Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  In his prime Peter was a big, bulky, shambling man, a bear-walker you might say. His rumpled appearance (the famous comparison to “an unmade bed” on bad days was unkind to some beds I have known) was no surprise to the thousands of loyal fans who lined up to meet him at book signings, including many for his wildly successful series of Morningside Papers. They were surprised, however, by his shyness, which was part of the man, and helped account for his failure on live TV. Yet he willingly undertook these tours because he was a pro who liked his books to do well, and because he relished witnessing “the Morningside effect” on his own books.

  What do these books — and his others, almost all fixtures on the bestseller lists — tell us about Peter Gzowski the writer? That he wrote well about his enthusiasms – hockey, or golf, or horse racing, or journalism, or broadcasting. That he could turn his hand to an astonishing variety of subjects, from the perils of being dismasted in mid-Caribbean to the pleasures of family hopscotch. What proved to be his last book, in his lifetime, A Peter Gzowski Reader, demonstrates the range of his skills, as journalist, essayist, narrator, and polemicist for Canada, and shows us he was, always, a writer.

  Sadly, what might have been his greatest book will never be written. He was at work in his final years on a book about the North, the last frontier that he knew well and loved with a passion, and he and I often spoke excitedly about its prospects. In the end he lost the race to finish it, and we all lost a potentially great book. At the private family funeral, Susan Aglugark paid an unforgettable Northern tribute to him, her clear voice rising out over the Toronto rooftops as she sang “Amazing Grace” in Inuktitut, magically linking the clouds above with those stretching all the way to the Arctic.

  Others have written about the glorious work he did for literacy, raising more than $12 million (and counting, as the tradition goes on) for Frontier College through his golf tournaments. (And his old Frontier College friend John O’Leary remembers other much less glamorous times he spent doing literacy work — in prison, for example, far from the fun of the golf course.) I remember a crowded Saturday meeting at the University of Toronto where student literacy volunteers were gathered from across the country. Did he thank them, and congratulate them? No. He ended his talk with the thought: “Aren’t we lucky — aren’t we lucky — to be able to do important work like this that we love?” I like to think he would have said the same about his own life and work.

  The byline was Goderich, Ontario, but the setting of the Globe and Mail piece was the neighbouring town of Blyth, where a fundraising dinner was being served to benefit the local theatre. The story began:

  “Excuse me, but I hear there’s a famous lady writer who lives near here,” said the man in the Blyth Hall, summoning an alert-looking, sixtyish waitress to his table. “I hear she sometimes comes to this festival.”

  The waitress nodded her silver curls.

  “Would that by any chance be her?” The man indicated a nearby table. A woman sat alone, artistic and dramatic. Wrapped in patterned shawls, the woman held high a fine head of auburn hair.

  “I’m not sure,” admitted the waitress. She sized up the woman and then, encouragingly, whispered back, “Yes, I think that might be her.”

  Alice Munro, who was the silver-haired waitress, gives a guilty laugh when she tells this story.

  Val Ross was the author of this famous article, which tells so much about Alice Munro, and about the standard of journalism Val Ross set for herself, reporting on the Canadian cultural scene for Maclean’s and then the Globe and Mail. She looked and wrote like an angel and every sensible publisher spent years trying to get her to write a book. That would, of course, be no problem, slipped in between her time spent raising three children with Morton, kicking people in her karate class, travelling, and leading a life full of friends, and of colleagues who were soon to be friends. How could you resist someone who came up to your desk, bearing sticks of fresh celery and saying, “I’ve decided that you deserve a celery increase”?

  In due course she wrote two excellent books for children. The first was The Road to There: Mapmakers and Their Stories, which won the Norma Fleck Award as the best Canadian book of the year for children. The second, You Can’t Read This, was even more ambitious. In Val’s words, “This book is a history of reading. But it is also about people who have been denied the power of reading. It’s about lost writing, forbidden books, mistranslations, codes, and vanished libraries. It’s about censors, vandals, and spies. It’s about people who write in secret. And it’s about people who devote their hearts and brains to learning what has been written.”

