In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  Recently I was rereading one of Margaret’s essays, “True North,” and I was caught by these sentences: “One way of looking at a landscape is to consider the typical ways of dying in it. Given the worst, what’s the worst it can do?” Like much of her writing, this seems on the surface simple, lighthearted, almost mocking, but it isn’t. It is quintessentially Atwood: ironic, while diving into the abyss.

  I think of these lines and her list of the many nasty ways you can die every time I go north and walk away from our cottage. Death by blackfly. Death by starvation, by animal, forest fire, thunderstorm, freezing, drowning . . . “Every culture has its exemplary dead people.” Ours seem to have been killed by landscape.

  She is as confident speaking from a podium as she is paddling a canoe, and I know because I have seen her speak to spellbound audiences. I can even attest to the fact that she is an accomplished pastry chef. I think she, herself, could easily have made that woman-shaped cake in the last chapter of The Edible Woman.

  * * *

  I. Charles (Charlie) Pachter is one of Canada’s most famous artists.

  II. Lorraine’s expectations often created havoc at M&S.

  The Master Storyteller

  THE ONE FARLEY Mowat book I had read before I came to Canada was Never Cry Wolf. I had read it in New Zealand, where there were no wolves—a pity, since I was seized with the desire to save them, though I am pretty sure they would have made short work of New Zealand’s iconic bird, the small, brown, flightless kiwi, whose last descendants were still lurking in the undergrowth on the South Island.

  Farley was Jack McClelland’s closest friend. They had both served in the Second World War. Jack had first crewed on a minesweeper, patrolling Nova Scotia, then commanded a Royal Canadian Navy motor torpedo boat. He was commended in dispatches and demobbed as a lieutenant. Farley had served in the Hasty Pees, a.k.a. Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, battling its way up through Sicily, then the rest of Italy, through rivers of blood. He lost most of his friends and found himself “staring down a vertiginous tunnel where all was dark and bloody and the great wind of ultimate desolation howled and hungered.” Those words are from the final pages of And No Birds Sang, his extraordinary memoir about coming of age in a world gone mad.

  Devastated by man’s ability to wreak mindless havoc, he tried to balance the horror by writing about Mutt, who would become the hero of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, for a while my children’s favourite book. His travels to the Canadian North after the war had not improved his impressions of humanity. He wrote about the fate of the endangered people of the Arctic and the equally endangered wolves and, later, the whales and other animals that had once roamed our oceans and our land.

  Jack used to tell the story of how Farley had first appeared in his office, a small, red-haired, wild man who wanted, more than anything, to be a writer. He thought words had the power to change the world. I believe that is what he was trying to do with People of the Deer, the book that opened the debate about the fate of the peoples in the so-called “barren lands,” which had never been barren and where greed, incompetence, and injustice passed for government policies.

  * * *

  I FIRST MET Farley in 1969. It was summer and he was marching down that long, hot, gloomy corridor on Hollinger Road, waving and helloing at everyone. He walked with such aplomb that he seemed taller and heavier than his 180 or so pounds. He had greyish red hair over most of his face, uncombed bits on top. He was loud and cheerful. When he reached Jack’s outer office, he hugged and kissed the somewhat flustered Marge, who guarded the entrance, then barged past her, yelling and swearing at “the old bastard” and inquiring “how the fuck” he was. Jack, as always, sat leaning back in his chair, his feet on his desk, a cigarette in one hand, the Dictaphone in the other.

  He greeted Farley with a broad grin but didn’t change position.

  The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float had just been published. It was the hilarious tale of Jack, Farley, and Farley’s soon-to-be wife, Claire, trying to navigate a recalcitrant, leaking tub called The Happy Adventure around Newfoundland.

  Jack had not been pleased with his own portrayal in the book—he thought it detracted from his reputation as a seaman—and Peter Davison, Farley’s American editor, had not been pleased with the title. “A boat is a that, not a who,” he had said in one of his more forceful notes to me. Peter was a gentle soul, a very fine editor, a respected poet, essayist, lecturer, and poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Despite his objections, the title remained.

