Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  Those two volumes, massively documented, represent a great work of scholarship. They hide a great tragedy. For the last years of her life Christina was so unwell, afflicted by many problems, including an arthritic back, that she was in effect unable to write, and one of our finest pens was stilled long before her death in 2006.

  Having played such an active part in what you might call “The Trudeau Industry,” I continue to publish books about Pierre Trudeau. In 2005 my friend William Johnson alerted me to the fact that two friends of Trudeau, Max and Monique Nemni, had received his permission to study all of his papers and write his intellectual biography, about how his thinking developed. He was reading the manuscript in the original French, Bill told me, and it was so exciting and new that I should do the same, and consider publishing a translation, which he would be glad to provide.

  I was initially reluctant. So much had been published already. But, with a sigh, I agreed to read the French manuscript. What followed was astonishing. I would emerge from my basement office to report to Jane that my French must be worse than I thought, since the documents quoted by the authors seemed to establish that my friend Pierre as a teenager and young man was anti-semitic, pro-fascist, and against de Gaulle and in favour of Marshal Petain, who had made alliances with the Nazis, who, after all, were not much worse than Winston Churchill’s British forces. It was not my French that was at fault. Max and Monique, two federalists in Quebec who worked on Cité Libre and were friends of Trudeau, were appalled at what they had discovered in his private papers. For example, even as a man of twenty-three, Trudeau was ignoring the war in Europe and plotting a revolution to take Quebec out of Canada.

  If the Nemnis (now Toronto residents, and good friends) were appalled by what they found, I was, too. But none of us doubted our duty to set the scholarly record straight, even if it put our friend in an unflattering light. Young Trudeau: 1919–1944 — Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, translated by William Johnson, came out as a Douglas Gibson Book in 2006. It shocked readers, and won the Shaughnessy-Cohen Award as the best book on Canadian Public Affairs. It has changed the world of Trudeau scholarship forever. It is unfortunate that the two-volume biography by John English, for all its merits, came out too soon after the Nemni book to be able to absorb its lessons in the text.

  In late 2011 I will publish a second volume by Max and Monique dealing in detail with how our friend Pierre spent the years from 1944 till 1965 becoming the liberal and Liberal politician we all know. The title is Trudeau Transformed. It will prove that, indeed, “He haunts us still.”

  BOY EATS BUN AS BEAR LOOKS ON. The caption writing task confronting young Linnet Muir is newspaper work at its simplest, stripped to its essence. Easy. Then comes a dangerous thought: BOY EATS BUN AS HUNGRY BEAR LOOKS ON. As Linnet/Mavis puts it, this “has the beginnings of a plot.” Soon her imagination is really rolling, with emotional questions arising about the boy being “a mean sort of kid” and the onlooking bear becoming “a starving creature.”

  No wonder Mavis Gallant (née Young) eventually left the newspaper world to become a fiction writer.

  She will, of course, tell you that in the story where this occurs, “With a Capital ‘T’,” and in the other five allied stories, the first person narrator, Linnet Muir, is not her. She says so directly in the 1981 introduction to Home Truths: “The character I called Linnet Muir is not an exact reflection.” To which I say that the first name Mavis (the Scottish word for a song thrush) and the short Scottish surname Young, translate amazingly well into Linnet (songbird) Muir (short Scottish surname). As they say, if it walks like a songbird, sings like a songbird . . . And all of the important autobiographical facts that we learn about Linnet, a young woman making her way alone in Montreal during the 1940s, seem to fit the real Mavis exactly. In fact, in the 2006 documentary Paris Stories, Mavis admitted to the interviewer, Lynn Booth, that “they were as close to autobiography as I have ever written.”

  Many of those biographical facts are known to her legions of admirers across the English-speaking world. Here is the sort of praise she has attracted. “There isn’t a finer living writer in the English language” (Books in Canada). “She is a very good writer indeed” (New York Times). And “Mavis Gallant is a marvellously clear-headed observer and a rare phrase-maker” (Times Literary Supplement). American writer Fran Lebowitz summed up the adulation among other writers, noting, “The irrefutable master of the short story in English, Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer. She is the standard.”

