In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  Barbara was diagnosed with leukemia in 1974. She was thirty-six years old and at a high point in her career. When she told her co-workers about her diagnosis, it was a mark of their affection and respect for her that not one of them ever told anyone else. She hadn’t wanted the maudlin commiseration of strangers, nor special treatment. Those of her friends who knew never spoke about it, though we all watched the evening shows with anxiety and watched her at our dinners and parties with concern. It was as if denial would render it untrue. As the years went by and she was still alive, we became bolder and more confident.

  She was determined to live what was left of her life on her own terms and not as an invalid. Most important, she didn’t want her children to know. She didn’t want her relationship with them changed in any way or their choices to be influenced by her illness. The person she talked with most often during the dreadful first few months after her diagnosis was June Callwood. June was a great listener, and that was what Barbara needed the most: someone to listen to her grief and outrage.

  My friendship with Barbara grew closer when we worked on her book, As It Happened. I organized transcripts of past interviews with common themes into piles on her dining room table. Each pile would form the basis of a chapter. We chucked some because they would soon become dated, added others she thought would stand the test of time, and then Barbara set about writing the connecting passages, commentaries, and introductions that made the book into the bestseller it became.

  Her children, David and Linda, would drift in and out of the room, commenting on the process, discussing topics of the day, or just asking whether they could do something or go somewhere. I was always impressed by Barbara’s way with her children: loving, respectful of their opinions, listening, arguing when she disagreed with them. They often joined guests at the Frums’ big round dinner table, when DavidI would seize the opportunity to try out his new ideas on Bob Fulford and Geraldine Sherman, or June Callwood and Trent Frayne, William Thorsell (the new editor of The Globe and Mail), Federal Deputy Minister Allan Gottlieb (and eventually Canada’s ambassador to the United States) and his wife, humourist writer Sondra, the CBC’s Peter and Eva Herrndorf, various politicians, businessmen, intellectuals, and us.

  The great M&S publicity machine had fun sending Barbara on a cross-Canada tour because there was not a radio or TV station or newspaper or book-signing venue that didn’t want her. The tour had to be arranged in chunks to fit her busy schedule, but everyone was thrilled to meet her. Everyone, that is, except the silly radio interviewer who hadn’t read the book and launched into a series of highly personal questions. Barbara retaliated with “dead air”: silence, as the man babbled to fill the time. She called to ask me once whether anyone at all slated to interview her had bothered to read the book, a question many authors ask. I had to confess that, if past history was any indication, they hadn’t bothered, but at least, in her case, most of them would have listened to As It Happens.

  Emboldened by her survival, we had begun to toast the coming year again at our New Year’s Eve dinner parties. I long to repeat one of those warm, laughter-filled New Year’s dinners with Barbara and Murray, sometimes with her mother, Florence, and with Bob Fulford, Geraldine Sherman, and many of our shared friends. We all brought potluck contributions to the meal, told stories, debated politics, talked of our children as they grew up. And there was that memorable night in 1983 when Murray danced on the table, celebrating that Barbara was still with us.

  Their home seemed always to be under construction—furniture moved, paintings and sculptures assumed new places. Murray believed that it was impossible to appreciate a work of art if you became too used to it. He moved art and furniture around to make sure you would see it again. In addition to African art, they had been collecting American and Canadian artists. They added Oceanic art and art deco furniture. Over the years most of the spaces in their home became occupied by art, and they knew the story of each piece and why and when they had acquired it.II New elements were added to the existing building, rooms were enlarged, the patio expanded, the garden took on a whole new life with paths and new plants, a gazebo was added, then a waterfall.

  Barbara’s approach to their living space was exactly the opposite to mine. I had done almost no decorating. Our garden looked dismal even at the height of summer. New plants I bought tended to wither as soon as they focused on me. Barbara suggested various improvements, including a wooden platform to extend into the ravine behind our house. I loved the idea but fell short of the execution. She also gave me a single dark-green plant she had pulled out of the ground in her garden as we walked by. She thought it would work well in front of our place in Georgian Bay, where not much had ever grown. It turned out to be an aggressive ground cover that killed most of the local plants, even the poison ivy, and still flourishes more than thirty years later.

  * * *

  I. David Frum would grow up to be a journalist, political commentator, speechwriter for George W. Bush, and fierce critic of the Trump administration.

  II. Today many of the African pieces are in the Art Gallery of Ontario.

  Marian’s Way

  WHEN SHE WANTED to talk with me about something, Marian Engel preferred to come to our home, as did many M&S authors, rather than take the long drive to Hollinger Road. She was usually gentle and kind but assumed a tough, no-nonsense pose when in company. The effort often required her to have a large drink to fuel her courage. At one of our book launch parties she took a strip off Attorney General Roy McMurtry over the divorce laws (unfair to women); at another, she challenged one of Julian’s lawyer friends on how lawyers handled rape cases (not well).

  She often had two cigarettes going at the same time.

  She was asked once whether she wrote women’s books. She answered: “I hate hearing them referred to as women’s books because it makes me think of women’s magazines of the old kind—women without brains. I don’t write for that kind of woman.” But at least the novelists she admired, such as Gabrielle Roy and Margaret Laurence, were no longer referred to as “lady novelists.”

