by John Metcalf
On my return to Ottawa from Guelph in 1988, I talked John Newlove into co-editing the series but he grew bored with the idea and withdrew entirely after about six weeks. We continued to put his name on the books and in the catalogue because I thought it looked more impressive to have two of us, but one day in 1993 I bumped into John in the street and he said that if we didn’t stop using his name he’d sue. I didn’t really think that he would—but with John you can never be quite sure.
I wanted each Sherbrooke Street volume to have an introduction by the author, setting the book in a literary and historical context. In cases where this wasn’t possible, I intended commissioning an expert to do the job for me. We thought that these introductions or afterwords would also make the books bibliographically significant to libraries and institutions.
In this, we were mistaken.
I attended three annual meeting of the Learned Societies at great expense, manning a Porcupine’s Quill booth, attempting to sell Sherbrooke Street books and other PQ titles to Canada’s assembled academics. In the three years we sold a total of something like thirteen books.
I recall one shambling scholar at our booth picking up Ray Smith’s Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada.
“Is there anything about sailing in this book?”
“Not that I recall, no.”
“Ah, well then, it wouldn’t interest me because, you see,” he said triumphantly, “it’s sailing I’m interested in.”
Thinking about the meetings of the Learned Societies reminds me of one attended by ECW Press in Winnipeg. Jack David and Robert Lecker always used to put on wine-and-cheese receptions. They bought wine locally and hired locals to dispense it. An academic surveyed the jumble of bottles on the table and asked of the local, “Where is the Côtes-du-Rhône?”
“Down the corridor,” replied the local, “and on your left.”
When we started Sherbrooke Street I assumed that we’d keep adding to the series until we arrived at something like the New Canadian Library or the New Press Canadian Classics. This was not to be. When I was setting up a reading tour for Norman Levine to promote and celebrate the 1993 republication of From a Seaside Town and Canada Made Me I was shocked that McGill, his own university, had no interest whatsoever in hosting a reading. “Nobody teaches him,” I was told. My contact in Calgary told me that a few older people might turn out but there wouldn’t be any students there because they wouldn’t have heard of him as he wasn’t on any courses. We were forced to face the brute fact that there really wasn’t much of an academic market at all and that the general readership was indifferent. Quietly we let the series lapse.
The reprint books were Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada by Ray Smith (1989); Lunar Attractions by Clark Blaise (1990); The Improved Binoculars by Irving Layton (1991); Europe by Louis Dudek (1991); The Happiness of Others by Leon Rooke (1991); Dance with Desire by Irving Layton (1992); From a Seaside Town and Canada Made Me by Norman Levine (1993).
Of these titles perhaps only Europe was a mistake. It certainly doesn’t stand up as poetry but it’s interesting for its ambition. Louis was important more as a teacher and an enthusiast and he is warmly remembered by those he taught such as Michael Darling, David Solway, and Michael Gnarowski.
The Happiness of Others preserves the best of Leon Rooke’s stories from The Love Parlour and Cry Evil, volumes long out of print with Oberon Press. Ray Smith wrote a lengthy and important introduction to Cape Breton, essential reading for anyone interested in the short story in Canada.
By the end of 1992 I was beginning to see the shape of the Press in an editorial sense. Between 1974, when they founded the Porcupine’s Quill in Erin Village northwest of Toronto, and 1989 when I started working with them, Tim and Elke had published a great deal of poetry but little fiction. I wanted to publish fewer poetry titles and place considerable emphasis on short fiction.
In 1989 I thought that the Press was too slight. Tim and Elke had published some good books but not enough of them. We had to gain mass and weight. Nor was Tim really thinking in national terms. I remember him saying to me in the early days, “Oh, Porcupine’s Quill books don’t get reviewed.”
What I had in mind was building a better press than Contact Press or the House of Anansi had been. I wanted, quite simply, the best literary press in Canada.
This is how I put it in an essay in The New Quarterly:
I wanted to counter apathy and blandness. I wanted to shock homogenized minds with the experience of writing at high voltage. I wanted the press to assert relentlessly literature’s importance. I wanted the press to be a national press and of national importance. I wanted nothing “small” about this small press. I wanted the press to become something of a “movement.” Not a movement committed to a particular “ism,” but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence. I wanted our writers to draw strength from community. I wanted each to embolden the next. I wanted writers who loved language and who would swagger and flaunt. I wanted elegance. I wanted sophistication. I wanted a press crackling with energy. I wanted to draw together into one place so many talented writers that we would achieve critical mass and explode upon Canadian society in a dazzling coruscation showering it with unquenchable brilliance.
There was, of course, no money. I was willing to do this job without a salary—which Tim certainly couldn’t have afforded—because I was attracted by the extreme romanticism of the task, by the vision of what could be wrought. I was bringing to the Press years of literary experience and a host of literary contacts, contacts not really available to Tim and Elke isolated in Erin Village. I was also bringing to the Press a readiness to talk to people, to listen, to soothe, to cajole.
Tim is very much not a “people person.” He is paranoid, belligerent, bloody-minded, and extremely intelligent, all qualities which are probably essential to survival in small press publishing. I sometimes get phone calls from the more emotionally frail among my writers complaining that he has yelled at them or been astonishingly rude. I explain to these ruffled feathers that he has too much on his plate and that he’s snarly because harassed.
