by Anna Porter
This is the country of our defeat
and yet . . .
It was the poem Dennis Lee read at the Al Purdy Tribute at the October 1997 International Festival of Authors.
* * *
I. Later he changed his name to George.
II. Though I used to see Doug/George at a variety of book-related events, we tended to stand awkwardly next to each other rather than talk. I don’t think it was his stammer or that he would leave long silences between sentences, but it took until 2003 for us to have a good conversation.
III. He got the date wrong, but it was a lovely gift.
IV. The Russian poet drew a huge crowd in Hamilton for the Key Porter book launch in 1995, with elderly women throwing flowers at his feet as he performed in both Russian and English. Like a rock star, he launched himself into the seats and lay, prostrate, on adoring ladies’ laps.
The Happy Hungry Man
IN HUNGARY, POETS were revered. Children learned to recite poems even before they learned to read, there are streets named after poets and life-size statues of poets all over the country. Most of my beloved poets were unabashedly nationalistic. I had grown up with poetry, admittedly the kind of nineteenth-century Hungarian poetry that scans in iambic pentameters and renders Hungarians tearful with patriotism or nostalgia. I had loved János Arany, Sándor Petőfi, Mihály Vörösmarty, and Endre Ady. I used to know every word in Vörösmarty’s verse play, Csongor és Tünde. So many years later, I can still recite a few lines.
My grandfather used to take me to the Gerbeaud coffee house on the square named for Vörösmarty and I would spend hours walking around his massive statue with stone versions of some of his characters. The statue of Sándor Petőfi, hero of the 1848 uprising against the Hapsburgs, is not far from Vörösmarty’s. A romantic figure, young, always in love, he died fighting for the country’s independence from the Hapsburg Empire. My chief ambition before the 1956 Revolution was to be a poet.
I gave up that dream together with my first language in 1957 when I landed in New Zealand but I had not given up my love of poetry.
* * *
GEORGE JONAS WAS the first Hungarian ’56er I met in Canada. It was at a party to celebrate his birthday. He wore dark glasses, though it was dark enough in the apartment where the party was held, a leather jacket, and leather pants with, incongruously, a collared shirt and tie. He was about six foot two, with a fringe (really), brown hair, high cheekbones, and a cigarette holder. He smoked constantly, lighting one cigarette after another. He had a soft voice and a relaxed Hungarian accent. He was working at the CBC then, producing radio and TV dramas and documentaries. Since 1962 he had written, produced, and directed about a hundred dramas. He would add a hundred more before he left the CBC.
More important in my estimation of George, he was a poet. His first poetry collection, The Absolute Smile, had been published by the new House of Anansi in 1967. His second, The Happy Hungry Man, was published in 1970. Margaret Atwood was his editor but, as she recalled, he didn’t need much editing. These few lines were my favourite:
The happy hungry man believes in food
The happy homeless man believes in a home
The happy unloved man believes in love
I wouldn’t mind believing in something myself.
George and I became friends by increments. We would meet for lunch and talk about music, fascism, Hungarian humourists, old films, George Orwell, poetry, Canadian law, motorcycles, the joys of flying, and politics. We had both survived a revolution and both of us were enamoured with Canada, but he thought my views of the world were, at best, naive, at worst, dangerous. He feared that I had retained too much socialism. I thought he was too far to the mordant right and lacking in sympathy for the poor.
But we always agreed on poetry. We would recite long Petőfi poems—ones with a bit of humour—and Heine, Rilke, sometimes even Pushkin. As for his own poems, I love “Memories”:
The Room has four walls, the room is empty,
And there is nothing left in the room.
Around the room the house is dying
The way worlds die.
I lived here, I am told. I don’t remember.
What I remember is nothing to speak of:
A summer perhaps, and a flow of streams.
Now I am tired. Elephants
Sit on my dreams.
One of George’s best-loved poets, George Faludy, had also landed here after ’56. He had been the most famous poet of the 1950s in Hungary. His translation of the little-known fifteenth-century French vagabond poet François Villon made him into a celebrity. Faludy had served hard time in both Nazi and Communist prisonsI: George called him “an equal opportunities resister.” A small man with wildly unruly grey hair, Faludy was a frequent visitor to George’s midtown apartment. When he met my mother, who could still recite his Villon poems by heart, he was impeccably polite and even flirtatious, though he was travelling with his gay lover at the time.
George Jonas introduced me to the work of Sándor Márai and Stephen Vizinczey, both of whom I still read today. Vizinczey had emigrated to Canada when George did, but unlike George, he had found Canada stifling. His first novel, In Praise of Older Women, was self-published. Vizinczey used to personally cart copies to bookstores, where they were snapped up by eager book buyers. Though Márai died in penury in the United States, his novel Embers became an international bestseller twelve years after his death.
Both George and I kept Márai’s diary next to our beds for late-night reading. I also keep T. S. Eliot there, the collected W. H. Auden, and now, the George Jonas Selected Poems. Poetry sustains me.
* * *
I. I used to send copies of Faludy’s autobiography, My Happy Days in Hell, to various publishers in the UK and United States, in hopes of seeing it back in print. I am delighted to find it now, available online from Amazon.
