In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  His The Miracle Game and The Engineer of Human Souls are among the best, most enduring books in world literature. Both are set in Czechoslovakia under occupation, and although Engineer’s Smiricky leaves his native land, he carries his country with him. Both books are deeply rooted in human relationships. Josef’s Lieutenant Boruvka novels were wonderfully realistic, hilarious, engaging, and, for me, full of the daily idiocies that characterized living under Communism. Very Central European. When I was a child, I had read Jaroslav Hašek’s famous satire The Good Soldier Schweik in Hungarian and loved it. Boruvka was the good soldier Schweik’s Soviet army successor.

  Josef and Zdena started 68 Publishers in Canada specifically to publish writers who could not be read at home. Josef was soft-spoken but determined, gentle but with a will of iron. When he disagreed with a particular editorial comment, he would become quite taciturn. In one of his letters to me about such comments, he asserted that his way of presenting his story was exactly the way he wished to present it, and while he appreciated our editor’s comments, he was not going to change anything. Naturally, I acquiesced.

  In our long, meandering conversations, we used to talk about how the role of writers living in totalitarian countries differs from that of writers who live in democracies, such as Canada. There was, he believed, a moral obligation that writers in Central and Eastern Europe shared: that of being witnesses to the crimes committed by their rulers. However, in order to stay alive, they, though all their readers knew the truth, had to disguise what their characters perceived. Thus they shared perilous secrets with their audience—secrets the regime suspected but couldn’t prove. That’s why writers are considered dangerous in countries with no free speech.

  Josef had a talent for being very still and suddenly bursting into laughter. In some ways an anachronism, a light-hearted, jazz-loving Bohemian in the rather barren Canadian university landscape—he taught creative writing—he was a great writer who had landed quietly in our midst and enjoyed not being recognized.

  In Prague he would have been stopped in the streets and hugged and begged for autographs, as he was during his infrequent visits after the Iron Curtain was raised in 1989. He showed me a video of his trip to Náchod, Bohemia, his old hometown—meeting people he had known in his childhood, a dinner in his honour, speeches, compliments—but he was suspicious of some of the people who had come to celebrate him. Some of them had been Nazi sympathizers, some had been Státní bezpečnost (Czechoslovakia’s singularly nasty state police) informers. He felt uneasy in Prague even while autographing books for adoring fans. Now he viewed the video with a mixture of pleasure and wry amusement.

  He didn’t want to go back. He said he preferred teaching at the University of Toronto, where no one cared that he was a famous Czech writer. There is a hilarious short story, “According to Poe,” included in his When Eve Was Naked. Josef is teaching a class of would-be writers. While listening to their creative work of unvarnished pornography—they mistakenly believed that he had asked for a “lovemaking story,” not a love story—Josef reflects on his own rather more restrained efforts at lovemaking when he was about the age of his students.

  “Money-Grubbing Has Become Respectable”

  WHEN I WAS interviewed by Maclean’s in 1986, I mentioned how much Canadians’ attitude to business had changed in the years since I had arrived. “Money-grubbing has become respectable,” I said. Peter Newman’s blockbuster gossipy business books would not have been of such overwhelming interest to ordinary folk in the fifties or sixties, but business leaders had somehow acquired star quality. Key Porter had started early in publishing business books.

  Diane Francis, then a lead columnist for the Financial Post, Maclean’s, and the Toronto Sun, gave us a slew of entertaining business books, including Bre-X: The Inside Story and Immigration: The Economic Case. Sandy Ross of Canadian Business used to stop me on my way through the Key Publishers’ rabbit warren to tell me about new developments in the Southam family saga—a story he relished and had hoped to write one day—and Conrad Black became a poster guy for second-generation success with his purchase of Argus Corporation, rising to international media fame with his acquisition of the UK’s Daily Telegraph.

