Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  The true story is as follows. Alistair published both of his short story collections with McClelland & Stewart. I became M&S’s publisher in 1988, but of course already knew Alistair’s work well. Indeed, I had got to know him in person at the Banff Centre, and one summer in the mid-1980s, when the Gibson family was touring the Maritimes, we visited the MacLeods near Inverness. Between juvenile soccer games on the grass in front of the house, Alistair showed us around his corner of Cape Breton and I remember walking that grassy track to his spartan clifftop writing cabin, which faces west to Prince Edward Island. It struck me at the time that, with the sound of the wind and the waves and the constantly changing view, I would get very little writing done there.

  From 1988 on, I was keenly interested in how much writing he was doing in that cabin, or elsewhere. Over the years, as it became clear that the work he had started in 1986 was a novel, and as Alistair’s readings from the novel at events across the country produced a groundswell of excitement, my contact would consist of a cheery phone call every six months or so, asking how the writing was going. This would produce charmingly vague responses from the Windsor (or, in summer, the Cape Breton) end of the line. So vague, in fact, that I would rely on information from a friend in the M&S warehouse, a member of Alistair’s extended family, for reports on his progress. There were many other friends and admirers, “MacLeod-watchers” (like the “Kremlin-watchers” in the old days who could read significance into the arrangement of Soviet officials on a reviewing stand), who would pass on scraps of information about what he had read at this event, or mentioned about his manuscript in that interview or meeting.

  All the while, of course, Alistair was holding down a demanding job teaching English and Creative Writing at Windsor (to the great benefit of his appreciative students), instructing a summer course at Banff, and raising their six children with Anita, not to mention undertaking the annual family moves between Windsor and Cape Breton. So I did not feel able to harass the man beyond the point of regular encouraging phone calls, letting him know that there was continuing interest at M&S, and in the wider world, in his next book.

  This changed around the beginning of 1999. All of my “how’s it coming along” questions — which Alistair has accurately likened to the “are we there yet?” questions from the kids in the back seat on a long car trip — had extracted no hard information about what proportion of the manuscript was now written. The book, despite my repeated offers, was still not under contract, presumably because Alistair was reluctant to commit to a specific delivery date. But messages from the “MacLeod-watchers” and my own sense of his situation led me to step up the pressure. My main motive was commercial. I could see that very few of the major figures in Canadian literature would have a new book in the fall of 1999 — Alice Munro had appeared the previous year; Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, and Jane Urquhart, among others, were not due for another year at least — so a book by a respected but not yet widely known author like Alistair MacLeod would have a chance to rise to the top, would have, to change the metaphor, room to breathe. Publishers keep an eye on these things.

  So my phone calls became more frequent, and more urgent, especially after Alistair rashly allowed that it was possible that he might finish the book in time for fall. This was a key moment of misunderstanding: when Alistair said “fall,” he meant that he would finish the book in the fall; what I chose to hear was that he would finish in time for us to publish his book in the fall, after the usual months of publishing preparations. I have referred to him as a stone carver, chipping out each perfect word with loving care. Certainly my confidence in the excellence of his writing was such that — without having read a word of the manuscript — I felt able to put the book in the Fall 1999 catalogue (going to the printer at the end of May) and to write him a letter in April outlining very precisely the generous terms we would offer for the new book, for which we would hold “a place of honour” in our fall list.

  In the midst of this campaign of harassment, I learned that Alistair would be reading in Toronto. Unluckily, I had a clashing previous engagement in Ottawa (at the opening of a James Houston–inspired show on Inuit Art at the Museum of Civilization) that same evening. But the next day I flew back early from Ottawa and called Anita to find out where to see her husband while he was in Toronto. She told me where he was staying and mentioned that he was catching the 4:30 train back to Windsor. Failing to catch him before he checked out, I decided, with our Chairman Avie Bennett’s amused encouragement, to try a direct approach.

