by Anna Porter
From Mortal Sins to The Bookfair Murders
MOST OF US never get over our childhoods. While I had acquired Canadian citizenship and a fully formed Canadian identity, those Hungarian phantoms continued to haunt me. My experiences with the Communist criminal justice system, what I had seen of the ’56 Revolution, my memory of the young Russian soldier who died while I was holding his hand, as much as my grandfather’s stories have remained part of who I am. There was no room for those memories in my publishing life, or in the life I had built with Julian and our children, though there was one strange event when Catherine was eight years old.
She had started to sleepwalk. Most nights I would find her wandering along the passageway to the stairs, or trying to open the back door toward the ravine. Julian and I read up on the dangers of waking someone when she or he was sleepwalking; instead we walked with her, making calming noises, and trying to gently steer her back to her bed.
After a few months of sleepless nights, I made an appointment with a child psychiatrist. He was a big, soft-spoken guy with a sunny disposition. Catherine, apprehensive, sat on my lap and watched him intently. About five minutes after we settled in, he got a pile of white paper and an assortment of colouring pencils and told her he would love it if she would draw him some pictures. She got down on the carpet and began to draw. As she was attacking the sheets of paper, he began to ask me about my childhood. He was particularly interested in the times I spent in jail, about the mangled bodies I had seen on the streets of Budapest, and how my mother and I had managed to escape. I kept telling him that the reason we had come was Catherine’s sleepwalking.
An hour later, he told me our session was over, took Catherine’s drawings, and complimented her on her choice of colours and her compositions. “Let me know if you have any more problems,” he said to me.
“Is this it for today?” I asked.
“This should be the end of it,” he said. “You have a very sensitive daughter. And don’t forget she listens even when you are not talking.”
He was right and Catherine never sleepwalked again.
The reason I tell this story is that I had assumed my childhood memories had receded over the years in New Zealand and Canada. They hadn’t and they had a strange way of showing up. There is a mysterious, malevolent figure in Hidden Agenda who is probably Hungarian, and the central figure in Mortal Sins is clearly Hungarian, hiding a terrible secret under a false identity in Canada. The novel turns on how far he and his family are willing to go to hide his true identity and how he had come by it. Both books are also satirical inside stories of the publishing world in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
With my third mystery, The Bookfair Murders, I had a chance to make fun of that Grand Guignol of book events, the annual Bertelsmann party at the Intercontinental Hotel during the Frankfurt International Book Fair. There were five hundred carefully selected guests. The picture I presented with the Bertelsmann wives at one end of the room, and the mistresses at the other, was only a little bit fictional. They actually mingled at the packed buffet tables. The novel’s central story of an author continuing to write her novels after her death because the company publishing her can’t afford to let her be buried was then a bit unusual, but true. Nowadays, the bestselling dead keep producing their books, unapologetically, and the public keeps buying them, as long as they are pretty much the same as the previous books.
I have kept one of the giant red banners List Verlag, German publishers of The Bookfair Murders, displayed over the wide avenue leading to the convention grounds: Mord auf der Buchmesse: Nur List kennt der Tater (Murder at the Bookfair: Only List knows who did it). It’s now the backdrop to one end of our tennis court in Georgian Bay and does a grand job of keeping the wind out.
I dedicated The Bookfair Murders to my eclectic group of book fair friends, a.k.a. the Quasimodo dinner group. It included British agent extraordinaire Clare Alexander, Penguin Australia’s Bob Sessions, Transworld’s Patrick Janson-Smith, Workman’s Carolan Workman, St. Martins’s Tom Dunne, and the inimitable, brilliant wit Les Pockell. Though we were scattered all over the world, we had all grown up in the book business. Frankfurt was our annual reunion. The dinner had one unbreakable tradition. Bob Sessions, at some point, would stand up and tell a long, hilarious, shaggy dog version of a Quasimodo joke. We all knew it so well, we’d call out our beloved turning points or howl with outrage if Bob left out a bit.
