by Anna Porter
He loved to tell a story about sitting in his Manhattan office one spring day as a huge flock of snow geese flew over the building. He left his urban comforts to follow them north, he claimed, not stopping until he reached the Arctic again. Manhattan may not be on the snow geese flight path, but it made for a great tale.
Despite his craggy features, his lantern jaw, I think James remained a kind of boy hero, keen to have new adventures. Seventeen of his children’s books are still available, including the one published by Key Porter: Whiteout, the coming-of-age story of a rebellious seventeen-year-old city boy who goes to live on Baffin Island. One Houston story, Spirit Wrestler, is about a boy who becomes a shaman, though I would be surprised if the writer’s presentation of Shoona and the white man who possesses truly magical powers would be acceptable today, when cultural appropriation is a sin.
I am still planning to go to the North, though so far I have only made it as far as Churchill, Manitoba, to see the polar bears.
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I. I wish I had bought one of the illustrations, but I was broke then, and when I offered to buy one of his paintings from the Kinsman Robinson Galleries in the 1990s, the prices were much, much higher.
II. I served on the Board of the Canada Council for the Arts from 2008 till 2016.
III. From the introduction to Survival: A Refugee Life.
The Best and the Brightest
JACK ALWAYS CLAIMED that it was a privilege to work at M&S, and he was right. But he was also fortunate to have such brilliant editors and designers. I’ve already mentioned Jennifer Glossop, who edited Margaret Atwood and Marian Engel. Both Mordecai Richler and Margaret Laurence respected her keen eye and gentle manner, as did Peter Gzowski and George Swinton. The witty and accomplished Charis Wahl edited Rudy Wiebe, Michel Tremblay, and Hubert Aquin. Lily Miller, who among many books, edited Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man, remained unperturbed by the usual M&S chaos. M&S editors were known for their ability to juggle multiple projects on a wide variety of subjects.
In later years I worked with Linda Pruessen, who edited fiction and non-fiction, children’s books and young adult books, including those by Dennis Lee and Carol Matas. Barbara Berson edited Erika Ritter and Tim Wynveen at Key Porter and proved to be very patient when she edited The Ghosts of Europe, my third non-fiction book. The multi-talented (fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, and canoe refurbishing) Susan Renouf edited Farley Mowat’s later books. Phyllis Bruce developed her own imprint at two publishing houses. The imaginative Rosemary Shipton, known for her high standards and the many prizes won by authors she worked with, edited my Kasztner’s Train. Linda McKnight, my first M&S hire, went from educational editor to managing editor, to president and publisher of M&S, then executive vice president and publisher of Macmillan, and finally became an agent. John Pearce edited my early mysteries and later, as my literary agent, continued to offer editorial advice.
Editors are a strange breed. Strong-willed yet exceptionally sensitive to other voices, devoted to their work yet uninterested in claiming credit, they rarely lay claim to fame. Ellen Seligman, as I’ve noted, was one of the very best. In just a few months after arriving at M&S, she developed an astonishingly assertive personality. She stubbornly refused to submit to M&S’s relentless schedules: a manuscript was either ready for publication or it was not. In addition to Margaret Atwood, she also edited books by Michael Ondaatje, Jane Urquhart, Elizabeth Hay, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and David Bergen, to mention a few.
After I left M&S, Ellen and I would meet from time to time to talk and drink Chablis or Sancerre—she knew her wines—and talk about clothes, books, cooking, her health, my back, and gossip. I served on the PEN Canada board when Ellen was chair. It was then I learned to admire her steely determination in a way that had eluded me earlier.
Many M&S grads, whether in editorial, sales, or marketing, went on to long careers in publishing. Scott McIntyre, who had left M&S in 1969 to travel in Europe, returned to join Jim Douglas in Vancouver, at first as a fellow West Coast rep, then as a partner in Douglas & McIntyre, a highly respected publisher. D&M produced some of the most beautiful art books in the country, and Scott, never too shy to rejoice in his authors’ successes, celebrated his fortieth anniversary as a publisher in 2011 with his usual aplomb and apparent self-confidence. Few of us knew of the financial struggle he was facing at the time. We have remained colleagues for more than forty years in the fraught fields of Canadian publishing politics—competitors for authors, once almost partners, and always friends.I
John Neale had been at M&S as sales manager under Peter Taylor. He was effervescent, imaginative, and very, very funny. Most days at the office he was accompanied by his dog, a black lab he said he had picked up quite accidentally. He would later become chairman of Random House Canada. A less likely corporate man would have been impossible to imagine, yet his successors have admired him for his leadership in building a publishing powerhouse with outstanding financial results.
Patsy Aldana, who started Groundwood, a children’s publisher in association with Douglas & McIntyre, has been a friend and occasional sparring partner. She has been honoured by the Writers’ Union, by the Bologna Book Fair, and by the International Organization of Books for Young People. But my best memories of Patsy are of her in full flight decrying some injustice she has observed and will not accept quietly.
