In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  He stayed married to the woman he had fallen in love with more than sixty years before, and though he may have been the richest man in Canada, he lived in the house they had bought when they first became parents. He saw no reason to change.

  We spent a weekend once on his yacht, Nova Spirit, cruising along the BC coast. There was never a quiet moment. Jimmy loved to hear good conversation and tried to engage his guests in a variety of activities. I suggested he should try “writing” his own book, one giving business advice to future generations, and I made the mistake of mentioning that he might be retiring soon. He looked at me with concern about my sanity: going strong at eighty-four or so, he was excited about some new venture, pleased with the expansion of his Ripley’s franchise, and looking forward to another trip to Walmart’s head office in Bentonville, Arkansas. He liked the way the Waltons operated. I wonder whether he still does.

  I asked Gordon Pinsent, writer of the original Rowdyman, to turn his successful CBC television Christmas special, A Gift to Last, into a novel. He was an accomplished performer, charming, erudite, a fine writer, a delight to watch and listen to, but my God, did he ever find it difficult to finish that book. Alun Davies started suggesting that we should just cancel the contract rather than keep postponing publication. In the end, though, Gordon did deliver and the book was, of course, a national bestseller.

  * * *

  I. By coincidence, in 2003 Julian defended Marian Hebb when Sullivan Entertainment sued her and the Montgomery estate for libel.

  II. Among the Rohmer oeuvre that the indefatigable Jennifer Glossop edited was the unfortunately titled Balls, which made everyone snicker rather than consider Richard’s prescient warnings about the growing reliance on fossil fuels and the possibility of a US grab for Canada’s natural resources.

  III. L. R.’s nickname was Bunny. Her mysteries are being reissued by Felony & Mayhem Press.

  IV. While W.O. was fiction editor of Maclean’s, he also helped Alice Munro, Alistair MacLeod, and Ernest Buckler, among others.

  The Challenge of Being Julian

  IN APRIL 1979, Julian, a busy partner in the firm of Porter and Posluns and already on the Stratford Festival’s board, was elected chairman of the Toronto Transit Commission. I don’t think he realized that both boards faced crisis and that he would be spending more time dealing with them than he could spare from the law. Other than daily complaints from subway and bus—the Avenue Road route!—passengers, many of whose comments were delivered directly to our home, the TTC was manageable. Stratford, not so much. The day of Julian’s first annual general meeting, actor/director Richard Monette shouted “You pig” at the retiring president of the board, a foretaste of interesting times to come.I

  Martin Knelman, theatre and movie critic, cultural commentator, and gossipy wit, would write about the turmoil in The Stratford Tempest, a 1982 book that recounts the events after Julian’s appointment to head the search committee for a suitable artistic director. Suitable, at a time of simmering Canadian nationalism, meant Canadian. Lloyd Axworthy, minister of immigration, Mavor Moore, head of the Canada Council, legendary actors Martha Henry, Hume Cronyn, and William Hutt were all involved in the melee. Julian, always a quick study, decided that the only feasible option was the inspiring, well-qualified, but mercurial John Hirsch.

  Hirsch lived a couple of blocks from our house in Moore Park. He was suspicious of Stratford’s approach because he felt he had been snubbed and insulted by them in the past. Despite that history, Hirsch was flawlessly cordial at their first meeting. Julian took me along for some subsequent meetings because Hirsch too was born in Hungary and, by strange coincidence, had also become a Canadian nationalist. Lean, hirsute, reserved, with a soft Hungarian accent, he offered wine and pretzels but not a hint of being inclined to consider the Stratford position. He believed in nurturing and promoting Canadian talent, not at the expense of excellence but at the expense of the colonial mentality that, he believed, still reigned supreme on Stratford’s board. Julian was so eager to break through Hirsch’s resistance that he overstepped his board mandate and actually offered Hirsch the position, with details to be worked out later. I think they both rather enjoyed the media storm that followed, but it took all of Julian’s powers of persuasion to calm the board.

