Just after he had outraged the entire bookselling community with this move, Jack showed up at the huge annual dinner of the Canadian Booksellers Association. I remember that while conversation at the tables in the crowded room faltered, Jack paused at the entrance, to light, very slowly, one of his ever-present cigarettes. Waves of silent outrage washed towards him, but the old torpedo boat commander had faced much worse, and clearly didn’t give a damn. A favourite phrase.
Sometimes the physical presence was unwisely projected. His old colleague, Hugh Kane, told the story of a wedding reception for one of Jack’s daughters that was held at the large McClelland family cottage on the shores of Lake Joseph in Muskoka, which Jack loved to cruise around with his family at the end of a summer day. On this occasion the polite reception chatter among the elegant guests was at its height when Jack burst from the cottage to run, naked, through the party and across the dock and hit the water in a racing dive. It was a scene not envisaged even in Charles Gordon’s imaginative classic, At the Cottage.
Robertson Davies, who knew Jack, once described him to me as a “Peter Pan figure.” He was not among the guests that day in Muskoka.
After Avie had bought the company, Jack did not enjoy his Lost Boy role as a senior advisor. I used to visit him in the front office courteously reserved for him, to chat and discuss publishing philosophy. But the arrangement with Avie did not work out — to my distress, since I admired both men, and even had illusions that I might help them get along. But Jack explained to me that it was hard to be a crew member on a ship that you had captained. Many years later, in 2004, when I was moved sideways at M&S after sixteen years as publisher and saw the company take a new direction, I knew what he meant.
From 1986 to 1988 I was on the sidelines at M&S, tending my separate Douglas Gibson Books imprint (and turning away from my door any M&S employee eager to share atrocity stories), while Adrienne Clarkson tried her hand at running the company. In the light of the comments from Jack that follow, it’s important to stress how hard it is for any person, coming in as an outsider, to learn how to be a publisher in just a couple of years. That person would have to be very humble, putting all of his or her trust in more experienced colleagues, and very eager to learn. I was glad to see Adrienne make a great success of her time as Governor General, a position where every new appointee is expected to learn “on the job.”
I had several superb assistants (most notably Valerie Jacobs and Gail Stewart) over the years. In every case I had to instill in exhausted new employees the truth that there is never enough time, or money, or people to do everything. There is no such thing as “a clean desk” at the end of a publishing day. There are always other manuscripts to be read, new plans to be hatched for promoting this or that new book, and new books thought up for this or that author.
Jack, who knew all about these pressures, did something wonderful for me when in September 1988 Avie persuaded me to leave the perfect cocoon that I had spun for myself at Douglas Gibson Books (No meetings! Just work with authors you really like!), and take on the role of publisher of McClelland & Stewart.
The letter speaks for itself, and tells us a lot about Jack.
September 13, 1988
Dear Doug,
Just a note to congratulate you on your new appointment. I say, congratulate, but just possibly mean commiserate.
Because of the flood of stories and rumours — and I certainly did not invite them nor did I want to hear them — I am not surprised about Adrienne Clarkson’s effective departure. It has been in the cards for some months. She is an extremely intelligent lady but it would have surprised me if she managed to survive in that new role for very long.
Welcome. You have the know-how and the experience and it should work extremely well. Obviously you are going to be busier than a one-armed paperhanger for a while but it will work out. Don’t bother acknowledging this letter. You have enough to do. It is just to tell you that I am pleased personally to have the old firm with Doug Gibson as publisher.
Cheers!
Jack
It was a laying on of hands. And I never did get around to claiming the $100 for winning my bet about Mavis, who was born, in a striking coincidence, in the same year of 1922 as Jack McClelland.
After the huge success of From the Fifteenth District, I sent Mavis a surprising letter. It said, roughly, “Although you don’t know it, you have written a very good new book, and I would like to publish it. It is called Home Truths, and it consists of your stories about Canadians at home and abroad. The table of contents I suggest is as follows . . .”
And after due consideration, Mavis wrote back. (Please note that we usually made contact by letter; phone calls to Paris were hugely expensive in the hard-scrabble world of Canadian publishing, where at Macmillan I tried to postpone my phone calls to Alberta or B.C. till after six p.m., when the rates dropped, since every cent counted.) She wrote to say that she agreed, but that she would like to drop stories B and C, but add stories Y and Z. So we proceeded with Home Truths.
Many years later, in 2007, she went into very frank detail about our relationship in an interview with French scholar Christine Evain:
Mavis Gallant: Douglas Gibson had been in Yale doing graduate work — he’s a Scot — and as he was a foreigner, so to speak, he didn’t know that I was “ungrateful, disgraceful, anti-Canadian” . . . Then [after the publication of From the Fifteenth District] he wrote to me and said: “I know you’re going to say ‘no’ to this, but think it over. I’d like to publish a volume of your Canadian stories.” This is what I wanted to avoid . . .
Christine Evain: The labelling.
Mavis Gallant: Yes! The ghetto! But then he’d said, think it over. And I remember I answered him and said, “I hope you have your shirt painted on your body, because otherwise you’re going to lose it! But, go ahead!” (Laughs) And he had a title, Home Truths, which I thought was a clever title.