Hostile and gloomy as he sometimes can be, he is at the same time something of a hero to me. I admire his energy, his devotion to what he does, his obstinate use of Zephyr Antique laid paper, the beautiful end-products of his passion. The fact that Tim still binds his books in the traditional manner and that he binds them with a Smythe book-sewing machine made in 1907 might suggest why I like and admire him and why we’ve worked together for fifteen years without homicidal incident.
Although I wanted to change the emphasis of the press I certainly wanted to continue publishing poetry but I wanted Selected Poems and Collected Poems rather than slim volumes by tyros. We started in 1990 with George Johnston’s collected poems Endeared by Dark. Mark Abley wrote about the book and the Press in the Montreal Gazette:
“The way I look at it,” Tim Inkster told me the other day, “the printing excellence we’re known for is a very sophisticated and understated marketing tool. The authors we publish are important, and we want to make sure their works last.”
But there’s more to it than that. Just think of the magnificent cover that graces George Johnston’s collected poems, Endeared by Dark. Since Johnston is a noted translator from Old Norse, Inkster decided that a Viking motif would be appropriate for the book. His unofficial editor-in-chief, John Metcalf, found a photograph of the celebrated Oseberg Ship in Norway but the photo was not good enough to reproduce directly. So Inkster passed it to an artist, Virgil Burnett; and from Burnett’s pen-and-ink drawing, Inkster had a magnesium die made. Onto each cover, the die was then foil-stamped by hand.
A complicated process—but the result is a joy to behold. “It’s about as nice a production as I’ve ever had,” Johnston says wryly. Against a pale, gray-blue background, the ship’
s embossed prow soars in gold. “Visually, it’s something of a ghost ship,” Inkster explains. “The way you perceive the image changes according to your angle of view. It’s designed to sail through your imagination.”
And one way or another, that’s what a lot of Porcupine’s Quill books have been doing of late.
Tim printed five hundred copies of Endeared by Dark; total advance trade sales in Canada were forty-five copies.
As the years passed we published Irving Layton, Gael Turnbull, Don Coles, Richard Outram, John Newlove, P. K. Page, and Christopher Wiseman.
Gael Turnbull is an anomaly in this list, being far more “experimental” than any of the others.
Some years ago I became interested in a small literary press called Contact Press which was run in the fifties and sixties by Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, and Peter Miller. Myrna and I formed the first complete collection of the books of the press, a collection now in the National Library of Canada.
The Contact Press was perhaps the most centrally important press in the history of Canadian poetry, publisher of the first or very early work of Doug Jones, Alden Nowlen, Eli Mandel, Phyllis Webb, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, Leonard Cohen, W. W. E. Ross, F. R. Scott, Milton Acorn, Gwendolyn MacEwen, John Newlove, Al Purdy, George Bowering, and Margaret Atwood.
One of the early books of the press was entitled Trio and it contained the first poems published in book form of three young writers—Eli Mandel, Phyllis Webb, and Gael Turnbull.
Also distributed by the Contact Press were four mimeographed pamphlets of French-Canadian poets translated by Turnbull in 1955—an early effort at crossing borders and cultures. Gael was living at the time in Iroquois Falls, Ontario, where he practised as a doctor and anaesthetist. He was assisted in the translations by Jean Beaupré, a French teacher in the local high school. Together they presented samples of the work of Paul-Marie Lapointe, Gilles Hénault, Roland Giguère, and Saint-Denys Garneau.
Gael Turnbull was much influenced by Raymond Souster and the Contact Press movement and by Cid Corman and the Black Mountain poets in the States. When he returned to England in 1957, he founded Migrant Press, one of the pioneer small presses for modern poetry in Britain.
I enjoyed the poetry and made efforts to find out about the man. I located him in Edinburgh and went there to see him, bearing with me an offer to publish a Selected Poems in Canada. I spent a couple of nights in my hotel room sitting up into the small hours reading new material and rereading until I was bleary-eyed. The eventual result was While Breath Persist which was published by the Porcupine’s Quill in 1992.
Whenever I think about Gael Turnbull, I think of his reciting the final lines of “Twenty Words, Twenty Days.”
. . . and I remember an Edinburgh room
and one saying, when I asked what he’d done that day,
how much—
“I tore it up . . . I wisnae pure enough
when I wrote . . . I wisnae pure enough . . .”
In 1993 we published Don Coles’s Forests of the Medieval World. It was the winner of the 1993 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Tim was ecstatic. Then it turned out that Don thought public readings and any sort of public appearance were little short of hucksterism and deeply detrimental to poetry’s dignity. He refused to perform. Tim was apoplectic and coarse descriptive invective issued from the telephone for days. There was a gala evening for the winners at the National Library where I had to read in Don Coles’s place. Among other of his poems, I read “My Son at the Seashore, Age Two,” a pretty little thing.