  In spite of that kerfuffle, Hirsch took the job. He liked the challenge of Stratford at a time when he knew every move he made was going to be scrutinized and, if possible, debunked by his opponents. As Julian had predicted somewhat unconvincingly, the 1981 season was a huge success, due as much to Muriel Sherrin, whom Hirsch imported from CBC drama, as to Hirsch’s own genius. Brian Bedford, Richard Monette, Len Cariou—already stars on stage—added the glamour, as did Nicholas Pennell and Fiona Reid.

  We attended most of the openings, and Julian settled the board down to enjoy the shows. He loves theatre, Shakespeare in particular. He can recite bits of dialogue and soliloquies with as much verve as an actor. The courtroom, where he still did most of his acting, is itself a stage where opposing counsel fight with words before an audience. Julian loved jury trials. I think Hirsch recognized in him a fellow thespian.

  I met festival founder Tom Patterson on one of our Stratford trips. He was keen to reminisce about the early days of the festival, the efforts to persuade the town to allow a festival each summer, his time with Tyrone Guthrie and Alec Guinness. Without their extraordinary talent and the support of the British theatre community—not just the actors, but the experienced costume crew, the dancers, and the stage managers—Patterson felt the festival would never have happened. His memoir, First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival, ghosted by Allan Gould, should be required reading for Stratford’s annual new arrivals, both the talent and the board.

  As for me, I remember Tom every time we are in the Tom Patterson Theatre. The town of Stratford has justified his dream. No longer the failed small town he left behind when he went to fight in the Second World War, it is a major international attraction, site of an inspiring theatrical extravaganza that drew an audience of half a million in 2017. There are plans now for a new Patterson Theatre building. I think Tom would be pleased.

  * * *

  I. Monette himself would be artistic director of the Stratford Festival from 1994 till 2007, and he was unfailingly polite to Julian every time they met.

  Sylvia’s Magic

  SYLVIA FRASER HAUNTS these pages and will, no doubt, continue to be part of my story for as long as my story lasts. She is a novelist, a journalist, an activist and, as June Callwood was, an occasional ghostwriter.

  After our honeymoon in Barbados, Sylvia and Russell shared two more magical holidays with us, one in Bermuda, where we hired scooters, explored small, hard-to-find beaches and the Fourways Inn, and one in Haiti, where we stayed far above the Tonton Macoute–infested city and woke to birdsong.I

  Jack’s insistence that M&S authors take part in over-the-top publicity gambits reached insane proportions when it came to the 1980 launch of Sylvia’s The Emperor’s Virgin. Jack and Sylvia donned togas with gold-leaf crowns and attempted to ride in a kind of gilded chariot drawn by two surprised horses down Yonge Street to the launch party, where she was to be attended by scantily clad young men posing as slaves. Jack was in his element as the emperor, but Sylvia was supremely uncomfortable and exceptionally cold. The whole affair had been meticulously planned by Peter Taylor to coincide with the Ides of March, a dangerous time in Shakespeare’s Rome and an unpredictable one in Toronto. A snowstorm put an end to the chariot ride, and my intrepid friends completed the journey on foot.II

  I had been an early reader of The Candy Factory, a book that, like The Emperor’s Virgin, is still disturbing in its intensity. I sent Sylvia long, detailed memos about its structure, characters, and symbolism, and we spent long nights drinking chocolate liqueur while discussing every aspect of the manuscript.III When he was presenting it at the M&S sales conference, Jack talked about Sylvia’s heightened sensibility. Her perceptions of reality an
d of the inner lives of people were sharp, exacting, searingly honest.

  Berlin Solstice, her fifth novel, was another dark, compelling book set in the grimmest days of the Third Reich. The violence in this novel, perhaps more than in her previous books, foreshadows what she was finally forced to face about the violence in her own childhood. Her perfect marriage would become one of the victims of her desperate struggle to confront that evil.

