by David Mason
I expect that whether a passionate Zionist or not, he was very conscious of being Jewish, for indeed his forebears were Russian Jews. The anti-Semitism he displayed was eerily similar to the wrathful scorn he heaped on what he considered the multiple sins of Canadians (especially easterners and most especially Torontonians). You could say he was at his best when he was attacking his own.
Perhaps this was the root of his rage, the frustration at not having accomplished his dreams of grandeur. All these unprovoked attacks I recount, plus many others I’ve heard of, convinced me, finally, that Bill’s attacks were really manifestations of some painful frustration at his failure to measure up himself to his grandiose view of what he believed should have been his personal destiny.
In an earlier time Bill would have been a religious visionary or a revolutionary. Eventually I came to realize that Bill was another of those few people I have known who were essentially religious people, but who, lacking any belief in the established religions, had to find other outlets for their religious impulses. The most common result of this need many seem to have to believe in something larger than themselves usually ended in political movements, all the “isms” which have cost so many millions
of lives.
What I also came to believe—and still do—is that most of Bill’s “causes,” and the consequent vendettas, were fraudulent. By this I mean I believe he actively sought out causes on which to focus his rage. I also believe that once he had found a cause he sincerely believed in it; he wasn’t a hypocrite. I think he manufactured these passions because he needed enemies, needed to find those windmills. I don’t think his passionate campaign against subsidized Canadian Literature, and by extension the Canada Council, had any basis in his real beliefs. Subsidies were simply an easy target. And life without targets was impossible for Bill. Certainly he cared about literature, and certainly about books and the history of the booktrade. But I always felt that Bill, in his own mind, operated on a very different level. I think he believed, and I do not say this in any disparaging manner, that he was destined for greater things, that his vision of the way things should be in the world was superior to that of others. He believed that his vision was of such importance that he had an obligation to fight for its implementation.
In principle, that’s a stance I agree with. The truth is that Bill was brilliant, but there was a problem with his vision: parts of his vision were indeed brilliant, but other parts were obviously demented; the problem was to sort out one from the other.
Bill’s shop stock, observed on visits over many years, reflected his personality, as do the stocks of all booksellers, gradually evolving in a manner that also reflected the changes in focus and emphasis that time and experience impose on all of us. In the early years he had a general used stock stressing literature more than other areas, with Canadian literature being the only really impressive part of it. Later his stock of Canadian literature was truly impressive, only Nicky Drumbolis and later Steve Temple and Nelson Ball being able to compete in terms of richness and depth.
But in later years, his hatred for many Canadian writers and the feuds that ensued, his rage at so many of the professors who taught Canadian literature and whose buying practices (or lack of them) caused him to attack them as well, got out of control. He even titled one of his catalogues, full of his succinct opinion of those people, Cheap Sons of Bitches. Afterwards he started concentrating on buying more widely in antiquarian books, but it was too late for him to effectively explore other options.
I don’t think it was an accident that in his last shop almost all of the huge stock of Can Lit was relegated to the second floor, a sure sign of his anger and disillusionment with his acknowledged specialty.
Much later, after the huge ABAC fight, when many scurrilously nasty letters full of vicious insults were criss-crossing the whole country, tearing the ABAC apart for a generation, one of my own contained what I considered (and still do) a very apt accusation.
“Bill,” I wrote, after deliberately insulting him by telling him that I believed that he had only been able to cause so much trouble because his father had given him a half-million dollars or more, “You would be the only bookseller I ever met who purported to despise the only area of books you know anything about.”
That was a lovely insult—made more telling, I thought, for being true.
Here are a few more of Bill’s self-contradictions. He would invariably be a lively host in Vancouver; but back home vicious slander would filter back or paranoid accusative letters would appear.
He spent a lot of his own money, and an enormous amount of time and energy, on his attacks on the Canada Council, but I discovered he himself had both applied for and received a grant some years before to publish a book. When I inquired if he didn’t see a certain irony in this he shrugged it off contemptuously. His vision was too majestic to be concerned with such petty contradictions.
My own view then, and now, about the Canada Council’s grants is, so what? I don’t mind the thought that future generations of booksellers will have to throw out all that self-indulgent puerile crap purporting to be poetry that the Canada Council paid for. What about the ten thousand other stupid projects the government, like any government, funded in the same period, which flushed away millions of the taxpayers’ dollars? If even one great book or painting resulted from all that bureaucratic excess, it’s still, in my view, preferable to another mile of freeways or a few more sewers.
For the serious writer, who views his craft in a religious sense, such misplaced patronage must evoke rage as yet another example of the triumph of the mediocre. But booksellers know that time takes care of mediocrity by placing it where it belongs, always.
After Toronto, and other booksellers, Bill loved most to eviscerate those writers he hated. When one had incurred his wrath, for any reason, he never missed an opportunity to attack them, usually trespassing far beyond the boundaries of legitimate criticism and entering libelous territory.
I came to believe that Bill was a born anarchist. The trouble was that he was an anarchist not in the philosophical sense that his co-westerner George Woodcock was, but in of the old-fashioned born-in-Russia fashion, where bombs were the solution.