The Amazing Ms. Atwood
I FIRST MET Margaret Atwood in 1969. I didn’t know then that she was a genius. I did know that she had written some remarkable poetry and that The Circle Game had won a Governor General’s Award. We were meeting because somewhere in the mad labyrinth that was McClelland & Stewart the manuscript of her first novel had been lost.
There are various versions of the lost Edible Woman story. Jack favoured the one that started with his sending Margaret an obsequious letter asking whether she would consider submitting to M&S a novel she had mentioned in a recent newspaper interview. She replied that she had submitted it to M&S some two years earlier. He then discovered that the manuscript had been in a drawer of his desk all along. In another version she had received an offer of publication from M&S and agreed to the terms. There ensued two years of silence. It was not until she demanded the return of the manuscript that it was found.
Jack tried to placate her with a nice letter but, since I was the managing editor, it was my job to smooth things over with the understandably grumpy Ms. Atwood. It was a helluva way to start a relationship that has lasted through forty-eight years and the publication of (so far) twenty novels and collections of short stories and essays, thirteen volumes of poetry, seven children’s books, and two graphic novels.
When she arrived, Margaret was accompanied by Pamela Fry. Pamela was Margaret’s first editor at M&S (followed by Jennifer Glossop and, then, for many years, Ellen Seligman).
I had read The Edible Woman the night before and was still pondering the fate of its heroine, now divested of her male companions and determined not to be absorbed into their lives. I loved its humour, its utterly disrespectful treatment of sex (“ ‘How was it for you?’ he asked casually, his mouth against my shoulder. He always asked me this. ‘Marvellous,’ I murmured; why couldn’t he tell? One of these days I should say ‘Rotten’ . . .”), and the final scene when Marion makes a cake in the shape of a woman and presents it to Peter. “ ‘You’ve been trying to assimilate me. I’ve made you a substitute, something you’ll like much better. This is what you wanted all along, isn�
�t it? I’ll get you a fork. . . .’ ”
I loved her sharp wit, her devastating observations of modern (then, and still valid now) life, and her unsentimental perceptions of men and women. I expected her to seem tough and world-weary. Instead, she seemed gentle, small, with long, curly dark-brown hair, white creamy skin, intense blue eyes, and a frequent smile. There is a moody, soft Charlie Pachter portrait of Margaret that captures both her toughness and her fragility.I
Charlie is, I think, Margaret’s oldest friend. They had first met when they were both counsellors at a kids’ summer camp. They still make each other laugh. I too find it impossible not to laugh at Charlie’s utterly silly jokes. He told me that he has a jokes cache that allows him to find one for every occasion.
Margaret was almost as interested in finding out about me as I was in finding out more about her. We discovered that we shared a past as ineffectual waitresses. She had worked as a cashier and waitress in a coffee shop on Avenue Road. I had worked in a coffee shop operated, briefly, by my aunt Leah in Hastings, New Zealand. Leah, who had somehow managed to get married seven times, was one of my mother’s two older sisters. She had an espresso machine (rented) and was very good at making European-style coffee, but it was her looks that attracted most of the customers.
Margaret’s father had been a forest entomologist who, for obvious reasons, did most of his research in forests. She had spent much of her childhood in the wilderness, didn’t attend a full year of school until grade eight, and knew more about worms, snakes, tent caterpillars, and wood-boring beetles than everyone else. One of the characters in her novel Cat’s Eye, first published in 1988, is a forest entomologist but he is not, as Margaret told me, based on her father.
Margaret had studied at the University of Toronto in a class taught by one of the world’s great intellectuals, Northrop Frye, and she went to graduate school at Harvard. I studied at Canterbury University in Christchurch, on the South Island of New Zealand, where I could have become a hiker but didn’t. I am not much of a wilderness person. Unlike Margaret, I can’t even paddle a canoe. Other than a love of stories and the words that tell them, we didn’t have much in common.
But Pamela had told me that Margaret could read palms, and a few days later in a coffee shop in Yorkville she offered to read mine. It was not a particularly comforting experience because she said “hmmm” a lot, from which I assumed she had noted I would have a short life but refrained from telling me.
Her tarot reading was more of a success. She was spot-on about some of my checkered past and convinced me that the Hanged Man card was not as dreadful as it seemed. Instead it suggested that I should break free of old patterns of behaviour, habits that restrained my development. Having just broken free of the UK and arrived in Canada, I was not at all sure I could follow the card’s lead again, but it gave me something to think about.
Even as The Edible Woman was making its way through our production processes, Margaret was already working on The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a poetry collection first published in 1970 (not by M&S, sadly). I remember telling Margaret that there was a reason why my people didn’t become settlers.
When The Edible Woman was published, M&S sent Margaret on the usual book tour, complete with television, radio, and print interviews. Her first book signing at a Hudson’s Bay Company department store (yes, the Bay used to sell books) took place in the men’s socks and underwear department. A few years later there were long lines of fans waiting for signed copies at the book department and in bookstores all across Canada.
