by Anna Porter
The Barn was how I first met photographer and artist Dudley Witney. He co-ventured The Barn with architect Eric Arthur. I was in Eric’s son’s office the day Dudley first showed his slides and drawings and talked about the concept for a book that celebrated “vanishing landmarks of North America,” the words that would become the subtitle of The Barn. He argued that barns were the most authentic pieces of vernacular architecture in North America.
Eric, a New Zealander, had come to Canada in his twenties and, much as I did many years later, fell in love with the place. The author of Toronto, No Mean City, he was an avid conservationist who had warned that many of our heritage buildings would disappear unless we cared about them and their (and our own) history.
Dudley and I became friends almost immediately—a friendship that has lasted a lifetime. Tall, thin, gangly, bespectacled, he is capable of folding himself into the smallest spaces. He can sleep almost anywhere, a useful ability when driving around the countryside with no motels he could afford. An Englishman from Oxfordshire, smitten with the Canadian outdoors, he is a keen observer of objects—both natural and man-made—a collector of people and impressions. He is a romantic with unbending determination. I understood his quirky English sense of humour and his deceptively straight-faced asides, and I loved his moody photographs. He was a strange mixture of nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mill was intensely rational, Shelley the polar opposite: an idealist, a Romantic with a great love of beauty. Dudley was pleased with that description.
Several US publishers made remarks about manure and whether we would have brown covers, but we did, in the end, get an offer for a significant number of books.II Dudley and I celebrated with champagne as the first books rolled off the press.
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I. Then head of William Collins and Sons. Now the firm has been absorbed into HarperCollins.
II. The Barn has been reprinted several times, both in hardcover and in paperback, and you can still pick up copies of the original edition, though the price can be steep.
Finding Home
I WAS BEGINNING to realize I would be staying in Canada. It was an extraordinary time for the country and I was in the best place to enjoy it. Pierre Berton, who was named “Man of the Century” by the Canadian Authors Association, opined: “The country was in love with itself.” Most days I listened to CBC radio and loved its broad coast-to-coast reach and unusual perspectives, its quaint musical interludes, its varied hosts, the dramas, the plethora of voices, its repeated time zones, even that half-hour difference with Newfoundland.
And in those shabby offices on Hollinger Road I was falling in love with Canadian writers. During my first years there, I met Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Earle Birney, Michael Ondaatje, Farley Mowat, Leonard Cohen, Marian Engel, Peter C. Newman, Austin Clarke, Mordecai Richler, Al Purdy, Irving Layton, Max Braithwaite, Sylvia Fraser, James Houston, Sinclair Ross, Marie-Claire Blais, Audrey Thomas, Rudy Wiebe, Charles Templeton, Pierre Berton, and Richard Gwyn. (We published Gwyn’s Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary, about the man who brought Newfoundland into Canada, and later The Northern Magus, still a great book on the most intriguing prime minister we have ever had.) Many others came down the damp corridors with manuscripts and galley proofs or just waited in the grim reception area for one of the editors or Jack or me to take them to the nearby Holiday Inn to talk. Of course we missed a few: Anne Hébert, though I pursued her relentlessly in Montreal and begged Sheila FischmanI to introduce us; Roch Carrier, also translated by Sheila; Robertson Davies; W. O. Mitchell; and Alice Munro, whom I importuned in vain at various bookish events. One of my stupid mistakes was not offering to publish Clark Blaise because, I said, “We do not publish short stories,” though, in truth, I could have added “by little-known writers.” A North American Education would haunt me for many years, and I often apologized to Clark when I met him.
Jack’s mantra about publishing authors, not books, meant that M&S authors were to be treated like royalty, that the staff was told daily that we were replaceable, the writers were not. That real talent had to be nurtured. That Canada, after decades of neglecting its best and brightest, was now ready to honour them. There was, now, a direct relationship between literature and citizenship.
