In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  Our home, I told Marian, had taken on the Marian Engel look with mountains of manuscripts spilling onto the floor, Catherine drawing on piles of unanswered mail, Julia on my lap as I read, and Julian picking his way through the debris of my working life. He rarely came home before nightfall. He was busy with one of the accused on what the newspapers referred to as “the dredging case,” involving alleged bid rigging for tenders in a number of harbours. The case grew to encompass most of the large dredging companies in Canada. The two-year criminal trial started in 1977, the year Julia was born. During the examination of witnesses and the trail itself, Julian would invite some of the leading counsel to dinner—a great opportunity to work on my cooking skills.

  I had learned to cook from my grandmother, who was also learning to cook after we moved to the apartment in Pest. Before the war, she used to have a cook, a maid, a spacious house, and a gardener. By the time I was ten, I could make soups, eggs à la russe, and crepes.

  Julian’s co-counsel turned out to be appreciative eaters. But I was usually too tired to eat myself.

  * * *

  I. The more you manufacture, the lower the cost for each unit. That’s the way it is with socks. That’s the way it is with books.

  II. In 1981 women working full-time were still earning about fifty-four per cent of what men earned.

  III. From Jack’s unpublished and incomplete autobiography.

  IV. The Olden Days Coat.

  V. Shoeless Joe went on to become an international bestseller (though not in the UK). It was the basis of the very successful movie Field of Dreams, starring the young Kevin Costner.

  Intermission

  WE TOOK BABY Julia to Georgian Bay when she was only a couple of weeks old. Our prefab was finished; we had running water and, amazingly, even electricity. Catherine was already a swimmer, and she loved the lake. That summer Julian’s stint as president of the Ex ended, so I didn’t have to appear on site wearing “appropriate” clothing and didn’t have to make polite conversation or pour tea for the ladies.

  The Hunt was still in good shape—it’s on its last breaths now—and Julian used to drive it at great speed across the lake to Charles’s cottage. Catherine called him Uncle Chawas and loved exploring all the gadgets at his home, while Charles explained how everything worked. Charles was then putting the finishing touches to his most successful book, Act of God. He was under no illusion that these books were literature or that they had staying power; he thought they were entertainments, in the same way that some of Graham Greene’s books were entertainments. He plotted them much as he might have planned a complicated puzzle.

  He was so determined that the story be plausible and the settings authentic that he had gone to the Vatican, managed to gain entry to the Pope’s apartments, and visited all of Israel’s Christian Holy sites. I thought that this attention to minutiae was supposed to distract him from the hard truth that his Christian faith had failed, that he no longer believed in God. It was a great relief for him when the manuscript was finished and he no longer had to grapple with its dark centre.

  US rights to Act of God were auctioned for $200,000, a large amount in the late 1970s. Bantam Books’ Marc Jaffe had been the successful bidder, ensuring that Charles would get excellent treatment on both sides of the border. Charles and I were feted at the Westbury Hotel by a coterie of senior Bantam people. There was a sumptuous dinner with very expensive wines, since Charles professed to know a lot about wine.

  Despite the nasty reviews, the personal attacks on “a failed evangelist,” and persistent interview questions about Charles’s early days with preacher Billy Graham, the book sold well in both the United States and Canada.

  * * *

  AMONG MY MOST bizarre memories of 1977 is Irving Layton’s sixty-fifth birthday party at Casa Loma, the fairy-tale castle in the middle of Toronto. There were elaborate preparations. Jack, Sylvia Fraser, Aviva, and I had several secret meetings to plan what was to be a surprise for Irving. Julian was tasked with delivering the unsuspecting Irving to the venue. He had persuaded Irving that an Ontario government minister wanted to consult him on some matter of policy—the sort of flattering pretext Irving found irresistible. It’s astonishing that none of the more than a hundred invited guests breathed a word about the event. Irving was genuinely astounded and not immediately pleased when Julian ushered him in through the massive oak doors to be greeted by people shrieking “Happy birthday!” But he quickly warmed to the occasion.

