by David Mason
The truth is that we both—librarians and booksellers together—had to educate ourselves not just in evaluating content, but also in terms of technique. We learned on the job, and in retrospect I think that we did a pretty good job of it. I can’t remember a single instance when we shortchanged a donor, although I do remember several occasions when I thought I was using the usual profession caution when I didn’t really have enough experience to make proper comparisons.
My first two appraisals were of the papers of Mark Gayn, the long-time foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and James Mavor, Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto, a member of the Scottish-Celtic revival at the turn of the twentieth century, a friend of Tolstoy and, not least, the father of Dora Mavor Moore and grandfather of Mavor Moore, a family which has contributed so much to Canadian theatre. It was James Mavor, through his personal friendship with Tolstoy, who was instrumental in arranging to bring the Doukhobors to Canada as immigrants because of their religious persecution under the Czar.
I’ll start with the Gayn appraisal because that experience illustrates the sort of chaotic state that typifies the beginnings for me.
I entered the reading room of the Fisher Library one day to find all of the tables covered by some hundred and sixty or so cartons. This was the way Gayn’s widow had sent his archives: large cartons, each labelled with the subject of the carton noted on top. Such an appraisal today, when all of us, both archivists and dealers, are so much more sophisticated, might need a year or two of work on the part of the archivists and perhaps a week’s worth of work on the part of the dealers. But those were different times.
I looked at this enormous mass together with Richard Landon. “We need a figure and it needs to be a fair figure. But the truth is, Dave, what Gayn’s wife really wants is for this archive to be accessible to future scholars. I don’t think she gives a damn about the money.” Today we call such appraisals “ballpark appraisals,” and there are still occasions when an educated guess, needed quickly, is acceptable for various reasons. Had I known then what I do now I might have insisted that they properly catalogue everything so that I could spend a week or so immersed in this incredible treasure trove. But we didn’t have the time, nor had I delved deep enough to realize what I would be missing. But somehow I already seemed to have had the proper instincts. I quickly realized that in spite of the incredible breadth of Gayn’s activities, what would indicate its true importance would be its depth, its richness.
It was obvious that if I skimmed the material I would miss much of its importance, but a proper appraisal of that much material in its unsorted state would take months. So I invented my own system out of necessity. I looked at every box, noting subject contents, and made notes on the whole mass. Gayn had travelled everywhere for the Toronto Star and, earlier, several American newspapers. He had both experienced and written about most of the major international events of his time, as my examination of the box labels showed. Googling him recently, I find him described by the FBI as a Russian spy. One assumes, given his antecedents and the time, that he may well have been. Now that the political history of the twentieth century is being placed in its proper historical context, we know that many people, not all traitors or curs, could be justly accused of the same. In the thirties, when almost the entire intelligentsia was appalled by the rise of fascism and the Nazis, those same people had an almost mystical regard for the promises of socialism, which caused many of them to join the Party or at least sympathize with what they considered the “Great Experiment” in Russia. Maybe Gayn, of Russian descent, was simply one of the many who offered their allegiances to the ideals of equality and brotherhood by serving Russia and therefore Stalin, resulting in a tyranny of equal depth, if not exact form, to that of Hitler and his thugs. A lot of people seemed to have relinquished their reason to those ideologies, and maybe Gayn was another of them. Or maybe, more logically, he still had relatives in Russia and chose to give in to the threats we now know the Soviets regularly used.
Anyway, we worked out a system which we sometimes still use today to reach a “ballpark figure.” That is, we estimate by examining superficially and extrapolating. What I did with the Gayn archive was examine all the boxes that were labelled by subject area, and then chose two distinct subjects to look at in depth.
The boxes were standard packing boxes of some size, mostly two to three feet deep, so there was a lot to look at. I felt that would give me a proper sense of the richness of the archive and that I would then be able to extrapolate from what I learned in those two areas onto the entire mass. And it worked, too. To be frank, I remain, all these years later, astounded at the prescience I had then to arrive at what seems to me to be a brilliant system. Indeed, it makes me marvel once again how such an obviously brilliant innovator has never made a living above the official poverty level. I guess it’s all those books I’ve bought.
The Gayn archive was stupendous. I believe I undervalued it, although I don’t remember what I appraised it at. I remember a high appraisal, around $200,000.00—but today, with forty years experience behind me, I would value it much higher.
Gayn was born in China. His parents were Russian Jews who had escaped, probably after one pogrom too many, and eventually made their way to the promised land, America, where, with a new anglicized name their son became a journalist. He was the foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star for many years, writing about world events for as long as I could remember.
Gayn was one of my people, a hoarder. He never threw away anything; it was all there. Since I assessed only the two chosen areas, I still wonder periodically what historical
treasures I missed. For many years I have toyed with the idea that when I retire one of my personal projects will be to spend some time, maybe a lot of time, exploring the intricacies of twentieth-
century history through a study of the Gayn archive. But, of course, booksellers don’t retire; my current resolution is to force myself to make time. I still hope to do so.