  So it came about that the unfortunate Dr. MacLeod, peacefully reading a book in Union Station at 4:00, found a bearded man in a coat dropping down to sit beside him on the bench with the words: “Isn’t this amazing! Here I am patrolling Union Station in search of a bestselling novel for this fall, and I happen to run into you!”

  We laughed, but I was able to emphasize the urgency of the matter, in person, and to tell him how certain I was that the literary world was eagerly awaiting this book (something that Alistair, a truly modest man, found hard to believe, even though I assured him that I was right on this). Above all, I was able to urge him on to a final sprint as he approached the finish line of this long distance race. Alistair was politely non-committal. When the Windsor train was called and a queue began to form, there was a fine moment when I offered to carry his briefcase, with a look of frank, open-hearted generosity, and Alistair laughed and clutched the bag protectively to his chest. Laughing, but still clutching.

  To keep the pressure on, I put the book in the M&S catalogue, writing a description of the novel that stands up remarkably well, given that I had not yet read a word of it, or learned more than a sentence of two about it from the tight lips of the author. (When the manuscript later came in, containing the two lines of poetry that immediately preceded the two lines I had chosen to quote in the catalogue, I knew that the gods were with us.)

  At this point the title changed. It had originally been No Great Mischief If They Fall, but Alistair phoned to report that he had just learned of a Scottish book with the same title. Not necessarily a problem, I said, since titles are not restricted by copyright. “Ah well,” said Alistair, “unfortunately, the name of the other book’s author is MacLeod.” In one second the book became No Great Mischief, as nature surely intended.

  As we neared the end of May the pressure on both of us increased. The catalogue was about to be printed at the end of the month, and it is not good for a book to be announced and then postponed. My phone calls about needing to see the manuscript by mid-May were not bearing fruit. Finally, on a Wednesday I called Windsor to tell Alistair that, because we were nearing catalogue deadline and because our sales conference was the following Tuesday and I could not face forty or fifty people and describe the merits of a book I had not read, I was flying down to Windsor on Friday to pick up the manuscript.

  He was appalled. No, no, it wasn’t ready, I shouldn’t do that, don’t come, and so on. But I told him that I was coming, hung up, and didn’t answer my phone for two days. (At the airport on Friday morning, while my office was calling Alistair to let him know I was indeed on my way, I ran into Heather Robertson, the well-known author, who asked where I was going and was fascinated to hear about my mission. One year later Heather was to be part of the jury that unanimously gave the Trillium Prize to No Great Mischief.)

  Arriving in Windsor, I startled the cab driver by asking to be taken to the nearest liquor store. He swung around nervously, checking for indications that I would pass out — or worse, throw up — on his back seat. Then, armed with a bottle of Talisker, a fine malt from the appropriate part of the Highlands, I went on to the MacLeod house.

  At the door, I received a courteous but reserved reception from Alistair, and I was glad to have the Talisker to present. We sat in the front room with Anita and chatted for a bit about our families, and it was very pleasant. But there was an elephant in the room that we were a
ll ignoring. After all, I had barged into their lives with the express intention of wresting the manuscript out of his hands. To make matters worse, no manuscript was in view. Much worse, above the piano I could see the MacLeod clan coat of arms with its terrible, blood-chilling motto: “Hold fast.”

  I did not comment on this.

  Eventually, I produced a contract for the book and laid the large envelope on the coffee table, noting that they should treat it with care because it also contained a cheque, and then wondered aloud what he had for me. And Alistair rose in silence and left the room — and came back carrying a manuscript! Needless to say, it never left my possession from that moment until I was back in Toronto, jubilant from having read a wonderful piece of literature.

