by Anna Porter
Peter Gzowski and Ken remained friends. Natural storytellers, they sparked off each other, they made everyone laugh. They also shared a passion for horses and racing, buying a yearling together for ten thousand dollars, a princely sum for two writers. They had hoped to make a fortune when it was sold. It hadn’t worked out that way. As Peter recalled, Johnny Canuck, the horse, had “lacked heart.” As did the wooden yawl they also bought together. It sank.
I asked Bob Fulford to write the text for our soon-to-be beautiful Canada book. The photographs came from one of the National Film Board Still Division’s favourite sons, John de Visser, who had photographed every part of Canada. He was willing to go back and reshoot anything we felt needed an update.
Ken and I assembled and edited the book. I do not recall much about the process except that we laughed a lot and drank a lot of wine at various eateries along Church and Front Streets, while coming up with captions that didn’t repeat other captions. It’s not surprising that after my immersion in nationalism, the title would be Canada: A Celebration.
The book was published in ten countries in twelve languages, including Serbo-Croatian, and was still more or less in print when I last looked on Amazon. It spawned a line of illustrated books that we published over the years. In fact, it was such a success that at our traditional Key Porter Friday afternoon pub times, we all vied for the silliest illustrated book ideas to which we could append “a celebration” or “a tribute.” But Canada: A Celebration also proved that books about our country could sell internationally and open new doors for Canadian photographers and writers.
It was an exciting prospect.
* * *
I. In 1997 I wrote a mystery set at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Bookfair Murders was that year one of “the books of the fair.” It was later made into a very forgettable TV movie.
II. Bato’s book Life and Death in the Balkans is a fascinating memoir, now published in twelve languages.
III. The Motovun Group still meets but in other countries.
Dudley and Malak
AS I MENTIONED, Dudley Witney and I became friends through his M&S books. After The Barn, I had commissioned The Lighthouse (Alan EdmondsI and I wrote the text) and Summer Places with The New Yorker’s illustrious Brendan Gill. I have no idea how Dudley had talked Brendan into writing the text, let alone spending a great deal of time roughing it in Canada’s cottage country. His natural habitats were New York and East Hampton. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, a Yale graduate, a film and theatre critic, a “Talk of the Town” feature writer, an architecture critic, an attendee at formal parties with celebrities, he had been writing for The New Yorker for more than forty years. He was a patrician presence, tall, thin, with an aristocratic nose and a seemingly inexhaustible store of anecdotes, hilarious and embarrassing stories about people like Dorothy Parker, Buster Keaton, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Plimpton, Georges Simenon, and Man Ray. He was also the author of some fifteen books and an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose buildings he delighted in showing me in New York.
What could have hooked Brendan was the architecture of grand old summer places in the United States—the Biltmore House, Boldt Castle, for example—rather than our prefab in Georgian Bay. But he didn’t complain about the rain, the food, or the narrow bunk beds. Dudley and Brendan became inseparable friends. Dudley was the only outsider at Brendan Gill’s eightieth birthday party and perhaps the last to talk with Brendan about his dying.
* * *
DUDLEY’S NEW BOOK was going to be about ranches. He had cajoled historian and journalist Moira Johnston, with six previous books to her credit, to write the text. Moira, I thought, had been a little bit in love with him, a fate she would have shared with several other talented women of his acquaintance.
Dudley was an unusual man, comfortable anywhere, so long as he liked the company—even when that company was his own. He had spent years living out of a single suitcase, spending nights in friends’ homes or in his car. When he decided to photograph ranches, he drove his ancient Russian Lada throughout the US heartland, where no one had ever seen a Russian car before and few had ever met an Englishman, let alone one with a passion for ranching. He was a hit with the ranchers, as he had been with cottagers, farmers, and lighthouse keepers. He had a mischievous sense of humour and, while he took his work seriously, he was unable to take himself seriously. He became friends with people he found interesting and a few who were almost as unusual as Dudley himself. He spent a lot of time with artist and philanthropist Nelje Doubleday (yes, that Doubleday family) in Wyoming, with novelist Marian Engel in Toronto, with the great bird artist Fenwick Lansdowne in BC, and with us and our daughters in Georgian Bay.
