In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  On the way to the airport, along the road past Jemseg, Dalton saluted a lay-by. He said he did it to remind himself of who he really was. Wouldn’t explain what he meant. Then we passed a church where he had slept one night after he drove off the road. He didn’t salute the church. He said he was still working on whether there really is a God.

  Though he tried, he never did write the book we had talked about. Too little time, still too much living to do.

  After Dalton died, I signed Geoffrey Stevens, one of the best political writers in Canada, to write the biography. I think The Player: The Life and Times of Dalton Camp was a much more revealing book than one Dalton would have written. There were thousands of people all across Canada who wanted to know the inside story of the Diefenbaker debacle in the late 1960s, many more who were curious about Dalton, and there were those who had loved him.

  I wonder what has happened to Dalton’s mother’s little leather-bound book.

  * * *

  I. The Whale, a cargo barge carrying oil and PCBs, was reputed to have been leaking for twenty-six years before it was salvaged by the Canadian Coast Guard in 2000, at a cost of $42 million (of which the Irvings, as determined by an out-of-court settlement, paid only $5 million).

  PART THREE

  Passages

  Memory, Secrets, and Magic

  MY GRANDFATHER HAD been the most constant figure in my childhood, as I have frequently acknowledged. As a land surveyor, my mother was often away, and when she was in Budapest, she worked during the day and liked to go out with her friends in the evenings. I was too young to sympathize and quite unforgiving of her second marriage to the balding Jeno, an idealistic Communist with a pugilistic son, nicknamed Jenci. Jenci’s idea of a good time was to try to wrestle me into submission, and when that didn’t work, he practiced his boxing skills on my head and stomach.

  As she often explained, she had married my father because she was desperate to escape the boarding school where my grandparents had parked her; she was only seventeen and he was thirty, and anyway, he was probably in love with my grandmother. She married Jeno only because he could pull strings in the Communist Party. It was the only way to extract my grandfather from prison. She did not think he would last much longer at hard labour. I was usually angry with both my mother and father when I was younger but tended to forgive my grandfather’s serial infidelities.

  Vili is the storyteller of my book The Storyteller: Memory, Secrets, Magic and Lies, the man who didn’t stop telling me tales until I was in my teens and we were living in New Zealand. His form of exile was my aunt and uncle’s horse farm near Hastings, mine was the Sacred Heart Convent. When I began to write about him so many years later, his fanciful stories became intertwined with my own memories of events in Hungary. His fantasies about our family’s ancient past were tangled with his retelling of our country’s history in a way he believed was suitable for my age. He believed he was shaping a young Hungarian to be ready to resist the depredations of the Soviet empire, Hungary being one of its outposts. I was to be a dissident poet with a large, underground following. I loved our long walks along the Danube, the hushed conversations in coffee houses, even the incomprehensible jokes his friends told and our random meetings with people he pretended not to recognize.

  Later, in New Zealand, I missed those times as much as Vili did. He was always hoping that there would be another revolution, that this one would succeed against Soviet armour, and that we would return home. He thought I would return as the Hungarian poet-hero, and judging by his impassioned letters, he didn’t give up on that idea even after I became a Canadian book publisher. Publishing, as it happened, was part of his own past as a magazine publisher.

  During the 1980s I returned to Hungary a few times, twice with my mother, who had wanted to see a couple of her old friends, once with Julian when the TTC was planning to buy Hungarian streetcars, and again with financial wizard Andy Sarlos, who was working on his autobiographyI while exploring ways to start new businesses with his former countrymen. Andy was a legendary Bay Street arbitrageur, tireless gossip, power broker, and another 1956 refugee.

  I have always found being in Hungary stressful, in part because I have never managed to lay my childhood ghosts to rest, and in part because I find I am a different person when I speak Hungarian. The ghosts lurk behind doors where I am still expecting that late-night knock, the one that takes away friends and family. That different person may be the one I would have been, had we never left. She is at once scared and defiant.

