Over the next thirty years (up till 2010’s The Master of Happy Endings, which I, in my semi-retired state, did not publish) Jack has brought out other fine novels and short stories that combined comedy and tragedy. He won his share of prizes and recognition, becoming both a Member of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Yet even as he continued to bring out “sprightly” books that were distinctive in tone and subject matter, his book sales never really took off in the way I believe that they merited. All too often his new books received reviews like this one, for his 2003 novel, Distance: “Without equivocation, Distance is the best novel of the year, an intimate tale of fathers and sons with epic scope and mythic resonances. . . . A masterwork from one of Canada’s too-little-appreciated literary giants.”
That review by the writer/bookseller Robert Wiersema ran, significantly, in the Vancouver Sun. And you, dear reader, may be wondering why the book never came to your attention — and why you have missed so many of Jack’s books. You should know that the question baffles me, his editor and publisher, too.
One explanation may lie in the fact that the best book of criticism of his work — On Coasts of Eternity, edited by J.R. (Tim) Struthers, which I recommend to everyone wishing to know more about Jack and his work — was well-published by a Vancouver Island press, Oolichan Books, with a fine Vancouver Island painting by the famous Island painter E.J. Hughes. I wonder if all this is significant. Somewhere along the line, I believe, the Canadian literary establishment decided that Jack was “a regional writer,” rather than a writer from a solid regional base who used it to draw fictional messages that could apply anywhere. So it may well have been significant that it was the Vancouver Sun that ran a review calling him a “too-little-appreciated literary giant.”
I have two theories for why this damaging change (which others may claim never occurred) took place. One is the fact that in 1994 the Giller Prize appeared on the scene. There is no doubt that Jack Rabinovitch’s brilliant annual tribute to his wife Doris Giller has been a wonderful thing for Canadian writing. But it has changed the landscape for our fiction writers. If you are among the five writers nominated for the Giller, you’re in luck, and booksellers and reviewers and interviewers will be all over you, as ordinary Canadians hotly debate the merits of your book and its rivals. The process is magnified ten-fold for the lucky winner — and I have published half a dozen of them over the years, and know the impact well.
But if you are the author of a book of fiction that is not short-listed, you might as well not have published it. Potential interviewers melt away, attention dies, nobody cares. Your book is written off. This happened several times to Jack. His 1998 novel, Broken Ground, for example, won the Drummer-General Award, given each year by A Different Drummer Bookstore to the excellent book most unjustly neglected by the juries of the big literary prizes.
To make matters worse, Jack was now “a regional writer,” from the wrong damned region. Thanks, largely, to the work of Alistair MacLeod (ironically, one of Jack’s greatest admirers) writers from Atlantic Canada became the new flavour of the decade. To make matters even worse, the Canadian fiction world seemed to become steadily more Toronto-centric. As the man who once jokingly told a magazine writer that Jack’s literary roots are so strong that “If he ever moves off the Island I’ll kill him,” I watched morosely as — to take just one example — David Adams Richards moved to Toronto and saw his career take off. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Who knows? I have nothing against Dave — I like him and wish him well — but all my editorial life I have fought against the idea that you need to move to Toronto to hit the literary big time, and maybe I was wrong.
That certainly was the burden of my talk to the 2008 conference organized in Vancouver by Alan Twigg to celebrate B.C. writing. I rained on the parade by apologizing to Jack (who was uneasily present) for my bad career advice, lamenting the fact that the mountains separating B.C. from the rest of Canada seemed to have increased in height in recent years, at least in the mind of the central Canadian publishers. Amidst the general scandalized reaction, it was forgotten that B.C.’s Daniel Francis, discussing the non-fiction scene, later made exactly the same observation, lamenting that Doug Gibson had “stolen my thunder.”
One of the reasons that I have loved publishing Jack is because he soon became a lightning rod for Appalling Author Promotion Tales. This section will be devoted to examples of the sort of humiliations endured by authors promoting their book — at readings, autographings, or other public events.