  Born in Montreal, she was brought up by distant and ineffective parents, who sent her away to school as a tiny child. In an interview with the French scholar Christine Evain she recalled, “I was only four when I was sent to a convent school. In the bath we wore little rubbery clothes so we couldn’t see ourselves. . . . And the nuns were not supposed to see us. And I had no one to help me with my clothes, and at four, you really need help.” After her artist father died when she was only ten, there was even less attention. Mavis Young was shunted between seventeen different schools, some French, some English, some in Canada, some in the United States. Somehow, as the perpetual outsider, the observer of the new world around her, she managed to survive. Remarkably, at the age of fifteen, she was able to tell a schoolmate that she was going to write for the New Yorker and live in Paris — as the schoolmate reminded her many years later.

  When she was eighteen she escaped New York and her mother’s nerveless grasp. She made her penniless way to Montreal, presenting herself at the door of her old French-Canadian nanny (“Mavis! Tu vis! You’re alive!”), who took her in. Then, Linnet-like, she set about finding an office job, initially at the National Film Board. In turn (“with so many men away at the war,” as it was explained to her), this led to a job at a weekly newspaper, doing more than writing captions about buns and bears. She was an undeniably good journalist. For six years, even after the men came home, she worked for the weekly Montreal Standard. She may never have been “one of the boys” in the Montreal Men’s Press Club, but she gained such respect for her writing skills that she was able to choose major assignments, like interviewing Jean-Paul Sartre. As she met and interviewed tides of refugees flowing into Montreal from all over Europe, some with numbers on their arms, she found herself increasingly fascinated by what had gone on “over there” on that mysterious continent that she had never seen.

  Growing up in Montreal at the time, young Mordecai Richler noticed this young woman who had a newspaper column, with the photograph at the top showing her looking “jaunty.” A woman columnist, not writing about recipes, or decorating tips, or society events? Mavis clearly had arrived. But there was still what we might call the “hungry bear factor” gnawing away at her. The non-fiction world of the newspaper was not enough. The world of fiction attracted her, and she had started to write short stories.

  Many years later, in 1984, by then a world-famous writer that Canadians were belatedly claiming as one of their own, Mavis received an honorary degree from the University of Toronto. As her publisher, I was selected to give the speech introducing her to the packed audience filling the 1,500 seats in Convocation Hall. I’m sorry to say that I offended Mavis by telling the graduating class that this woman — dramatic arm gesture — represented their parents’ “worst nightmare.” I explained that having achieved a remarkably prominent position as a young woman at the top of the Montreal newspaper tree, “she threw it all away, to go off to Paris, to be a writer.”

  Starving in a garret was not actually obligatory, but it was likely. And Mavis, her marriage to a Montreal piano-player named Johnny Gallant long gone (without rancour, but with the great, lingering benefit of an elegant byline) was indeed on her own, with only one story sold to the New Yorker when she took the plunge. She gave herself two years to make it. To this day, when North Americans shake their head at this, and ask, “Why Paris?” she answers, swe
etly (and Mavis is at her most dangerous when she says things sweetly), “Have you ever been to Paris?” And in Paris Stories, she adds, “I found for the first time in my life a society where you could say you were a writer and not be asked for three months rent in advance.”

  But it’s true that she travelled around Europe, not restricting herself to dealing, like Henry James, with the safe theme of (North) Americans abroad. She travelled widely, marvelling at what she was finding about the impact of the War (no adjectives needed, just the War). “The Latehomecomer” is typical of the true stories that she stumbled across; how many English-speakers knew that German soldiers were still being held in near-slavery on French farms, years after the war was over? And it’s distressingly true that as she wrote and sent off stories to her New York agent, without success, she went through hard times. Once, in Spain, she was reduced to selling her clothes for food. Then she discovered that several of the stories she had sent off into the void had indeed been bought by the New Yorker. The rogue agent had failed to inform her and had pocketed the money.

