by Anna Porter
When Jack was there, the whole room focused on what Jack said and very few of us argued with him. One time when he was lauding the virtues of a long piece of what he considered “commercial fiction” and I suggested it was crap, he left, sweeping his papers off the table. He didn’t come back that day but he insisted we publish the “crap.”III
Each editor was expected to work on at least twenty manuscripts a year and supply each book-to-be with heartfelt recommendations for the sales department. Both Jack and Peter had a tendency to slip into grief over a lackluster list or too-low-key presentations. They wanted displays of passion and commitment.
On the brown boardroom’s wall, someone had written: “It is the duty of all good M&S employees to devise the most expeditious way to cross the river from one bank to the other. However, when you are up to your ass in alligators, it is hard to recall that your original objective had been to drain the swamp.”
* * *
IN 1969 JACK asked me to work with Peter Mellen, a very young professor of fine arts at the University of Toronto, who was planning a big book on the Group of Seven. They were Canada’s iconic landscape painters, the first to portray Canada as it really is—a rugged Northern country. Their artistic ambition had been to produce something “strong and vital, and big,”IV like the land itself. It would be hard to imagine a more appropriate education in what was quintessentially Canadian than this project. The art of the Group of Seven was very different from European paintings I had seen in galleries in London and Paris: more dramatic, wilder, less restrained even than the work of the Impressionists. In my earliest experience, Hungarian art had been mostly storytelling, detailed, and representational, portraying scenes from Hungarian history.
The Group of Seven was designed by Frank Newfeld with the young David Shaw, who would succeed him as M&S’s art director.
My copy of the book has a finely penned note of thanks from Peter for my “help and patience” and A. Y. Jackson’s shaky signature. It was appended when Jack and I drove to Kleinburg to meet with Robert and Signe McMichael of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. A. Y., one of the founding Group of Seven artists, was in residence at the time. Polite but preoccupied, he was at work on a large painting near the open door of one of the rooms of the building.
* * *
MY FIRST M&S sales conference was also an education in Canadian geography. The reps came from every region of the country, and our editors knew how to make sure that each one of them took away something from the conference that would spur their sales efforts on behalf of individual authors. I remember Jim Douglas (later co-founder of Douglas & McIntyre) scribbling notes and Allan MacDougall (later of Raincoast, the Canadian publisher of the Harry Potter books) throwing paper airplanes at Scott McIntyre, and Keith Andrews (from Montreal) with his handlebar moustache, who wore his bowler hat for the entire day. It was well known that no bookseller, department store, or chain store book buyer could give a rep more than two minutes to present a book, so key words, regional angles, comparisons to known bestsellers were vital. The editors, of course, took at least ten minutes to present each title to the general irritation of the salespeople. Delighting in my discovery of the Seven plus Tom Thomson, I took even longer to talk about The Group of Seven.
Most reps dozed part of the day, but not our Alberta rep, Ruth Fraser. She had been an editor herself and had presented her books to other reps, so she understood how difficult it was for someone close to a book to sum it up in only two minutes. She had spent years working with Maria Campbell editing Halfbreed, Maria’s revelatory memoir of sexual abuse and poverty, followed by alcoholism, drugs, and prostitution. Ahead of its time, the book drew attention to the racism, brutalization, and oppression of Métis women in Canada and led the way to changes both in government policies and in Métis self-perception.
Since its first publication in 1973, Halfbreed has become a classic, taught in schools and debated among scholars, though as I read about the thousands of Indigenous women who have been murdered or disappeared during the past forty years and counting, it seems not to have made enough of a difference.
Ruth Fraser had been a student of W. O. Mitchell,V a multi-talented spinner of tales in many forms. She was a “facilitator” at W. O.’s weird but very enjoyable writers’ workshops at the Banff Centre. It was Ruth’s idea to invite me as a young publishing professional to read and comment on the bits and pieces emerging from the workshops.