M&S was fortunate to have on staff some of the best book designers, including the legendary Frank Newfeld and the wildly inventive David Shaw, who designed many of M&S’s poetry books and art books, including the two Roloff Beny tomes about Iran.II M&S book covers from the seventies are known for their bold, sometimes psychedelic designs.
I have had the privilege of knowing the best and the brightest book publishers of my generation. We survived on hope and promises. We argued and battled with governments, with successive ministers and deputies, with the bosses of the Canada Council and various provincial arts councils for recognition that what we did was of unique value to the country. It still is. Roy MacSkimming wrote in The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers (2003) about the “junta,” the small group of us who had been asked by the Association of Canadian Publishers to present our case to the government, to explain that without an independent press it would be very difficult for our voices to be heard and that, while our bestselling fiction would still travel the globe, our Canadian non-fiction would die or be relegated to personal blogs. That, like many of our battles of the 1980s and nineties, is worth refighting with every new generation.
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I. Douglas & McIntyre published three of my books.
II. One of my favourite David Shaw designs is Max Braithwaite’s hilarious The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car—winner of the 1971 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
The Disinherited
I AM NOT sure what I was expecting next from Matt Cohen, but The Disinherited was certainly not it. I thought Matt, like most young writers, would draw on his own experience, that the novel would feature people like Matt and his friends, the women who had loved him, or whom he loved, the people who had inhabited the student/teacher/activist world of Toronto. Instead, The Disinherited belonged to a group of people so remote from Toronto, so far from downtown that I found it strange that they could exist in Matt’s world.
They had sprung whole, he told me, from some part of him he hadn’t known existed, as if the Thomas family and their friends and acquaintances had arrived fully alive, very demanding, as if all he had to do was to record their well-lived lives. It was as if he and his characters had been living in parallel universes, each unknown to the other. Most days, he thought, their world was far more convincing than his own. Take Richard Thomas, for example. He was as solid as an oak, sprung from the hard soil of Ontario’s farmland, north of Kingston, where even now a man can barely eke out sustenance for a family, a man in love with an indifferent land. Or his passionate wife, Miranda, who harboured family secrets and hopes. I had imagined
that the character Eric might have carried some of Matt’s own dreams and sense of estrangement, but as Matt gave me pieces of the manuscript, I realized he too had sprung whole from Matt’s imagination.
After The Disinherited, we published two more Kingston novels. Already then I was curious about Katherine Malone, Matt’s sexiest heroine. But it would be years before Matt decided to come back to her and write The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone.
“She wasn’t ready to tell me her story,” Matt explained. Or she hadn’t lived it yet.
Matt and I became friends through the Salem manuscripts. It was a gradual process, and I don’t know when we closed the distance between author and editor. I remember long walks, drinks in the Holiday Inn’s bar, Matt’s arriving at our home with a bag full of manuscripts and his playing tennis with Julian in Georgian Bay and failing to mention that he had once been an Ontario junior tennis champion.
Around 1978 I suggested a children’s story and he came up with a most unusual one, The Leaves of Louise, an unfunny precursor to his series of funny children’s books using the pseudonym Teddy Jam. They were all published by his partner Patsy Aldana’s imprint, Groundwood.
Although Matt’s books garnered some critical success, a few even appearing on bestseller lists, they did not become bestsellers. And the positive reviews were always accompanied by nasty attacks on Matt’s prose style, his characters, his storytelling. A few critics surprisingly launched almost personal attacks on everything Matt felt was important in his writing.
I didn’t succeed in talking Mordecai Richler into selecting one of Matt’s books for the Book of the Month Club when Mordecai was a judge. As far as I could tell, he had never even read an entire Matt Cohen manuscript. But my tenacity impressed him sufficiently that we would go for drinks—usually at the Park Plaza Roof Lounge—though not even four or five Macallans could soften his heart.
When Matt and Mordecai finally met, they had nothing to talk about. They stood, largely in silence, ignoring each other.
Matt continued to write, though the books didn’t make him a living. Nor, as Matt argued, did they change anyone’s life, as philosopher George Grant had changed his. Matt was his own harshest critic.
To make ends meet, he ghosted other people’s books. There were several of these strange partnerships, but the one I remember best is the autobiography of the young woman who may or may not have accidentally killed the Hollywood actor John Belushi. While suffering great pangs of grief over her ruined life and his death, she decided Matt would be her salvation, the man who would listen and forgive everything. “A kind of priest,” Matt said, after a long night of listening and trying not to fall asleep. “I can’t imagine how those guys do it. Priests. Day after day.” He thought perhaps the fact that priests were encouraged to forget made it easier for them.
* * *
BECAUSE I WAS a European with the burden of the Holocaust in my mind, because we had now known each other long enough for me to ask, I had wanted Matt to tell me about growing up Jewish in this part of the world. He had never talked about being Jewish. His fiction didn’t relate to his Jewish experience. His fictional people were farmer folk, Irish, Scots, English. His last book, Typing, a Life in 26 Keys, begins with this: “A Jew is a person in exile from nowhere. Or maybe that’s a myth I like to believe because the truth is too oppressive.” All four of his grandparents had escaped Russian pogroms, and all their children had been eager to escape the immigrant experience.
