they broke up, he came to Toronto again, looking sad and dishevelled but determined to continue with “his mission.” Though he was openly and proudly homosexual, he insisted he was not “gay.” He was seeking a “new kind of man,” sentient, not effeminate, a male ideal that he thought might exist in other countries.
He chose Morocco.
His last book, Helmet of Flesh (1989), a novel set in Morocco, was neither scandalous nor a critical success, and no amount of editorial attention could save it from its author’s overwrought prose.
* * *
I. John had been one of M&S’s best book doctors before he became famous for his books of quotations. Now his website lists more than two hundred books.
II. E. P. Taylor, the former brewery king, had become one of the richest men in Canada and, later, in the Bahamas.
III. John de Visser’s photographs are some of Canada’s defining images. I had a chance to work with him on a number of books, including Winter with Morley Callaghan and Canada: A Celebration.
The Unfortunate Incident of Ted’s Name
A FEW WEEKS after I was hired at M&S, I discovered how to spell Ted Allan’s name. Unfortunately it was too late. We had been preparing a revised edition of The Scalpel, the Sword, the biography of iconic doctor Norman Bethune, by Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon. It had been an arduous task, as Ted and his co-author no longer spoke to each other and both wrote longish, abusive letters complaining about each other’s lack of professionalism. Several times the project dropped off the schedule and was revived only after Jack’s mollifying talks with both authors. Sydney lived in East Berlin at the time and Ted lived in London. Both had been die-hard Communists. Sydney was still a true believer,I but Ted had wobbled after Soviet troops attacked Hungary in 1956.
I had okayed for press the redesigned (several times, because the authors couldn’t agree) cover of the book. It was not until Ted Allan received his author copies and yelled on the phone at me that I discovered the mistake. His name was misspelled. The books had rolled off the press with “Ted Allen” on the cover.
Ted was a celebrated playwright, novelist, and short story writer (he had been published in The New Yorker), a Communist-Republican journalist and volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He’d been on the Hollywood blacklist during the 1950s McCarthy era and was a close friend of Jack’s close friends Mordecai and Florence Richler. One of Mordecai’s early novels, A Choice of Enemies, draws on the people both he and Ted had known in London’s world of expat Canadians eking out a living. Ted had been the most successful of them all.
Ted had every reason to assume that editors and designers at M&S would be familiar with his name, especially as this was a revised edition of an already successful book (I confess I had not previously heard of the famous doctor). Bethune had also been a Communist and a surgeon who, like Ted, had volunteered to help the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. He operated close to the front, perfecting a method of blood transfusions for the critically injured. It was the same method he used later in China, operating on Mao’s soldiers in 1938 and in 1939 during the Sino-Japanese War.
Ted was
apoplectic. He demanded to talk to Jack.
Jack ordered me into his office while the two of them talked on the phone. As was his habit, Jack leaned as far back in his chair as the back wall would allow, his feet planted on his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his top button undone, tie askew, a full ashtray close to the hand holding a cigarette. The office was clouded in blue smoke.
After patiently listening to Ted for what seemed to me at least twenty minutes, Jack inhaled deeply and said, “Ted, I have just shipped twenty thousand copies of your book and I can tell you we are not about to reprint because of one small mistake. Perhaps you could change your name.”
Then he laughed. Ted, a future winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, did not laugh. He kept talking and shouting so loudly that I could hear him where I sat meekly near the door.
Jack listened. Then, astonishingly, he said, “Picky, picky, picky, Ted,” and hung up.
Later, when I saw the Academy Award–winning film Lies My Father Told Me, I understood Ted better. It’s a warm, delightfully quirky heartbreaker of a story based on Ted’s long-ago childhood in Montreal. Ted wrote the original script, and he even played a bit part as Mr. Baumgarten, one of the old Jewish characters. I felt a connection: both our grandfathers had been storytellers.
I spent hours with Ted to see if he could turn the film’s story into a novel, but he was too busy on scripts—he was working on four or five at the time—so the novelization was ultimately written by his son, Norman. You can read the whole novel on Norman Allan’s website. There you can also find Ted’s delightful children’s book about a squirrel-mouse who is a retired acrobat, Willie the Squowse.