When Jack won a prize for Spit Delaney’s Island he was flown to Halifax to be the guest of honour at the Canadian Authors Association AGM. When Jack shyly turned up at the evening cocktail party reception he was greeted with cries of “Ah, there you are!” and “Thank goodness you’re here,” and propelled behind the bar. He was instantly too busy filling drinks requests and mixing inexpert cocktails to explain that he was not the barman. The charade went on for the entire party, not helped by Jack’s liberal hand with the martinis, and the next day the conventioneers were openly surprised that the award had been won by the inefficient barman.
On another occasion Jack was invited to read at a high school. The frightening PA announcement just before lunch went something like this. “The bell will ring in a few minutes. You will go to the gymnasium to meet . . . (very, very long pause) . . . a writer.”
What Jack learned when he showed up was that the reading would be given in the gym to the ten resentful kids who weren’t fast enough to get away. They sat scowling on the bleachers and Jack stood on the gym floor, trying to read loudly, while the basketball team noisily practiced alongside. Bam, bam, bam, squeak, swish, bam, bam, bam, bam.
In A Passion for Narrative he tells of doing a Canada Council reading tour in the Yukon, which at one point involved a flight in a bush plane over herds of migrating caribou. A pickup truck took him north from the airport, the driver warning him that the population of the mining town would be, you know, down the mine, but the librarian would no doubt have arranged an audience. The library, however, was locked up, and they had to chase around the village for a key. In the end, his audience consisted of one person, “the Anglican priest, dressed in full regalia, as though for a wedding or funeral . . . The minister sat in the middle of the front row, trying very hard to look big. Just as I opened my book to start reading to him, a wide smile spread across his lips. ‘Now you know what it’s like to be me every Sunday morning in this place.’”
While we’re on the subject of religion, in Canada the only type of authors who can be guaranteed good treatment by everyone on the book promotion trail are hockey players. Montreal veteran sports writer Red Fisher summed up an important part of my life as a Canadian publisher with his book title Hockey, Heroes, and Me (1994).
When we published Jean Béliveau’s memoirs, for instance, the response was so overwhelming, with crowds turning up at every event across the country, that in Winnipeg he ran out of steam and Avie Bennett flew out to encourage him to keep going. He appreciated our help to the extent that when I came across him, years later, at the Montreal Salon du Livre signing autographs for a worshipful lineup of hundreds, and he spotted me lingering nearby, Jean Béliveau stood up and walked across to greet me as “Mr. Gibson,” shaking me warmly by the hand. Meanwhile, the awestruck crowd racked their brains to remember which NHL team I owned.
Gordie Howe was even more personal. Once, at a cocktail party he playfully announced his presence by moving up beside me, on my blindside, gently checking me with his hip. Now Gordie is renowned for mysteriously getting bigger the more clothes he takes off, and I can report that when he gives you even a friendly check, you stay checked. It was like having a building move against me.
We worked with Gordie and his wife Colleen on the book After the Applause (1989), by Charles Wilkins. Colleen was such an active force promoting Gordie’s interests that she never stopped talking. As in never. It was a
real problem, but Ken Dryden (and you’ll find my encounters with him in my Paul Martin chapter) shrewdly noted that by behaving in such a demanding fashion, “Colleen lets Gordie be Gordie” — the amiable, slow-talking, beloved hockey icon from Saskatchewan.
Bobby Orr is in a class by himself. He once helped us with a picture book about the NHL by providing a foreword. I drove from downtown Toronto to a Mississauga mall for a book signing that was due to start at 7:30. But as I drove in at 6:30, something was terribly wrong in the mall, with parking unavailable and the roads jammed. Even getting into the bookstore was bewilderingly hard — and then I realized that the hundreds of people standing in a line snaking through the store and out of the door into the parking lot were there to meet Bobby.