The writers were all young and enthusiastic. They found W. O.’s approach, which he called “freefall” and others called “Mitchell’s messy method,” somehow liberating. It certainly eliminated performance anxiety and writer’s block. Students were told to start typing or writing whatever came to their minds and eventually a story would emerge. Words would float out of their subconscious, and often those words would be the right ones to express what they were reaching for. To test the theories on young would-be writers, he had them read what they had written to other, equally inexperienced and uncritical students. Then he added a few “professionals” to the mix. That was my own baffling role, but I loved it—not so much because of the experience of hearing and reading those young writers, but because of the mountains.
The first time I saw the Rockies, I was thunderstruck. On the way to Banff, I had to ask Ruth to stop the car and let me out to look at them. I was spellbound and I have never tired of the sight. Hungary’s mountains, the Carpathians, have lodged mostly in Romania since the end of the First World War, so I didn’t have a chance to see them till many years later when my daughter Julia and I went in search of our ancestors. New Zealand’s Mount Cook is a long way from Christchurch, Wanganui, and Wellington, where I spent my teen years. Okay, so Mount Cook is impressive, but not as massive, wild, breathtaking as the Rockies. Once I’d been there, I pined every year for another chance to go to Banff.
Fortunately for me, Ruth and I remained friends and she managed to invite me several times to the workshops—usually when my friend and novelist Sylvia Fraser was also there as a professional writer.
* * *
I. I spent a day in a car with former cabinet minister Judy LaMarsh in 1969. We had just published her book, Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage, and we were travelling to dozens of interviews. By coincidence, I did the same job for her in 1979 during my last weeks at M&S and her last weeks of life. She died in December that year. The first trip she had talked about how much she loathed Pierre Trudeau, the second about not wasting even an hour of whatever time we had. Changing the world was not a quick task and women had a long way to go.
II. More central to his career, Paul was a poet. Their early performance pieces were always well attended. The group stopped performing after bp died, but Paul went on to perform alone and with other groups in various countries. When I last talked with him, he was on his way to the Lvov music and poetry festival.
III. I won’t mention the author’s name. No point in hurting her feelings, nor in being sued for libel.
IV. From the “manifesto” of the Canadian Art Club.
V. W. O.’s work has stood the test of time. Readers wanting to know why could start with Who Has Seen the Wind and, if they love the book, go on to read the others.
Roblin Lake and After
IN HIS INTRODUCTION to the aforementioned Drawings, Bob Fulford had written that Harold Town was “a heroic figure attracted to heroic figures.” Other than wearing a heavy twill jacket during the summer, though, I found his heroism difficult to discern. At book launch parties, he stood apart. He hated to be touched and frequently threatened anyone who, in some conversational gambit, laid a hand on his arm or shoulder, with immediate destruction. He would mention or demonstrate his judo moves. Fortunately I never observed whether he had really learned judo. The closest I came to witnessing a punch-out was when Harold told photographer Roloff Beny that he would kill him if Beny touched his jacket again.
Once he threatened to hang young Doug Fetherling over the railing of the apartment I shared wit
h Lou. I am not sure what annoyed him so much about Doug,I who did not reciprocate the animosity. Perhaps it was that Doug was a scruffy-looking American draft dodger with a stammer who didn’t always have a room of his own. He had been sleeping on our couch while he looked for a flat to rent.II A poet, a critic, a journalist, Doug eventually wrote more than forty books as a general observer of our times and his own life.
One memorable evening in 1970, Jack drove Harold and me to Prince Edward County for a friendly meeting with Al Purdy. We arrived at Purdy’s A-frame house on Roblin Lake near Ameliasburgh in the late afternoon. Al offered us some sweet wine he said he had brewed himself; his wife, Eurithe, set out crackers. There was talk of a collaboration between Harold and Al.