I began to look more closely at all those Bill attacked and I came to certain conclusions about his hostilities. I measured Hoffer’s attacks alongside his constant attacks on me, although I was well aware of his respect for me as a bookseller. Aside from the obvious perceived affronts to his personal dignity, which usually meant booksellers who had offended him, or customers who asked the wrong questions, or innocents who thought a bookstore was a safe haven of learning, where their awe and love of books would protect them, it was mostly writers who suffered Bill’s wrath. The pattern I saw seemed to show that the Canadian writers he attacked all had one thing in common: they were the successful ones, often the most famous, Margaret Atwood being perhaps the best example.
It seemed that it was precisely those writers who were becoming highly respected both within and outside of the country who became the focus of Hoffer’s rage. It was not a huge leap to find a connection between his rage at these people and his own perceived failure to obtain a similar status. I began to wonder how much of his vitriol might be born of personal disappointment.
Bill attacked many writers. In his now-famous Catalogue 87 he attacks half the writers in Canada in his typical cruel and dismissive, but often brilliant, style.
This and other catalogues were extremely amusing no matter what you might think yourself of the authors he chose to skewer. I still reread them with amusement and wonder.
Two authors he loved to attack were bpNichol and bill
bissett, both writers whom, no matter your opinion of their work, were widely loved and admired by just about everyone who knew them.
Bill’s attacks always became personal attacks; his hatred and contempt for writers’ work (or in the case of bookse
llers, their sins, real or imagined) might not escalate if they were ignored, but if any defense or even response ensued, Bill made it personal and things would quickly escalate to total war.
Bill’s scorched-earth method of dealing with adversaries didn’t allow for subtlety; if you weren’t with him you could expect a devastating response. Many people pretended to be with him rather than risk his wrath, I think.
I find it difficult to imagine that anyone could hate bill
bissett, but Hoffer did. He regularly announced his plan to hold a public burning of bissett’s books—in fact all the books published by bill at blewointment press—in his parking lot. The attendees would arrive dressed in full formal wear to witness the ceremonial conflagration. Here, incidentally, we see yet another of the many contradictions I noted in Bill over the years. Every bookseller I ever met shares the contempt civilized people should feel towards all censors, but here’s Bill Hoffer, who wants to burn books he doesn’t like. If you pointed out such contradictions to him, instead of being embarrassed, he would be delighted.
He once told me, and I later heard him repeat it many times, even in print, a very scurrilous anecdote about Atwood. It goes like this. A Vancouver collector, a very cultivated man of East-Indian extraction, who had studied at Oxford, met Atwood at some literary function. During a chat the man mentioned in passing that he had been at Oxford, whereupon Atwood replied—according to Bill—“What were you, a janitor?” Even a cursory examination of this anecdote demonstrated very clearly that Bill’s motivation was not just malicious, but ill-thought-out. Bill claimed he had it from the man involved, but one only had to hear it to know that almost no one would act in the manner or use the words he ascribed to Atwood.
It never seemed to occur to Bill that such a response was so unlikely as to be ludicrous. It was obvious that he expected us to understand the anecdote as proof of Atwood’s racism. It was even more ludicrous given this man’s obviously elegant style and manner of speech. No one would have ever mistaken this man for a janitor. But most ludicrous of all was the idea that even a blatant racist would speak that way during a social encounter with a stranger. The relish with which he recounted it was really a measure of his hate for Atwood and his curious inability to even recognize how inane such an accusation made him appear. I came to believe that these attacks gave a great clue to Bill’s character. He was always privately—at least in the first twenty years—respectful, and even deferential towards me, saving his vicious attacks for times of ABAC strife, always magnified by distance (he once referred to me in print as the enemy of his which he considered most talented). I think his attitude was the same towards Bernard Amtmann. Once, trying to understand the vicious attacks on Amtmann he initiated at any opportunity, I asked him out of curiosity, “Bill—tell me, how well did you know Amtmann?”
“Oh,” replied Bill, seemingly indifferent to the import of his words, “I only met him once. For about five minutes.”
“Then why,” I asked, perplexed, “could you decide a man you only spoke with for five minutes was as evil as you seem to think he is? Did he insult you or something?”
“No,” said Bill, “he was very kind and solicitous. I just knew he was evil and dangerous.”
His attacks on writers, as vicious as they may have been, were nothing compared to his vendettas within the trade, especially the Canadian trade.
I was enraged by Hoffer’s repeated attacks on Bernard Amtmann, which were both malicious and in their substance completely erroneous. Bill and I clashed over this a few times, although mostly his diatribes came to me second or third hand. I know Bill was afraid to attack Amtmann openly, just as he was afraid to confront me. And I believe I know why. He knew Amtmann was a man of courage, who wouldn’t take shit from anyone, just as he hadn’t taken shit from the Nazis, and Bill wasn’t about to mess with him, not to his face anyway. But the truth is, I believe that Bill respected Bernard as a man and I came to believe that some frustration at his own personal failure to accomplish what he felt he should have caused him to lash out at people who had made their mark. Like Atwood and like Amtmann.