As I travelled the length of the country in the seventies, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, I began to understand how the people I met fitted into their landscapes. It was not difficult to see similarities between artistic visions of the land in paintings as disparate as those of Christopher Pratt and Tony Onley, or A. Y. Jackson and Alex Colville. And I could see how different writers—from Gabrielle Roy to Ethel Wilson, Margaret Atwood to Anne Hébert—grappled with the vastness of Canada and their own sense of belonging.
I was still baffled by Quebec separatists. Though I had heard the resentment of the maudit Anglais, listened to how Quebecers felt diminished by English Canadians, I did not think they would be happier as masters in their own house (maîtres chez nous). I used to spend a lot of time in Montreal meeting with publishers, editors, and writers, listening to their stories and observations. I read Pierre Vallières’s Nègres blancs d’Amérique (published in translation by M&S) and listened to him give an impassioned talk at a Salon du Livre de Montréal, but still failed to see that Quebec would be happier on its own. I spent a day wandering about downtown Montreal with novelist and political activist Hubert Aquin, a grieving separatist, but it still made little sense to me. I went to hear firebrand separatist leader Pierre Bourgault at the Montreal International Book Fair. He was a strange all-white presence, but brilliant and passionate and, though he failed to convince me, I did get Jack’s agreement to M&S’s publishing one of his more incendiary books. We were also translating and publishing Marie-Claire Blais, Roger Lemelin, Fernand Ouellet, Antonine Maillet, and Jacques Godbout.
My own, admittedly brief, experience didn’t divide Canada into two separate domains. The deux nations seemed more like family members debating, disagreeing, squabbling over rights and mutual respect, rather than borders. Canada is such a vast open country that there should be room for everyone’s opinions without having to create new barriers. After my life within a system of absolute repression, Canada seemed to me to be governed for the people. Elections were free and unencumbered by reprisals. Writers were free to express their views.
Jack had added a patina of glamour to publishing. His exhausting championing of authors had moved their books from the back sections of “Canadiana” to the front sections with the bestsellers. He inspired new, young, upstart publishers. It was a time when you could dream up new publishing houses like the House of Anansi, Coach House, Oberon, Talonbooks, New Press (one of Dave Godfrey’s babies,II co-founded with writers Jim Bacque and Roy MacSkimming), Hurtig Publishers, and ECW.III Their idea was to publish stories and poems, often experimental, by young Canadian writers. It was a time of optimism, a confidence that writers in Canada were finally valued, that Canadian literature was not peripheral but central to the nation. Jim Lorimer and two friends established James, Lewis & Samuel in 1971, a company with an edgy left-wing political agenda. Kirk Howard was so inspired by one of Jack McClelland’s speeches about the need for Canadian economic and cultural independence that he set up Dundurn Press.
In 1970 Jack helped form the Committee for an Independent Canada with businessman and politician Walter Gordon, writer/journalist Peter C. Newman, and economics professor Abe Rotstein. The purpose of the committee was to focus public and, ultimately, government attention on the increasing foreign influence over the Canadian economy, our corporations, and our resources. Canada, they believed, was in danger of losing its independence to the United States. Jack was co-chairman with Claude Ryan, a prominent French Canadian journalist and politician. They were joined by Alberta bookseller and publisher Mel Hurtig and lawyer Eddie Goodman. Within a few months, the committee had accumulated 170,000 signatures on a petition for the government to limit foreign inve
stment in Canada.
Jack was always quick to point out that he didn’t want to put restrictions on foreign-authored books coming into the country. To the contrary, he said, we should encourage the reading of all great writers of whatever stripe. Yet, I thought, all you had to do was to browse the shelves of any bookstore in the country to see that we were flooded with foreign product. Canada needed to retain control of its own economy, and to level the playing field.