Jack proposed a collection of poems—one poem by each of Canada’s best poets, chosen by Al and accompanied by Harold’s portraits. Both Jack and Al smoked steadily. They talked a bit about the most successful example of such a cooperation between artist and poet, Irving Layton’s bestselling Love Where the Nights Are Long, love poems selected by Irving with drawings by Harold.
Al wondered whether Harold would illustrate Purdy’s forthcoming book, Love in a Burning Building, but Jack didn’t think Purdy’s poetry was romantic enough. “Too hard-boiled,” he said. Besides, Harold did not view himself as an illustrator.
The new collection, as Jack imagined, would feature only the most “significant” (Jack’s word) Canadian poets, including Earle Birney, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, E. J. Pratt, maybe Milton Acorn, and John Newlove, but the choice was to be Al’s. Jack claimed he had no opinion on who should be in, but Harold, of course, did have a lot of opinions. I thought it was best for me not to have an opinion either, though I did love some of the poetry they discussed. I was awed by Al and wary of Harold.
Discussions about the choice of poets and poems started politely enough in the living room, then moved outside, to a somewhat marshy outcrop by Roblin Lake, where Harold held forth on the quality of the poets and Purdy’s “unaccountable” (according to Harold) insistence on including himself in the galaxy of the best. Harold wore a large dark cape and marched about, emphasizing his points by an ever-escalating range of vitriol.
Al, no blushing violet, and taller and wider than Town, rose to the occasion and demonstrated to Harold that he could match him both verbally and physically, if that was called for. Jack, drinking the vodka he had brought, mostly stayed out of the fray.
I have no idea why Harold had chosen that moment to tell a long, rambling story about a bunch of skiers or snowmobilers he had terrorized with a long whip. It was too dark to see Al’s face, except for the part lit up by his burning cigarette, but his stiff shoulders said appalled or outraged. His big hands were scrunching the papers he had brought out earlier.
For me, the night ended at dawn. Both combatants were still on the field when Eurithe ushered me up to a bunk on the second floor of the A-frame. I have no recollection of how or at what time we made it back to Toronto, what with Jack still drunk and Harold still talking and waving his arms to show his rage at Al’s presumption. I must have driven the car.
Surprisingly, the project limped along for a while, with Harold drawing several of the selected poets. It came to an end only when Jack proposed a royalty split of seventy-five per cent to Harold and twenty-five to Al. Jack explained that Harold would not be able to sell the portraits—I have kept the drawing of a lovely brown and white Earle Birney—and Purdy was not writing new poetry for this volume.
Purdy insisted on fifty-fifty. After all, he was the country’s most celebrated poet; he had been publishing poetry since 1944; he was the winner of the Governor General’s Award (for The Cariboo Horses) and, like Harold, he was a sought-after prose writer for magazines and newspapers. His chief reason, though, for persisting in a demand for equal royalties was that he had come to loathe Harold.
One memorable occasion when the two men almost met again was in my Broadway Avenue living room. Purdy and I were working our way through the proofs of Love in a Burning Building when Jack and Harold arrived. While they knocked on the door, Al dashed to my bedroom and hid in the clothes closet until they left.
In the end, Jack ponied up a token one thousand dollars for Purdy not to go away mad and they never mentioned the damned thing again. Or at least not until Purdy slyly told his short version in the Preface to Love in a Burning Building and a more elaborate version in Reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
* * *
TO MY UNTRAINED EYE, Al Purdy was the kind of heroic poet I had grown up admiring. He too was in love with his country. He talked about his poetry mapping the country, starting from the specific, the particular, expecting it would reach the broad, the general, as it always did. He was quintessentially Canadian. In one of his letters he says Canadians have been disguised as other people for a hundred years, and suddenly we are beginning to realize such disguises are useless. His poems celebrate Canada’s landscape, its place names, and the Canadian way of speaking.
He wrote about the country in a way no one had written about it before. In a letter to Dennis Lee, he said he had “opened up the country thru poetry.” Just read his poem “Say the Names.”
