As people rose to their feet and started to mingle, it was noticeable that nobody wanted to come near me. I was the burn victim, the scarred survivor of a flamethrower attack, and people bumped into one another or brushed against the wall to avoid coming anywhere near me. Apart, that is, from my old friend Pat Webster, who took me home (we agreed that probably the official front row party dinner could get along just fine without me) and fed me dinner. As I related the evening’s events to my old friend Norman Webster, the legendary newspaperman, his eyebrows would rise in disbelief, and he would look at Pat, who would nod in confirmation. There are roughly 100 people in Montreal who will confirm the account you are reading.
It took some time for Mavis to forgive me. That evening she told Bill Weintraub, “I’ll kill him!” But of course we got back on an even keel. She had followed me from Macmillan to my Douglas Gibson Books list at M&S, and we would continue to work together as old friends. Such old friends that in her Bertie Wooster fierce aunt role she inspected my new wife Jane at tea at the Ritz-Carlton in the course of a Montreal visit. Jane was on her best behaviour, and passed the test.
Since then, as ill health and the effects of osteoporosis have made travel harder for Mavis, there have been few visits to North America. There was, however, the triumphant evening in her honour in New York, where the authors who gathered to sing her praises from the stage included Michael Ondaatje and Russell Baker, both of whom have written introductions to recent collections by Mavis. Russell Baker has written about her choosing “to write in English, and in it fewer than a handful of living short story writers are her equal. William Trevor, and her countrywoman Alice Munro, perhaps, and — since the death of Eudora Welty — no American that I can think of.”
Michael Ondaatje’s admiring comments include the telling remark: “I know two writers who have told me that the one writer they do not read when they are completing a book is Mavis Gallant. Nothing could be more intimidating.”
I must note that she has not always been well served by her New York publishers. After many years of researching a major book on the Dreyfus Affair, for example, she was told by her editor that big, lengthy books were no longer in fashion. According to Mavis, her despairing reaction was to burn the many hundreds of pages she had written, leaving no copies.
I can vouch for the fact that when we co-published The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, the New York publisher — unbelievably — gave precisely the same book the misleading title The Complete Stories of Mavis Gallant (1996). When we in Toronto caught a major error in the order of the stories, it was regarded by them as a major nuisance to fix, until I appealed to very high levels. And so it went, with panic-stricken calls from New York at the last minute, incredibly, asking Mavis to cut sixteen stories (including the vital Linnet Muir stories) from the end of the book. I did what I could, and the correctly titled Selected Stories continues to sell well in Canada.
Our 2008 visit to Paris included a visit to Mavis in hospital. Some weeks earlier I had failed to get an answer to repeated phone calls, and had called her New York agent, Georges Borchardt, to get someone in Paris to check up on her, please, since I had “a very clear image of her lying helpless on her apartment floor.” He had someone check. The phone was broken, relax, Doug, no problem, she’s not lying on the floor, relieved laughter all round.
Exactly one week later Georges called with a very different message. “Doug, do you remember that image you had of Mavis lying on the floor? Well, it just happened. She collapsed on Thursday, and the neighbours broke in with a locksmith on Sunday, and she’s in hospital, but doing well.” Georges wondered wryly about my using my talents elsewhere, like a circus, for example. Longchamp, anyone?
Jane and I visited her near the end of her fifty-day stay in the Broca Hospital in Paris. Despite the fact that she had lain unconscious for so long, without food or water, her brain, to the amazement of the doctors, was unaffected. When we reverently tiptoed into her hospital room, she wasn’t there; her roommate, an Alzheimer’s victim, was. Enquiries of the nurses about Madame Gallant revealed that she was an unpredictable gadabout, to be found who knew where. We were glad to find her in the cafeteria with a visitor.
She recovered completely, but her energy was affected. This led me into a new role with her 2009 book, Going Ashore. My editor’s note tells the story of the book’s origins.
This book was conceived in a Toronto-Paris phone conversation in 2007, when Mavis Gallant remarked to me that it was unfortunate that so many of her stories were out of print, or had never appeared in a book. This caught my attention. . . .
Intrigued, I encouraged her to compile a list of the “missing” stories, and promised to publish them. She was delighted, and asked me — in a typically direct way — if I could bring the book out before she died. We are such old friends that I felt able to answer with another question: “What are your plans in this regard, Mavis?” She laughed and started to make research enquiries.
Then serious ill-health intervened. . . . Later, in another trans-atlantic call, I gently suggested that, given the lack of progress on the new book, perhaps I should step in and take on the task of collecting the stories. “That,” said Mavis, “would be noble of you.”
Inspired by the adjective, I set to work.
With the help of friends like Christine Evain in Nantes and William Toye in Toronto, I was able to amass copies of the hidden stories. Despite serious ill health Alberto Manguel was able to write a brilliant introduction that speaks of “the profound, vital sense of revelation that comes from reading Gallant’s stories.” I put on the cover a photograph by Geoff Hancock that showed Mavis in her prime, smilingly posing in her cardigan in the sunny Tuileries Gardens. Mavis, although pleased, jokingly described herself as looking “like a gym teacher.” The book by the gym teacher did extremely well, and was hailed by every reviewer.