Christine Evain: From a marketing point of view, it was an excellent idea.
Mavis Gallant: He’s very good at that! But, you know, I didn’t know him then . . . I didn’t even know he was a Scot.
Christine Evain: He has a very good feel for the Canadian market.
Mavis Gallant: He’s brilliant at that. He’s sometimes a bit eccentric, and so on, but, in the long run, he turns up trumps.
At my request — possibly an eccentric one — Mavis wrote a long, thoughtful introduction about being an expatriate Canadian. It contains dozens of gems such as this: “I have been rebuked by a consular official for remarking that Rome in winter is not as cold as Montreal; and it surely signifies more than lightheadedness about English that ‘expatriate’ is regularly spelled in Canadian newspapers ‘expatriot.’” She even writes about the choice of language. Although we know she leads a French-speaking existence in Paris (with some of her friends surprised to learn that she is a famous writer, in English), here she says, “I cannot imagine any of my fiction in French, for it seems to me inextricably bound to English syntax, to the sound, resonance and ambiguities of English vocabulary. If I were to write in French, not only would I put things differently, but I would never set out to say the same things.”
And so on. Marvellous stuff (ambiguities!) that shows how Mavis has always had a razor-sharp intelligence that she could easily apply to non-fiction, as in, for example, her accounts of the riotous events that she witnessed in Paris in 1968.
Home Truths was a spectacular success, winning the Governor General’s Award for 1981 and sending me to Winnipeg on Mavis’s behalf to joust with separatists, as I recount on this book’s opening page. Much better, it brought Mavis Gallant home, in that over the next few years she received many Canadian honours, including becoming an Officer, then a Companion, of the Order of Canada.
It brought her home physically, too, since I was delighted to send her across the country to promote her work. We never quite got around t
o putting her in a toga aboard a chariot, but she might have surprised many by her response, for one of her many qualities is that Mavis is a good sport. At home in Paris she is a keen soccer fan. Knowing this (and following the same instinct that led me to take Morley Callaghan to a boxing match), I took Mavis to watch a soccer game. Two very different games, to be precise. One was a match for eight-year-olds in Rosedale Park where I, normally “Coach Doug,” found myself racing around the field in the role of referee, to the great pleasure of Mavis on the sidelines. As if she had scripted it, an eighteen-month-old ran, unnoticed, onto the field, and to protect him I had to scoop him up and carry on refereeing with a child in my arms while the game raged around my feet for a surprisingly long time — with the child’s parents no doubt distracted by discussions about house prices in Moore Park. Mavis laughed so hard we almost lost a famous writer, right there on the sidelines.
On the other occasion, at a slightly higher level, I took her to an international exhibition game at Varsity Stadium, and Mavis clearly knew what was going on, as she watched intently.
To add to the portrait of the sportive Mavis, I should add that she has dropped tantalizing hints about her love of horse racing (I can imagine her, among the jockeys, in the background of a Degas racing scene at Longchamp) and her skilful betting on the sport of kings. Peter Gzowski had the bright idea of inviting Mavis to watch the horses at Woodbine (naturally, she also spotted what was going on in his romantic life) during her time as Writer in Residence at Massey College in the University of Toronto in 1983–84. Her teaching time was not a total success, in that she did not (and does not) believe that writing can be taught. Her lessons, she claims, consisted of getting students to read good authors like Nabokov and E.M. Forster, and encouraging them to get on with writing.
Her spell in Toronto, however, allowed me to spend more time with her and to see how she terrified people. Even in the Gibson household she took on the role of one of Bertie Wooster’s fierce aunts, teaching fourteen-year-old Katie Gibson the correct way to answer a telephone, for example, which Katie has never forgotten.
Another example: when the Toronto Harbourfront Reading Series held an event in her honour, it was full of worshipful attendees, onstage and in the audience. A high point was an onstage interview with her old friend Mordecai Richler, to whom she had once taken a gift of oranges when he was new in Paris, lying ill in his small room. (Charles Foran’s fine biography of Mordecai adds the detail that the young writer was worried that spots on his elbows possibly indicated a venereal disease.) Now I had an interesting relationship with Mordecai, featuring a duelling correspondence with him over some long-forgotten point of pride. My assistant Valerie Jacobs would come into my office, beaming, bearing Mordecai’s latest salvo in letter form; usually it began with head-shaking sorrow, “Gibson, Gibson.” That night I sat with the Richler family at the event, expecting fireworks. But Mordecai had decided that whatever Mavis decided to answer — or refuse to answer — was fine with him. After her first response, delivered in friendly tones, “I’ve no interest in answering that,” Mordecai was unruffled and, as I whispered to the family, it was clear that a very unconventional interview was under way. The interview continued along these lines, but her impatience with the questions of some audience members soon showed.
She has a formidable presence. She speaks in an accent that she says belongs to another era in Montreal, but to modern Canadian ears sounds English-influenced. She speaks with great, sibilant precision that can on occasion be mistaken for a hiss. As for her manner, with strangers she is such a reserved, dignified, and lady-like figure that she seems, metaphorically, to be wearing white gloves. Scores of journalists have come away from interviews with her, confessing that they felt intimidated.