  Eventually, I persuaded Val to write a book for adults: it was one of the greatest compliments of my life that she — on first-name terms with every good publisher in the land — chose to publish it with my editorial imprint. The fit was very good. Val’s year as a journalism fellow at Massey College had imbued her with the spirit of Massey’s founding master, Robertson Davies. Now she had the brilliant idea of producing an “oral biography” of my old friend and author by interviewing people who had known him.

  All went well for three years as Val did her research and started the book, and I received pleasing reports of progress. Then came the events that will answer any reader of this book who wonders why a little-published author, with only one adult book — Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic — earned a place here, in this book, alongside authors like Munro, Gallant, MacLeod, and Davies himself.

  Read on.

  The phone message was recorded early in November: “Doug. It’s Val Ross. I have brain cancer and it’s been operated on and I’m home and at work on the book. I’ve almost completed chapter thirty-three and I’ve roughed out the next two chapters . . .”

  And so on, with more book details. It was clear right from the start how Val wanted to play this. Val’s Rules.

  So I called back and asked about chapter thirty-three, and then talked about how far my editing had gone and what I was finding. And then after ten book-filled minutes I cleared my throat and started: “You’ll notice that I haven’t said how terrible . . .” And she cut me off, telling me there was no need for any of that. She was a tough Scot, she said, and she was going to get on with finishing the book. Val’s Rule Number One: no self-pity.

  And so we played by Val’s Rules. Our phone calls were always about the book, or about arranging what Val teasingly described as my “house calls.” If after the book talk was over, I ventured to ask how she was doing she would say, for example, “Well, I’m not quite in what Bertie Wooster would call ‘mid-season form.’” And we’d be off and laughing about Hugh Laurie and his pop-eyed P.G. Wodehouse character, and the subject would be successfully deflected. Val’s Rules.

  As for the house calls, they were full of work and jokes. We’d sit side by side at the dining room table and do our stuff. Once, just before Christmas 2007, the kids were home and we did our editing together in front of Max and Maddie, both back from university. I’d never edited with an audience before, but there, in that house, it seemed easy and natural and right. Once Val even jokingly complained that she wasn’t getting the full authorial treatment: weren’t authors and their editors supposed to fight? But we were too busy for any of that, working against a clock that we never acknowledged. Val’s Rules.

  The house calls revealed physical changes. One day she was wearing a rakish fur hat. “I’m bald,” she announced, adding, “balder than you!” This was a detail that I would certainly have edited out.

  Then, as her left side seized up, I would sit on her left and turn the pages for her. In the Davies book there are references to his turning the pages for musicians, so even that was fodder for a wry joke. Val’s Rules.

  I tried to introduce my own rule, which was that as soon as work on the book became too hard for her, I’d take over. “I know what I’m doing,” I said. “I’ve done this before.” This was a cue for more jokes from Val, about my
boyish inexperience — but she never took me up on the offer.

  She saw the book through the proofs stage, approved the cover, and wrote her final acknowledgements just three days before she died.

  Following Val’s Rules, at McClelland & Stewart we refused to let our grief delay the book, and moved fast to get it out in June. The book was reviewed with admiration and sold well. At the end of 2008 it was selected by the Globe and Mail as one of the Year’s 100 Best Books. An equally significant tribute came in from the people she had interviewed. When they received their copy of the book, scores of them wrote to me to praise how Val had accurately reflected their words, to say how much they had enjoyed the time spent with her, and to mourn the fact that they could not send their congratulations to her directly.

  The February memorial service was held in a packed Massey College, and like the best such “celebrations of a life,” it revealed to everyone the wide range of her friendships, and many hidden aspects of Val’s life, including this saintly woman’s karate skills. Now a discreet plaque in that same common room records the spot where she liked to sit, and talk, or read, or write.