The Ranch: Portrait of a Surviving Dream was designed by Ken Rodmell and edited by Ramsay Derry, a former editor of Robertson Davies, in Key’s cluttered boardroom over coffee and beer, but mostly long discussions about life. Ken, Ramsay, and Dudley were all happy philosophers.
When we were about halfway, Ken prepared a mock-up of the first hundred or so pages—much as M&S had done for The Barn and Roloff Beny’s Persia—and I flew to New York and Boston to see if we could sell US publishers on joining our print run. In the end we presold so many copies to Doubleday that they paid for our entire printing. I remember taking the same presentation to Woodward’s in Vancouver and talking them into taking a chance on a book I feared would be ignored by the Eastern media.
Later we commissioned Dudley to produce Railway Country: Across Canada by Train and An American Journey by Rail. And last, my personal favourite Witney book, The Moorlands of England, the book that took Dudley home to his first love: the landscape that had also inspired the Brontë sisters.
Having established a bit of a base and a reputation, we found it easy to publish Malak Karsh’s Canada: The Land That Shapes Us; The Northwest Passage with Ed Struzik and Mike Beedell; Freeman Patterson’s The Last Wilderness: Images of the Canadian Wild;II Dudley Witney’s Canada: Railway Country and An American Journey by Rail; and Fred Bruemmer’s The Arctic World. Foreign publishers loved our big illustrated books and bought them in large enough numbers that we felt shielded from the unpredictability of the Canadian market.
Even at home, we became known for photographic books. We commissioned Malak Karsh to produce books about Ottawa and the Parliament buildings. Malak was Yousuf Karsh’s less famous but no less talented brother; his images of Ottawa make it seem like a city where you would actually want to live. In the spring he would lie among the tulips to get the best views of the flowers. In the winter he photographed skaters on the Rideau Canal. At eighty-three he was still climbing scaffolding to get close to the Parliament buildings’ gargoyles.
Born in Armenia, bearing the burden of memories that defy Turkish denials of the genocide, Malak was inordinately proud of his adopted country. I remember his induction in the Order of Canada and the celebration that followed in the Senate chamber. “I have had the chance to portray the magnificence of Canada, and something of the indomitable spirit of the people who are fortunate enough to inhabit it,” he said. I knew how he felt.
* * *
I. Yes, the same Alan Edmonds who had starred in Live It Up.
II. Our first printing was 30,000 copies, a significant number even in 1990.
Our Spanking New Premises
THE OFFICES WE moved into after we had outgrown our squatting privileges at Key were on the corner of Church Street and The Esplanade, at the far end of Phil Greey’s block and directly above Brandy’s, a noisy hangout for young men and women looking to hook up after work. The smell wafting upstairs was of stale beer, barbecue sauce, and cheese. The building had been a warehouse, the floors were uneven, and our chairs would roll down the length of the passageway to the stairs if you didn’t plant your feet firmly enough. The rattan window blinds had long since stopped functioning and hung at half mast. The wallpaper in the boardroom was a sort of Arabian pattern of blue and gold, and there were two or three fake garish-green dusty palm tree
s left over from a movie company that had used the premises before us.
There were a lot of mice, a few small rats in the early evenings, and roaches that had been living there for a long time and had no intention of leaving. Once, while most of us were in the boardroom, a ceiling panel fell down, bringing with it a nest of mice, roaches, and a dead bird. Luckily, the rest of the office had no panelling, only the original wooden planks that held up the floor above. We could hear every footstep and some of the conversations from the fourth floor. Having spent a decade at M&S’s Hollinger Road offices, I felt right at home in our shabby surroundings. I was excited to be starting a new publishing company, a bit like an acrobat might feel, flying without a net, doing exactly what I loved to do.