  August 11, 1969

  Dear Peter:

  Well, what do you know—the title is back again to THE BOAT WHO WOULDN’T FLOAT . . . This is apparently what Jack and Farley came up with during their weekend together.

  Yours,

  Anna Szigethy

  I had so far kept my last name, my father’s only gift. People trying to contact me via the M&S switchboard had the unenviable task of trying to pronounce it, while the receptionist, used to the confusing sound of s and z and that baffling thy, would wait and enjoy their suffering. Farley would ask for “Anna Spaghetti,” Al Purdy said “Szszsz, what the hell.” Peter Newman, who was born Czech, rather enjoyed his perfect pronunciation of my name, as did Frank Newfeld (it’s pronounced Sigetti). But they were the only two.

  Boat won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1970. It’s impossible to read it, even today, without laughing out loud and without seeing those determined, larger-than-life characters as they wrestle with the obstinate little schooner.

  * * *

  MY FIRST BATTLE with Farley was over his manuscript of Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia, about his travels in the USSR during the coldest months of the Cold War. He loved the Russians, their energy, their welcoming vodkas, their poets, and their vociferous enjoyment of his books. He was thrilled that most of his books had been published in Russian. He said he had been bent on using up all his Russian royalties for food and drink while he was there. But they had obstructed his plans at every turn, insisting on offering him free food and booze in outsized portions, hosting him at banquets and applauding him at every opportunity.

  I am not sure whether this story is true, but one of his hosts had told him that Never Cry Wolf, translated into Russian as Wolves, Please Don’t Cry, had been so influential that the Russian people demanded an immediate end to the slaughter of wolves. Canadian wolves had not been so lucky.

  Farley was as much in love with Russians as I was not. I had seen Soviet soldiers mow down civilians in Budapest with machine guns and flatten them with tanks in 1956. It had not been a pretty sight. Farley still thought of them as Second World War allies. Given our very different points of view and my desire to make changes in his manuscript, it is a miracle that we didn’t come to blows. We fought and argued all afternoon, mostly in the Mowats’ garden, then stumbled into the sunroom, where Claire had prepared some food we both ignored and some wine we both drank.

  I drove home from Port Hope late, after we had settled into an exhausted peace and Farley had shown me his extensive collections of books and photos. During the ensuing years, we became cautious friends. Cautious in the sense that Farley didn’t entirely trust anyone in business, not even the business of books.

  I travelled west with him and Claire on a couple of his more arduous book promotion tours, planned with him and artist David Blackwood, for their book Wake of the Great Sealers, a eulogy for the Newfoundland fishermen who had once harvested cod and seals before they became scarce. I still have a couple of David’s eloquent etchings on the second floor of our house. The three of us celebrated the unintended publicity stunt when the United States banned Farley from travelling there (he hadn’t wanted to go anyway). After the birth of my own company, Key Porter Books, in the 1980s, I ended up being his publisher.

  Farley’s books have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide in umpteen languages and editions, yet he remained quintessentially Canadian: extremely serious about preserving life on the planet, serious
about his art, but also funny about the silliness of everyday things other people value: money, cars, big houses, elegant clothes.

  At first Farley, who was naturally shy, had been very uncomfortable with Jack’s forced author performances, the publicity tours that demanded a writer should be centre stage, an entertainer ready with the quick quip, always up for whatever the occasion demanded. Farley compensated for his shyness with exaggerated bonhomie, too much rum, and legendary exhibitionism. A while ago in Montreal, a woman of about eighty told me how Farley once crawled down her dinner table (it was a benefit for the Writers’ Trust) and buried his face in the cake. He was, of course, wearing his traditional kilt with no underpants.I

  * * *

  I. Some years later, my daughter Catherine was enchanted when Farley asked her to dance at novelist John Irving’s son’s wedding. Farley was a lively dancer and he looked splendid in his kilt.

  Tough Times

  ONE PARTICULARLY DARK moment in 1970, three years after I joined M&S, while pondering what more he might have done to save the company, Jack suggested we try setting fire to the warehouse. Books, being dry, would burn easily and the company could collect insurance. We published, as he was fond of saying, authors, not books, and we could reprint what we needed.

  Fortunately, the books were too damp and, after a few desultory attempts, we gave up and repaired to one of the bars at the Inn on the Park Hotel for refreshments. Back then, the Inn was something of a novelty, all steel and glass, in the industrial desert of Leslie and Eglinton.

  I knew, of course, that M&S was painfully short of cash, but I did not realize how close we had come to bankruptcy until Jack announced to the press in 1971 that M&S would have to be sold to an American buyer. No Canadian buyers, he said, had offered to come to the table. You’d have to be living in some distant land not to be aware of Jack’s brand of Canadian nationalism, so the news hit hard. Knowing Jack’s flair for publicity, I thought that his announcement was merely a ploy to attract potential investors, and to light a fire under the recently formed Royal Commission on Book Publishing. It would certainly be more effective than the warehouse fire he had planned.

  The Ontario government set up the commission in 1970, in response to the acquisition of the venerable United Church–owned publisher Ryerson Press by US-owned McGraw-Hill. As it happened, two future M&S authors—lawyer Lieutenant General Richard Rohmer, retired, and Conservative journalist Dalton Camp—were members of the commission. The third member was Marsh Jeanneret, director of the University of Toronto Press. All three could be counted on to be sympathetic to our woes.

  Publishers, both large and small, presented position papers to the commission’s public hearings. Both Jack McClelland and my future business partner, magazine publisher Michael de Pencier, submitted briefs urging the government to make room for Canadian books and magazines on convenience store and other newsstands.

  The Royal Commission’s Interim Report found that book publishing deserved government support because of its unique role in Canadians’ understanding of who we were as a people. The report stated the fundamental lesson of Canadian publishing economics I had already learned: because book publishing is a capital-intensive industry, Canadian publishing companies are at a double disadvantage. Not only do they quickly reach the point where their total capital is tied up in author advances and inventories, often with relatively slow turnover prospects, but as a consequence, new opportunities go to the Canadian branches of foreign publishing firms, which have access to capital from their foreign owners.

  As for M&S, they said it was “a national asset worthy of all reasonable public encouragement and support.”

  The government gave the company $961,000 as an immediate interest-free loan. All it demanded in return was that Jack should install on his board two directors of their choosing. It was fascinating to watch them fall under Jack’s spell, as our various chief financial officers did, soon after entering 25 Hollinger. Larry Ritchie, for example, arrived in pinstripes, white button-down shirt, short power-cut hair. Within three months he wore chinos, white shoes, open-necked shirts, and had his hair permed. He installed huge potted plants in his office that tended to obscure the view of his desk and the fact that, in addition to looking at financial information, he had taken to doodling.

  The loan didn’t solve the financial problems, it just postponed them. It was a temporary fix. Jack needed more money to operate. The annual injection of cash delivered by bestsellers such as a Pierre Berton book or a Peter Newman book or a new Farley Mowat was no longer enough.

  Various forms of assistance to Canadian publishing firms followed the Royal Commission. There were “operating subsidies,” loan guarantees, both provincial and federal grant programs, export subsidies, travel grants, and flotillas of studies, but none of them eliminated the sense that we were always teetering on the brink of financial disaster. To quote Dickens, we were living in “the best of times” and “the worst of times.” There had never before been such a plethora of excellent Canadian writing available, never had so many Canadian writers appeared on television and radio, been celebrated internationally, or won major awards, and yet the money kept running out (or into the stacks of books in the warehouse). Jack was forever looking for long-term solutions that could include the sale of the firm he had inherited from his father and made over into a national institution.