  A final thought. When I told Robertson Davies’s daughter, Jennifer Surridge, about Val’s death, she spoke of the “joy” that working on the book had brought Val in those last few months. I like to think that’s true. And I won’t forget the “house call” conversation when Val remarked on how many Robertson Davies books had come out since his death. “Yes,” I said, carefully, “and books do live on.”

  The phrase hung in the air between us, and I could see that Val was pleased. But of course she didn’t say anything. Val’s Rules.

  When I reach the Pearly Gates, I know that I have the perfect password to get in. Even if St. Peter is at his grumpy, bureaucratic worst — “So what have you ever done in your miserable, selfish life to deserve getting into Heaven?” — I can waltz in simply by saying, “I kept Alice Munro writing short stories.”

  And he, if his English is any good, will rush to wave me through, maybe even making a saintly exclamation like “Holy smokes, Alice Munro!”

  I even have the documents to prove it. When Robert Thacker was hard at work researching his masterful biography entitled Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, (2005, since revised and updated, and published in 2011) he came upon a letter that Alice wrote in March 1986>. The situation was this: I had just left Macmillan of Canada to set up Douglas Gibson Books at M&S, and Alice was keen to join me there, with her book The Progress of Love that I had signed up for Macmillan. Linda McKnight, the new head of Macmillan, was less keen on this idea. So Alice wrote her the following letter, asking to be set free from her contract, in order to join me:

  Doug first talked to me about publishing with Macmillan in the mid-seventies. I was very discouraged at the time. Ryerson had done nothing to promote or even distribute my first book. McGraw-Hill Ryerson had published the second with expressed reluctance and the third without enthusiasm — merely, I believe, to keep a Canadian fiction writer on their list. Every publisher I had met had assured me that I would have to grow up and write novels before I could be taken seriously as a writer. No one in Canada had shown the least interest in taking on a writer who was going to turn out book after book of short stories. The result of this was that I wasted much time and effort trying to turn myself into a novelist, and had become so depressed that I was unable to write at all. Doug changed that. He was absolutely the first person in Canadian publishing who made me feel that there was no need to apologize for being a short story writer, and that a book of short stories could be published and promoted as major fiction. This was a fairly revolutionary idea at the time. It was his support that enabled me to go on working, when I had been totally uncertain about my future.

  I came to Macmillan because of Doug, and his respect for my work changed me from a minor, “literary” writer who sold poorly into a major writer who sold well. I hope you will understand how I have felt, from that time on, that I owe him a great deal, and I want him to have charge of any book I publish. I am not making a judgement against Macmillan — my relations in the house have always been good — but for Doug Gibson.

  In the end, thanks to Avie Bennett’s generosity in paying Macmillan a fee to free Alice, it all worked out. In fact it worked out so well that the Toronto Star reported that I had “scored a coup by acquiring Canadian publishing rights to the work of Alice Munro from Macmillan.” The Globe and Mail reported the story, which included the news that Hugh MacLennan and W.O. Mitchell were also coming with me, under the agreeable headline “CanLit Luminaries Stick with Gibson.”

  It was priceless publicity for my new line. In the next few years, so many Macmillan authors chose to follow me to M&S that Macmillan simply stopped publishing fiction. And The Progress of Love sold far better than even our highest hopes had predicted, handsomely recovering our investment.

  This is a good place to pay tribute to Avie Bennett, a good friend of Alice, and of mine. It was typical of Avie that he would take the gamble of paying out what I call a large “ransom” to Macmillan (despite which my former employer, sadly, went downhill and disappeared) in order to let Alice’s new book start off my new imprint with a bang. He had used that same daring gambler’s instinct to make a fortune as a developer, and then, fairly late in his life, after joining the M&S board to help it through bad times, had used it again to buy the company in 1986. He soon lured me there to start my imprint, and from September 1988 until he sold the company in mid-2000, he and I were in and out of each other’s office for hours every day, and I got to know him very well.

