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GRAY’S LUCK

I never wonder why I am in publishing; for all its responsibilities it is a rare privilege.

John Gray to Hugh MacLennan (1958)

In one of the stories he relished telling on himself, John Gray arrived at the old Macmillan building on Bond Street in Toronto for his first day at work. It was August 1930, and the twenty-three-year-old had obtained the job by a circuitous route. After failing two years at the University of Toronto while enjoying himself immensely, he’d barnstormed around Europe with a pickup hockey team, toyed with being a writer in London, and spent a year as a junior master at his alma mater, the boys’ prep school at Lakefield, Ontario. Presented with a casual offer from Hugh Eayrs of Macmillan based on his prowess at bridge, Gray had passed it up, opting to work his way around the world on a freighter. But he soon thought better of that and wrote explaining his change of heart to Eayrs, who had assured him the door to Macmillans (as everyone called it) would remain open. Gray waited days, then weeks for a reply. His other options had closed by the time he was told Eayrs had departed on a voyage to England. Gray fired off a cable to Macmillan’s London headquarters, politely insisting on a decision. A reply arrived from Eayrs within twenty-four hours: “Awfully sorry completely forgot letter join us August 18th.”

“And so by chance encounters, by blind luck, and perhaps guided by some instinct,” Gray wrote in his memoirs, “I stumbled into what was to be my career.” This remarkable man wouldn’t be the country’s most innovative publisher nor its most flamboyant, but without him – as exemplar, mentor, setter of standards – the profession would not have developed as it did.

Curiosity and optimism help make a book publisher, especially if combined with a modicum of luck. On all counts, young John Morgan Gray was superbly qualified. Unsure where his destiny lay, he renewed nightly his pledge of “fun tomorrow,” a bright and adventurous day ahead. His luck resulted partly from being born into an affectionate and privileged family. As a boy, Gray lived in London with his mother and older brother so that the family could be together while his father served in the First World War. Schoolmates taunted the boys for their Canadian accents until they learned to ape English diction. Later the brothers boarded at Lakefield and attended Upper Canada College, where John became “something of a connoisseur of caning” and played first-team hockey.

Gray’s luck was often reinforced by sound intuition: as in his decision to marry Antoinette Lalonde, for example, who had “more lovely, bubbling vitality and enjoyment of life than I had ever encountered,” or his later refusal to be lured away from Macmillan by job offers elsewhere. Even so, as a young publisher he got into scrapes. After a liquid lunch in 1936 to celebrate the record-breaking Canadian sales of Gone with the Wind, he committed a minor hit-and-run on Spadina Road involving the company car and a brand new Cadillac, fortunately parked. The Cadillac’s owner didn’t press charges, however, since Gray “seemed to be a nice young man.” The idea of John Gray as an amiably blundering buffoon and young rake-hell belies the Ashley and Crippen portrait on the jacket of his memoirs: the very image of a judicious publisher of the old school, with all the English tics of the genre intact down to the thoughtfully flourished pipe and white handkerchief tucked up the grey gabardine sleeve.

Gray’s patina of Britishness suited him well for rising through the ranks. Long a bastion of empire, the publisher of Kipling and Tennyson, Macmillan had opened a Canadian office in 1905. The branch’s fortunes were entrusted to Frank Wise, an Englishman with ten years’ experience in the New York office. Wise built up the Canadian market for Macmillan’s British and American books and published a few Canadian authors, as long as their views were consistent with his own imperial convictions.

Under Wise’s direction, the Bond Street building was erected in 1910. Two years later, Wise made a valuable acquisition for the firm by taking over G.N. Morang, a leading Toronto textbook publisher. But as the historian A.B. McKillop entertainingly recounts in The Spinster and the Prophet, Wise also proceeded to enrich himself at his employer’s expense, running various personal enterprises out of the Macmillan building and siphoning off company resources. When the previously sound Canadian branch began to falter, investigations revealed Wise’s misdemeanours, and he resigned in disgrace in 1921.

His successor was Hugh Eayrs, another Englishman, only twenty-five on being elevated to president. Eayrs was also a budding author; he’d written a biography of General Isaac Brock for Macmillan’s Canadian Men of Action series and collaborated on a novel with Thomas B. Costain, when the future bestselling author was still editor of Maclean’s. Eayrs combined ability and energy with a skill for self-promotion. On a business trip to London, the “bumptious boy from Yorkshire,” as Gray described him, disarmed the three elderly Macmillan brothers so completely with “his charm and wit, his cockiness and real capacity,” that he overcame their doubts about his youth and limited experience.

One of the first books Eayrs published, an English translation of Louis Hémon’s historical novel of Quebec, Maria Chapdelaine, became an overnight success in Britain and the United States. Subsequently London gave him a more or less free hand in running the Canadian show. During the 1920s and ’30s, he drove a Stutz Bearcat touring car and entertained at the Toronto Club, black tie only. One of his guests was the rising young novelist Morley Callaghan, who fifty years later was still reminiscing about Eayrs’s “magnificent champagne parties and dinners.”

John Gray wrote this assessment of his first boss, whom he greatly liked and admired: “At the core of his confidence was a belief in his luck; a belief all gamblers – and publishers – must have, but none should have too much; at once a great and dangerous gift. I was to see it make him by turns unbeatable and intolerable, and to see it contribute to his destruction long before his time.”