My role was to stick with him and make sure that the line of autograph seekers moved along efficiently, with nobody taking up time to babble endlessly at their hero. I saw how expert Bobby was in his “Bobby Orr” public role. Worshipful dads would come along with their ten-year-old sons — “His name’s Robert, but we call him Bobby” — and instantly Bobby would be chatting easily with the kid, establishing that, yes, the young admirer was a defenceman on his team, with Bobby hoping that he was offence-minded, and there would be happy laughter all round. Every single member of that lineup went away with their signed copy, thrilled by their genuine full-eye-contact friendly meeting with Bobby Orr. And even in his smart modern suit and fashionable haircut, you could still see the joyful crew-cut kid, photographed flying through the air after scoring a vital goal.
Bobby even stayed half an hour extra to make sure that no one was disappointed. Then the bookstore staff took us behind the scenes where they had piled up hundreds of extra copies of the book that they hoped Bobby would sign. So I stepped in to run interference for Bobby and get him out of there, “letting Bobby be Bobby,” if you like. Bobby was grateful, and we had a friendly chat the next day, but I never did get him to write his own memoir. Canada’s bookstores and their parking lots might not be able to handle it.
One of the hazards of publishing hockey heroes is the fact that invariably — apart from my good friend Dryden — they have been helped by a ghostwriter. So one of my delicate tasks before they set out on the tour to promote “their” book was to make sure that they had read it. This was important. The publishing world knew the cautionary tale of the Great Player — a real golden boy — who had “written” a hockey-coaching book. At the sales conference great stress had been laid on how closely the Great Player had been involved in writing the book, sharing his experience and wisdom. Finally — tada! — the Great Player was brought into the room, as a sort of climax before the lunch break. The applause was deafening, both for the glamorous man, and for the book that was going to make them all rich.
After the applause, in response to a request for questions, one brave sales rep asked him about the advice he had given in the book about the slapshot.
“How the hell should I know,” the Great Player laughed, “I haven’t read the fuckin’ thing.”
Sales estimates and promotion plans for the book shrank audibly. The lunch was not a success.
Margaret Atwood did not have a good slapshot — except metaphorically, as debating opponents know — but from her first book signing (soon to be described) she has amassed a number of interesting promotional experiences. I was involved in one of them, when I was behind the scenes with Margaret before she was to give a reading at the National Library in Ottawa. She had just completed an American publicity tour, and we laughed together at how amazingly enthusiastic American audiences were, with people happily employing superlatives about her reading being the best they had ever attended in fifty years. Canadians, we noted, were much, much, more reserved.
Then Margaret went out and gave a fine reading — in that carefully level, understated voice that repays very close attention — and afterward I joined the autograph-seeking line of book buyers. When I reached the front I said, “Hey, Margaret — that was . . . not bad.”
She was crushed.
“Oh, Doug,” she said, “I was hoping for not bad at all!”
The Canadian crowd around us got the joke, and liked it very much.
Margaret is one of the authors represented in a splendid British book about authors’ humiliations, appropriately entitled Mortification: Writers Stories of Their Public Shame, edited by Robin Robertson. Her contribution concerns her first autographing session, in Edmonton, where she was set up in the Hudson’s Bay store at a little table beside the men’s socks and underwear department. Surprisingly, book buyers did not flock there to see her and to buy The Edible Woman.
In that book of shame William Boyd, the Scottish novelist, tells of a day from hell spent promoting a thoughtful new novel in Cleveland in the 1990s. One live on-air radio host announced his book title, welcomed him to the show, then said, “Now William, tell us about your Princess Diana.”
It got worse. The host was such a commercials-driven personality that after a few minutes he posed the unexpected question: “Do your carpets ever get dirty, William?” and he was off on a subtle segue to a carpet-cleaning commercial. There were other such segues.
In all of the sad stories in Mortification, the saddest is perhaps the tale of the poet visiting a small, unexciting English town to give a reading. In the question and answer session he was challenged by a young member of the audience to explain what one of his carefully polished poems “really means.” He worked hard to explain it, pleasantly and helpfully reconstructing the poem, in very simple terms, to be met with the response: “Well, why didn’t you just write that, then?”