He laughs and a breeze
lifts his hair. His face tilts up
towards what has happened
to his hair, that it should lift,
and his laugh goes. Why
is this happening, his suddenly
serious face wants to know, and
what is happening. But
all it is is a little breeze
lifting his hair for a few seconds,
a little breeze passing by
on its way to oblivion—
as this day is on its way there too,
and as that day, twenty years ago,
was, too.
When I read the last, soft words I heard someone catch their breath. For some reason I was certain it was a woman.
We have also had the honour of publishing the glittering poetry of Richard Outram. Four of his collections are still in print with us: Man in Love, Hiram and Jenny, Mogul Recollected, and Dove Legend. Alberto Manguel wrote an essay on Richard Outram in a recent book, Into the Looking-Glass Wood. He wrote: “I discovered, in fact, that Outram’s entire career had been one of absences. He has never received a national, let alone international award, nor a Canada Council grant; he has never been included in any major anthology of Canadian poetry, rarely been acknowledged in reviews . . .”
Manguel then goes on to claim that Richard Outram is “one of the finest poets in the English language.”
Who could resist exploring such a resounding judgement? The answer to that rhetorical question is, Nearly every Canadian.
The easiest way into Richard’s work is through Hiram and Jenny. Hiram and Jenny are two quirky maritime characters and the poems celebrate in playful and gorgeous language their comings and goings, their maunderings and heroics.
Here are just a few lines from “Techne.”
Hiram is washing his socks in the creek.
Not far offshore, unseen,
crammed with warheads and comic books
a nuclear submarine
noses about with her cornfed crew,
bored, but ready to cope
at the drop of a ciphered word. . . .
Who could resist reading on? But you will.
By 1991 I had also fully realized what had been nebulous before, that ink and paper were only a part of a literary press. Literary presses which were mainly ink and boards and paper—presses like Black Moss, say, or Mosaic—are largely inert. I would never underestimate the importance of Tim’s printing and design. He has won awards from the Leipzig Book Fair, the Art Directors’ Club of New York, the Alcuin Society and the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, yet at the same time I believe that a press lives fully only when it creates a personality and mythology.
Faber and Faber had that mythology under T. S. Eliot and continued having it under Charles Monteith; Macmillan in England had it in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Boni and Liveright had it under the hand of Ezra Pound. It comes about, I think, when a certain group of authors, a generation perhaps, come to be associated with a press. In their commingling, the by-product is a glamour, a glitter of talent. The mythology is nurtured by launches, by lunches, by burgeoning friendships and mild rivalries. It grows through editorial soothing and encouragement which is not some insincere schtick but is a genuine interest in the work and its creator. It comes about through a sense of community and shared purpose. It comes about through a shared aesthetic interest in literature. It brings people into a more than commercial association.
The mythology of the press is built by the commingling of the reputations of such brilliant and disparate writers as
Caroline Adderson, Michael Winter, Steven Heighton, Libby Creelman, Russell Smith, Andrew Pyper, Mike Barnes, Annabel Lyon, Terry Griggs . . . It is also built by application to endless detail. By phone calls to alert writers to reviews. By letters to celebrate or commiserate. By conversations about books, writing, ideas, reviewing. By the press’s ever-expanding Web site.
A good example of that attention to detail is the bookmarks Tim makes, each featuring an author photographed at his or her local bookstore. A simple enough thing to do, but when these bookmarks are distributed all over the country they’re just one more reminder of the press’s specialness.
The press also builds myth
ology by turning its principals into a cast of characters. When The New Quarterly was about to publish a special issue on my editing work, the editor, Kim Jernigan, wrote in a letter, “You have, as you must know, a reputation for being FORMIDABLE.” I have no idea how this slander got abroad but Steve Heighton amplified it in his New Quarterly contribution.
How do I know what John is like with the others? I know because whenever I happen to meet other writers he’s edited, we always end up huddled together and asking, in hushed tones, “So, what kind of thing does he write on your stories?”
I usually answer with a few choice samples of Metcalfian marginalia: “Another EXCREMENTAL metaphor.” “Oh Christ, Heighton, are you KIDDING?” And my personal favourite, which appeared, in large caps, between the lines of an unmedicably ailing story, later put down: “YOU CAN ONLY SAY THAT ABOUT HORSES, YOU DINK.”
Thus in the play that is the Porcupine’s Quill I have been cast as the Formidable Editor. I have myself cast Tim as Don Quixote, writing of him “. . . if one is going to tilt at windmills, who better to ride with than that gloomy aesthete Tim Inkster with his antique Zephyr laid?”
And Elke? Elke is the éminence grise, the Power Behind the Throne.
Such imaginary characters are as real and vital to the living press as the cold steel of the Heidelberg Kord 64 in the workshop’s basement.
Beginning in 1991 the pace of the press was picking up so fast that we were under considerable pressure. Of the five titles shortlisted for the 1991 Governor General’s Award for Fiction two were Porcupine’s Quill books of short stories, Blue Husbands by Don Dickinson and Quickening by Terry Griggs. And the pressure never let up. To give the reader some idea of the pace, the House of Anansi over a period of twenty-three years and under five or six editors published about 160 books. Over a period of fifteen years, alone, I will have acquired and edited more than 100 books. By the year 2000 I was feeling tired and overworked.