Mavis, fighting ill-health, continues to work, slowly, at the series of diaries that I hope to publish, although when we chat by phone she evades my questions about her precise progress. I was pleased to learn from Lisa Allardice in the Guardian that in November 2009, Mavis was still able to get out to the famous Paris restaurant, Le Dome. There she is automatically given Picasso’s old table.
As for Mavis and me, she will be cross that I have written this account of our relationship down through the years. But she will forgive me. As this excerpt from Christine Evain’s interview proves, we know one another very well.
Mavis Gallant: Doug came to New York once when I was giving a talk, years ago. And he has a tendency to stand up at a gathering and talk about one. And he found out that I was at a dinner and he muscled his way in — he’s very good at that: he just called and said, I heard that you’re giving a dinner, and he came along. And I cornered him and said, “I’ve asked everyone not to give a talk about me, or single me out, or whatever.” And he said, “You have not asked everyone, you just asked me!” And that was true. (She laughs).
In the fine documentary that I quoted earlier she speaks memorably about how she writes:
The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image like a slide, or closer still, a freeze frame, showing characters in a simple situation. Every character comes into being with a name (which I may change), an age, a nationality, a profession, a particular voice and accent, a family background, a personal history, a destination, qualities, secrets, an attitude towards love, ambition, money, religion, and with a private centre of gravity.
The final words of her introduction to her Selected Stories also deserve to be remembered: “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.”
“That bastard Newman! You can’t ever trust him!” It was 1968 and my boss, David Manuel, was furious. The letter in his hand contained bad news. Despite the exist
ence of a signed contract, Peter Newman was cancelling his plans to provide Doubleday with his next book, which was certain to be a bestseller. He was cancelling the contract with regret, and returning, without interest, the money that had been advanced to him some years earlier.
But it wasn’t just that. The letter to David — announcing, and feebly explaining, this decision — was a copy, and the envelope contained an original, signed letter from Peter to Jack McClelland, saying, in effect: “This should fool those guys at Doubleday.”
David Manuel sent back the correspondence to Peter Newman with a curt note explaining that it seemed to have been intended for someone else. Then we sat back and waited to see how Peter Newman could get out of this situation of almost terminal embarrassment.
No problem. Back from his desk as Ottawa editor of the Toronto Star came a cheerfully unrepentant letter that joked about the unpredictability of the mails, glossed over the difficult facts, and went on to spread general good will and best wishes all around.
That day I learned why John Diefenbaker, who had suffered badly in Newman’s 1963 book about him, entitled Renegade in Power, had called him “the bouncing Czech.” Although Dief bore the fine people of Czechoslovakia no general ill will, it was not an affectionate nickname. So I learned very early in my career that there was more to Peter than met the eye. Clearly, this was a man who bore watching. As the years went by I found that watching him was a lot of fun.
Fast forward almost forty years. By now, after I had edited and published Peter’s superb autobiography Here Be Dragons in 2004, we were friends. I had enjoyed my encounters with him down through the years, since I had seen him clearly from the start. I knew that he was a mischievous fellow, with his own agenda, and not a candidate for sainthood.
But after the predictable success of Here Be Dragons (stuffed full, as it was, of amazing stories involving Canada’s major figures), I had tried, like a good publisher working to keep his major authors busy on another book, to get Peter going on a new project. He was always flattered, and always keen to get started on something in due course, but a little vague about when that might be, since he was so busy, as always, with newspaper and magazine work. I found it very hard to pin my friend Peter down.
So when Jane and I were invited to join Peter and his wife Alvy for a sail in their boat in Lake Ontario, I was delighted. I looked forward to getting to know Alvy better (since in a earlier conversation I had brushed away her objections that I would have no idea about the Peace River district she came from, and amazed her by establishing that she had been in high school in Fairview with my second cousin Fraser Robertson). And spending a whole summer Saturday in a yacht with Peter — an experienced sailor who has ventured right around Vancouver Island — at the helm, meant that I could find out what his plans were, for sure.
Except that the boat also contained Ray Heard and his wife. I don’t know if Ray was actually assigned the task of talking all the time, of if Peter assumed that he would fall naturally into the role, but a tête à tête with Peter proved to be impossible. We had a fine sail, fine food and drink, nobody drowned, and nobody strangled Ray Heard. So I was still making no progress in getting Peter to start a new book, and still unsure about what his next project might be.
Until, that is, the morning of September 12, 2005, when Jane, an early riser, disturbed my morning drowse with the words, “I think you should see this.”
This was the front page of the Globe and Mail, which revealed in a huge headline that Peter C. Newman had just brought out a clandestine book, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister. These were tapes that Peter had made during the years of Brian Mulroney’s time as prime minister. Peter had talked (perhaps the word is “flattered”) his way into the role of Boswell to Mulroney’s Dr. Johnson, and the two had chatted frankly over hundreds of Ottawa hours as the Prime Minister’s life in office unfolded. The eventual publication, Mulroney obviously hoped, would be a team effort that provided him with a great legacy.