  But not, it proved, a complete one. That same day, after Alistair had taken me to lunch in downtown Windsor (and significantly he was greeted in the parking lot and outside the restaurant and by another diner in the restaurant) and told me about the book’s plot for the first time, he drove me to his office at the university. I noticed many handwritten scraps of paper. In response to my question, Alistair admitted that he wrote in longhand, and the absence of secretarial help in summer vacation time meant that his final chapters were being held up while he asked others to type it for him as a favour. I reeled at the thought of this bottleneck and promptly arranged for him to send his remaining handwritten chapters to us by courier and we would arrange to get them typed and on a disc.

  And so, for the next six weeks or so, a package of ten or twelve or fifteen pages written by hand on yellow paper would arrive every few days at the M&S office, and I would take it for typesetting to two young interns, Medbh Bidwell and Adrienne Guthrie, graduates of the Simon Fraser University Master of Publishing Program. They were initially a little hesitant about this menial typing assignment, although I assured them that they were playing a role in Canadian literary history: they soon came to agree, as their wonder at the material they were typing grew, along with their impatience to find out what happened next.

  In the course of these frantic weeks, I had occasion to call Alistair in Cape Breton. The phone was answered by a MacLeod son to whom I introduced myself as the man who was ruining his father’s summer, ha ha. “Oh yes,” he said, heavily, and passed the phone to Alistair.

  My reaction to the final chapter was misunderstood by the National Post but will be easily grasped by anyone who has read the book and its last line: “All of us are better when we’re loved.” I was moved to tears.

  My role in editing the book was almost non-existent. The early material, typed in a variety of faces over the years, was so polished that it needed almost no attention from me. Alistair’s style is distinctive — sparse punctuation, a frequent preference for “which” instead of “that,” much use of “perhaps,” and dialogue punctuated very simply by “he said” so that a variant like “expostulated” would bring the whole chapter crashing down — and it is so deliberate and the rhythms so clear that pages of the manuscript would fly by untouched by editorial hand.

  On occasion my own Scottish background proved to be very useful. For example, I knew a lot about Montrose’s rebellion, having played the role of Montrose in a St. Andrews procession — cavalier’s hat, breastplate, sword, thigh-boots and all (not to mention the runaway horse, and the ruined centuries-old lawn) — so I was useful in clarifying the odd historical detail. By way of general helpfulness I was able, for example, to remind Alistair of T.S. Eliot’s lines about Rannoch Moor when he was describing that area, and I was sound in the general area of Scottish history and, by extension, Wolfe’s battles at Beauport and upstream on the Plains of Abraham. (And if you shake your head at the ubiquity of Scots in Canada, consider that the aforementioned Abraham was “Abraham Martin, dit l’Écossais.”)

  Another Scottish aside: Rannoch Moor is where Alan Breck Stewart and David Balfour spent a hot day being hunted by English redcoats in Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson, who knew something about Jekyll and Hyde personalities, has been credited with making these two characters represent the two sides of what might be called the Scottish schizophrenic personality: David, the sober, plodding, industrious common-sense Presbyterian Lowlander (good material for lawyers, bankers, teachers, engineers, and doctors), and Alan Breck, the wild, creative, romantic Highlander, an ideal man to set up a fur trade route, to conquer a kingdom, to cry over a sad song, or to fight against the odds in wars around the world. Working with Alistair — a Highlander to the bone — it was hard not to find myself being tugged into the ethnic role of my Lowland ancestors. In terms of the historic events of the book, these ancient Gibsons were presumably all in favour of Bruce (another Ayrshire man) and Bannockburn, where they were on the same side as the MacDonalds; but they were opposed to Montrose, dead set against “Bonnie Dundee” (“Bloody Claverhouse”) at Killiecrankie, and notably unenthusiastic about Bonnie Prince Charlie. Now, centuries later and world away, here I was, David Balfour–like, urging the commercial advantages of finishing a novel like a sober man of business, on Alistair, a Celtic visionary and a great artist. It was, and is, a sobering thought.