I remember going to Montreal to meet with Quebec publishers and explaining to them in my enthusiastic but heavily accented French (I am told I have a pronounced Hungarian accent in French) why Margaret Atwood was one of the most important writers in the world. By 1975 Grasset in Paris had already published her and people lined up for copies of her books in French.
The New York Times characterized the novel as “feminist black humor,” an invented category that made it easier for the reviewer. The Edible Woman, like much of Atwood’s work, does not fit into any narrow category. She has broad emotional range and presents, often quite casually, arresting images that stick in one’s mind. A poem called “You Fit into Me” has these lines:
You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
After all these years, I still cannot get that image out of my mind. For a completely different mood, just read the “Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later,” her poem maybe for Charlie Pachter and herself (some others thought it was for them), growing older but still singing, whether anyone listens or not.
In seemingly fast succession, we published Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Cat’s Eye; Atwood had become a household name, the one writer most Canadians could name. Margaret has won the most Canadian and international prizes, including (seriously) the Swedish prize for humour.
In the beginning she used to send me her manuscripts to read. Now she no longer does, but I am one of the first thousand or so readers of every new book and I sporadically follow her on Twitter.
* * *
ELLEN SELIGMAN WOULD eventually become Margaret’s Canadian editor. Ellen had come to Canada from New York, following a romantic dream. I remember her arrival at the M&S office for the first time in 1976. She sat in the narrow hallway of what we jocularly called “Reception.” Tall, willowy, with thick dark hair and big eyes, she had an uncertain smile. She claimed that when I first saw her, I asked, “What the fuck are you doing here?” I don’t remember that, but it’s not impossible. After eight years, I had acquired much of Jack’s vocabulary. I needed it to get through even the average days, and 1976 was hardly average. We had a huge list and were in the middle of production of Between Friends: Entre Amis, co-published with the National Film Board’s Still Photography Division to honour the American Revolution’s Bicentennial and the two hundredth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. The empress of the Still Division, the most powerful woman for Canadian photographers, was Lorraine Monk. A fascinating mix of extreme vulnerability and steely determination, she prided herself on setting the highest possible standards and was untroubled by the costs that often accompanied those standards.II
I hired Ellen an hour after she answered my question. Margaret says Ellen was meticulous, kind, and funny. “I always feel I’d hit the target when I made Ellen laugh,” she said.
* * *
FROM THE FIRST time I saw them together, Margaret and Graeme Gibson seemed the ideal couple, talking to each other quietly, sharing observations, laughing at the same stories. My early memory of Graeme is at a House of Anansi party attended by the young editors and writers. Many of them worked there, editing and commenting on one another’s work, sometimes slept there, certainly wrote there, and often fell in love there, as Margaret and Graeme had done.
Shirley Gibson, then still nominally married to Graeme, was also at the party. She had been one of the House of Anansi’s early supporters, a revered editor, and active both in the literary and theatre worlds. She had been the first woman member of the Bookmen’s Lunch Club (it has since been renamed the Bookpersons’ Lunch Club), founded by Jack in 1962, a group where bookish people could talk about books. Bob Fulford, who was one of the original members, still joins us once a month.
Very tall, blue-eyed, with an easy charm and confidence, Graeme wore an elegant cape-style overcoat and corduroy trousers. He was intensely serious, with a wide-open laugh all the more cheering because it was infrequent. He was suspicious of me because I worked for M&S and Jack had mishandled his novel Five Legs.
Next to him, Margaret seemed small and deceptively fragile. Some journalists have described her as “elfin,” an odd word for a woman with such a substantial presence. Graeme seemed protective of her. Though they sometimes escaped to their house on Pelee Island, I think their only long quiet time was the year they spent in an Alliston far
mhouse, with neighbouring cows and a resident ghost.
An extraordinary aspect of Margaret’s life is her formidable energy. In addition to the novels, her poetry, the operas, the television series, the Writers’ Union, the book reviews, the public readings, the lectures, the speeches on topics that she considers vital, her Arctic journeys, the international promotional tours to please her publishers (my publisher friends in Germany, Australia, and Norway have been thrilled with her support), PEN, her investments in inventions (for example, LongPen) and enthusiasms (she had 1.26 million Twitter followers when I last checked), the Massey Lectures, and the movies and television series based on her books, she is an active environmentalist and travels widely to see birds. She managed to turn her tour for her novel The Year of the Flood into a series of staged summer camp–style public readings with performers—actors, singers, musicians—and dedicated the funds raised to the protection of bird habitats. Ron Mann made a forty-five-minute documentary, In the Wake of the Flood, about the experience. Oh yes, and in 2016 she published two books: Hagseed, a remarkable novel of revenge and enchantments, and the first of her, so far, two graphic novels (with Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain), Angel Catbird. Her 1996 novel Alias Grace was made into a six-part miniseries on CBC/Netflix.
Her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale was in its fifty-second printing in 2016. I assume it has now passed its eightieth printing, what with the Hulu television series, the awe-inspiring reviews, the magnificent photo of Margaret in The New Yorker, and even the habitual carping of the Canadian press. It was number one on Amazon twenty years after it was first published, when Amazon was still just a name for a fierce woman warrior. Yet throughout all this activity she has retained her sense of humour and her old friendships.