  The National Business Book Awards were launched in 1985. Peter Foster’s The Master Builders, about the Reichmann family empire, was our contender in 1986, and Ken Lefolii’s Claims: Adventures in the Gold Trade, about mining and the unusual cadre of people who prospected for, invested in, and speculated in gold, won in 1987. Conrad Black’s A Life in Progress was a finalist in 1993.

  Conrad, by then, presided over a major newspaper conglomerate, Hollinger Inc. I was, for a short time, a director of Hollinger and later of Argus Corporation. Hollinger was, by far, the most fascinating board I had been on, though I had found Maritime Life, Empire Company, Alliance Communications, and Peoples Jewellers interesting and sometimes challenging. Argus was Conrad’s holding company but meetings were attended by, among others, Paul Reichmann and His Eminence Emmett Cardinal Carter.

  Conrad was probably the only board chair who had no illusions about the book business when he asked me to join the Hollinger board. Most of the meetings were held in the boardroom at 10 Toronto Street, whose door had served as the cover of Peter Newman’s The Canadian Establishment. I looked forward to the discussions of newspapers, the political situations in the United States and the UK, in Australia and Israel (Conrad had also bought the Jerusalem Post), and had a ringside seat at the Daily Telegraph’s newspaper price war with News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch, the take-no-prisoners Aussie proprietor of the London Times and much else besides. The Times, trying to beat the Telegraph’s circulation, had assumed that aggressively lowering the price of its papers would do it. When that didn’t work, they inserted free Eurostar tickets into each copy of the Saturday paper. Conrad was, in the end, forced to lower his own paper’s price.

  I loved listening to Conrad’s erudite, often ornate, and sometimes very funny review of his empire and its enemies.

  Now and then I noted words I had never used and never heard anyone else use, a great deal more fun than the jargon of life insurance. (I had planned to commission an actuaries’ joke book, but fortunately never got around to it.)

  I attended days-long Advisory Board meetings that included people like David Brinkley, William F. Buckley, Lord Carrington, Henry Kissinger, billionaire financiers Lord Rothschild, Gianni Agnelli, and Jimmy Goldsmith, economist and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, global strategist and US presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and George F. Will. I once had a fascinating conversation with Brzezinski about the long-term effects of quick, painful economic reforms in Poland and the economic outcome of the end of the Soviet Union. Already, he had predicted Russian efforts to reestablish a sphere of influence to mirror the former Soviet empire.

  Another time when I attended the advisers’ meetings with a broken leg, Lady Margaret Thatcher helped me to the washroom. While I hobbled, she talked with admiration about the United States’ having been founded on idealism and about civilization being in peril “as long as brutal forces of enslavement walk the earth.” She was the least guarded politician I have met. The current state of the European Union, unfortunately, confirms her fears of what would happen if you tried to force together disparate nations with different objectives.

  Conrad’s A Life in Progress has a wonderful jacket: black-on-black elegant, minimalist but striking. It was designed by the preternaturally talented Scott Richardson,I who also designed Farley Mowat’s second Key Porter book, Born Naked. It would be difficult to invent two people less alike than Farley and Conrad, or two books less alike than their memoirs. I think it says something interesting about Key Porter that we proudly published both. We were eclectic in our choices and, apart from our environmental dedication, not particularly ideological.

  A Life in Progress, while offering interesting portraits of Henry Kissinger, Brian Mulroney, Lyndon Johnson, and Margaret
Thatcher, is revealing about the private Conrad Black. Since then, he has published eleven more books, including his epic work on Roosevelt, a controversial biography of Nixon, a second autobiography, and his history of Canada. He ultimately sold his company’s interests in the Southam papers to Izzy Asper, founder of CanWest Global Communications, in what Peter Newman billed as “the largest media transaction in Canadian history.”

  In 1998 we published a new, shortened edition of Conrad’s Duplessis as Render unto Caesar: The Life and Legacy of Maurice Duplessis.