  There was music and there were speeches, including a long encomium from Moses Znaimer, whom Irving had taught at Herzliah School in Montreal. Irving, Moses said, had convinced his class that only poets and poetry mattered. The rest of the world was useless. Moses ended his speech with “Irving, you have ruined my life. Because of you I feel worthless.” After the speeches, a giant cardboard cake was wheeled in. Sylvia Fraser, in a backless red dress, leapt out of its white centre and everyone sang “Happy Birthday.”

  Moses had come with a camera crew, who recorded the entire over-the-top evening, so I assume there is a film of it somewhere. I wonder if it includes some footage of the rather lonely figure of young David Layton,I lost in the crowd, trying to figure out how he fitted into the picture of general conviviality.

  Another strange memory of that year and the next is reading bits of Leonard Cohen’s new, unnamed manuscript. He had been sending in parts of what he sometimes referred to as My Life in Art, a title he mercifully abandoned. The manuscript was rank with disappointment, bitterness, and desperation. Part of the desperation, as I wrote to Jack, was Cohen’s apparent fear that he had little or nothing left to say, that he was no longer a lover and not yet a priest. He wrote of impending death and the embarrassment of having so few ideas. He kept adding to the manuscript and changing some of the prose and the poems, though the tone of bitterness and anger stayed. In one memorable passage he wrote: “Death to this book or fuck this book and fuck this marriage. Fuck the twenty-six letters of my cowardice. Fuck you for breaking the mirror and throwing the eyebrow tweezers out the window . . .”

  Now and then he still referred to the manuscript as My Life in Art, and though I know he worked on it for several years, it felt like something he had dashed off in a moment of fury. The lyrical poems like “All Summer Long” were easy to overlook in the thicket of anger and loss. I thought Death of a Ladies’ Man was an infinitely better title for what he wanted to say. Jack hated it, but we set type and designed alternative cover treatments. Leonard always had his own ideas for covers and wanted to see the options.

  We were in Montreal for the new Montreal International Book Fair, an event Jack had imagined would bring together publishers, writers, agents, and booksellers from all over the world.II He had rented a suite of rooms alongside the pool, so that bookish partygoers could recover in the water after too much smoke and too many drinks.

  Cohen had not wanted to be part of the scene, so we sat on the carpet in the corridor outside the suite and looked at covers, paper samples, and pages with different type treatments. He was very quiet, sombre really, as he examined each cardboard-backed design, then picked one with a few adjustments. Looking at the book today, I think it is the perfect jacket for this deeply unhappy work: creamy brown with old-fashioned black type and a gold-embossed drawing of two intertwined figures, a winged man and an equally winged (though somewhat squashed) woman, purporting to represent the spiritual union of the two sexes. It’s a reproduction of a woodcut in the 1550 Rosarium Philosophorum.

  By 1978 Cohen had become an international celebrity. Hundreds of thousands turned out for his concerts, and the voice Jack had thought was a handicap had become his trademark. Though the book was still an expression of misery, it sold reasonably well and continues to sell still. The critics were harder on it than they had been on his previous books, and even the well-meaning took exception to the inexplicable prose commentary he had added to the poems.

  * * *

  I WAS HAPPY that Aritha van Herk’s J
udith won the inaugural Seal Books First Novel Award in 1978. She was the right kind of writer to become an international star. She was only twenty-five years old and as feisty as her heroine. It was also the right kind of book: an unusual setting (an Alberta pig farm) and a fine literary style. I loved the novel, Jack loved the book and the chance to present the award in a way that would attract maximum attention. Peter Taylor created a giant cheque that hung high on a billboard outside Place Bonaventure so as to provide cameras with a good view both of the presentation and of Jack and Aritha balancing precariously over the attending groups of critics and usually (but not on this occasion) jaded media types. There were publishing offers from around the world.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE last books I worked on at M&S was Landmarks of Canadian Art, edited by Peter Mellen, whose Group of Seven book had been my education in Canadian art. Landmarks was also an outsized, expensive art book with 150 reproductions. Every work was chosen by our specially appointed panel of experts, “each one in the forefront of his or her area of specialization.” As it happened, however, it was a group of warring individualists, each with a different idea of what was great Canadian art.