—say the names say the names
and listen to yourself
an echo in the mountains
Tulameen Tulameen
say them like your soul
was listening and overhearing
and you dreamed you dreamed
you were a river
and you were a river
Tulameen Tulameen . . .
It is difficult to describe to anyone who was not fortunate enough to have heard and seen him read how Al Purdy read his poems. A big, shaggy man with uncombed hair, big shoulders, white sleeves rolled up, beefy hands, a booming voice, glasses slipped down low on his nose, he did not declaim as so many poets do but talked to you, as if he had just met you and decided to tell you what he had been thinking about. He looked as if he had just wandered onto the stage accidentally and would be so much more comfortable somewhere else, perhaps leaning on a bar instead of a lectern.
Al’s family had moved to an old rundown house in Trenton, Ontario, after his father died. Al was about three years old, but he remembered the sagging floors, the wooden barn that filled the backyard, farm wagons clopping by on their way to the market, the black Trent River, the Crimean War cannon on a hill, and most of all his whisky-drinking, tobacco-chewing hellraiser of a grandfather, who was then about the size and shape Al grew into much later. He wrote about “Old Rid” in Morning and It’s Summer, the slim book he sent me in 1983, with a whimsical dedication: “For Anna—16 years after hiding in her clothes closet.”III
He was a natural storyteller. He talked about working at a range of menial jobs; he had been all over the country, at first as a kid riding the rails, seeking work during the Depression. He drank with novelist Malcolm Lowry in BC, made friends with Earle Birney (“genial and expansive”), met Irving Layton (“the Montreal magnet”) in Montreal. He and George Bowering became friends. He wrote about the Arctic for Peter Newman’s Maclean’s; to make ends meet, he also wrote for Weekend magazine and The Canadian. (Sadly, both are long gone.) He travelled to Cuba with an assortment of other lefties, including Pierre Trudeau.
Known as a brawler, he commemorated some of his more interesting fights in poems. My favourite is “At the Quinte Hotel”:
I am drinking
I am drinking beer with yellow flowers
In underground sunlight
And you can see I am a sensitive man
And I notice that the bartender is a sensitive man too . . .
But in many ways, his self-representation as a tough working man is misleading. He was a voracious reader and dedicated book collector. He had signed first editions of most of his contemporaries. He read Persian, Greek, and Gothic history as well as anthropology. He read Rilke, D. H. Lawrence, Creeley, Williams, Hardy, Pound, Pratt, Auden, Eliot, Thomas, Yeats (he loathed
Whitman), Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and many more. He would have been pleased with my later publishing of Yevtushenko’s autobiographical novel Don’t Die before You’re Dead.IV
He used to invite young writers to the A-frame on the shore of Roblin Lake, where he plied them with food, American beer, wild grape wine, and opportunities to share their poetry. Next to the A-frame, but not too close, he built a one-room study, a separate building where he could write.
During the late eighties Al spent a year at the University of Toronto. He thought it was ironic that a person with such little education should be invited to a university to talk with students about poetry. Far from the simple man of the soil, the image he cultivated in public, he discussed literature with any graduate without fear of being less than what he was.
The wonderful documentary Al Purdy Was Here opened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. It is a celebration of Al’s life, his poetry, and the A-frame he built with an assist from Milton Acorn—another fine poet, though I could never look at him the same way after he had vomited on my shoes the day he received his Governor General’s Award for Poetry at the Governor General’s official residence in Ottawa.
I have a cherished memory of Al from the late seventies. We were walking along Yorkville, where we found a patio table at a restaurant and ordered beer. Al stretched out his long legs, lit a cigar, and started to talk about where he had just been and where he was going. He may not have been conscious of attracting a crowd, but since this was Yorkville trying to preserve its hippie reputation, some people slowed down and listened to Al talking poetry. Most of them were in their twenties. They didn’t know the poems but they clapped every time Al took a long breath. One of the poems he recited that day was “The Country North of Belleville,” his voice rising and raging:
