In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  * * *

  WHEN JULIAN CALLED to ask whether I would accompany him on a trip to France, I didn’t even think before I said yes. While he was representing Canada at the UNESCO Copyright Convention, I walked about Paris trying to come to terms with my staying in Canada for the rest of my life. We drove south from the city, meandered along the Gorges du Tarn, and got to know each other. By the time we reached Moissac, it seemed inconceivable that we would return to our previous lives.

  Julian and I were married in January 1972, a few months after we first met. Alfons’s brother, Fritz, who lived in Canada, kindly volunteered to walk me down the aisle. Julian’s mother, who had hoped he would come to his senses before marrying a Hungarian, seemed to have resigned herself to the occasion. Our wedding photographer was Toronto boulevardier John Reeves, who talked almost incessantly while he took his black-and-white pictures and reassured me—because I needed reassurance—that marriages were not necessarily forever. There was a moment when I called Qantas to check flight departures for Sydney—in case I needed a quick getaway—but my mother, who had endured three weddings of her own, said I could always go to Australia later if this didn’t work out.

  Marriages in our family had not been particularly fortunate. Except for my grandfather’s, they made no one happy and didn’t last. My grandfather’s lasted only because my grandmother Therese had been determined not to notice Vili’s philandering. Vili had warned me that marriages rarely worked for women. His own mother, Jolan, could read and write in four languages, including Greek and Latin, but in her time, young ladies had few choices. “In the nineteenth century, it was pinafores and piano lessons and waiting for the right man to come along,” he had told me. “You, on the other hand, you have a choice. Don’t bother with marriage.”

  At the reception, Jack presented us with a massive goblet full of contraceptives, in case I was so thoughtless and uncaring about M&S that I planned to have children. Fritz’s wife, who had been kind enough to host the reception, a lady with a private school background, was as horrified as my mother-in-law was at the crudeness of Jack’s gift.

  Aviva and Irving Layton gave us a Greek silver cake-slicer I still cherish, and Irving presented me with a poem called “For Anna”:

  You wanted the perfect setting

  for your old world beauty postwar Hungarian

  a downtown Toronto bar sleazy

  with young whores pimps smalltime racketeers . . .

  I have it framed in my office. It is a wonderful poem to reread during bad times.

  Despite my sense that adopting a man’s name deleted a woman’s self, I changed my name to Porter with a great sigh of relief. I owed no allegiance to the name Szigethy, and Porter was so much easier to pronounce.

  Julian’s two daughters were both at the wedding, and though they were not thrilled with the new arrangements, they looked brave, hopeful, and quite splendid in the green velvet dresses Julian’s mother had sewn for the ceremony. They would spend weekends with us for the next many years, at least until their new stepfather sent Suse to a Colorado boarding school. Jessica, who was shy in public, among family had a natural ability to charm and to put on one-person shows with tumbling, impersonations, and funny voices.

  She is now an actor, a writer, and a macrobiotic chef. Suse became a counsellor, a teacher, and eventually a school principal.

  I had met their mother, Susan McCutcheon, shortly before the wedding. She was polite and friendly, though puzzled by my decision to marry Julian. The divorce, she told me, had been her idea. Despite her negative assessment of my brand new husband, I liked her enough that I subsequently invited her to all our family get-togethers.

  We moved into an apartment on Walmer Road, where my big piles of manuscripts could occupy our dining room table and the floor next to my side of the bed. Julian rarely brought his legal briefs home.

  1972, a Year to Remember

  THAT YEAR TURNED out to be extraordinary for publishing as well.

  Three of Pierre’s books, The National Dream, The Last Spike, and The Great Railway Illustrated—a short text from both books, with pictures—were on bestseller lists at the same time. Back when Pierre first proposed the illustrated version, I was quite certain it couldn’t work, especially following so close to the release dates of the originals, but I was wrong.

  An eight-part CBC series based on The National Dream was in production. After it aired, the three books went on to sell more than 175,000 copies each. Those sales and Pierre’s ongoing roles on TV, in newspapers, and on radio counterbalanced the fact that not all reviewers loved Pierre’s versions of history. The Berton extravaganza continued unabated.

  The year 1972 also saw M&S’s publication of Sylvia Fraser’s first novel, Pandora. I first met Sylvia at somebody else’s launch party. I don’t recall whose book it was but I do recall a large non-smoking house with a veranda and several doors that allowed people to go outside to smoke. Back then, I still smoked about a pack a day and found that smoking provided me with an excuse to take a break from a crowd. Smoking was also a fine occupation for my hands when I was nervous, and our launch parties tended to make me nervous.

  Sylvia was on the veranda, talking to someone and looking beautiful. She was slender, with a small waist, but she filled out her soft, light-blue silky dress, her hair was soft and blond, her eyes very blue, her hands animated, her nails long and red. (Later I discovered that she used to chew her nails and wore fake, acrylic glue-ons.)

  I had just finished reading the manuscript of Pandora and couldn’t wait to tell her how riveting I had found it, how I had never read anything remotely like it, and how excited I was that we would be publishing it. Pandora is the story of a little girl in a wartime Canadian town. The minutely portrayed accoutrements of that era were as riveting as the writing itself. It’s a story you are pulled into, then dragged along to witness both the young heroine’s golden-curled innocence and the brutality that overtakes her.

  That’s what I started to tell her when she stopped me in mid-sentence and stared at me with barely disguised fury. The next moment she was in tears, running to Jack McClelland and demanding to know why he had betrayed her confidence. He had promised not to show the manuscript to anyone until she had done another draft. Jack, deflecting her accusations, denied that he had given it to me. Knowing Jack, I shouldn’t have been baffled. A generous explanation of his slip-up is that he forgot his promise when he gave me the manuscript, but it is more likely that he had been hoping for a spectacular cat-fight between two blondes.

  Sylvia and I didn’t speak for months, a state of affairs that could have continued longer had Julian and I not bumped into her and her lawyer husband, Russell, on our 1972 honeymoon in Barbados. We were all gravely underdressed in bathing suits with nowhere to hide past sins, so we became friends.

  We travelled around the island, drank lots of dark and stormies, discovered a shared delight in jumping on trampolines (mostly Julian), and gossiping about other writers, editors, and Jack, of course. Both Russell and Sylvia were funny, warm, engaging, and adventurous.

  Harold Town had drawn the soft, gentle image of the young girl for the cover of Pandora. He offered to sell the original to Jack or to me but neither of us could afford the price. Russell bought it as a gift for Sylvia and it still hangs, framed, in her King Street apartment. Much later Harold lambasted me into buying one of his bugs-in-machinery series that I have hidden in our basement, hoping someone one day will need such a painting.

  In addition to the Bertons and Pandora, M&S published A Whale for the Killing, one of Farley Mowat’s saddest books, the story of a stranded whale he tried to save and send back to sea. It was harassed, shot, and killed by Newfoundlanders, thus ending Farley’s love affair with the island. And probably theirs with him. Once again, Farley was surrounded by controversy.

  And in 1972 Mordecai Richler returned to Canada from London. Jack introduced us (again) at a garden party at their home in Quebec. Mordecai was rumpled and at his acer
bic best. Florence Richler was gracious and effervescent in a pink-and-blue dress. Brian Moore and his wife, Jean, old friends of the Richlers, were there. Brian and I had a long conversation about Catholics, a novel I had loved, and a much shorter one about The Revolution Script, which I had not liked. I could not understand why he had written it.

  I had first met Mordecai in 1970. He had asked what I thought of the manuscript of St. Urbain’s Horseman. We were in the Park Plaza Roof Lounge, and I was on my third drink (he drank Macallan). He listened to my extravagant praise and the very few suggestions I made, which, of course, he ignored. St. Urbain’s Horseman won the Governor General’s Award in 1971. In the Richlers’ garden a year later, Mordecai talked about the grand award ceremony and the hilarious notion of someone in Canada standing in for the Queen.