The Independent Publishers Association—distinguishing itself from the Canadian Book Publishers Council, most of whose members were branches of American firms—was formed in 1971. Five years later, it changed its name to the Association of Canadian Publishers. Strangely, Jack decided that M&S would not join. His explanation to me was somewhat petulant. He saw the newcomers as undisciplined, immature, and overly radical. He believed he could achieve more for M&S (and by implication for Canadian writers) than they could.
Canadian academics were beginning to demand that jobs at universities be filled, primarily, by Canadians to increase “Canadian content” in courses. New Press had published Robin Matthews and James Steele’s controversial The Struggle for Canadian Universities in 1969, igniting the debate. Part of the authors’ argument was that as long as most senior academic positions in Canada were occupied by Americans, it would remain difficult for graduate students to study their own country’s history, society, and literature.
I hired Jim Marsh, ex of Collier Macmillan, to expand our Carleton Library series—one of Jack’s projects intended to bolster Canadian studies at universities. Jim left in 1980 to become editor of the Canadian Encyclopedia at Hurtig.
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WHEN JACK, EDDIE Goodman, Mel Hurtig, Walter Gordon, and executive director Flora MacDonald were invited to meet with Prime Minister Trudeau, Jack was hopeful that there would be a policy change. Trudeau listened, agreed with much of what he heard, and promised urgent action.
But not much happened.
It was difficult to push the government on these issues, when its focus remained on employment and on Quebec. Only a few of the committee’s recommendations were taken into account when the Liberals created the Foreign Investment Review Agency in 1973 and the Canadian Development Agency.
Now, some forty-five years later, even these efforts to support Canadian companies would be impossible. Our governments are eager for new investment, whatever the source, and our cultural sectors are advised to seek digital salvation. Yet, even with the current porous state of Canadian nationalism, and the striving of economic elites for further integration with our more enterprising southern neighbour, some of the old myths and visions survive. And they help define who we are. Though this sometimes entails smugly comparing ourselves to the United States, it also entails seeing ourselves in the context of the land we inhabit.
Years ago, Graeme Gibson first recommended that I read George Grant’s much debated Lament for a Nation (published by M&S in 1965) to gain a broader understanding of Canada. The danger that our country would be lost, that we would be swallowed up by the American “pursuit of material well-being” to the exclusion of all other values, seemed very real then, as it still does now. But Grant’s notion that the Church would provide leadership for our society seemed baseless even then. I didn’t think Canada needed that kind of leadership. And his assertion that our cultural institutions were not powerful enough to resist the draw of the United States has proven to be wrong.
In his review of Lament for a Nation, Mordecai Richler stated flatly that Canada’s “independence from the United States was always illusory.”
I believed then, as I still do, that Mordecai was wrong.
Though the kind of country Grant thought we should be is, indeed, a lost cause, I believe that the questions he asked about our identity are worth asking every few years, certainly with every new generation.
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I. Sheila Fischman is the best and most prolific translator in Canada and, I suspect, the world. She translated more than two hundred books and won every literary translation prize in the country.
II. Godfrey had also co-founded Anansi and, later, Press Porcépic.
III. Started by Jack David in 1974 as Essays on Canadian Writing. Jack didn’t think CanLit had enough critical writing at the time. Robert Lecker came on board a year later. ECW published its first book in 1979.
The Very Young Matt
MATT COHEN ARRIVED with a letter of introduction from one of M&S’s star authors, Peter C. Newman. Newman’s massive page-turners—Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years weighs in at 540 pages, and Distemper of Our Times, about the Lester Pearson years, is 660 pages—had topped bestseller lists. Each sold more than 100,000 copies, unprecedented numbers for Canadian contemporary political history. The letter said that Matt Cohen should be read “very carefully at McClelland & Stewart.” Matt had already published a novel called Korsoniloff and a collection of short stories Peter couldn’t name. Johnny Crackle Sings landed on my desk with an accompanying note from Jack telling me he had never heard of Matt Cohen and hadn’t read the manuscript, but since it came from Peter . . .