We had a tiny but versatile staff. Lorraine Durham was our first editor. Our first sales manager was Peter Waldock, former president of Penguin Books Canada, who happened to be between jobs. He was well-informed when it came to motivating book buyers. His only problem was that he had put his back out lifting boxes and most days he was proposing new sales approaches while lying on the floor alongside two offices, being too tall to occupy only one doorway.I
Peter was succeeded by Tom Best, scion of the famous printing Bests. I used to travel to Frankfurt with his dad, who always wore a rosebud in his lapel and managed to look elegant even after the eight-hour flight. Tom was charming, lively, and amazingly combustible. When he left, we gave him a brass gavel he could use for whacking the table for emphasis, rather than damaging his hands. He went on to be VP sales at HarperCollins.II
My first secretary-assistant was Gloria Goodman, who had been recommended by Judge Rosalie Abella’s office and proved that judges’ offices could be hilariously funny. She kept me organized and laughing through most of our first tenuous years. Once when I had a German author in my office, she goose-stepped outside my door in an uncanny imitation of John Cleese in Faulty Towers.
Robert Wilkie, formerly of M&S, managed production and our finances and insisted that each of our new manuscript acquisitions had to have a “profit & loss” form attached, showing our expectations—however unrealistic—of the book. He was also an expert proofreader (he’d started as a hot metal typesetter in Edinburgh). Jonathan Webb, editor and former co-winner of the Seal First Novel Award, was an early employee, as was the estimable Krystyna Ross, managing production and design.III
* * *
TED ALLAN USED to say the place had character. He would frequently bring his own lunch while we talked in my office. He would settle between the half-broken springs of my Goodwill discard couch, seemingly undaunted by the bar below’s aromas. He still had his neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard, the quick smile, the fast movements of the hands as he explained or remonstrated, but his shoulders had begun to stoop and he was no longer interested in going to the restaurants on Church Street. “Doctor’s orders,” he said, as he opened the plastic container of his meagre lunch.
It was during those long conversations that he told me about the women in his life. He could never atone for taking his beloved sister to an insane asylum. He talked of his affairs with novelist Doris Lessing, a few other writers and actresses, and his one true love, Gerda Taro. They had met during the Spanish Civil War.
On a bright, sunny day in July 1937, Gerda and Ted went to witness a battle near Brunete, west of Madrid. General Walter of the Republican Thirty-Fifth Division had ordered them to leave, but they didn’t. Gerda was taking pictures as bombs exploded all around them; she photographed planes strafing retreating soldiers, and kept taking pictures, ignoring the bullets and flying rocks, as men were blown to pieces. Ted pleaded with her, but Gerda wouldn’t listen. They finally jumped on the running board of a car. Moments later, a tank veered into the side of their vehicle, throwing Gerda and Ted into a ditch.
Gerda died at dawn the next day.
Ted never recovered.
* * *
ACTOR HUME CRONYN visited only once but everyone wanted to see him and hear his famous voice talking about his magical Ontario childhood, his wife and fellow actor, Jessica Tandy, and the plays they had both been in on Broadway. Our subsequent meetings were all in the New York apartment he shared with Jessica, who frequently corrected his memories. Despite his charm and self-deprecating humour, Hume was every bit the star and he knew it. Years later, he finished writing his memoir, A Terrible Liar. The title, he explained, was his reference to the role memory plays in a memoir. There was going to be a second volume but Hume got busy with television and, I believe, the film The Pelican Brief.
Toronto Star columnist Gary LautensIV used to drop in on his way to work, just to see how we were getting on. In the early nineties we published a collection of his funniest columns: Peace, Mrs. Packard and the Meaning of Life.
Eric Wright would come by and chat with anyone in the so-called reception area, then walk down to my office past the dusty rubber plants to share some snippets of gossip. Eric was chairman of the English department and dean of arts at Ryerson College (now University) for a number of years and he used to bring chunks of his first Charlie Salter mystery manuscript to board meetings when both he and I served on the Ryerson board. Once I had been so engrossed in the manuscript of The Night the Gods Smiled that I inadvertently voted against one of my own motions.