Then things went wrong, somehow, between them — it may have been the word “team” — and the project languished. But there were these many hours of tapes. . . .
As I lay there in what had been my restful bed I cast my mind back for any clues that this bomb was about to explode. No new Peter C. Newman book had been listed for that fall season by any Canadian publisher. Random House, it was true, had been offering booksellers an anonymous book for that month by a major author that would, they promised, be hugely controversial. Since Random House was a 25% owner of McClelland & Stewart (cynics might have added more), it was, in effect, a sister publisher and undeniably used the same design and production and sales and marketing teams, so it would have had to go to extraordinary lengths to keep the new book secret. (And that indeed was the case, with the book even being printed outside the country, in the United States, for greater secrecy.) So this news was a total surprise to me.
Then I remembered a lunch, some years earlier, when Peter had mentioned in passing that he had all of these tapes that he had made with Mulroney. I didn’t get into the obvious problem that tapes of a conversation belong to both of the parties involved, because I simply told Peter that I was going to be publishing Brian Mulroney’s memoirs, so was not interested in any other Mulroney projects, and we moved on to other topics. It occurred to me that morning that this vague thirty-second conversation, in Peter’s world view, constituted fair warning.
That morning I was the only person in a world of screaming “Mulroney Betrayed by Newman” news stories to receive a phone call from both Peter C. Newman and Brian Mulroney.
Both calls were instructive.
Peter, who called shortly after 8 a.m., was not a whit apologetic. He was gleeful, like a kid who had just constructed a firework that had gone off with a very big bang. “Hey, Doug, you’ve seen the papers! I guess you know now why I wasn’t rushing to take on a new book, ha ha ha.”
For him this was wonderful fun. Such fun that I couldn’t stay angry with him, and we parted affectionately, with Peter still chortling, and me shaking my head in disbelief.
The next phone call was from Brian Mulroney. He was well aware, of course, that I was a friend of Peter Newman’s, since he had been keenly interested in the sales of Here Be Dragons and had regularly asked how his (ironically described) “old friend Peter Newman” was getting along. He knew, too, how likely it was that I would have known about a new big book like Newman’s, so hard to keep secret.
Yet his call did not begin with any angry accusations. Instead he said, evenly, “I take it that you knew nothing about this new book by Peter Newman?”
“That’s right, Brian. I’ve just read about it in today’s Globe, like everyone else. It’s a complete surprise to me.”
“Okay. So he’s betrayed both of us,” Mulroney went on, and we proceeded to discuss the implications. Later that day Mulroney’s office issued a press release that used words like “devastated” and “betrayed,” noting that he considered the published material to be confidential.
I was, and remain, impressed by how Mulroney handled the call to me. A lesser man would have leapt to furious conclusions, and hard words might have been exchanged between us, before things were cleared up.
Thereafter, I stayed carefully on the sidelines as a legal battle was waged between them and their lawyers, with Random House (which did not publish Peter’s next book) an unhappy participant. I understand that in the end Peter was able to keep only some of the proceeds from the book, while Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children is now much richer. Brian Mulroney has been quoted as boasting that he “ruined” Peter Newman. Who knows? But we do know that Peter, born in 1929, is still working noticeably hard as a journalist and an author.
On the other hand, Peter always was a hard-working, unstoppable force. His amazing life story is told in Here Be Dragons, over 700 lively pages. Some critics claim that the book may indeed
be brilliant, but enjoys an extra sheen added by his imagination. Certainly, the sub-title: “Telling Tales of People, Passion, and Power” gives us a number of clues to Peter’s astonishing career.
He was born in Moravia, now Czechoslovakia, the only son of a prosperous family that owned the town’s sugar beet refinery, the largest in the country. Young Peter led a charmed — if somewhat lonely — life, until Hitler entered the picture. As a prominent secular Jewish family the Newmans were in danger, and as the Nazi net closed around them, they fled. Peter’s grandparents were not so lucky, and died in a concentration camp.
Young Peter and his parents left everything behind. In order to travel light (something that was to become a family characteristic) Peter’s father exchanged their cash for some supremely valuable postage stamps, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s currency. To avoid attracting official attention they were given to Peter, part of his little stamp collection.
After the train left Prague forever, Peter’s father noticed that his son was playing with a fine new cap gun. Asking casually where the stamp collection was, his father learned that Peter had traded it away for the cap gun to “another boy.”
“And where is this other boy?”
“He was at the train station in Prague.”
“I see.”
My father was silent for a long while, as he no doubt pondered the vagaries of life. I don’t think he ever forgave me, and I don’t blame him.
Eventually, after fourteen months on the run in Europe they made it to Biarritz, on the Atlantic, just north of France’s border with Spain. There, in one of the most exciting passages in the book, Peter records the night that he — a young boy of eleven, in short pants — and other refugees lying on the sandy beach were strafed from the air by a Nazi Junkers plane. His father, he reveals, had trouble getting the local French inhabitants to help the wounded, and the Newmans were glad to escape on the last boat to freedom, in this case London.
Stories About Storytellers Page 26