  “I rarely use the word ‘brilliant.’ I use it now, with respect, about this novel,” wrote Margaret Laurence. “I’d give my left tit to have written Berlin Solstice,” wrote Irving Layton in July 1984: “having a sharp eye for selecting the apt metaphor and revealing detail, she keeps her prose elegant, crisp, and energetic. . . . Even the dullest and the most self-complacent philistine will find it impossible not to be moved.”

  It was on one of those preternaturally bright days well known to people who live in or near the Rockies that Sylvia found out her father was dying. We were at the students’ pay phone, a very public spot under one of the Banff Centre’s buildings. Her mother had just told her the news. It was as if the bottom had fallen out of Sylvia’s world. She was shaking and gagging and unable to talk. I thought at first that it was the shock of a parent’s dying, but it wasn’t. It was the horror of her slowly dawning recognition that her father had abused her as a very young child. It would take some years before she fully confronted that truth. As she describes the experience in My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and of Healing, “When my father died, he came alive for me. A door opened, like a hole cut in the air. It yawned before me, offering release . . .” For Sylvia, it was the beginning of a journey that would reveal the source of her nightmares and allow her long-buried child-self to emerge and reveal itself. She had buried this “other self” deep in her subconscious so she could live a near-normal life.

  In 1984, having disposed of her worldly possessions, she moved to California for two years to write My Father’s House. The full impact of her remembering the sexual abuse that had devastated her childhood was such that Sylvia had to disappear for some months to try to deal with the pain. But she always stayed in touch and I always knew where she was and, mostly, what was happening in her life. The memoir is, like all of Sylvia’s books, unflinchingly honest, horrifying in its details. Since publication in 1987, the book has become a classic. It is taught in some university courses and remains enormously helpful for others who have endured childhood abuse.

  A magazine profile once described Sylvia as “intrepid.” She has travelled down the dark passages of her own past. She also travelled alone into Egypt, India, and South America. She was the first person I knew who had tried ayahuasca—not once but eight times—in the Amazon jungle under the guidance of a shaman. She had gone on this journey of psychic exploration to discover something about the universe and maybe to draw its healing power to herself. As usual, Sylvia abjured all notions of safety. She prefers to fly without a safety net. One Sylvia Fraser book, The Rope in the Water: A Pilgrimage to India, tends to find itself on my bedside table and I still dip into it to remind myself that there may be some magic left in our industrialized world.

  We meet and talk often and, as with all friendships, there are usually some quite banal things to talk about, things like future dinners or movies we both wish to see or wish we hadn’t seen, but I know that under her cheerful good humour, there is a depth of knowledge and understanding of human nature that I can draw on, if I need to. Sometimes, with a close friend, it is easy to forget what attracted you to them in the first place. With Sylvia, that’s never been an issue. That’s why I remind myself never to take her for granted.

  * * *

  I. It is hard to imagine such an idyllic holiday now, after the devastating earthquake and seeing photos my daughter Catherine brought back from her reporting about the catastrophe for the Toronto Star.

  II. I know Sylvia hates this story and the way it keeps reappearing online, but I just couldn’t resist.

  III. There is a five-page memo to Sylvia from me, dated May 29, 1974, in the M&S fonds at McMaster University.

  Trying to Heal the World with Graeme and John and Monte

  THE MOST SATISFYING manuscript I read during my early Seal years was Graeme Gibson’s Perpetual Motion. Determined to include it in Seal’s list, I promoted it to M&S.

  Graeme and I had some strange conversations about why Jack had not offered to publish Graeme’s first book, Five Legs. Graeme’s theory was Jack’s literary tastes did not include innovative writing. My theory, at the time, was that M&S had simply misplaced the manuscript and when it was discovered at the bottom of the slush pile, Jack was too embarrassed to admit it. When I asked Jack about it, he claimed he had not read the manuscript; he could hardly keep track of all submissions.

  By the time the book was published by Anansi in 1969, Dennis Lee had spent months working with Graeme to make sure that it was the best it could be. “He forced me to think more clearly about my intentions, about the implications of my work, than I had previously thought possible,” recalled Graeme about Dennis’s editing.