  Soon a more prosperous pattern was established. With occasional trips here and there in Europe, later revealed in her work, Mavis established a base in Paris and wrote short stories for William Maxwell at the New Yorker. As the number swelled (eventually, with over 100 stories accepted and printed, Mavis stood at the top of the prestigious magazine’s list, with only John Updike ahead of her total) her reputation grew. By the late 1970s she had published two novels — Green Water, Green Sky (1959) and A Fairly Good Time (a marvellous Gallant title) in 1970. Her short stories had been collected in The Other Paris (1956), My Heart Is Broken (1964), The Pegnitz Junction (1973) — her personal favourite, for artistic goals achieved — and The End of the World and Other Stories (1974).

  In a fine article in the Guardian in 2009, Lisa Allardice wrote about Mavis’s career: “A Canadian in Paris who has devoted her life to writing, she is one of the great chroniclers of exile, her fictional landscapes inhabited by misfits and lost souls, characters far from home, literally or emotionally.” It is appropriate that one 1988 story collection had the excellent title In Transit. In fact Robert Fulford has shrewdly pointed out that the “grand theme” of Mavis’s work “has been the movement of populations.”

  In summary, by the late 1970s, Mavis Gallant was a popular success everywhere in the English-speaking world. But not in Canada. In Paris Stories, Robert Fulford agrees that Mavis “was neglected in Canada.” But he suggests that, on her part, “Mavis neglected Canada . . . She obviously didn’t pay any attention to her publishing situation in Canada. She published with a Boston firm and a New York firm that had no distribution in Canada. So her books weren’t even in the Canadian bookstores. So, you know, she wasn’t even in the position to be neglected.”

  Enter John Gray. One day when I was at my desk at Macmillan, trying to expand the company’s distinguished but small list of authors, a letter came in from Paris, addressed to the company in general. It was from Mavis Gallant, asking for news about the health of her old friend, John Gray. I wrote back, bringing her up to date on John’s situation. Then I cleared my throat, as it were, to say that I had noticed her work and admired it greatly. I told her flatly that she, as a Canadian, deserved a Canadian publisher, rather than relying on her New York–based publisher to distribute her work. As it happened, her last book had barely appeared in Canada — some mix-up in the American warehouse was blamed — so my timing was good. Mavis wrote back to say that she was delighted by the idea. In short order I had made an arrangement with her agent, Georges Borchardt (not the rogue agent), to publish her next collection of stories, From the Fifteenth District (1979).

  We went all-out on that book, sending review copies everywhere, telling the Canadian literary world, in effect: “Look, there’s this world-class author named Mavis Gallant, living in Paris and writing some of the best short stories the world has ever seen. She’s one of us, a Canadian, and it’s time we claimed her.”

  The reviewers read the book and responded with superlatives, recognizing a new planet in the Canadian sky. The book was a huge success.

  Earlier, in the course of my campaign, I had told Jack McClelland of our plans, and he had scoffed at the idea that we could sell 4,000 copies of a book of short stories by Mavis Gallant. In his mind, Mavis was not the drawback. The received wisdom all over the English-language publishing world, as Jack knew well, was that short stories were hard to sell. With the superhuman help of Mavis and Alice Munro — and indeed of Margaret Atwood, whose superb short stories I later published, but never edited (a tip of the hat here to my renowned colleague, Ellen Seligman) — I planned to change that. To this day Canadian book buyers are revered by publishers abroad for their willingness to snap up books of short stories by these major figures, allowing short story collections to ride high on bestseller lists, as well as winning praise and prizes.

  In the end, Jack bet me $100 that I would not be able to sell as many as 4,000 copies of From the Fifteenth District. Even in hardcover, we sold far, far more.

  A word about Jack McClelland. In his history of Canadian publishing, The Perilous Trade, Roy MacSkimming’s chapter title calls him simply “Prince of Publishers.” He was very much a man of his wartime generation. As a dashing young naval officer he commanded a motor torpedo boat in England, conducting nightly raids against the deadly German E-boats in the channel. It was a pirate’s life, and the losses were terrible. “I lived every day as if it was the last,” he remembered.

