This was too much for Lindsay, who dragged her nana off to see the nearby pole, from top to bottom, then loudly returned to interrupt my tale-weaving with the words “What did I miss, Grandad?”
The Welsh tale was “The Lady from the Lake,” and the Scottish one (where Alistair proudly told his neighbours, “I know this one, I know what happens”) was “The Goodman of Ballengeich.” This almost perfect story is about a disguised king passing secretly among his people (doing mediaeval public opinion surveys in a very informal way), and being rescued from sword-wielding robbers by a brave young farmhand armed only with a flail.
Just before the second show, Jane and I were roaming around the main floor of the ROM, where an all-woman Celtic band was playing fine traditional music. When they paused to ask for a song from anyone in the audience, Jane called out to ask them if they knew the old Irish song “The Wild Rover.” When they said yes, and invited her to start singing, she demurred, saying, “Not me, him!” and thrust me forward.
So it came about that the busy main floor of the museum resounded to three verses of me singing “The Wild Rover” while the audience joined loudly in the chorus “And it’s no, nay, never (CLAP, CLAP, CLAP, CLAP). No, nay never no more . . .” Etcetera.
And then as I took my bow, still blushing in disbelief, the PA system cut in to announce, “The Celtic Storytelling Session is just about to begin on the fourth floor,” and I had to rush off. Believe it or not, some of the audience actually followed me upstairs for my second storytelling session.
So clearly my résumé has to be updated, to include the sacred title “Celtic Storyteller.” I think we’ll leave out the entry about Irish drinking songs.
To most people in Ontario, Queen’s Park stands for the government of the province, based in the massive legislative buildings in the centre of the park, aka “The Pink Palace.” The politics that went on there almost put an end to my career in publishing.
In 1974, when I arrived at Macmillan of Canada as the new, young editorial director of the trade division (the people who produced books aimed at bookstores, rather than textbooks), I was horrified to find that almost no new books were under contract. So I moved fast to find new books, and was delighted to discover that Jonathan Manthorpe, the Globe and Mail’s man covering provincial politics, was just completing a book called The Power and the Tories, about the Tory dynasty in Ontario from “1943 to the Present.”
It was a thoughtful, well-written book, but it was also full of wonderful, irreverent fun, and I tried to catch the irreverence by persuading the legendary cartoonist Duncan Macpherson to produce a cover showing Tory premiers handing down the crown till at the end of the chain William Davis was handing down a blindfold that went over the eyes of John Q. Public. That superb cartoon hangs in our house, and I see it, with pleasure, every day.
Manthorpe’s writing was equally entertaining. Of a hard-fought leadership convention he notes: “It may shock the idealistic reader to learn that not all votes were won by the exercise of sweet reason.” On another occasion he talks about the way that William M. Kelly, the Tory Party’s bagman, operated. When people who did business with the government had an audience with Mr. Kelly to discuss possible contributions to the party “they were astounded to find that Kelly’s idea of what was generous exceeded their own by many thousands of dollars.”
As for political portraits, in those Castro-Guevara days Manthorpe described the young NDP leader Stephen Lewis as unfortunately coming across on television as “an arrogant ruthless fanatic who would have the whole province cutting sugar cane given half a chance.”
It was all lively stuff, but never better than when he explored why an incoming member of the Davis team was having trouble removing a “deadbeat” who was a hold-over from the previous Robarts regime, whose very senior position “appeared to bear no relationship to his rather limited abilities.” The Davis new broom discovered that the man had protectors in high places. “More digging revealed that a small group of very senior people were very concerned that the man should be handled with all delicacy and deference. They feared him and what he could do to them because, to put it plainly, he had been procuring women for them.”
The man is kept carefully anonymous throughout, and Manthorpe concludes with the words, “Lovers of fairy stories will be glad to know that everything was eventually resolved neatly and happily. The man was persuaded to accept a well-paying and prestigious post on the fringes of government in a city a long way from Toronto, and many people breathed a lot more easily.”