I thought it would be an interesting tactic to choose boxes based on my ignorance. Meaning that if I chose areas where my reading hadn’t taken me I might be better able to assess research value based on what I learned. Of course the opposite argument could be just as valid. Had I chosen areas I did know reasonably well from my reading, I might be in a better position to assess what was lacking or erroneous. But I think I did take the best course, because I still have vivid memories of what I learned.
I chose two areas of which I barely had any even superficial knowledge. They were the Japanese post-war war crimes tribunals, and the Greek near-civil war/revolution of the late forties, when the Communists tried to take over. Like many another I had read considerably about the Nuremberg Trials, but I knew nothing about the Allied treatment of Japanese war criminals. What a history lesson.
It turns out Gayn was an obsessive. It seems he wrote his wife a letter every day of his life, often three or four pages long on 8 ½” x 14” paper, single-spaced, and kept an onion-skin copy of each one. I still remember vividly how the first one I read began. Gayn is flying to Japan and tells his wife that he is sitting strapped into his seat on an old DC-3 because of the turbulence, with his typewriter strapped on his knees with his belt. He tells her that everyone but him is deathly airsick, the stench of their incessant vomiting only bearable because his intent to tell her everything allows him to ignore it.
He goes on, recounting all sorts of salacious gossip, mostly sexual, about the American generals and diplomats involved in the Pacific War and its aftermath. He passes on all the nicknames that the U.S. servicemen had affectionately bestowed on their commanders, from Eisenhower and MacArthur on down, almost all of them relating to their personal traits and most of them entertaining outrageous sexual insults. It reminded me of my readings in ancient history, when Roman generals (Caesar especially) would exhort their troops before battle by insulting them with sexual taunts designed, usually succ
essfully, to instill the emotional connections which made men then, and it seems now, love their commanders enough to be willing to die for them.
Reading history gives perspective. I write from a distance of forty years, yet I still retain the impressions from those letters. Here are some of them: Japan was devastated, flattened before its surrender, not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki but every city of any strategic significance. Cities built of wood and paper were devastated by incendiary bombing, leaving almost nothing. The poverty and want were horrendous. Gayn relates going to an open market where old Japanese women would be sitting cross-legged with the wares they hoped to sell on a handkerchief in front of them, things like a bent nail, a cracked glass blackened by some incendiary bomb, an empty tin can, bent and filthy. These people were starving and desperate; as always, the ordinary people paid for the sins of their so-called betters, their leaders. And we get all the dirty gossip of the war crimes trials, different from Nuremberg only in detail, not essence.
As I said, Gayn had the true historian’s eye for detail, and the bonus was that I found, every time, three versions of his dispatches to the Toronto Star. First one would encounter his observations in the copy he sent his wife, full of incredible detail, and his own
horrified opinions. Then would come his actual dispatch to the Star, usually only half the size of his wife’s version. Then would come the third version, which the Star published, usually around half of that. Therefore one initially gets a fully salacious version and, lastly, the version a major newspaper saw fit to print.
Incredibly, Gayn had also been on the beginnings of Mao’s long march. There was a movie, grainy and jerky, that showed the beginning of the march and the caves bored into hills from which it all originated. This was the first time I was ever paid, and well, to watch a movie. Not easy—to be forced to endure a fascinating historical experience, just because it’s one’s job, and to be paid for experiences that one clearly remembers with enormous pleasure forty years later.
I opened one envelope that contained quite a few gruesome original photographs from the time of the Japanese attempt to conquer China. The photos show Japanese soldiers decapitating Chinese captives, complete with severed heads strewn everywhere, and including a photo of a just-severed head still suspended in the air. I remember thinking, “I bet the Japanese regret that some bystander snapped these disgusting and revealing records of such barbarity.” Some fifteen years later I discovered how wrong that supposition was. It turns out that the Japanese themselves had taken and then distributed these photos, their intent being to terrorize the Chinese who, in 1935, they were intent on conquering. They wanted to terrorize the Chinese by demonstrating the consequences of resistance to Japanese superiority.
I bet it worked, too. It certainly did with me.
There were also examples of Japanese World War II propaganda, mostly sexual in nature, which the Japanese dropped from airplanes into the hands of the Australians fighting them in the jungles. There would be overlaid cards, folded so that one scene would show, and then when you pulled the ends, opening the card to double the length, a very different scene unfolded. The one I best remember showed, on one side, a smiling attractive woman and on the other a laughing soldier with the easily recognizable American helmet of the times. When the card was pulled out it revealed that the woman was on her hands and knees and the American soldier was entering her from behind. The text, also revealed by the unfolding, said, in typical Japanese-English, “Australians. This is what the American soldiers are doing to your women in Australia while you conduct your futile struggle with us, the Japanese liberators, here in the jungles of Burma. Go home. Rescue your women from these American barbarians.” If these were not the exact words—my memory is not what it once was—they certainly capture the essence of the card’s message. The pictures were very precise.