It was Les Pockell who, having spent several years in Japan working for Kodansha, was able to initiate me into interpreting Japanese reactions to seeing book projects. They ranged from the mild “very interesting,” meaning “no thank you,” to the more determined “hmm, very, very interesting,” meaning “stop showing me this piece of Western trash,” and the final “hmm,” meaning “I would sooner die than waste one more minute looking at this dreck.” “One more thing,” he instructed. “Do try to look shorter.”
Les’s invaluable advice saved Key Porter’s Polly Manguel and me a great deal of time during selling trips to Japan. One day in Tokyo, there was an earthquake during Polly’s rather spirited presentation. The table and our chairs moved, the chandelier swung, the windows rattled, and Polly and I followed our hosts’ example in pretending not to notice. She mentioned later that it would have been an ignominious way to die.
Polly, who was with Key Porter for a number of years, was a funny and brilliant salesperson. On our international travels we always shared rooms to save money, laughed a lot, listened to each other’s phone calls, and bought each other wine when we felt discouraged or wanted to celebrate. Polly had been married to writer Alberto Manguel. They divorced when he announced that he was gay. Polly liked to talk to all three of their children every day, timing her calls so that they would be home from school.
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TO MY ASTONISHMENT, Catherine announced in 1989 that she wanted to be presented as a debutante at the Helicon Ball in Toronto. Not everyone has heard of the Helicon Ball, and if you are neither a dignitary nor Hungarian, chances are you would not have been invited. It is a somewhat anachronistic old-world ball with long gowns for the women, dinner jackets or traditional Hungarian evening wear for the gents. There is an introductory dance called palotas, performed by energetic young people in colourful embroidered costumes. As far as I could determine, Catherine’s interest in things Hungarian was negligible. She spoke five or six words of the language, hated the couple of times I tried to interest her in Hungarian school (they did folk dancing), and when I took my two daughters to Hungary, she was eager to get home to her friends. Hardly surprising, since she was about eleven at the time, and one of the highlights of my childhood, tiny Lake Balaton, was a huge disappointment after Lake Huron and Lake Ontario.
But now she was seventeen and determined. Julian took waltzing lessons from an abrasive German woman who thought he lacked talent for dancing. Catherine looked spectacular in her white, layered lace gown (I wish we had kept it). I have a photograph of her practicing her curtsy for her presentation to Lieutenant-Governor Lincoln Alexander, her father grinning sheepishly at her side.
As the psychiatrist said, Catherine had listened even when she seemed not to be listening—and even when I wasn’t talking.
Five Years of Struggle to Come to Terms with an Illusion
WHEN MARCUS WILHELM was moved to the United States to take over the American Doubleday book clubs, he was replaced by a numbers man from Bertelsmann’s head office in Gütersloh with no interest in the clubs’ Canadian selections. Commitments that had been made in the United States were to be honoured in Canada, even when the books seemed quite unsuitable to our audiences. Every Canadian selection was a battle, and the bundles of Canadian classics that Susan Renouf had introduced into the program no longer fit the systems Bertelsmann had developed.
I remember meeting for breakfast in Frankfurt with international book club boss Dr. Walter Gerstgrasser, who informed me that, while deviations for each country were acceptable, overall directio
n had to come from the men (yes, they were all men) who had developed the clubs and had grown them to more than 25 million members worldwide. It was Gerstgrasser who introduced me to Karsten Dietrich, in charge of France Loisirs, the French club, Bertelsmann’s most successful book club enterprise at the time. Karsten was sympathetic to what I had been trying to do in Canada, but he told me the kinds of changes would be viewed more favourably by the bosses if I was working for the book clubs full-time. It turned out that there was no love lost between the clubs and the publishing divisions.I
I used to visit Alberto in New York: he rarely came to Canada. Our discussions about Doubleday Canada were cordial but infrequent. The 1980s recession had been tough on the booktrade both sides of the border. He reminded me that the real value of Doubleday Canada was in its right to sell books produced in the United States, and as long as those sales continued to be at least ten per cent of the American market, there would be few problems. Canadian books were a negligible part of their overall income, but as long as they didn’t lose much money, there was no harm in them. He said he thought it had been wise that I had hung on to Key Porter. At least it was something I could have real influence over. That could never be the case with Doubleday. As for the Canadian government’s protectionist policies, he believed that phase would pass. Canada needed American investment and increased trade with the United States. He saw no sense in nationalism—not even of the benign Canadian variety.