  The one notable exception to the wars was Jean Sutherland Boggs, former director of the National Gallery of Canada, and Harvard University professor of fine arts. Though she was tough and opinionated, she was also a peacemaker and an enthusiast. She may also have been somewhat preoccupied because she was about to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she wanted the selection settled before she started her new job. Long before then, I’d decided that I couldn’t do it all when it came to publishing—at least not well enough to make sense of my days and nights.

  I told Jack I would quit as soon as he found a replacement. Instead, he wrote me a long letter (September 14, 1978) suggesting a number of scenarios for my future. His preferred option was for me to take over running Seal Books (its corporate name was McClelland-Bantam Limited). While I pondered the options, I would certainly stay both on its board and on the M&S board.

  * * *

  I. David Layton wrote his own book about his improbable childhood, Motion Sickness. In spite of its tough though affectionate portrayal of his mother, Aviva gave the book her wholehearted support.

  II. He had been one of its founders, and though the fair has changed some over the years, it is still an annual event, now called Salon du Livre de Montréal.

  Talking about Feminism

  A YOUNG WOMAN at a recent social event asked whether I was a feminist. I could tell from the slight sneer with which she endowed the word where she stood on this subject. Never one to back away from a fight, I told her that I have always considered women to be equal to men in both intellect and ability.

  The Communist control of Hungarian society made it vital that women worked. My mother was a surveyor, outdoors all winter and summer, away from home for weeks at a time. Her sister Leah was a truck driver. In New Zealand, women were still expected to be at home, though in the countryside they helped run the family sheep farms. My mother, of course, continued to work, but once she got her qualifications confirmed, she was in an office, practicing town planning.

  The late sixties didn’t offer equal opportunities for women. Certain professions and courses of study were off the table, and even in the same jobs, women were paid less than men. I resented being paid less than my male colleagues not only at M&S but also at both Cassell’s and Collier Macmillan. I knew it was unfair but I thought I could live with it, if I was doing something I loved. There were few women in management positions, fewer on corporate boards, and some of us engaged the issues head-on through expressing our ideas openly.

  By the seventies, of course, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was part of our history, as was Germaine Greer’s militantly anti-male The Female Eunuch. Most women, unlike Greer, did not feel we had to hate men to be feminists. Margaret Laurence was a feminist. She publicly supported the Canadian Abortion Rights League, believing that women should have the choice whether to carry a child to term. She believed that women were about equal to men in most respects, except when they were superior. Still, she liked and sometimes loved men.

  In Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t Told, an anthology of women’s writing edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson, there is an essay by Margaret Atwood that captures the era of “garter belts and panty girdles” when there were things that were not openly discussed. “Abortion. Incest. Lesbians. Masturbation. Female orgasm. Menopause. Impotence. Anger . . .” We’ve come a long way since then. “I remember a grand fermentation of ideas,” she wrote. “Language was being changed. Territory was being claimed. The unsaid was being said.” She taught a new course at York University called Canadian Women Writers.

  In her essay “Writing the Male Character,” delivered as the 1982 Hagey lecture at the University of Waterloo, Atwood spoke of what civilization might be without the contributions of men: “No electric floor polishers, no neutron bomb, no Freudian psychology . . .” In her usual ironic tone, she went on to say that “they’re fun to play Scrabble with and handy for eating leftovers.” For the novelist, whose work features male characters, there is the challenge of writing about some men who are “good” but not “weak,” men who are not “rapists and murderers, child molesters, warmongers, sadists, power-hungry, callous, domineering, pompous, foolish or immoral, though I am sure we will all agree that such men do exist.”