  Michael Levine, the entertainment lawyer, agent, and ubiquitous man-about-town, called us “the Odd Couple,” exulting in the many differences between me, the fancy-pants literary guy, and Avie, the businessman from the school of hard knocks who, among many other differences, did not share my aversion to alcohol. Avie used to complain publicly that I was “stubborn” (a charge I’ll fight to my dying day), and I would roll my eyes at his passion for doing things differently, for “trying something new.” I learned that it was a terrible mistake ever to propose a solution by saying, “Well, here’s what we usually do in publishing. . .” But I also learned that he was such a bright guy that his new ideas were often good ones, and that they were motivated by the same love of books — and of doing a good job for our authors, and selling lots of copies — as my own, more traditional, plans.

  For his dedicated (often very expensive) support of McClelland & Stewart over the years, Canada’s writers — and their readers — owe him a great deal. His support of many other good causes is impossible to quantify, because he preferred to do so much of his good work secretly, as an “Anonymous Donor.”

  Editors, too, are usually fairly anonymous (unless they shamelessly blazon their own imprint all over their books) and it is always a magical thing for editors to find a book dedicated to them by the author. That is what happened to me with Alice’s very personal 2006 book, The View from Castle Rock, which is a fiction collection based on the history of her own family, the Laidlaws. Her dedication at the front of the book is pure Alice. “Dedicated to Douglas Gibson, who has sustained me through many travails, and whose enthusiasm for this particular book has even sent him prowling through the graveyard of Ettrick Kirk, probably in the rain” (as I check the exact wording, I find that Alice has corrected these words in my personal signed copy, adding “For Doug, who is even more loyal and admirable and funny than this indicates”).

  Let me explain the Ettrick Kirk reference, by accounting for the (rain-free!) research trip that I took with my wife Jane who is — almost by definition — a patient woman. She has always cheerfully accompanied me on the routine social occasions, and even the more unusual expeditions, that a book publisher’s life provides. Yet a raw winter morning spent poking around unglamorous streets in the east end of Montreal, following the career of Yves Beauchemin’s bold young hero, Charles Thibodeau, once m
oved her to ask, “Let me get this straight. We’re tracing the life — finding the high school, and the church where they buried his mother, and so on — of a fictional character?”

  It was more a comment than a complaint, you understand, and she listened politely, shivering only slightly, while I explained the need to catch just the right atmosphere on the cover for Charles the Bold and the rest of the series, and how vital it is for an editor to fully understand a character’s life, blah, blah, blah, blah.

  But these things even out. She was much keener when we interrupted a visit to Scotland in order to explore the setting for the first chapters of Alice’s then-forthcoming book, The View from Castle Rock. We knew that Alice’s ancestors, the Laidlaws, came to Canada in 1817 from the Scottish Borders. We had also learned from the first version of the manuscript that the earliest known Laidlaw relative, born around 1700, lived at the very end of the Ettrick Valley, at a farm named Far Hope. We were sure that we could find it.

  The Ettrick River flows roughly from west to east into the North Sea about halfway between Edinburgh and the English border. From the town of Peebles we drove south until we met the Ettrick Valley. On the way we passed Tushielaw (Alice, I remembered from the manuscript, on her own exploration had caught a bus from Tushielaw — not a name you forget).

  Following the river west we were among wild, lonely, bare hills, sheep country for many generations, ever since the medieval forest that once sheltered William “Braveheart” Wallace’s guerillas was felled, leaving no trace but the name “Ettrick Forest.” The only place that had even a cluster of houses, and a small grey school, was Ettrick itself. There, in the graveyard by the Kirk, we found the grave of William Laidlaw of Far Hope, locally called “Phaup.” The tombstone memorably declares: “Here lyeth William Laidlaw, the far-fam’d Will o’ Phaup who for feats of frolic, agility and strength, had no equal in his day.”