  * * *

  IN 2003, NEW York investment firm Tweedy, Browne initiated an investigation into Hollinger’s management practices. Initially Conrad welcomed the special committee and its chairman, Richard Breeden. All corporate files and papers would be open to them, he said. He was confident, he told me, that the company’s books were in order. The special committee’s report, however, accused Hollinger’s chief shareholders of “corporate kleptocracy” and initiated a suit against them for inappropriately acquiring Hollinger assets.

  I followed the course of Conrad’s trial in Chicago closely and thought American justice had failed—as it has failed in many other cases (except on television). A hallmark of the US system is a ninety-nine per cent conviction rate, ninety-seven per cent without a trial. So, just this about Conrad’s case: his persecutors lacked the one essential ingredient for a fair trial: credible proof of wrongdoing. They abandoned three of seventeen counts against him even before the trial began. One more was abandoned during the trial. The jury discarded a further nine counts. Eight justices of the US Supreme Court threw out four more counts. When the Chicago appeal judges were left to reassess these four convictions, the court either had to abandon the case or try to make something stick. Two charges stuck: one for improperly receiving $285,000 from the sale of newspapers, even though corporate files showed that matter had been approved by the audit committee and the board; the second was for obstruction of justice. Conrad had removed thirteen boxes of his papers from his former Toronto office. The prosecution claimed that he had done so furtively, and in contravention of a Canadian court order. In fact, he removed them in broad daylight, under his own security cameras, having announced his intention to do so. Furthermore, there was no Canadian court order forbidding him to remove his papers.

  Conrad spent three years and two weeks in jail. He was a model prisoner, witty even about his incarceration and polite to the men who shared his fate. He taught history and English and French grammar to inmates who wished to pass exams, and he learned first-hand how the US justice system discriminates against blacks and the poor—“the US system of injustice,” he called it.

  In A Matter of Principle, published in 2010 by M&S, he recounts the events leading up to his incarceration, the members of the Special Committee charged with discovering what, if any, wrongdoings there had been under his leadership of Hollinger, the trial in Chicago, the appeals, and his time in prison. Meanwhile Hollinger’s value (about $2 billion) disappeared. Conrad accused his accusers: “Court-protected charlatans took $100,000 a month in directors’ fees each and rifled the treasury for their own benefit.”

  Conrad returned to Canada and continues to write columns for the National Post and National Review, and though there are those who still insist he acted with unenlightened self-interest while running his companies, he is practically mobbed by well-wishers and admirers at social events. In 2011 he sued members of the Special Committee for libel and accepted a $5 million settlement.

  * * *

  I. Scott himself, as C. S. Richardson, wrote two novels, one of which, The End of the Alphabet, should be read by everyone who is planning a trip to Paris.

  The Last Decade of the Last Century

  DISASTER HIT IN 1995, when book superstores came to Canada and I first met Larry Stevenson. He was a tough-talking, Harvard-educated former paratrooper with no particular love for books: he once mentioned to me that he could have run any other business just as successfully and with a whole lot fewer complaints. With a group of venture capitalists he had taken over Smithbooks, which already owned the Classics chain, then added Coles to create a mega-chain of bookstores across Canada—all with his own brand: Chapters. His strategy, as he explained to those of us still mired in old-world publishing practices, was to modernize the industry. That included building superstores with children’s play areas and coffee outlets on the American model and demanding payments for “placement,” meaning if you wanted your books to be seen, you had to pay extra. What he didn’t mention openly was his intention to replace all independent bookstores with slick marketing and deep discounts on bestsellers at the publishers’ expense. He installed former Ontario premier David Peterson as chair of the board perhaps to distract regulators’ attention from applying the government’s own competition rules.

  Larry’s strategy took a couple of years to gel. Meanwhile, he badgered, threatened, and sweet-talked us into staying quiet. The early orders for the new superstores helped to quell our fears. But worse was to come.