“Besides, with a name like Cohen,” he once told me, “you don’t have to advertise that you’re a Jew. Only an idiot would miss the fact. And no, I haven’t been escaping, I have been what I am.” He didn’t want to be a Jewish writer. He was simply a writer.
Matt had been planning to write a book about Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish writer dead since 1939, but he hadn’t decided yet whether it would be a novel or a fictional biography, an inquiry into Roth’s death. Though he had not been brought up to be Jewish, he felt a deep kinship with Roth based on their shared values as Jewish intellectuals. I know I was looking forward to reading more of the manuscript. It would have been a great book for Matt.
The Spanish Doctor opened another door for Matt, another set of imagined people to write about, and many brilliant books followed. Some of his best writing, I think, is in Elizabeth and After, published by Knopf. It won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1999, just a few weeks before he died.
There is this wonderful passage Dennis Lee read at a memorial for Matt:
Mysteries begin with the body but sometimes the mystery is not death but love. There is so much to love. Cats. Bits of dust caught in the light. Colours. Unexpected waterfalls. And of course: the body. Warm skin on cool sheets. The blood’s night hum. Summer heat seeping through damp moss. The raw smell of an oak tree opened in winter. A long-missed voice over the telephone. So much to love that life should be made out of loving, so many ways of loving that all stories should be love stories. This one is about a man and a woman.
For Matt, that special love was Patsy Aldana, and for the children they shared, including the ones she brought with her into their marriage.
The last time that I saw him we laughed more than we cried, shared memories, asked questions of each other we would not have asked before. As Matt said, when you are dying, nothing is personal. When we said goodbye, I told him I was sure he was going to live. I thought it was what he wanted to hear. Now, I’m not so sure.
The Greatest Gift
I THINK THE Stone Angel has one of the most wonderful opening lines of any novel: “Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet.”
I had fallen in love with Margaret Laurence long before we met. My affection for her grew with the manuscript of what became A Bird in the House, a series of short stories based on her childhood and her family, set in her fictional Manawaka. I remember calling the sales director of her US publisher and going on and on about what a fabulous book it was going to be. The sales director (I don’t remember his name) suggested that it would really help Margaret’s sales to relocate Manawaka in the American Midwest. Not much difference, he had said, between Manitoba and, say, Minnesota or Wisconsin, and since Manawaka didn’t exist, it could be anywhere. It’s a credit to Margaret’s sense of humour that she laughed when I told her.
She hated Toronto: she called it Vile Metropolis, or V.M. for short, though she had agreed to be writer-in-residence at Massey College for the 1969–70 academic year. It was when we first met. I think she may have persuaded herself that the college was not really Toronto. It had been designed by architect Ron Thom to look and feel separate, enclosed, quadrangled, peaceful. Its master then was the redoubtable Robertson Davies, whose novel Fifth Business was published by Macmillan in 1970, the same year that we published A Bird in the House.
During 1972 and ’73 Margaret was deeply involved with her next novel, the one she said would be her last. She was editing and rewriting long before she was ready to show it to anyone else. The Diviners features Morag Gunn, a novelist living in rural Ontario who is trying to discover the meaning of the past, including her own, and thus the meaning of her life. One of the novel’s most deeply felt themes is the possibility of gaining new vision from the terrible, colonial past that had almost destroyed our Indigenous peoples. Morag’s sexual relationship with the Métis songwriter Jules seems to presage some form of understanding, in the same way that water divining relies on the deeply intuitive relationship between humans and the earth:
The river was dark and shining, and the moon traced a wavering path across it. Morag sat cross-legged on the dock, listening to the hoarse prehistoric voices of the bull frogs. Somewhere far-off, thunder.
Incredibly, unreasonably, a lightening of the heart.
I loved that manuscript!
Her editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, wrote a long, detailed set of notes on where she had to take the novel next and how and why. Jack McClelland agreed with m
ost, not all, of her suggestions and added a few of his own.
Contrary to the myths he had spread about his own lack of interest in editorial matters, how he left that for others better qualified than himself, Jack was a very careful reader who managed, despite his improbable working methods, to dictate excellent editorial observations and notes. He worked late into the nights, drinking vodka, reading manuscripts, and dictating memos and letters. As the night wore on, his observations would become more repetitious and less measured. He would then give the tapes to Marge in the morning. “The drinks are the only things that keep me awake,” Jack used to say. He was pleased that Marge could decipher most of what he had said. The fact that he rarely read his own letters (most were signed by Marge or declared themselves to be “dictated but not read”) before they left his office, added to the risk he took in having them sent. His notes to Margaret were a good example of both his method and his editorial skills. But given how the letters were produced, I often had to explain to a befuddled Margaret what Jack had meant.
Margaret was insecure about her own abilities as a writer and, unlike some M&S stalwarts, took criticism very seriously. “I learned something important from Margaret about writers,” Jack wrote in his later tribute to her accomplishments. It was “the anguish, the anxiety, that an author experiences while waiting for a judgment from the publisher—the kind of uncertainty that remained with Margaret long after she had become an established writer.”