  On This Country in the Morning, Marjorie Harris carved out a women’s segment of at least twenty minutes each week to talk about equal pay, equal rights, and even daycare. All my friends were feminists. Marjorie, Sylvia Fraser, Geraldine Sherman, Barbara Frum (though she protested once that the women’s movement was primarily middle-class, for women who could afford the luxury of self-discovery), Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Marian Engel, Doris Anderson, Isabel Bassett, Yvonne Worthington, and of course, the extraordinary June Callwood.

  June was the most polished, least pretentious writer ever to have been hired by Maclean’s. Even Peter Gzowski, who was a tough competitor, admitted that he never lost his admiration for June’s brilliant way with words. She was witty, irreverent, sharp but forgiving. She dressed in pastels. She seemed to have a year-round tan; long, thin legs, usually in slingbacks; blond, flighty hair; and a big smile. She was a seventies feminist, a social activist determined to reach the consciences of people too involved with their own lives to care about others. She dealt with homelessness, drug addiction, AIDS, women, children, and the law. She wrote thousands of magazine and newspaper articles, twenty books, and ghosted a host more, for Barbara Walters, Dr. Charles Mayo, and Otto Preminger among others. She was also a devilishly daring glider pilot—a skill she learned in her late sixties and continued to perfect till she was in her eighties.

  We were friends for more than thirty years. We talked a lot, laughed a lot, and tried to make sense of each other’s passionate engagements. June’s were usually more exhausting and often less rewarding than mine.

  * * *

  BOB FULFORD WAS right in his Saturday Night article in that by the mid-seventies feminism was no longer a fringe movement. There were more women in senior management. We had gained new rights. Some companies wanted to appear progressive by hiring women to serve on corporate boards. But it was slow progress. It was not until the late seventies that I had my first invitations to join corporate boards. In seemingly quick succession, I served on the boards of M&S, M&S-Bantam, Imperial Life, Maritime Life, Peoples’ Jewellers, Doubleday, Alliance Communications, TVO, Ryerson, York University, the Empire Company, Hollinger, and a bunch of charitable foundation boards where at last I wasn’t the only woman. I was appointed to boards because the time was right and, to all appearances, I was a business executive. I had a ringside seat for the takeover of some companies, the struggles for succession in others, the family feuds, and one bankruptcy.

  A lot has happened for women since the seventies. Did we, as some women today argue, adopt patr
iarchal goals? Did we emulate men in our power suits, striving to sit at boardroom tables and in parliamentary offices? We probably did. Certainly the shoulder pads of my blue and yellow suits were a far cry from my old miniskirt outfits, but it was a step that gave women choices. (One photo of me on the cover of a business magazine wearing a yellow suit with seriously padded shoulders made me look like a stuffed canary.) Did white women own the feminism of the sixties and seventies? It seemed that way, but then white men owned the political and business power. We did not, intentionally, exclude women of colour. Doris and June, Sylvia and Margaret did invite them in and some of the time we were successful. But only some of the time. It’s so rewarding today to see a multiplicity of women of all backgrounds finding their own voices and telling their own stories.

  That I became president of a wonderful publishing company—Key Porter Books—in the early 1980s was in large part due to the changes other women had fought for. So, in answer to the young woman’s question about whether I am a feminist, hell, yes, I have always been a feminist and it is time to celebrate our own. But that assessment itself brands me as a second wave feminist. The third wave, as its many advocates declare, is upon us now, and it assumes that previous waves were defeatist, that we bought in to the male mystique. Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women argues that we are still emotionally and physically tortured by our need to look beautiful. The assumption is that our achievements have been “manipulated by those hostile to feminist causes.” She is right, of course, but myths are tough to get rid of and this one has been around for so long, we barely notice the ads and commercials that feed on our insecurities and perpetuate its existence. Still, I am hopeful. We have come a long way, but there is still a long way to go. Each generation of women must find its own way, and my daughters’ generation, and the generation that was born after theirs, is, I am happy to see, redefining feminism and its central issues. It will be up to them to decide where the #MeToo movement will take us. The time is right for naming and shaming perpetrators of sexual aggression, though I fear that some men have been publicly lynched without due process and I resist the push to seeing women as hapless victims. We are much better and stronger than that.