Alberto had little interest in individual authors. He was a businessman. His job—and it was a big job—was to steer the company right in troubled waters and make sure everyone did their work for the benefit of the corporation.
I am not sure how the partnership lasted five years. I was constantly exhausted, worried, beleaguered by too many demands and looking for a way out of my multiple roles. My usually laid-back staff was complaining. No one understood why certain books would be published by Key Porter and others by Doubleday. I had lost track of where Seal fit into the overall plan. Or whether there was even an overall plan. My original idea of Doubleday’s performing sales and warehousing functions for Key Porter had gone down the drain and I now realized that there was never going to be an independent Doubleday Canada. As far as Bertelsmann was concerned, all parts of the puzzle had always been intended to fit into the large Bertelsmann group—publishing on one side, book clubs on the other. I knew I had to get out of the partnership.
Bantam Doubleday Dell and I parted ways reasonably amicably when I invoked the “buy-sell” clause in our original agreement. I am not sure which one of us was more relieved, Alberto or me. We managed to remain cordial, though mutually suspicious. From time to time I visited him in his swish New York offices. Occasionally he still invited me to lunch. As did Marcus Wilhelm, who had taken over all of Bertelsmann’s US book clubs but complained that the fun had gone out of the mail-order business as well as his own life. The pressure was unrelenting and the top honchos were unwilling to admit that there were crucial differences between the Bertelsmann model for book clubs and how American buyers operate.
After the end of my Doubleday adventure, we also sold Key Porter’s shares in Seal Books to Bantam Doubleday Dell. When I was asked why, I answered that I gave up on it for the same reason I had given up skiing. It wasn’t going to get any better.II “It hadn’t worked for Jack and it wasn’t going to work for me.” Bantam’s administrative overhead charges, their destruction of all returns and unsold books, their approach to write-downs was never going to work for a small, nominally independent company such as Seal. “Nominally” is, indeed, how it felt when Bertelsmann decided to exercise their option to buy our shares. There was no chance that we could bid competitively in the terms of the buy-sell agreement we had signed when Key Porter bought the majority of Seal shares.
After all that struggle, it was a relief to return to Key Porter full-time. Even the dusty overhead beams looked good.
Alberto Vitale had been appointed president of Random House in 1989. He was given a much larger office with a much better view and an expense account that had no difficulty stretching to expensive lunches at the Four Seasons Restaurant’s inner sanctum, where waiters were eager to usher him to what I assumed was now his usual table.
The last time I saw Alun Davies, he had retired, but he still knew all the gossip about everyone important in the book business. He let me take his small white dog for a walk in a nearby park.
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I. It was only in Canada, and only because of the government’s policies on takeovers, that the clubs and the publishing division produced combined year-end financial statements. The whole exercise drove the Bertelsmen crazy.
II. Roy MacSkimming quotes this in The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers (McClelland & Stewart, 2003).
Saving the World, One Book at a Time
EVER SINCE MY mid-teens, I have been an environmentalist. It started with too many imported rabbits and the clear-cut, eroding mountainsides in New Zealand. Then, in 1965, my stepsister Ines and I sailed from Sydney, Australia, to Naples, Italy. There were islands of floating plastic debris, the stench of dead fish, and as we entered the Indian Ocean, oil slicks. Years later, I listened to the Indigenous people in Haida Gwaii off the coast of British Columbia talk about their success in stopping the forestry companies’ clear-cuts. I wrote an article about “the ghosts of Haida Gwaii” for The Globe and Mail. In the Pacific Ocean there had been mounds of cans, bits of netting, and plastic bottles rolling in with the waves. I had been on the board of the Young Naturalist Foundation with Mary Anne Brinckman and Annabel Slaight, working out ways to engage kids in the battle to save what would soon be their own world.