  I wrote much of The Storyteller late at night and during summer weekends on Quarry Island, over a period of several years—not an ideal way to write, but I was too busy with my family and other people’s books to take a long time away. I would sit through long meetings about warehousing and distribution, about pricing and returns, and find that I couldn’t focus. Being a publisher is complicated enough if you are focused, let alone when you are imagining long-forgotten events in Transylvania and Serbia.

  In 1997, when my daughter Julia offered to come to Hungary with me to help with the research for The Storyteller, I grabbed the opportunity. Andy Sarlos lent us a friend’s car and driver for the long journey to Transylvania. He was delighted that my ancestors had lived there and charmed that they had been around long enough to do battle with the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

  Unfortunately, Julia and I found no trace of them. Not a ruined building. Not a fallen gravestone. Nothing. But we did find Hunyadvar, the Hunyadis’ castle, where one of our ancestors, my grandfather claimed, had stabbed a disloyal royal retainer. I told Julia some of the stories I had grown up with. We climbed up into the Carpathian mountains, where the great Transylvanian dragon used to thrive, and we explored the site in Arad where the Hungarian generals were executed after a failed attempt to free their lands from the Hapsburgs (another story).

  It was not until a year or so later, with my mother and our cousins, that we found Vili’s parents’ grave in Kula, now in Serbia. There was also the wooden pew in the little church where the family had knelt on Sundays during the long sermons and where the child Vili had been fascinated by the painting of that Transylvanian dragon behind the altar.

  I had wanted to keep writing The Storyteller long after I sent it to the publisher, but Modris Eksteins’s story of escaping from the past had taught me that all stories have to end somewhere, and with the visit to Kula, Vili’s story came back to its beginnings.

  * * *

  I. Andy’s autobiography, Fireworks, was published in 1993. Peter Newman contributed the foreword. It was Andy who proposed me for the board of Alliance Communications, run by another Hungarian expat, Robert Lantos.

  Key Porter’s Twentieth Birthday

  MY PROMOTION OF Susan Renouf to president of Key Porter Books in 1999 was akin to Jack’s appointment of Linda McKnight in 1978. I needed someone with experience, talent, and love of the business to run it so that I could focus on dealing with the nasty new challenges that had crept up on us.

  We celebrated our twentieth year in the book biz with most of the staff and many former staffers, many of our authors, a few booksellers (some of them had already given up in face of the Chapters onslaught), candlelight, wine, Scotch for Farley and Foth, and, in acknowledgement of the future, a couple of agents. More than a hundred people came to our house, Bob the barman was ensconced in the alcove near the window, our daughtersI served hors d’oeuvres, and Julian played some doleful music and helped fill the glasses. I toasted our two exciting decades and did not mention my fear that the next decade would not be one to celebrate.

  We took out some ads, printed a catalogue with a gold patch, and launched one hundred books, including Farley Mowat’s Walking on the Land, Josef Skvorecky’s When Eve Was Naked, Daphne Odjig’s retrospective art book, and Fotheringham’s Last Page First (a reference to his having been the king of the back page of Maclean’s for more than twenty years). We trumpeted our authors’ awards, including Zsuzsi Gartner’s for
All the Anxious Girls and Eric Wright’s Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man.

  With a sense of optimism for our children’s future, we published Dennis Lee’s new poetry for kids: Bubblegum Delicious, illustrated by David McPhail.

  We had already reprinted his Alligator Pie, the collection of children’s poems that had swept the country when my children were little and has successfully endured through four more decades and counting. Even our grandchildren can recite poems from it, as can most kids and their parents.

  My favourite of all Dennis’s children’s poems is “The Cat and the Wizard,” illustrated by Gillian Johnson. I can recite it all if a child is interested in hearing to the end, and I absolutely love the last two lines:

  The wizard is grinning.

  The wizard is me.

  Yes, I do think the wizard is Dennis.