  Marian felt perpetually under-appreciated. Reviews were at best ambivalent and at worst unpleasant.

  In 1975 she separated from her husband, Howard, a CBC producer and later author of the Benny Cooperman series of private eye mysteries. Benny, the unkempt Jewish gumshoe who lives in Grantham and eats chopped-egg sandwiches, became a fixture on our bookshelves. I still have them all.

  I suggested to Marian that she might like to contribute something to a book of Canadian ghost stories. She said she couldn’t do that, but she did offer us a really strange short manuscript about a woman who has a very passionate, though not entirely satisfying, affair with a bear. It was an unusual, often quite funny, and rather disturbing story, but also a literary tour de force. Its original shorter version had been destined for the Writers’ Union fundraising book of pornography, based loosely on Naked Came the Stranger, the 1969 American literary hoax written by twenty-four journalists.

  The Union, being impecunious, had numerous fundraisers, but the only one I remember is the All-Star Eclectic Typewriter Review, where Jack McClelland, with cape and fangs, danced across the stage as Jack the Knife, five women with wigs and beards appeared as the Farley Mowat Dancers, and Berton belted out “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

  I sent copies of the manuscript to people I thought might say something positive about it and most of them did. Margaret Laurence, Adele Wiseman, and Margaret Atwood (she had read the earlier version as well) loved it. Irving Layton thought it was brilliant. When I asked Jennifer Glossop, then M&S’s most senior editor, to take it on, I was worried that she would find the sex too graphic or too offensive. In a long memo dated November 25, 1975, I suggested a plain white, classy front cover, nothing garish, several quotes praising the novel, and the line “a novel that may shock . . .” Jennifer wasn’t shocked, finished editing the manuscript in three weeks, and the resulting book, Bear, became a huge success. It was hailed
as a new kind of Canadian book by critics and fellow writers. Roy MacSkimming gave it a rave in the Star. It won the 1976 Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

  Interesting to recall that the jury for that year was composed of Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro. Atwood and Munro, like Margaret Laurence, had always been very supportive of other Canadian writers; Mordecai had not. He seemed quite dismissive of the idea of a national literature. And even if there was one, he had no desire to belong to it. Although he liked some Canadian works—Morley Callaghan’s short stories and Robertson Davies’s novels, for example—his literary heroes were not Canadian. They were American, like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, or English, like Kingsley Amis and Muriel Spark, great writers who had written funny and emotionally strong books. He thought the greatest writer of our time was Evelyn Waugh. Mordecai had derided cultural frontiers in art as a “patriotic production.” Having been in Quebec during the FLQ incidents of 1964, he had seen the burning of Canadian flags. If that was patriotism, he said, he wanted none of it.

  He didn’t believe in special treatment for writers. He was damned if he would admire a book because its author was Canadian. But he did like Bear.

  A Whole Lot Larger than Life

  FOR ABOUT TWO decades Roloff Beny was Canada’s most famous photographer. He had a reputation for stunning visual effects, spectacular architecture, and lush, operatic scenery, photographs that seemed like Renaissance paintings. He was a perfectionist, often spending a whole day on one image, making sure it was exactly as he imagined it should be.

  He was born Wilfred Roy Beny in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and his father still called him Wilf. After a stint of art classes at Banff and later at the University of Iowa, he changed his name and, progressively, his appearance. By the time I met him, he was flamboyantly gay, wore flashy furs and form-fitting suede or leather trousers, leather vests, and beads. Strangely, he seemed to attract older women who thought him romantic and irresistibly entertaining. Several of them even insisted on helping to fund his travels. Signy Eaton of Eaton Department Stores was certainly one of them, as was Peggy Guggenheim, and Lorraine Monk, empress of the National Film Board’s Still Division, which had funded To Every Thing There Is a Season, was another. Published for the 1967 centennial, this stunning book had been a monumental success. An exhibition entitled A Visual Odyssey, 1958–1968: Roloff Beny opened in the Observation Gallery of the new Toronto-Dominion Centre in 1971. His prints and early paintings were acquired by galleries and art museums.

  Despite his success here, Roloff said he found Canada restrictive and visually uninspiring. He preferred Rome, where he bought the top two floors of a beautiful late-nineteenth-century building on Tiber Terrace in Trastevere. You could see the Tiber through the windows. Part of the ceiling had a Roman-style mural. Though most of the statuary was imitation, the apartment had the appearance of a Roman villa. Roloff’s books and hundreds of his photographs were arranged on a long, low table. There was a roof garden or terrace with an elegant arrangement of terracotta vases, a pale-ochre changing room, a small dipping pool, a couple of chaise longues, and an assortment of potted plants. There were numerous exuberant visitors, expensively dressed women, Roman friends of Roloff’s, and at least once, Pierre Elliott Trudeau with an entourage of civil servants. His housekeeper offered drinks in Venetian glasses and there was fruit on Venetian platters.

  I was there for several days, helping to put together our presentation of Roloff’s books on ancient Persia and, later, on Iran, both commissioned by the Shah and the Shahbanu of Iran.