The book was an instant success, and was flying off the shelves when we were hit by a lawsuit. A man, in a city a long way from Toronto, came forward and said, That’s me, and it’s not true, and I’m suing you! Stop publishing this damaging book!
Crisis! An emergency meeting of the Macmillan board was held, with me in the hot seat. Gladys Neale (the all-powerful head of the company’s chief money-maker, the School Textbook Division) leaned forward and put in the question that would have ended my career at Macmillan. “Why was this book not checked by our lawyers?”
The company lawyer, Jim Mathews, spoke up: “It was. I checked it and approved it. We didn’t foresee the possibility of this man stepping forward to incriminate himself.”
I lived to publish again. But the board meeting had a discreditable ending. The market was loudly demanding a second printing of this bestseller, and in response we came up with a miserable compromise. We reprinted the book, but left the offending three paragraphs blank. Three blanked-out paragraphs, in the middle of the book, dammit!
In retrospect, since the lawsuit went nowhere, we fell for a scare campaign cooked up by Tory operatives who didn’t like the light that this book was shining on dark places inside the party. They were determined to find some way to take the wind out of the book’s sales, and they found a way that worked.
The outside northwest corner of the legislative buildings at Queen’s Park contains a discreet stone staircase, flanked by six elaborately carved pillars, each one different in style, like an architectural textbook illustration. It leads to the chambers of the Queen’s official representative in Ontario, the Lieutenant Governor. When my author, Jim Bartleman (a former career civil servant in the Foreign Affairs Department) became the Right Honourable James Bartleman, the new Lieutenant Governor, it meant that I entered an interesting new phase of being involved in a number of behind-the-scenes events.
A word of tribute here. Jim Bartleman was a hard-working author, whose books On Six Continents: A Life in Canada’s Foreign Service 1966–2002 (2004) and Rollercoaster: My Hectic Years as Jean Chrétien’s Diplomatic Advisor, 1994–1998 (2005) revealed his fascinating career as a diplomat. I remember with pleasure that in the first book he tells of the time when as Canada’s Ambassador to South Africa he and Marie-Jeanne, his wife, visited the San people, a tribe of bushmen living near the Namibian border. They were having a fine visit, chatting and drinking coffee, when “the scene changed dramatically at the sound of an approaching bus. Our hosts hurriedly set aside their cups and stripped off all their clothes. ‘We look more authentic this way,’ one explained. … Sixty earnest German tourists were soon the unwitting participants in a very profitable charade . . .”
I was even prouder to publish Raisin Wine: A Boyhood in a Different Muskoka (2007), which gave details of growing up as an aboriginal kid, or, to use the language of the time, “a halfbreed.” His father, a labourer with a Scottish background, brewed homemade raisin wine in “dry” Port Carling, to help finance the household run by Jim’s Chippewa mother. Things were tough, but the local library inspired Jim’s love of books. With the magnificent help of a cottage-owning American who told Jim, the local boy who worked around the property, “You get into a University, and I’ll pay for it,” this led, in time, to a university degree from Western, and a truly remarkable career.
During his term in the Lieutenant Governor’s office I wat
ched with admiration as he used its prestige to advance the cause of aboriginal Canadians, especially young ones (and his campaign to collect books and fly them in to remote reserves in the north is legendary, with eighty-two summer camps for reading now established in communities around Ontario). But he also bravely chose to speak about another cause dear to his heart: mental illness. The mountain he had to climb with that last taboo subject was made clear to me when I was invited to attend a meeting of the downtown Rotary Club. From the podium Jim was speaking very seriously about how prevalent mental illness is in our society, speculating that in a crowd this size there would be roughly fifteen people fighting mental illness.
“Where are you? Show yourselves! Ha, ha, ha,” shouted a leather-lunged joker in the crowd.
Jim paused, obviously considered using the idiotic intervention as a teachable moment, an example of what he was up against, then graciously chose to ignore the loud-voiced moron. I assume, and hope, that the shouter got a tongue-lashing afterwards from his fellow-Rotarians, whom he had just disgraced.