  In 1995 the Ontario government under Premier Mike Harris cancelled the loan guarantee program that had been Lester Publishing’s main support with its bankers. Not unrelated to that fact, Key Porter’s bank—bankers don’t see books as assets—decided that our operating loan was too generous and our security insufficient. They demanded repayment at about the same time as we had doubled in size. Sadly, after only five years, our partnership with Malcolm ended on a grim note and Lester Publishing was wound up.

  Margaret Atwood, having listened to my whining, decided to give us a little gift that could help cheer us up during the bad times. She wrote a hilarious fractured fairy tale: Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut. Maryann Kovalski illustrated what was, up to then, our most successful kids’ book at home and internationally. Since the book was also a celebration of the letter P, as in “Princess Prunella was proud, prissy and pretty,” she also gave me a P poem to accompany the manuscript. I still have it framed on my office wall:

  AttemPting

  to Preserve Pretty, Personable

  Porter’s Precarious Publishing enterPrize,

  Petite Penperson Peggy Propels

  Herself Personally right over the toP

  And is Pronounced Possibly Potty.

  She went on to write Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, another hilarious alliterative masterpiece, this one about a boy called Ralph. Illustrated by Dušan Petričić, the book enjoyed several printings, with the intrepid Margaret’s reading in libraries and bookstores to oceans of kids and their curious parents. She ended her alliterative kids’ lit project at Key Porter with Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda, a particular favourite of my youngest grandchild, Violet.

  But I still think the end of the last century was Larry’s, and I still blame us publishers for our acquiescence. In 1999 he named his warehouse and distribution centre Pegasus and announced it was a wholesaler and would, therefore, be entitled to the same discounts we offered to other wholesalers: fifty per cent. Imagining that he was actually interested in my advice, I agreed to go on the Pegasus board. It never met. Unsold book returns from shipments to Chapters hit sixty per cent of sales, and Chapters stopped paying our invoices in anticipation of more returns from future shipments.I By then, whatever collegial relationship we thought we had with Chapters had vanished. That year The Globe and Mail Report on Business declared Larry Stevenson Canada’s “Man of the Year.”

  That was also the year I called Larry to tell him that our new Allan Fotheringham book, Last Page First, had been stuck for three weeks somewhere in his commodious warehouse or in the massive tractor-trailers waiting outside, victims of his firm’s growing inability to process its own orders. Since Allan was touring the country, I could assure Larry that he would mention why his books were not in Chapters stores. Larry’s usual belligerent response hit operatic scales: Julian in the next room could hear him shouting at me on the phone. He threatened he would have his staff return every Key Porter book
they could find in his stores, his warehouse, or in those trailers. It’s what he did to Lionel Koffler’s Firefly Books, when Lionel refused to give Chapters the terms Larry demanded. Lionel paid for his courage with more than one million dollars’ worth of returned books. Allan MacDougall, another M&S graduate, now running Raincoast Books in Vancouver, was more successful in resisting Larry’s demands, but then Allan had Harry Potter to perform his magic for him. The first two Harry Potter books had sold more than a million copies each in Canada, and the third, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was released in 1999.

  The rest of us were not so brave.

  Our bank, generally skittish about granting operating loans to book publishers, moved us to its “watch” list and demanded both personal guarantees and an additional one million dollars of “key person” insurance to keep them onside. I remember the moment one of the young banking executives looked at me and said, jocularly, “At this point, Ms. Porter, you are worth more to us dead than alive.”

  Michael de Pencier, who had remained steadfast throughout our struggles, began to suggest that we search for a way out.

  * * *

  I. Unlike most merchandise, books in Canada are sold fully returnable to all retail outlets.

  Farley: The Next Chapter

  THE DECADE HAD already become a disaster when Farley Mowat’s bestselling Never Cry Wolf and People of the Deer were used by journalist John Goddard to launch an attack on Farley in Saturday Night magazine. It was 1996 and Farley was seventy-five years old. I felt responsible because we had arranged the interview with Goddard as part of our promotion of the new book, Aftermath—Farley’s memoir of his travels after the “charnel house of mud and rain and shells and death” that was the Second World War.