I took it home that evening. It was mercifully slim, not quite two hundred pages, the story of a rock-and-roll singer, Johnny Crackle, and not at all the sort of thing I imagined Peter Newman enjoying. I, on the other hand, liked it a lot. The writing was fresh, funny; the story almost hung together; and I liked the author’s ironic, distanced voice. I was even prepared to go along with his technique of telling the tale in snatches, though at that time, I preferred more traditional storytelling.
I wrote to Matt Cohen, suggesting a meeting.
My first sighting of him was in the doorway of my office. He was leaning against the door frame, his hands in his pockets, his dark hair a jumble of curls, thick black-rimmed glasses obscuring his eyes, an uncertain grin on his thin face. He was asking, haltingly, whether he was in the right place. He had difficulty telling me what place he had been seeking because he couldn’t pronounce my name. He got hung up on the sz at the beginning. He didn’t seem comforted when I told him he was correct.
He proceeded into my office, his hands still in his pockets, and perched uncomfortably on the narrow fake-leather chair across from my desk. He wore frayed, faded denim. The rest of him was as thin as his face. He seemed coiled, ready to flee at any moment.
He told me later that he simply had no idea what to say.
After his struggle with my name, his first word was “Well?”
When I told him I liked most of the novel but thought it would be easier for the reader if he could make a few changes, he just stared at me. When I told him we would like to publish it, he continued to stare.
“Publish it?” he asked at last, his voice rising. “You said you would publish it?” He was stunned. He didn’t ask when or how; in fact, he looked as if the only question on his mind was why.
It wasn’t until Matt had left that I recognized the smell he had brought into my office: fresh cow manure. It was not a smell you’d expect in a warehouse building east of Leaside, surrounded by concrete and roadworks. Matt was living on a farm near Kingston, Ontario, some two hours’ drive from Toronto, but I didn’t know that then. I thought he might be the kind of guy who trailed cow manure wherever he went. I also discovered later that he had quite forgotten the letter from Newman and couldn’t believe his good luck in being invited to meet someone at McClelland & Stewart.
He lent me his only copy of Korsoniloff. It had been published by the House of Anansi, a publisher Jack often referred to as “alternative,” though he didn’t elaborate how or why he thought so. That assessment was not entirely wrong.
When Matt was not on the farm, he lived at Rochdale, a kind of student commune attached to the University of Toronto. One of Anansi’s two founders, Dennis Lee, already legendary for his editorial skills, had also lived there for a while, as had some of the young writers whose work Anansi published. Matt talked enthusiastically about Rochdale’s residents, their se
nse of community, their aspirations, and their conviction that a revolution was in the works. I thought the sorts of revolutions I had known had no place here but we didn’t talk about my Hungarian childhood then, as we didn’t talk about Matt’s childhood.
Matt was not given to easy confidences, but he loved to discuss ideas. He was, then, still much in thrall to George Grant.
I found Korsoniloff almost incomprehensible. Luckily Matt didn’t ask me about it for some time. When he finally did, we were sitting in one of the bars at the Inn on the Park. Matt loved the red and maroon plush furniture, the heavy drapes, the thick brown patterned carpets, and the dim lights. He said it reminded him of some Western saloon that was trying to seem refined. There should be spittoons by the tables, he said.
When Matt finally asked what I thought about Korsoniloff, he didn’t wait for my answer. “You hated it, right?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly hate—”
“Right. You hated it.” He was staring down at the table, his thin-fingered hands resting on either side of the ashtray full of my cigarettes. He didn’t look up.
He was working with someone at Anansi on a collection of stories called Columbus and the Fat Lady that I liked a whole lot more, but we didn’t publish short stories unless they were by a very famous author we had already published.
Johnny Crackle Sings was decently reviewed but hardly a success, yet Matt had already started to think about his next novel. We were to be friends for almost thirty years.
National Dreaming, or The Berton Extravaganza