The Greek records were similar. The Machiavellian politics of that area in that time are masterfully conveyed today in the magnificent historical “spy thrillers” of Alan Furst, a man who, like Eric Ambler before him, has the talent to make you feel you are actually present at histories unfolding. Mark Gayn prepared me for those historical novels. Furst doesn’t miss a nuance, as my recollection of Gayn’s facts clearly proves.
The Mavor archive was different in content but not in emotional force. That appraisal was also huge, but it had already been properly sorted and catalogued when I was confronted with it.
Mavor, a participant in the literary Scottish-Celtic revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been hired as a Professor of Economics by the University of Toronto, thereby conferring on Canada the cultural benefits continued by his more famous descendants. I seem to remember that I spent three or four days immersed in his incredible archive. One day, after Richard Landon and I had returned from one of our lunches, where I had had two or three glasses of wine, the first letter I picked up was from Prince Peter Kropotkin, the eminent anarchist, to his friend Mavor:
“My friend I have to inform you that yesterday died our old mutual friend, Tolstoy.”
Wouldn’t you cry too? Faced with such raw history? Especially after two or three drinks?
In a perhaps unseemly display of emotion I blatantly appraised that letter at $750.00 and then later, sober, worried for some time that someone might demand a justification for such
an outrageous estimate. Today I would, without any hesitation, appraise it at $15,000.00 to $20,000.00, maybe more if I had time to think on it. That would also perhaps be my first personal temptation. Who would miss it, I thought, among such riches? But my 1960s experimentation with drugs paid off here. I already knew that the first one only seems innocent. It isn’t.
The Mavor appraisal contained history in its most raw form: literary, social and political, with correspondence from every type of intellectual involved in the period of the Celtic revival and the political movements of the time. But one of its components so affected me that forty years later it still resonates. Since it also demonstrates the effect of primary archival material on history, I offer it as a good example of how important the evidence found in an archive can be.
I have read many accounts and memoirs of the horrible carnage of the First World War, but no book I have ever read conveys the real horror of that insanity so well as what Mavor’s papers contained. There were several boxes of letters, all black-edged in the fashion of the time, all from the parents of students who had been killed in action. I guess Mavor had sent a letter of condolence to the parents of his students who had appeared on the casualty lists. These black-edged letters were their answers. The sheer number of them was overwhelming. One professor, in one university, in a smallish city in a far outpost of the Empire, yet it seemed like he had lost hundreds of his students. It was shocking in a manner that no mere recounting of numbers could be. And to compound these emotionally devastating
numbers were the sentiments expressed by the parents in reply. Letter after letter said essentially the same thing. “Dear Professor. Thank you for your sympathy at the loss of our Billy. We only regret that we had only one son to sacrifice for the good of our great Empire.”
Letter after letter expressed these sympathies.
I have never been able to forget these sheer numbers—two or three boxes of such letters—and these poor people who lost their only son at eighteen or nineteen and could regret only that they hadn’t more kids to offer up for slaughter, for the good of “the Empire.” I’ve never read another word on that war without feeling the impact of these simple handwritten notes from ordinary people. This is pure history in its essence.
In the end I appraised so much material, for every generation of the Mavor and Moore families, and I became so familiar with their history, that I would joke with Mavor Moore that he should adopt me into the family.
At an early stage Mavor took me up to Dora Mavor Moore’s home to look at her books, which were going to the University of Toronto
. She was quite elderly then, and all I remember was a tiny woman with huge luminous eyes, which actually glowed with warmth, curiosity and enthusiasm. Her apartment was jammed full of memorabilia, artifacts, plaques, signed photos of actors and actresses, Canadian and foreign testimony of her long and illustrious life and contributions to the Canadian theatre world. I liked her enormously. How couldn’t I? She obviously shared my own character trait (thought by some, especially my partner, Debbie, to not be a trait but a defect, if not an incurable aberration) of hoarding sentimental curiosities. It was difficult to even navigate the apartment, there were so many mementos, but how could there not have been after such a long life full of accomplishments? Mavor also delighted in her—his adoration was obvious. He was also pretty good at navigating all the hazards of the apartment; he knew when to dodge and where to tuck in his elbows.
Mavor was then married to Phyllis Grosskurth (known as Pat to her friends), the justly acclaimed biographer of Symonds, Byron and psychologists such as Melanie Klein. Pat was a very beautiful woman, and she was one tough lady, too. Her maiden name had been Langstaff. I even appraised Pat’s grandfather’s papers. Her grandfather had been a doctor, and in his time he delivered most of the babies within a fifty-mile radius of what was then Langstaff (now swallowed by Richmond Hill, leaving only Langstaff Road as a memorial). I still remember many accounts of him hitching up the horses to his sleigh to travel untold miles in the middle of the night to deliver yet another baby. And I remember the many unpaid bills for those deliveries I found, still in his papers at his death. People may have promised anything to have a doctor travel miles on a sled to deliver a child, but they seemed to resent paying for it when the danger was past.
One day at the University of Toronto Richard Landon set in front of me a small pile of handwritten letters, all written on the cheap lined paper, now browned, of the sort that we all remember from our school exercise books. They were all in the childish hand of a young girl and were addressed to her mother; they were written from the Bahamas.