  While it wasn’t evident at the time, the most notable book of 1972 was Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, published by the House of Anansi.I It became the most-discussed book of the decade about Canadian writing and is still taught and debated at universities. It focused on the themes and ideas that had been central to Canadian fiction and poetry. Oddly, given how the book changed the conversation about Canadian literature, it grew out of a need to raise money for the House of Anansi. Jim Polk, to whom Margaret was married at the time, told me that the manuscript began with twelve people typing feverishly in the August heat, drinking wine and exchanging thoughts, before Margaret pulled it all together into a book.

  The first printing was an optimistic 4,000 copies.

  Survival has now sold more than 150,000 copies—a phenomenal number for a book of literary criticism.II Of course it was not only literary commentary, it was a tribute to the wellspring of Canadian literature, a handbook that allowed readers to feel a sense of belonging, even pride in the culture their country had produced. Though it was criticized for its focus on survival as the central theme of Canadian literature, even its detractors had to admit that it was a powerful analysis and one that could draw in many of our most important literary works.

  It was, in short, the perfect book for its time.

  As Pierre Berton noted, with reference to his railway books, “the nation is bound together by its creative artists and not by parallel lines of rusting steel.”

  Two other major events defined 1972. The federal election in October was humbling for the Trudeau Liberals and for Canada’s “philosopher king”: in Maclean’s Peter Newman called it “his fall from grace.” Trudeau had campaigned confidently in T-shirt and jeans, but far fewer Canadians had voted for him. He was now in a minority government situation. The election was rather cheering for Julian, who had been rooting for Robert Stanfield. A lifelong Tory, he had worked on the Stanfield campaign and believed that Stanfield would have been a great prime minister. Sadly for Julian, and maybe for the country, he never got that chance.

  And, of course, 1972 was the year Canada won the Canada-Russia hockey series. The whole country exploded in exultation at Paul Henderson’s legendary winning goal. Jack commissioned Jack Ludwig,III a novelist, journalist, teacher, and, ever since his Winnipeg childhood, passionate hockey lover to follow our team. He was there “when Ken Dryden took off on a rink-long dash that ended with him draped over Henderson,” and for the triumphant roaring of “O Canada” with not a dry eye in the arena. Nor in Toronto where we watched the game. I still remember how everyone stood and sang. There was no longer any doubt that I had become a Canadian.

  * * *

  THE MOST IMPORTANT day of 1972 for me, though, was Boxing Day, when my daughter Catherine was born and forever changed my life. Having children tends to put everything else into perspective, particularly publishing.

  My mother was our first visitor. She came from New Zealand, wanting to see her first grandchild and trying to determine the priorities of her own life. Sylvia Fraser was our second visitor, and though Sylvia remarked that the baby looked way too pink and much too small, she was willing to take on the responsibilities—if that’s what they were—of godmother. Earle Birney sent the baby this short verse:

  Welcome, welcome Catherine Porter,

  Lovely momma’s lovely dorter,

  Looks just like her

  Only shorter.

  Jack arrived at the hospital with a large box of manuscripts in lieu of more traditional baby gifts and told me I would have plenty of time now to catch up on my reading. As an added bonus, he was willing to grant me a full four weeks of vacation time.

  * * *

  I. Margaret wrote that Dennis Lee’s editorial skills were indispensable for the book.

  II. Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination was published in 1971. It was much talked about in bookish circles, but it had modest sales. Northrop Frye had been one of Margaret Atwood’s professors at the University of Toronto.

  III. My favourite Ludwig novel is A Woman of Her Age, published in 1973. I got to know Jack much better during the editing of that book and I liked almost everything about him. He was brave and uncompromising, despite the constant pain from his polio-afflicted leg.