  I have been an admirer of Dennis Lee since I first read his “Civil Elegies” in the 1970s, a brilliant, complex poem worth rereading to draw out its many meanings and its sadness. As with so much of his poetry, it reflects a hopelessness in the face of the devastation wrought by humanity. The ending suggests that a new beginning is still possible, but that was in my last reading of Civil Elegies and that ray of hope may have vanished in later versions. Dennis has—for me—a maddening habit of rewriting poems even after they are published.

  Mark Dickinson, who has been writing a book about Dennis’s work, told me, “Writing poetry for Dennis is like praying—a never-ending act of prayer. In this sense, his never-ending rewrites are part of a conversation between him and God.” When he was very young, Dennis had wanted to be an Anglican minister.

  Anansi has published his cataclysmic, difficult poetry collection Un. It is a lament for the earth itself. The title, says Dickinson, refers to the work of the German-language Jewish poet Paul Celan, who asked whether it is possible to reclaim the language after the Holocaust.

  Dennis himself has stood the test of time. He hasn’t changed much since we first met at Anansi years ago. He is still rumpled and abstracted, still wears those owlish glasses. His forehead is higher but his hair still flops on the sides and he still has that little beard and that impish (some describe it as dark) sense of humour. When I last saw him in a downtown Toronto restaurant, he offered that same look of amused attention he gave me the first time we met. But he no longer smokes his trademark pipe or the occasional cigar.

  I just recently read his long love poem Riffs. It may be told in another man’s voice, but it feels highly personal and, whatever he may tell his fans (and I am a Lee fan), Dennis is himself talking with longing and erotic joy: “We swam into/ paradise easy . . . / That was in the flesh . . .” It’s Dennis at his best. Not the Dennis of Alligator Pie or Bubblegum Delicious, but Dennis wistful and in love, and mourning the loss of love.

  * * *

  I. In 1997, when my daughter Julia introduced herself to June Callwood in Victoria, she said that June might not recognize her without a tray of food held high under her chin. From an early age, she and her sister usually served drinks and food at book launch parties at our home.

  The End of M&S

  IN JUNE 2000, after fifteen years, Avie Bennett announced the sale of McClelland & Stewart. Ostensibly he was donating seventy-five per cent of the company to the University of Toronto and selling twenty-five per cent to Random House. For those of us who had been making our living in the book business, there was no mystery about who was the real buyer of the “house that Jack built”: Random House was in control from the first day and the more than $5 million they paid for their twenty-five per cent stake in the company was about what its total value would have been. The university’s role was window dressing designed to make the deal palatable to a government not yet ready to repeal its ownership rules for publishing companies. Knowing Bertelsmann, which had owned Random House (including Doubleday) since 1998, I know there was no chance that Random House would let the university actually control M&S. Nor did it appear that the university had any desire to do so.

  What I found offensive was that between 2000 and 2011, millions in federal and provincial subsidies continued to flow to M&S as if it were still Canadian-controlled, when it was fully controlled by Random House, itself a subsidiary of the massive German conglomerate, Bertelsmann AG.

  The deal had been pre-approved by the Liberal government after skilful lobbying by Avie and, probably, Rob Pritchard, then University of Toronto president. Civil servants and agency heads administering the grants and tax credit programs held their noses and continued to dole out the money. I talked with several of them. A few deplored the situation and acknowledged that the deal should never have been approved. Some regretted that their hands were tied: they had to give M&S as many government grants as it would have been entitled to under Avie’s ownership, though they knew that the firm had effectively changed hands. One officer of the Canada Council said, defensively, that he was following orders “from above.” A charming man in the Privy Council Office said that as far as he was concerned, the takeover had made no difference: M&S was still publishing the best Canadian writers, so who cares about ownership?

  I had wanted to raise funds for a chair in Canadian literature in Jack McClelland’s name, but the price tag the University of Toronto put on such a venture—a minimum of $1 million—was just too steep, so I settled for a writer-in-residency in his name at Massey College. Peter Munk contributed to the fund. Avie Bennett did not. John Fraser, master of Massey at the time, helped, and the Jack McClelland writer-in-residence program was established. It has hosted such writers as Shani Mootoo, David Bezmozgis, Camilla Gibb, Tomson Highway, Jane Urquhart, and Barbara Gowdy. The 2015–2016 Jack McClelland writer-in residence was novelist Rawi Hage. Jack would have approved.