  Indirectly, the commission was responsible for the creation of the Writers’ Union of Canada when it decreed that writers could not appear before it. Margaret Laurence was the union’s guiding spirit; Graeme Gibson supplied the reasons and the drive. “Back then, we didn’t know one another,” Graeme recalled. “We had no idea what our rights were. There were no agents . . .” Eighty writers attended the first meeting in June 1973. Margaret Laurence, who used to refer to writers as “the tribe,” agreed to act as interim chair. Alma Lee was the first executive director. She would go on to found the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival.

  * * *

  IN 1970 THERE were still three substantial bookstore chains—Classic, W. H. Smith, and Coles—and many independent bookstores across Canada. However, despite Jack’s formidable talents for promotion and the flourishing of young independent presses, Canadian books that were not on bestseller lists were still difficult to find on front-of-store shelves fully occupied by American and British books, and on tables laden instead by discounted imports. I went to several meetings with Classic Book Shops’ owner Louis Melzack, trying to convince him that Canadian books needed more breathing space. Always polite and amiable, Mr. Melzack (I never called him Louis) explained that his stores would sell the books his customers would wish to purchase. I made the same argument to W. H. Smith in London, owner of Smith’s, with the same results, though they did give me a very nice set of Smith’s engraved glasses I have kept. Jack himself made the pitch to the irascible Jack Cole. Jack Cole and his brother Carl had opened their first store in Toronto in 1940; they had added a number of Coles outlets, and they published the ubiquitous Coles Notes that helped thousands of students across the country to graduate.

  Jack believed that we could increase our profits by selling more of our books to other countries. We had a duty to attend international book fairs, to showcase our best writers, to try to persuade publishers to translate and publish Canadians. Since I could speak German, Russian, and French, I went to the annual Frankfurt Book Fairs where publishers hawked their authors and made or tried to make deals in the aisles, in their booths, and at late-night parties. In the seventies, when literary agents were scarce, we were promoting Canadian fiction and the few non-fiction books that were not about Canada. Pierre Berton, though he came a couple of times to Frankfurt, was not able to persuade publishers in other countries that they should at least consider his books.

  We were a great deal more successful with illustrated books, George Swinton’s Eskimo Sculpture and Fred Bruemmer’s Seasons of the Eskimo and Encounters with Arctic Animals, for example. The fact tha
t Fred was originally a Baltic German and that George Swinton was originally Austrian and that both of them spoke German fluently helped with German publishers. We even sold UK distribution rights to the wonderfully eccentric Christopher Hurst, whose main interest was not the Inuit but birds. The lesson I learned from selling Fred’s and, later, Roloff Beny’s books was that there was an international market for stunning photography books, as long as you were able to offer them at reasonable prices. Canada, it seemed, produced both great photographers and extraordinary fiction.

  Jack hated Germany. He suspected that everyone his own age or older had been in the SS or in one of the U-boats his motor torpedo boat had tried to sink. Though he worked hard to meet people and they were, generally, interested in meeting him, he remained uncomfortable. William CollinsI (Jack called him Billy) came marching down the isle between the booths, demanding to know where Jack McClelland was. And there was Jack in long conversations with Andre Deutsch about literary publishing in the UK and how much bigger the UK market was than Canada’s. Andre was Philip Roth’s, John Updike’s, and Wole Soyinka’s publisher. He thought Jack would have been very wealthy indeed had he decided to be a British publisher instead of a Canadian one. By strange coincidence, Andre had known my grandfather Vili in Budapest and thought well of him for trying to do his best in 1944 when it was dangerous to do anything to help Jews.

  Jack sent me to New York several times during my first couple of years, always with a bag full of manuscripts and book descriptions. It was never easy to get in to see American editors, but once they got used to the idea that there were Canadian writers worth reading, I started making friends at Doubleday, St. Martin’s, Avon, Random House, and among art book publishers such as the New York Graphic Society and Abrams, who thought it was rather quaint to be offered a book on barns.