  We used to go to an uninspiring restaurant on St. Clair Avenue, across from Seal’s equally uninspiring office, and talk about writing and writers, about the Writers’ Union and its aims, about why Graeme had co-founded the Writers’ Development Trust, and his determination to broaden its mandate. He had been a close friend of Scott Symons at a time when Scott needed friends, but Graeme severed their relationship after Scott’s poisonous attacks against women writers, particularly Alice Munro, Marian Engel, and Margaret Atwood, in the 1977 West Coast Review. He was a friend of Matt Cohen’s and interested in Matt’s travels in Europe and the direction Matt’s new novels would take.

  I am not sure what led us into a discussion of Joseph Roth, but I know he was astonished that I hadn’t read The Radetzky March, and he gave me a copy of the book. Roth had been a citizen of the Hapsburg Empire in its dying days, a journalist, novelist, essayist, with an uncanny prediction of the future as he surveyed the crumbling empire. Years later, when I met the last almost-emperor-king, Otto von Hapsburg, in Pocking, a suburb of Munich, I discovered that he too was a Roth fan.

  Perpetual Motion was the story of a man so obsessed with the invention and building of a perpetual motion machine that he destroys everything else that could lend his life meaning. The setting is nineteenth-century Ontario but the scope of the novel is man’s single-minded fascination with machines and industry to the exclusion of nature and humanity. It was an ambitious work that I have returned to from time to time during the years since because the book’s message and its anti-hero’s overweening determination seem like a parable for our times.

  Reviews were mixed. A number of the usual reviewers had no idea what to make of the book. Some gave it a pass, a few attacked it for being dense, Bob Fulford panned it, but those who liked it made up for the others. Graeme and I had become friends along the way. He is generous, warm, a great storyteller. I remember him at our cottage, sitting hunched over in the bunk room our children shared, singing “Greenland Whale Fisheries” to help them go to sleep. An odd choice, I thought, but it worked.

  When he finished writing his next book, Gentleman Death, Graeme’s most moving, saddest, yet most humourous book, he told me he would not write fiction again. He had now said all that he wished to say about the human condition, about creativity, the absurdities of aging, the futility of writing fiction in a world gone crazy, and about mortality. He felt no desire to say more.

  In chapter 10 of Gentleman Death, Graeme’s protagonist writes an average of two hundred words a day. “But here’s the point, in the time it takes me to find my two hundred words over a hundred species of plants and animals become extinct. In case you’re interested, that’s thirty-six thousand a year . . . It’s a sickening thought.”

  It was Graeme who introduced me to John Livingston, whose One Cosmic Instant: A Natural History of Human Arrogance we published at M&S. John explained the titl
e: “one cosmic instant,” assuming a twenty-four-hour clock representing the time of the earth’s existence, is the approximate time of man. Yet—and that was the point of the book—humanity has wrought such devastation on the earth that we will end by destroying it. Our unbridled greed and hubris have led us to believe that we are the sole owners of our cosmos, above all the other life forms which we domesticate or kill in our rush to propagate our own species. As a result we destroy nature and, eventually, ourselves. I did not need convincing. I had seen the plastic, the oil slicks, the dead fish in the ocean and in Lake Huron.

  Later at Key Porter, my next publishing adventure, we published his Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication. The Toronto Star’s reviewer said that “if you buy only one book this decade let it be Rogue Primate.” It won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.

  Graeme, an early supporter of the World Wildlife Fund, also introduced me to Monte Hummel, its executive director. His very modest office was also on St. Clair Avenue. Monte looked like a sixties hippie—long hair, faded jeans, colourful shirt, sandals—and he was utterly committed to conservation of life on earth. He talked very fast, almost breathlessly, of the need to preserve small life-sustaining organisms essential to the eco-system. But it was the large animals that potential funders of WWF found attractive, which was why I suggested a book about polar bears and other Arctic wildlife. It was the first of many books we published as fundraisers for World Wildlife.