In Georgian Bay, clams have been replaced by zebra mussels. Our shoreline is often lined with soapsuds, and the carp that used to mate at the back of the island every spring are gone. I believe John Livingston’s thesis that we are on the verge of destroying our own planet. And I believed Farley Mowat when he told me we were, ourselves, on the path to extinction. Both John and Farley blamed our own, all-too-human greed.
Ever since I first met Monte Hummel, I had been eager to support the World Wildlife Fund. Monte and I planned books both as fundraisers and to focus attention on the need to preserve what we still had of the natural world. In the early days we spent hours plotting approaches to corporations for funding and to governments to set aside protected areas for wildlife. Monte was a great advocate. He had an unfailing memory for the facts, the numbers, the spaces—“You can’t save species without saving spaces”—where we still had a chance to make a difference. There was one memorable telephone meeting with a Progressive Conservative federal minister who didn’t even listen to our full pitch before he said, “You’ve got it, Monte.”
After Arctic Wildlife and Polar Bears, Key Porter published WWF’s Endangered Spaces: The Future of Canada’s Wilderness, a call for action to preserve Canada’s natural heritage. It set out a plan to claim 39 million hectares of land for parks and wilderness areas, including Wapusk south of Churchill for polar bears, Ivvavik in the Yukon for caribou, grasslands for prairie wildlife in Saskatchewan, South Moresby for marine species. Our petition collected more than a million signatures. It was a monumental effort, in part organized and paid for by Glen Davis, millionaire son of Nelson Davis of Canadian Establishment fame.
Glen was a naturalist, an explorer of wilderness areas, a big, ruddy-faced man who enjoyed canoeing with friends, and wearing Mountain Equipment Co-op clothes, Tilley hats, and red sweatbands, drinking beer, and eating burgers. He lacked every kind of pretension and had little use for his fortune, except for what good it could do. There was not much he didn’t know about endangered spaces and species. We used to meet at Biagio’s on King Street, and later with Monte and WWF staff in the Granite Brewery at Eglinton and Mount Pleasant. That was where we planned the caribou book, published by Dundurn after I had left Key Porter.I
Glen was consistently kind. Knowing that environmentalists made little money, h
e used to buy Elizabeth May’s formal outfits for meetings with government functionaries. Elizabeth, later the Green Party leader, was then executive director of the Sierra Club. I was very fortunate to have known Glen.II
We published Elizabeth’s At the Cutting Edge: The Crisis in Canada’s Forests, survived two lawsuits launched by forestry companies, and continued to take our chances with her How to Save the World in Your Spare Time. Elizabeth is both a passionate advocate and a witty companion who always makes a distinction between the seriousness of her subject and her own rather modest Cape Breton self. We used to joke about retiring to Nova Scotia, a couple of addled old ladies with not much to do but read books and lecture the locals on how life used to be. Nova Scotia, we both believed, is more tolerant of addled old ladies than other parts of Canada. It’s a joke—or was it a plan?—I also shared with Susan Renouf, who hails from Nova Scotia and has more reason than I have for being in love with the place.
* * *
SINCE JACK WAS no longer part of M&S, and Farley Mowat felt no loyalty to Avie Bennett, he decided to publish with Key Porter. In the past, we had weathered many publishing storms together, travelled together on a few of M&S’s mad promotional tours, and shared concerns for Jack’s health and well-being. Publishing Farley has remained one of my best memories of this crazy business, and I still cherish some of his late books: My Father’s Son, for example, Born Naked, and High Latitudes. His ferocity had not softened during the years since the publication of his first book—People of the Deer—at M&S.
As Margaret Atwood wrote in her introduction to High Latitudes: “His rage can be Swiftian, his humour Puckish, but his compassion for creatures great and small has been consistent. . . . The fact that he’s grinning like a goat should fool no one: he has always been a deeply serious and intensely committed writer.”