  Jack saw Persia, Bridge of Turquoise as an opportunity to break into the exclusive circle of international art book publishers and as a chance to sell a lot of books to the Iranian royals and hangers-on. There was a one-page “message” from Her Imperial Majesty Farah Pahlavi, the Shahbanu, and an essay by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, head of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy.I

  The slides were magnificently colourful: markets, mosques, the ruins of palaces, lush vegetation, awe-inspiring winterscapes. Roloff saw the work as “an austerely spiritual yet sensual feat that is Persia,” and we would have the honour of producing the book for the world market. His previous big international books, India, Island Ceylon, In Italy, and Rajasthan, had all been produced by the prestigious art books publisher Thames & Hudson. This one was going to be ours.

  When I travelled from Rome to Toronto with Roloff, the page layouts, the cover concepts, the massive mock-up, and the slides, my chief job became to not lose any of the pieces and to convince customs that they were of no value. Naturally, I also carried Roloff’s suitcases, his papers, and his camera case, and followed a few steps behind him, as befitted my lesser status. I had no trouble with customs because I was so exhausted I told them they could keep the whole lot, if they really wished to, I didn’t care, so they laughed and let me keep everything. Roloff was not so lucky. What with his fur jacket and small purse, he was a natural target. They demanded to know the value of the delicate plaster cast for a Roman head he carried much too carefully, and when he insisted (several times) that it had no value, that it was a gift from an Italian admirer, one of the customs guys dropped it, then apologized, but since it was of no value . . . Roloff wept all the way to his hotel.

  His next book, Iran, Elements of Destiny, was to be an even more lavish production, an overt puff piece about Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty. Jack had been utterly charmed by the Shahbanu, “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen on or off the silver screen.” He was impressed by the glamour, the sheer glitter of the Peacock Throne, by the reception he and Roloff were accorded, and by being part of a world he had never entered before.

  We took a mock-up to Frankfurt (it weighed about twenty pounds) and I lugged it around to publishers of high-quality illustrated books. By the time the fair was over, we had managed to share at least some of the horrendous costs of the colour separations, the printing and binding, and, of course, all the extras Roloff insisted would make the book worthy of its subject. Thames & Hudson agreed to take a few thousand, as did most of the publishers who had taken Roloff’s previous books. When I first presented our mock-up to Eva Neurath, the doyenne of Thames & Hudson and an almost ethereal presence at that messy international book fair, she inquired, her soft voice rising, why on earth Jack McClelland had decided to become an international art books publisher and did he know what he was getting into.

  There would be specially dyed endpapers (in a design borrowed from a glazed tile and stucco pattern at the entrance to the tomb of a Sufi “saint”), silkscreening, thick dyed paper with gatefolds for the text and black-and-whites and the best available opaque paper for the colour. It was to be printed by Italy’s top printing house, Mondadori, which softened the blow of their exorbitant price by taking a small edition in Italian for themselves.

  For Jack, that was just the icing on the cake. He was convinced that the business deal with the Shah and Shahbanu of Iran would bring in enough cash to save M&S. He was wrong, of course, but I am sure not even he could have foreseen the precipitous fall of the Pahlavi dynasty.

  * * *

  IN EARLY 1977, prior to Jack’s next visit to Tehran, we spent a few days in Rome to prepare the royal presentation. We ate in a local restaurant, where Roloff was greeted with great fanfare and given the best table with a view of the square and the Tiber. Jack paid for Roloff’s lunches, dinners with his friends, and even his electricity bill. I spent most of my time in the basement, in a kind of darkroom the landlord had provided. I was selecting photographs for the mock-up of Iran.

  All the participating publishers had been invited to Tehran for some grand receptions, a tour, and long luxury hotel stays. My friend Ken Webb, whose company was in charge of the binding, still talks about that visit as the most extraordinary time of his fifty years in the book business. He also remembers the spectacular reception at the Canadian Embassy, hosted by Ken Taylor, our ambassador who later saved the US embassy staff after the Ayatollah took ov
er.

  In the end I didn’t go to Tehran because I was pregnant and we didn’t think it was a look that would appeal to the Iranians.

  Jack called after a few days to warn that he might not be back for a while, if at all. He spent most of his time waiting for an audience in a palace where the book was no longer of vital importance. Negotiations took even longer. He thought he might end up swearing at the heavy-set, fully armed men with dark glasses whose job included making sure that guests behaved.

  I think the only reason he survived was that the Shah and his well-armed men had more important matters to contend with than a pissed publisher yelling obscenities at microphones embedded in the walls. Iran was Jack’s first visit to a country where surveillance was normal.II

  Roloff, himself, had been at his outrageous best in Iran, demanding spectacular accommodation for his cameras and himself, cursing the Shah’s notorious secret service, and complaining to the Shahbanu if something was not to his liking. On the occasion of Empress Farah Pahlavi’s birthday, he had presented her with a photograph of himself naked except for some tropical fruit covering his genitals. Jack had been sure Roloff would be executed, but strangely, that did not happen. Perhaps Iran’s pre-Revolution society was far more tolerant of gay men than the religious rule that followed.