WHEN I WAS ASKED to write a small piece on Dennis Lee, I began by counting up the number of years I’ve known him. It came as a slight shock to discover that it was over twenty. I first met him, ludicrously enough, at a Freshman Mixer at Victoria College, University of Toronto, in the fall of 1957. I was somewhat in awe of him, since, like everyone else, I knew he’d won the Prince of Wales Scholarship for the highest grade thirteen marks in the province of Ontario; but nevertheless there I was, shuffling around the floor with him, while he explained that he was going to be a United Church minister. I, on the other hand, was already doggedly set on being a writer, though I had scant ideas about how this was to be accomplished. At that time I thought, in my intolerant undergraduate way, that poetry and religion — especially the religion of the United Church — did not mix, which brought us to the end of the dance.
Then there was a gap, as Dennis was in mainstream English and I had digressed into Philosophy and English, foolishly thinking that my mind would thereby be broadened. But logic and poetry did not mix either, and in second year I switched back, having missed Bibliography forever. Some time later, Dennis and I became friends and collaborators. I suppose it was inevitable. Art of any kind, in the late 1950s, in Toronto, at Victoria College, was not exactly a hot topic, and those of us who dared to risk incurring the pejorative label “arty” practised herding and defensive dressing. We worked on Acta Victoriana, the literary magazine; we wrote on, and acted in, the yearly satirical revue. At one point, Dennis and I invented a pseudonym for literary parodies, which combined both our names and which lingered on after our respective departures: Shakesbeat Latweed. “Shakesbeat,” because the first thing we wrote was a poem called “Sprattire,” variations on the first four lines of “Jack Spratt,” as if by various luminaries, from Shakespeare to a Beat poet. According to my mother, we laughed a lot while writing it. Dennis, then as now, had a faintly outrageous sense of humour concealed beneath his habitually worried look.
Dennis took fourth year off and went to Germany, thus enabling me to get a Woodrow Wilson fellowship (if he’d been there, he’d have got it). After that I was away from Toronto for the next ten years. So it must have been by letter, or during one of my infrequent visits back (I seem to remember Hart House theatre, at intermission; but intermission of what?) that he contacted me about the House of Anansi Press. Some people were starting a publishing house, he said, and they wanted to reprint my book of poems, The Circle Game, which had won the Governor General’s Award that year but was out of print. He said they wanted to do two thousand copies. I thought they were crazy. I also thought the idea of a publishing house was a little crazy too; it was still only 1967. But by this time both Dennis and I were cultural nationalists of a sort, though we’d come to it separately. We were both aware that the established publishing houses had been timorous about new writing, particularly in prose fiction, though also to a certain extent in poetry. The dreaded “colonial mentality” was not yet a catchphrase but it was on its way. The first four Anansi authors got small grants from the Canada Council, most of which we bumped back into the company. It amazes me now to realize how little money it took to start Anansi. But it took a lot more blood and guts, much of both Dennis’s.
During the late 1960s — the period of Anansi’s rapid growth and the establishment of Dennis’s reputation as an editor — I was in Boston, then Montreal, then Edmonton, so was in touch only by letter. I worked in various ways on three Anansi books with Dennis: George Bowering’s The Gangs of Kosmos, bill bissett’s nobody owns th earth, and, less intensively, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. When my own book, Power Politics, was ready to be seen, I felt it was an Anansi book and took it to Dennis. I returned from England in 1971, joined Anansi’s board, and worked with various writers (sometimes with Dennis, sometimes alone), including Paulette Jiles, Eli Mandel, Terrence Heath, P. K. Page, John Thompson, and Patrick Lane; and Dennis himself, with whom I edited the second edition of Civil Elegies. Our most engrossing collaboration at that time, however, was his editing of my critical work Survival. Dennis was indispensable for the book, and in top editorial form: fast, incisive, full of helpful suggestions, and, by the end, just as exhausted as I was.
Small publishing is an energy drainer, as anyone who has done it will testify. By 1973 Dennis was withdrawing more and more from Anansi, and shortly thereafter so was I.
I think it was in the summer of 1974 that Dennis read the first draft of Lady Oracle for me, with the usual helpful results. The editorial conference took place on the top of a rail fence, which was typical of Dennis as an editor. The process was never what you would call formal. Given the choice of a dining-room table or a kitchen full of dirty dishes and chicken carcasses and cat litter boxes, Dennis would go for the kitchen every time.
This is as good a place as any to throw in my two cents’ worth about Dennis-as-editor. The reputation is entirely deserved. When he’s “on,” he can give another writer not only generous moral support but also an insightful, clear view of where a given book is trying to go. This is usually conveyed not in conversation alone but in pages and pages of single-spaced, detailed, and amended notes. I have never worked with an editor who delivers so much in such a condensed mode. His willingness to enter so fully into a book’s sources of energy make him more than usually vulnerable to invasion by the author’s psyche and to the demands of the author’s clamorous ego. At one stage of his life he was acting not only as surrogate midwife but as surrogate shrink and confessor to far too many people. It’s no wonder that he’s fled from the editing process from time to time. It’s no wonder too that he’s sometimes become bored or impatient with the Super-editor uniform. He is also a writer, and both his own time and the attention and acclaim of others has often gone to the editing when it could or should have gone to the writing. It’s his writing that’s of primary importance for Dennis. It’s also, I think, the hardest thing to talk to him about and the hardest thing for him to do.
When I try to picture Dennis to myself, it’s the anxious wrinkles on his forehead that appear first, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. Next comes the pipe, eternally puffing, or sometimes a cigar. Then the rest of him appears, on the run, rumpled, harassed by invisible demons, replete with subterranean energy, slightly abstracted, sometimes perplexed, in spite of it all well-meaning, kindly in an embarrassed and hesitant way; and, when he’s talking to you about something important, working very hard not only at but towards saying exactly what he wants to say, which is usually complex. Sometimes Dennis is less complex when he’s had a few drinks and is playing the piano, for instance, or when he’s making a terrible pun. This maniacal side of Dennis is most visible in Alligator Pie and its sequels, and probably keeps him sane; but friendly old Uncle Dennis is of course not the whole story.
I don’t have the whole story, and it’s clear to me after twenty-odd years that I’m not likely ever to have it. Dennis isn’t what you’d call an easily accessible person. In any case, the whole story isn’t finished yet. There’s more to come.