  For the Love of Words

  I HAD MET Earle Birney during my first year at M&S. He was a tall, spindly, white-bearded figure with a strong resemblance to Don Quixote. I love the Harold Town drawing of Earle for the Purdy book that never happened. Earle was best known for his long narrative poem “David,” a fact that he resented and liked in about equal measure. Poetry was only one of his passions. He had the astonishing ability to speak Old and Middle English. I had battled at university with Sir Gawain and Beowulf, but for Earle they were poetry, as was the unfiltered Chaucer. He was a traveller, a novelist, a teacher, a professor of literature, a mountain climber, a collector of memories and of remarkable women. I had met only three of them—all unusually attractive and accomplished. I knew only two well: Wailan Low, the great love of Earle’s late years, and briefly my mother. Earle had courted my mother in 1969 and 1970, when she was visiting Canada from New Zealand. He even wrote her some fine, rather suggestive poems.

  I found a couple of them in a drawer of her memorabilia, where she keeps photographs of her parents and her grandchildren (my children); letters from her father, Vili; miserable letters I wrote her when I was in the Sacred Heart Convent; and a few of my Hungarian poems. There is a particularly fine poem Earle wrote on Galiano Island where he appears to be missing her. There is another one he called “The Moon of Pooh Chi,” celebrating the “melting of ice” and birds that invented special songs for my mother’s benefit. Her nickname, the one that stuck from her early childhood, was Puci, pronounced a bit like Pooh Chi.

  She was (thank God) not interested in a serious relationship with Earle. It would have been disastrous.

  Earle and Wailan could not have been less similar physically. He was nearing seventy, painfully thin; she was short, cheerful, dark-haired, and more than forty years his junior. They moved into an apartment together on Balliol Avenue, Toronto, in 1973 when Wailan started her legal studies.

  Earle’s most tender love poems, such as this, are to or about Wailan.

  . . . when warm winds come

  she will move

  all her body

  in a tremble of light . . .

  I hired John Newlove at M&S without so much as an interview because he had been recommended by both Earle and Al Purdy. I had read some of John’s poetry, which was great, but had no idea whether he would be a good editor. He turned out to be a fine editor of both poetry and non-fiction, but he descended into rages when he drank too much. He often seemed on the verge of quitting or just erupting in anger and despair at the world. I was never quite sure whether his anger was aimed at the manuscripts sprawled across his desk, his experiences as a labourer or social worker in Western Canada (he fulminated about both), or me for bothering him in his office.

  Among his most loathed editorial tasks was dealing with Earle Birney. Earle, if he felt slighted by Jack or M&S’s lack of attention to his ma
nuscripts, and by the scant presence of his books in bookstores he visited, was given to temper tantrums—in writing.

  Earle’s most frequent grudge during the years I worked there was “macstew,” as he called us collectively, and, in particular, Jack. They had started sparring as long ago as 1949 when Jack had to convince Earle that army language, absolutely right for the men he too had fought beside, was not going to be possible in print. The censor would not allow him to publish Turvey. In the end, Earle had reluctantly changed words like cocksucker, shit, and fuck.

  They used to exchange violent, mutually abusive letters that did not have to pass through the censor. This is one from the M&S Archives: “Dear Jack: Jesus fucking Christ, what in fucking hell are you up to? I haven’t heard a goddamn word from you for six long bloody weeks and I want an explanation . . .”

  Jack replied, pretending to be his own secretary, that he was “utterly revolted” by the language.

  Earle responded thus: “Dear Jack: I am furious! If I can’t write to my own fucking publisher in any form I wish, then I’ll find a new goddamn publisher. Stuff the whole fucking thing up your ass . . .”

  Earle fumed about the terms of his contracts or the delay in receiving them, about the lack of sufficient books at his readings, and about typos in his printed books. All these failings he blamed on Jack’s preoccupation with saving the company—or selling it.

  One prevailing rule of the book business, Jack taught me, is that an author will very rarely find his/her book in a store he/she visits and there will never be enough copies at a reading, unless nobody shows up—and that too will be your fault. Another is that no book is published without typos.

  Sometime in the seventies Earle got into a legal spat with fellow poet Dorothy Livesay, who had written that his “David” poem had recorded the real death, or possible murder, of a friend. Julian agreed to represent him, but Jack refused to engage in the suit.