  Understandably, I was useless as an editor when it came to Gaelic. A toast, a greeting, a few swear words, enough topographical features to be able to tell a ben from a loch, that was the extent of my knowledge, although I grew up in an Ayrshire village with a Gaelic name. So I called on the assistance of a Toronto husband and wife team originally from Scotland, and they raised a number of proofreading questions that Anita (the expert in the household) was able to settle. By the end I was familiar enough with the language that, to my great satisfaction, I caught a typo in the Gaelic dedication.

  The expert copy editor, Heather Sangster, maintained the same light-handed editorial approach, recognizing that the deliberately oral way of storytelling adopted by the author right from the start (“as most people hearing this will know” — page three) called for deliberate repetition of certain phrases, such as “the modernistic house in Calgary.” As always, such a skilled copy editor caught inconsistencies that had somehow escaped the eyes of both author and editor over many readings.

  In terms of the text, my chief role was to work with the designer to produce a book page that did justice to the writing. The typeface is clean, traditional, and easy to read, with plenty of “leading” (rhymes with “heading”) space between lines. There are 43 chapters in the 283 pages of No Great Mischief so to start each new chapter on a fresh page would be disruptive to the reader’s eye and would make the book seem padded. Hence our decision to allow a six-line spacing between chapters, and to mark each chapter opening simply with a numeral set against a Celtic design.

  The book was not divided into formal chapters when it came to my office. I consulted Alistair by phone and undertook to divide it into chapters as seemed best to me, with occasional one-line breaks in the middle of a chapter when something less than a full chapter break seemed appropriate. I am happy to report that when we first saw the proofs of the book, formally divided into chapters, Alistair and I agreed that I had got it right the first time, with the exception of one paragraph, which was moved back into the preceding chapter.

  After that it was merely a matter of giving the book an appropriate look, which Kong Njo, in his role as art director, did with his usual skill, tactfully ignoring my suggestion that the MacDonald tartan might show up somewhere on the cover. Incidentally, at a Cape Breton launch for the book, the hall was decorated in MacLeod and MacDonald tartans, not to mention variants of the McClelland and the Stewart tartans. Had this particular Gibson been able to be present, his Buchanan tartan might also have put in an appearance.

  In the course of presenting the book to our sales conference, that famous conference in June 1999, I did something unprecedented. I used music to convey the sense of the book. To be precise, from my Puirt a Baroque Halifax recording, I played “Niel Gow’s Lament” in the background while I talked about how the music of the
Scottish Highlands and of Cape Breton pervades this marvellous book. And the sad, slow music of the fiddle was worth a thousand words.

  The publishing success of No Great Mischief is history, and it is history that was written around the world, as publishers in a dozen other countries, from Turkey to Japan, revealed the wonders of the book to their readers. For many readers, I suspect, one of the most moving scenes, in a book that almost overflows with them, is the incident where the narrator’s sister from Calgary visits Moidart, the part of Scotland her family left two centuries ago, and meets a woman walking on the beach.

  “You are from here,” said the woman.

  “No,” said my sister, “I’m from Canada.”

  “That may be,” said the woman. “But you are really from here. You have just been away for a while.”

  My friend R.H. Thomson tells me that when Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre staged David Young’s adaptation of No Great Mischief, in rehearsal that scene was so powerful that it stopped the show dead. It had to be cut.

  The book’s wisdom and good-heartedness have taken it far beyond those to whom that passage speaks most directly. Commentators in Canada have spotted this. In an essay entitled “From Clan to Nation,” David Williamson has written of the book’s warm inclusiveness as it deals with other migrant groups in Canada, “all imagined as fellow citizens. In that respect, at least, the book is a virtual instrument of citizenship.”

  Similarly, a senator with a French-speaking background, Laurier LaPierre, might have been expected by shallow readers to disapprove of the book’s treatment of the French-Canadian miners in the camp. Au contraire. He went so far in his approval as to read aloud for Hansard the passage dealing with the impromptu concert involving both the Cape Breton miners and the rival clan of French-Canadians in the camp.