  Safely returned from the war to the family business, he took over the company in 1952, the year he turned thirty. His elderly father was still around. The famous designer, Frank Newfeld, claims that he once saw Jack — affectionately — remove his father from a boardroom discussion that he had wandered into by wrapping his arms around the old man and carrying him bodily into another room, where he could potter around to his heart’s content. In the hot M&S offices off the warehouse at Hollinger Road, where air-conditioning was for wimps, and leaving the vodka-bottle-strewn office before 8 p.m. was regarded as taking it easy, Jack was known for wearing his shirt piratically, very unbuttoned indeed.

  The great, decisive moment in Jack’s career was in 1963, when he dropped twenty-three of the twenty-eight agency lines that the company distributed. From now on there could be no turning back to the old days when selling books written and published elsewhere would support a small list of new Canadian titles. Now Jack was committed to the much riskier business of surviving by creating Canadian books from scratch. With the aid of his contemporaries Pierre Berton, Farley Mowat, and Peter C. Newman — and novelists like Gabrielle Roy, Margaret Laurence, young Mordecai Richler, and the even younger Leonard Cohen — he proceeded to do so, with energy and flair.

  Almost everyone who was to play a role in Canadian publishing joined in the Children’s Crusade that was life at the M&S office in the sixties and later. Names like Jim Douglas, Scott McIntyre, and Anna Porter later appeared on rival publishing company letterheads, but people like Allan MacDougall, Peter Taylor, John Neale, Peter Milroy, Patrick Crean, and Linda McKnight were also later to play a huge role in the book world. It was a hectic office. Once the fiction manuscript of a promising young writer named Margaret Atwood was “lost” for two years. She reminded Jack of this, in a remarkably friendly way, when her success in the world of poetry caused him to contact her to ask if she happened to have written a novel. If so, he said, innocently, M&S would be glad to see it.

  Jack and his group of author pals worked hard and played hard. There were tales of a “Swordsman’s Club” in Toronto where very smart girls were likely to jump out of equally smart cakes, and M&S parties were legendary for the booze that flowed, with employees known to make their exit on all fours.

  Famously, Jack worked hard to make Canadian books big news. To help promote the New Canadian Library, the paperback series started by Professor Malcolm Ross (which, you may recall, started
out as an enormous gamble by Jack, but proved to be the battering ram that opened the sometimes resistant doors of the academic world to the study of Canadian literature), he created a snazzy blazer adorned with NCL covers (which is now preserved with care in the McMaster University Library Archives). He travelled the country in his “coat of many covers,” distributing free NCL titles to surprised pedestrians on city streets. To promote a 1980 novel by Sylvia Fraser, The Emperor’s Virgin, set in Ancient Rome, he staged a toga-clad chariot ride down Yonge Street, in a March snowstorm. He and the shivering author survived the trip, and the media loved it.

  But apart from the brief ride down Yonge Street, it was all uphill work. The economics of publishing in a widespread, thinly populated country that shares a language with cheap books flooding in from abroad meant that even with the great books his major authors produced dominating the bestseller lists — despite my best efforts at Macmillan — M&S ran into financial trouble. Repeatedly. Even when the Ontario government, aware that an important national asset was in danger, arranged for a generous loan: more than once. It was like “the perils of Pauline” throughout the seventies and beyond, until at the end of 1985, Avie Bennett bought the company and gave it financial stability. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Avie brought me in to start my Douglas Gibson Books imprint three months later, on Jack’s advice, and I owe both men a lot.

  Jack was a strikingly handsome figure with a shock of hair like Kirk Douglas the movie star, hair that he wore fashionably long, even as it turned from blond to pewter. A fine speaker who liked the limelight and cared about national issues — with Claude Ryan he was co-chairman of the Committee for an Independent Canada, launched in 1970 — he remained a striking physical presence. Once, to stave off yet another financial crisis, he sold warehouse stock directly to the public, cutting out the booksellers; I remember that Leonard Cohen, out of loyalty to his friend Jack, took the trouble to travel to Toronto to make a helpful personal appearance alongside Jack at the fire sale, which drew great crowds.