Eric’s mysteries won numerous awards but my personal choice of all his books is the memoir that reads like the best fiction, Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man. He was soft-spoken and loathed all forms of pretension. His Moody’s Tale is a deliciously funny take on pretensions. He had retained some of the humour that got his impoverished working-class family through the worst of times. Out of the ten children, he was the only one who succeeded in getting an education.
Explorer Joe MacInnis showed his underwater slides in the boardroom and former prime minister Joe Clark wrote much of his book, A Nation Too Good to Lose, in the office next to mine. At lunchtime he would ask if someone was interested in joining him at the small coffee and sandwich place on the corner of Front and Church Street. Joe was often accompanied by Livio Copetti, the number two guy in our two-person accounting department. When people recognized him, Joe responded with a small smile. None of the hand-waving bravado of other politicians. Once when a woman at the food counter said to him, “You know, you look like Joe Clark,” he replied, “I know, it’s a burden I have to bear.”
Despite the dust and the noise, the mice and the roaches, there was some magic in those offices: Freeman Patterson, philosopher-artist from New Brunswick, with his soft voice and his sets of magical photographs, ready to show us the beauty you could capture; Dudley Witney on my couch talking about the drama of the moors; and Fred Bruemmer talking about his love of the Arctic. Fred wrote about “its rugged beauty, its haunting loneliness, its infinite space. It has the vastness of the sea, the grandeur of a Bach fugue. The Inuit call it ‘Nunatsiaq,’ the ‘beautiful land’ and it became my second home.” He would write more than a thousand magazine articles and several books about the Arctic and its people.
Fred was, essentially, a shy man who had not been interested in revelations about himself. He hated promotion tours and invasive questions. Yet he was a mesmerizing storyteller. His wife, Maud, once told me about the wonder-filled, happy stories he used to create for his kids—a miraculous feat given his own childhood traumas. The stories, she thought, had brought him close to them, despite his long absences. It took time and persistence for me to talk him into writing Survival: A Refugee Life, a memoir that deals with the sadness and deprivation of his early years, his time as a slave labourer in a Soviet camp, the starvation, disease, the mistreatment. He and his sister had been forced to dig their parents’ grave. Only fifteen years old, shrivelled, emaciated, but determined to live, Fred made his way to Canada. He learned English (he already spoke six other languages), journalism, and photography while working several back-breaking menial jobs.
The Inuit called him “Amarak,” the wolf, lone wolf, because he liked to go for long, icy walks b
y himself. He spent six months of the year in the Arctic, sharing igloos and tents with the locals, tagging along on their hunts, eating the food he was offered, learning about their culture, the animals who shared their land.
He was about sixty then. He had undergone a high-risk heart transplant operation in Montreal, and his new, young heart was struggling with his aging body. He told me he would, finally, write “that book”—if he lived.
* * *
KEY PORTER RAN on an extremely tight budget. Staff, in the early days, often had more than one job. Trying to save a salary, we installed a telephone answering system that could direct calls to the few extensions we had. Then I got this letter from Farley Mowat:
“To the President (if there is a live one, and I begin to doubt it): I have had it with your fucking phone system. Please post a notice that if anyone wants to hear my voice, they will have to call me. . . . I swear I will never again endure the inane babble of your goddamn machines.”
After that, we hired a part-time receptionist who was willing to work for next to nothing in order to be involved in publishing, and Farley decided to come to Key Porter for his next book. One of our early volunteer receptionist-proofreaders, Marion Garner, later became publisher of Vintage Canada.
I hired Susan Renouf for the first time in those early years. I had met her father, the legendary Harold Renouf, when we were both on the Imperial Life board, where I had learned to watch his every small movement because Harold always knew when someone was concealing something. He told me that his daughter was moving to Toronto and could be interested in a job in publishing. She came to us as our first junior editor and remained with Key Porter in a variety of jobs, ending in president. She would leave from time to time to have babies or to try her hand at a different firm, but she tended to return. We have remained friends through it all.