  * * *

  JACK MCCLELLAND, THE prince of publishers, the man who invented Canadian author publicity tours, who “had lent his bravery and confidence to a whole generation of authors,”I and my friend, died on June 14, 2004. He was, as Gabrielle Roy wrote, “one of the few left of the breed of friendly publishers who genuinely love their writers.” He would have been pleased that his life was over. The last few years had been terribly difficult, and eighty-one was an age he had never intended to reach.

  The funeral was private but there was a memorial service at the stately Granite Club on Bayview Avenue. It was low-key, sombre, quiet, not the kind of event Jack in his heyday would have wished as a send-off. But Leonard Cohen was there, paying tribute to his publisher and friend, who, he said, was “an open heart in Toronto.” Poet and novelist Anne Michaels wrote in thestar.com that November about Jack: “the visionary, a man who had given himself over to a task, something bigger than himself—in this case, the passionate belief in, and support of, Canadian literature.”

  As for me, I went home and cried.

  * * *

  I. Margaret Atwood in the University of Guadalajara’s Homage Edition, 1996.

  Welcome to the Twenty-first Century

  IN NOVEMBER 2000, Julian and I had gone to Russia. He had been hired by Maclean’s to examine one of the men accused of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. I went along to see whether I was ready to face a few of my own demons. On November 7 we were in St. Petersburg—called Leningrad when I was in primary school—and watched a group of elderly Russians march under red flags displaying faded hammer-and-sickle emblems, celebrating the 1917 Revolution. I remembered the long, boring parades of my childhood, when every citizen was expected to march to Heroes Square in Budapest to honour our Soviet “liberators” and listen to endless speeches from the leading Comrades.

  I also remembered them in their tanks in November 1956, when their swivelling turrets destroyed much of the city of my birth, including the small flat my mother and I had shared. As Julian and I were ambling through the Hermitage Museum looking at his beloved Rembrandts, about fifty young Red Army recruits passed by, and I had to grab Julian’s arm to stop myself from screaming.

  Is the past ever really p
ast?

  When the World Trade Center Towers in New York were destroyed by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, I was in the third-floor Key offices watching CBS News. Someone had called me upstairs when the first plane hit. There were about a dozen of us that morning, all of us silent. Disbelieving. Downstairs in our office, I was greeted with shocked silence. I told everyone to go home and hug the people they loved and not to bother coming in the next day.

  For Key Porter, the twenty-first century began not with a terrible bang but an extended whimper. Entrepreneur Heather Reisman, having wrested control of Chapters from Larry Stevenson, announced “the purge of about $40 million” of books to publishers for full credit, and the shutdown of at least twenty stores. Our bankers had not yet recovered from the 1990s, when independent bookstores kept disappearing and library budgets were being slashed. Now publishers were struggling to understand a fiercely competitive retail marketplace that included Costco and an ambitious online outlet called Amazon. Our distributor, General Distribution Services (GDS), was tottering under the onslaught.

  In self-defence, we had been selling illustrated books directly to Chapters in Canada, to Barnes & Noble, Costco, and Price Clubs in the United States, to American promotional and remainder merchants, and to a variety of door-to-door businesses. We had even created books specifically for this market, producing heavy mock-ups with art or photographs and dummy text that I lugged to meetings often lasting only fifteen minutes. Invariably we were told to think bigger but at a lower cost. I imagined that selling non-returnable into these markets would give us operating income to support our regular publishing of Canadian books. We made Dudley Witney’s The Farm, The Children’s Treasury, several pretty wildlife books (the same animals but we billed them Canadian for Chapters, American for Barnes & Noble), a couple of books about wildflowers (who can tell the difference between our wildflowers and US ones?) and loons, an American national parks book, and other assorted stuff about mountains and rivers that we called “merch,” short for merchandise.