That day I had arrived late at the National Club, where this event was held. In a miracle of split-second bad timing, just as I was trying to squeeze through the receiving line of Rotary officials, Jim Bartleman came up the stairway opposite and, seeing a familiar face, greeted me enthusiastically. “Doug! I didn’t know you were a Rotarian,” he cried, shaking my hand, while the dark-suited line of real Rotarians edged away from me resentfully. I managed to extricate myself in order to buy my lunch ticket.
When I emerged, with the instructions The table at the front, on the left ringing in my ears, I reached the entrance to the large, formal dining room, where everyone was seated. I was not to know that in another miracle of bad timing the chairman had just said, “So here he is, the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, the Right Honourable James Bartleman!” There was a mix-up, causing a delay after the announcement, so Jim was not ready to enter. But I, arriving too late to hear the introduction, definitely was ready to go, and in I went.
I was surprised by the burst of applause as I strode in to the crowded room — The table at the front, on the left — and even more surprised when the applause turned to laughter. So I marched down the aisle, waving both arms above my head, in self-parody, until the real Lieutenant Governor arrived, to real applause. It was a Zelig moment, and Woody Allen would have enjoyed it.
And I did enjoy attending some fine events at Queen’s Park, as Jim Bartleman’s guest in the Lieutenant Governor’s chambers, including the time that Princess Anne and I commiserated about the fortunes of the Scottish national rugby team. “Another ‘building year,’ I’m afraid,” she said, gloomily.
The centre of power in Toronto is the corner of King and Bay. Flanked on all sides by giant bank towers, there is a shortage of sky. This is the hub of Canada’s financial world, and countless corporate movers and shakers have offices clustered around it. So when, as a shameless publisher, I wanted to catch the attention of Corporate Canada, I staged a piece of street theatre right at that corner.
We had just rushed out a book called The Bre-X Fraud in August 1997 (by Douglas Goold and Andrew Willis of the Globe and Mail) and we wanted to get the financial world talking about this controversial new book on the Canadian gold-mining scam that had cost thousands of investors many millions. So I hired a young actor friend, John Gordon, as a sandwich-board man. He was well-dressed, in shiny black shoes, neatly pressed black pants, and a tie around his neck. What was missing was a shirt under the tie, or a jacket. The sandwich board above his naked torso explained that. Front and back it proclaimed I LOST MY SHIRT ON BRE-X, before announcing the new book in smaller type.
Through the warm August weather I walked from the M&S office at Dundas and University with the half-naked John, and along the way we were greeted by smiles, and nudges and nods and winks, even laughter. But as we approached the corner of King and Bay, the atmosphere changed. No more smiles. Just scowls, which seemed to say things like “Hey, this wasn’t funny.” “We were all fooled by Bre-X. People lost real money there!” “We’re talking real money, $6 billion.” “The biggest mining scam of all time, for God’s sake! A penny stock that ended up at over $280, then the crash came and it all disappeared. Not funny!”
So John tramped around all four sides of that key corner, looking mournful, through the lunch hour, and in theory everyone went back to work talking about the new book. But clearly most of the financial crowd, the people Tom Wolfe called “the Masters of the Universe,” were not amused by our prank. As John said afterwards, it was as if people came to work “with their game face on,” and took everything about money very seriously. Standing nearby in my role of observer/protector, I was surprised by this humourless reaction, and was left thinking that maybe the view that the rest of Canada has about Toronto (“Hogtown,” and a place that could produce a mayor like Rob Ford) as a solemn city that’s all about making money — and takes itself far too seriously — is not all wrong.
Just ten minutes on foot from the power corner takes you to the part of downtown that I know best. Opposite the old Eaton Centre lies a public space lit by the dozens of flashing ads that mimic Times Square, and pulsate around the clock. Just beyond there, along Dundas two blocks east of Yonge, lies Bond Street. Despite its elegant London name, Bond Street is shabby now, and runs for only three short blocks, but it was once a centre of Canadian book publishing.