The primary basis for one of Bill’s attacks on Amtmann was the latter’s habit of putting out catalogues of Canadian literature which were really just accumulations of whatever had found its way into Bernard’s store. Bernard didn’t care about Canadian
literature; he issued those lists for a very simple reason: to pay the rent. Bill would have seen this as heresy; he really did care about literature and, I think, a good part of his rage was a direct result of the indifference of almost all Canadians to it, as well as the misguided interest in anything that appeared like literature by all these academics who had an institutional stake in the field.
Bill followed his usual style with anyone—writer, bookseller, or customer—who had aroused his ire: he attacked whenever and wherever he could.
Sometime after Bernard Amtmann had died I was slyly shown a letter from Bill to someone else (another example of a disciple stirring things up) which began “I’ve been waiting ten years for Amtmann to die so we could make something of the ABAC.” The problem with that statement, like so many of Bill’s, was that it had no basis in fact. Bernard Amtmann founded the ABAC, he made his friends join, he paid all the initial expenses, and having got it going he then bullied us all into attending foreign book fairs. Then he made us run our own Canadian book fairs and he organized the first one. He refused to allow our timidity and lack of self-confidence to keep us from showing an international presence. Once he’d done that, he forgot about the ABAC. He had made the timid kids act like adults and that was enough. After that he barely even bothered to attend any more ABAC meetings. He believed that having jump-started us, we could then take care of ourselves, and he was right. Who knows how long it would have taken us to figure that out on our own, without Bernard’s prodding. He had done his duty. He went back to berating the librarians and the institutions of Canada for ignoring Canada’s heritage. And he went back to trying to make a living. He had damaged himself enormously, indeed he died broke, deeply in debt, and with many institutional enemies because he insisted on sticking his neck out and demanding that we, the booksellers, be treated with respect by these institutions, because he believed that we were important and what we do is important, and that our cultural heritage, which we search out and sell to those institutions, is important.
He had his admirers amongst librarians, but many others called him a crook. But no one ever has ever gotten away with calling him that in my presence. I know what I and every other bookseller in this country owes to Amtmann, and, indeed, what many of our institutions also owe to his courage and his stubborn refusal to shut up. I have tried to emulate what Bernard initiated, sometimes to my cost, but never suffered even close to the extent that Bernard suffered for his opinions. He regularly forfeited his rightful profits because he insisted on the right of the rest of us to ours. He fought for our legitimacy at the cost of his own. And I will not forget that, nor let anyone else ignore it.
At the San Francisco book fair in February 1979 word circulated amongst the Canadian dealers present that Bernard had died. Several of us found ourselves standing morosely on the floor together, deeply saddened at the passing of this man to whom we all owed so much. I remember six to eight Canadians being there, but the only ones I clearly remember were Grant Woolmer, Alfred Van Peteghem, Hugh Anson-Cartwright, Ned Bowes, Steve Temple and myself. But there were certainly more. Hoffer and Bill Matthews were there but did not join our little group. Some of our American and English colleagues would approach us from time to time to offer condolences, as though we had lost a family member—which, I think, we all felt we had.
We stood there, each no doubt lost, as I was, in his own memories of Bernard; each no doubt aware that we wouldn’t probably even be there if it weren’t for Amtmann. Curiously, it is one of the times I remember feeling most intensely Canadian, standing there surrounded by forei
gn dealers, in an American city, feeling terrible, bereft, because a scrappy little Jewish guy from Vienna had died, making me feel like an orphan.
Shortly after this Peter Howard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, a close friend of Hoffer’s and a dealer I consider the best bookseller of my generation, even though I fought with him most of the forty years I knew him, came up to me and asked: “Is it true that Amtmann was the miserable bastard they say he was?”
I knew where that had come from. “Those sons-of-bitches had better not dare say that in front of me. Or any other Canadian here, either,” I replied angrily. I then blasted Peter with the tirade I have just written above.
To Peter’s credit he didn’t reply.
Perhaps here is the place to introduce some interesting points about the behaviour of some of Hoffer’s friends. Peter Howard may have actually wanted my opinion when he made that query about Amtmann, to measure it against what he had been told by others; or he may have been doing what several others have done for years, unaware that I have mostly seen through their not-so-subtle ploys. Maybe Peter simply wanted to stir things up. Certainly I have lots of evidence that others did. Many of Hoffer’s friends seemed to stay loyal to him whatever he did—even to them.
One important conclusion I arrived at, which continued to surprise me after I figured it out, was that some of Bill’s friends were far more dangerous than he was. Because of his style and because he appeared to be the instigator of so many things, it took a while to see the much more sinister nature of some of his followers. With Hoffer, because he was so volatile, you usually knew where you stood. He usually attacked openly. But several of his followers lacked the nobility of aim that he demonstrated alongside his craziness, the craziness that almost always caused him to escalate a worthy thought into the realm of insanity.
Curiously, all these years after Bill’s death, I find myself becoming even fond of him again. After a lifetime of admiring outsiders and misfits I find that I am again coming to admire his passionate tilting at the windmills which obsessed him. Maybe he was Don Quixote, as he probably saw himself; or maybe he really was a character from almost any of Dostoevsky’s novels, as I and many others saw him.