Even her great admirer, Jhumpa Lahiri, suffered badly when she conducted an interview with Mavis, later reproduced in Granta magazine. Jhumpa, a well-known American novelist, almost worships Mavis. In an introduction to one of Mavis’s books she describes her as a writer “who demands intelligence from her readers and rewards them with nothing short of genius.” In the interview, however, the much younger American seemed to be playing the Disraeli-to-Queen-Victoria “authors like us” card a little too often, and Mavis was resisting. When Jhumpa, who obviously had a romantic view of the writing life in Paris, asked Mavis if she had ever worked in cafés, back came the sweet, sibilant reply, “As a waitress?”
Um, no, Jhumpa replied lamely, you know, for writing in. Game, set, and match.
I give these background details to set up my own humiliation at her hands in Montreal in 1998. The Quebec English-language writers’ group, QSPEL, had honoured her by naming a prize after her. Because the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction already existed, they decided that her name should adorn the non-fiction prize, since Paris Notebooks had established her credentials in non-fiction in 1986. Mavis, in Canada for other reasons, had arranged to attend the formal event to celebrate this prize at a downtown Montreal hotel.
I was present as a member of the front-row official group. In the green room beforehand, with Mavis present, we went through the plan. Since there was no food or drink available, just a room with uncomfortable stacking chairs laid out in rows for an audience of 200, the plan was to move briskly, starting just after 6, and be out of there by 7:00. People had made dinner arrangements accordingly. Out by 7:00, we all agreed.
At 6:10 the QSPEL people started the meeting, very efficiently introducing me. I spoke briefly about Mavis’s high standing in the literary world, and in turn introduced my great friend William Weintraub, the author of several urbane books, like City Unique. Bill was an old friend of Mavis from their journalism days together, and he spoke affectionately about them, before introducing Mavis.
It was 6:20 when Mavis handed me her purse and walked to the podium just ahead of where we sat. She thanked everyone for naming the prize after her, then said that because the prize was for non-fiction, she intended to read some of her own non-fiction, namely some diary entries. Having chosen the year (let’s say 1995), she began: “January 1st. A grey day where the main event was . . .”
One hour and twenty minutes later, at 7:40, she said the words “July 1st, Canada Day . . .” and kept going. She was so absorbed in her reading that she was unaware of the constant procession of people slipping out of their seats and creeping away. Dinners were burning in ovens across Montreal, reserved tables were being forfeited in the city’s busiest restaurants, but Mavis was on a roll.
For thirty minutes I had been on the edge of my seat, trying to catch her eye to give her a “cut” sign across my throat. But she was oblivious, lost in her reading. Now it was clear that she was going to read the diary for the whole year. Until — quick calculation — 9:00.
I conferred in whispers in the front row with Bill and Magda Weintraub. “Bill,” said Magda, “You must do something!” Bill, a wise and witty man, just groaned. I, the son of a man who responded to an ancient minister’s coughing fit by halting the church service and sending everyone home, realized that no one else was going to “do something.” And I had taught my kids that in such a situation it’s incumbent on you to be the doer.
Oh hell.
I rose and took the three longest steps of my life, to stand with my hand on the front of Mavis’s podium. At the time, the phrase “own the podium” did not exist, but Mavis knew all about it.
“Excuse me Mavis,” I said, “ I think that people are very keen to have a chance to ask you questions.”
She might have said, “Oh my goodness, is that the time? Of course, let’s go straight to questions.”
What she did say was “Questions? Questions? But I’m in the middle of my reading!”
I stood my ground. “Yes, but as I say, time is going on, and I know that people are very eager to ask you questions.”
Mavis went over my head. Literally. She appealed to the crowd behind me, who were watching, thrilled
. “Aren’t you enjoying my reading?” And they, the cowards, gave her a supportive round of applause, and Mavis looked down at me in triumph.
I slunk back to my seat and gave Bill Weintraub the best line of my life. “Well,” I said, evenly, “I think that went off pretty well, don’t you?”
Now Mavis, enraged, was reading brilliantly. Every so often she would glare down at me and say something like “I was going read you the entry for September 20th, but” (angry turning of pages) “I’m told I must hurry up.”
I sat there, arms folded, at peace with the world, while the audience suffered. Eventually Mavis finished at 8:10.
At this point my friend Linda Leith, who was soon to found Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Reading festival, came to the stage and tactfully began, “Well, as we’ve heard, many people in the audience are keen to ask questions. Are there any questions for Mavis?”
One brave person asked a question, which Mavis batted away, along the lines of “I’ve no interest in answering such a question.”
Linda asked if there were any other questions and a very, very stupid young man raised his hand. What, he wondered, did Ms. Gallant think of the criticism of her writing produced by So-and-so? Mavis flew at him, saying that she didn’t believe in writers suing other writers, but what So-and-so said was so outrageous that she was sorry that she hadn’t sued him, and — with angry finality — she refused to discuss him further.
“Well,” said Linda, “if there are no more questions . . .” and she went on to comment on what a memorable evening this had been, and to thank Mavis.
Stories About Storytellers Page 25