I worked there from 1968 to 1980, and it is full of memories for me that may interest the literary tourist taking shelter from the flashing ad boards on Yonge Street. Just north of Dundas, under the scowl of Egerton Ryerson’s statue at Bond Street’s north end, you’ll find 105 Bond Street. That was for many years the home of Doubleday Canada, where I got my first job as a trainee editor. The three-storey office building is not much changed (although the giant warehouse is gone) and it is easy to imagine excited authors taking a deep breath before they swung open the door and mounted the stairs to meet their publisher for the first time.
You can imagine ghosts from across the country, like Harold Horwood or Cassie Brown from Newfoundland, Thomas Raddall from Nova Scotia, David Legate from Montreal, Blair Fraser from Ottawa, Arthur Hailey from Toronto, Harry J. Boyle from Alice Munro country, R.D. (Bob) Symons from Saskatchewan, George Hardy from Edmonton, and Ernie Perrault from B.C. all stepping in off Bond Street with a quiet sense of occasion.
This was where the famous Thomas P. Kelley came with his white-gloved wife, on a mission to sell me on the merits of his book on the Donnelly murders. This mission culminated in him jumping excitedly on top of my desk (which was ankle deep in papers) as he continued his rousing sales pitch … until I had to help him down. Here, too, Joey Smallwood, trying to impress an audience of two (me and a pop-eyed colleague) with the merits of his autobiography, became aroused by his own oratory in a way that I will tell in my final chapter on Newfoundland; I was delighted by the larger-than-life little man as he sprang from his chair and began to pace around, giving a speech, his thumbs in his lapels. And this was where I returned with Barry Broadfoot from the memorable lunch at a cheap restaurant on Dundas Square where he had showed me tantalizing sample material for his tape recorded book that he wanted to call Ten Lost Years.
The success of that book led me to make a big move — at least a one-minute walk down Bond Street — to number 70, in the middle block of the three, where Macmillan of Canada had its offices. Since Macmillan has disappeared without trace from the Canadian book scene, it’s important to explain how central it once was. That is achieved brilliantly by Ruth Panofsky in her 2012 book, The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture. The London-based company expanded around the world from its 1843 beginnings, with offices in London and New York, and branch offices in India and Australia, to the extent that by the turn of the century Frederick Macmillan could be described, by Shafquat Towheed, as “almost certainly the single most influential
man in the world of Anglo-American letters in the period.”
In 1905, they decided to open a Canadian office. By 1910, in Ruth Panofsky’s words, “business had grown sufficiently to warrant construction of Macmillan’s own stately five-storey premises, with an above-ground basement, at 70 Bond Street.” That grandly faced building is still there, and likely to impress the literary tourist. I worked there from 1974 until 1980, when Macmillan moved elsewhere. We left with appropriate ceremony, out of respect for the 70 years’ worth of new books that were born there. A piper played a lament, and I made a farewell speech into the roar of traffic. But 70 Bond Street still stands, and is well preserved by the current occupants. I hope they are aware that those stone stairs and lime-wood panelled halls saw the passage of authors like Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove, Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Donald Creighton, W.O. Mitchell, Hugh MacLennan, Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant.
Even Grey Owl, the Englishman who successfully posed as a Native man, and was revered by all, used to stalk softly up these steps in buckskins and moccasins. In his 1978 memoir, Fun Tomorrow, the former Macmillan publisher John Gray remembered his time as a young sales rep chauffeuring Grey Owl around town, one seat in the back of the car reserved for his feather war bonnet. When he was revealed after his death as Archie Belaney, from Sussex in England, John Gray was taken aback: “For a time I clung to a theory that if he wasn’t an Indian he really believed he was, for I could still see the jabbing upright finger and hear the strong voice, ‘I am the custodian of the ancient dignities of the Indian people.’”
Across Canada by Story Page 5