Returning home to his shabby, lonely, damp hotel room he noticed a used bookstore. Wallowing in his own misery he went to check if a rejected copy of his book was on the shelves. It was. Who, he wondered, would give up and throw away such a precious book? You can imagine his feelings when he carefully opened it at the title page and found, signed in his own hand, the words “To Mum and Dad . . .”
One story filtered though from the West Coast after a tour by the brilliant British lawyer, dramatist, novelist, and Rumpole creator, John Mortimer. A not conventionally handsome man, he was standing up at the front of the room addressing a crowd of adoring matrons when someone whispered to his publicist that he should be told that his fly was wide open. “Oh, he knows,” she replied, glumly.
If costumes are involved, the possible humiliations expand. Don Harron (a.k.a. the rural Ontario sage Charlie Farquharson) once wrote a spoof on the Canadian establishment in the guise of “Valerie Rosedale,” who was, as the name implies, a stiff, formally dressed WASP lady of a certain age. The costume — in which he toured the TV studios of the land — was hilarious. But as Don waited to start a day of Halifax promotion, standing in the lobby of the Lord Nelson Hotel, the house detective — trained to spot troublesome transvestites — sternly told him to move on.
I once picked up Don in his Valerie costume, taking him for an appearance at the Canadian Bookseller’s Toronto convention downtown, from his Annex home. As I escorted him down the sidewalk to the car a neighbour lumbered towards us, in the last gasping, wheezing stages of a very vigorous jog. He staggered to a stop, courteously, to allow Valerie to mince across the sidewalk in front of him. Don — a trained actor — produced his most basso-profundo voice to say man-to-man, “Hey there, Giorgio, how the hell are ya!”
We got into the car with the gasping neighbour, hands on knees, squeaking plaintively “Don? Don?”
Farley Mowat — as my chapter on Harold Horwood recounts — once disgraced himself at a Writers’ Development Trust private dinner. John Irving, the amiable American novelist married to the former Canadian publisher Janet Turnbull Irving (a woman with her own stories about how poor, unjustly treated Colin Thatcher phoning from prison can turn from an amiable “Hi Darlin’” phone friend into a hissing, threatening bully in half a second), once gamely went as the “guest of h
onour” to one of these fundraising dinners in a private Toronto home. He is a very nice man, so with a sense of his own responsibility he worked at being the life and soul of the party, telling stories and making friendly contact with everyone around the table.
There was only one problem. The woman seated beside him was clearly unhappy. She sat there with her arms folded, scowling at everything he said. Finally, with the conversation drawn elsewhere, he took the chance to speak to her privately. “Look,” he said, “I’ve obviously said something to offend you. I don’t know what it was, and it certainly wasn’t deliberate, but I’m sorry about it.”
“No, no,” she said, “It’s nothing you’ve said. It’s just that — well, I’ve read all of your books, and I thought — I guess I thought you’d be more . . . more . . . interesting.”
John told me this in a Montreal parking lot and I laughed so hard that I hurt my leg falling against a car. The way of an author — even a popular, celebrated author, engaged in doing good charitable work — is never easy.
L.R. Wright was still dazed when she called me after her very first interview. “Bunny” Wright was a sensible adult person, who went on to fame with her crime-fiction series, but she was reduced to incoherence by her very first interviewer’s very first question.
This was on a live morning TV show in Calgary and the host (think hair and teeth) introduced her as follows: “Our next guest is L.R. Wright, a Calgary writer whose first book, Neighbours, has just won this year’s ‘Search for a New Alberta Novelist’ competition. Welcome Ms. Wright. And after looking through your book I have one question for you. Why are there no pictures?”
The correct answer, of course, is “Because it’s a novel,” with the added words, “you moron” entirely optional.
What happened, Bunny reported, was that she was so thrown by the question that she gaped into the bright lights — and bright teeth — and said, “Pictures? I never really . . . pictures . . . Nobody at the publisher’s . . . pictures . . . I don’t know why . . . it just never . . . pictures . . . ?” And so on. Throughout the rest of the interview she was in a daze, confronting the question why she had never thought of pictures in her book.
Stories About Storytellers Page 18