During the 1920s, Eayrs had been fortunate in hiring an ambitious young man, W.H. Clarke, who quickly learned the educational side of the business. Clarke took charge of all Macmillan’s school publishing, plus its college and medical books, and was soon guiding projects to profitable conclusions. But he and Eayrs were temperamentally too alike, according to Gray, and at the same time too different in their natures to coexist comfortably. “Both were forceful, fiercely competitive, and stubborn,” but whereas Eayrs played and drank hard, the teetotalling Clarke “seemed never to play.” Clarke believed his successes entitled him to a greater share of authority and rewards within the firm, and when he didn’t get them, he and his brother-in-law John C.W. Irwin left Macmillan “in great bitterness” to start Clarke, Irwin. In the wake of their departure, the untested Gray arrived.

Eayrs sent his recruit on the road as a sales rep to Ontario schools, and Gray took to the work immediately. When the firing of a colleague required him to travel to the Maritime provinces, Gray was exuberant. Although he’d make the trip many times in the future, “I was never to lose that sense of privilege and pleasure. It had been there all through the twenty-four-hour train trip aboard the Ocean Limited from Montreal, but it swept over me with a peculiar joy as I stepped off the train at last in Halifax, and walked along the still-panting train at the edge of the harbour, sniffing the sea and hearing a distant fog-horn. This was the life!”

Much of that life was spent on trains, accompanied by giant sample trunks full of books, and in hotel rooms, entertaining visiting educators and sharing a drink with rival travellers. Like any enterprising sales rep, Gray soon found himself metamorphosing into a field editor. His first big find came when a tip from an educator in Truro, Nova Scotia, led to a meeting with a superintendent of schools in Amherst, which provided an introduction to a professor of chemistry at Mount Allison University, who ultimately co-authored one of Macmillan’s most successful textbooks, Dominion High School Chemistry. On another occasion, Gray and his colleague Frank Upjohn asked one of Macmillan’s authors, the distinguished poet and professor E.J. Pratt, to co-edit an anthology of narrative poems for high schools. A Pedlar’s Pack filled the niche so well that it remained in print for over forty years.

After only two years with the firm, Gray became manager of the educational department, with Upjohn, a year younger at twenty-four, as assistant manager. Their swift ascent was paved by the dismissal of two older colleagues, victims of what Gray acknowledged as publishing’s “occupational disease,” alcoholism. He soon learned to recognize the potential for corruption in educational publishing; subtler than money changing hands, it could be as simple as offering a textbook contract to an educator who had influence on the provincial selection committee. But as Gray worked more closely with Eayrs, he became implicated in some seriously compromised situations. Eayrs’s health was deteriorating and his judgment dimming as he himself became alcoholic. Still only in his late thirties, he tended to make snap decisions, committing the company to costly projects without any clear business rationale.

The most ambitious publishing project Macmillan had yet attempted was a set of readers for all four western provinces, from elementary grades through high school. The investment necessary to compete for such a major contract was beyond Macmillan’s means, so the company joined forces with Ryerson, while W.J. Gage collaborated on a competing bid with Thomas Nelson.

To win an advantage, Eayrs resorted to the high-handed tactic of denying competitors the right to use any selections to which Macmillan or its agencies held copyright, including works by Kipling, Hardy, Yeats, and many other authors. When the competitors objected that this would deprive the authors or their estates of permission fees, Gray had to agree. He took up the issue with Eayrs, but the boss stuck to his legalistic justification. The Macmillan-Ryerson volumes for grades seven, eight, and nine were edited by Lorne Pierce of Ryerson and Dora Whitefield (in private life Mrs. Hugh Eayrs, who had little experience to qualify her for the task).

The comeuppance came after the Macmillan-Ryerson reader for grade seven won the contract for Alberta and seemed likely to sweep the other provinces. Ten thousand copies had already been printed and shipped when Gage and Nelson alleged that the winning book contained teachers’ notes plagiarized word for word from American readers. If their complaints weren’t satisfied, the two companies would seek a court injunction.

With Eayrs and Pierce away on holiday, the young manager of Macmillan’s school department had to face the flak alone. During a three-day train journey to Edmonton, Gray racked his brains for a solution to salvage Macmillan’s investment, coming up with a compromise at the eleventh hour: if Alberta used Macmillan’s grade seven book without changes for a year, he proposed, the company would cede the grade eight contract to Gage and Nelson, clearing all copyrights for their book, and eliminating all plagiarism in its own future editions. Gray was gambling that the fall term was about to begin and Alberta needed its books quickly. His calculations proved correct: the province’s deputy minister of education told the rival publishers to accept Gray’s proposal. The offending book went on to be revised and live a happy and profitable life for another twenty-five years.

The young publisher’s life wasn’t all schoolbooks. Rubbing shoulders with prominent Macmillan authors at the Eayrses’ parties, Gray chauffeured Grey Owl, before the English imposter’s unmasking, to sign books at Eaton’s and lecture at the King Edward Hotel; he squired stately Mazo de la Roche, winner of the Atlantic Monthly prize for Jalna, to lunch at the York Club. Mixing with celebrity writers inspired Gray to continue his own writing in his off-hours. His most substantial accomplishment of the period was a boys’ thriller modelled on his experiences at Lakefield; after many rejections by publishers, it appeared as The One-Eyed Trapper from the British firm Blackie, which offered him “an iniquitous type of old-fashioned contract” and a flat royalty of £40 in return for world rights. That experience gave Gray a lifelong empathy with the precariousness of the writing life. “Every publisher should write at least one book and try to find a publisher for it,” he wrote.

John Gray was thirty-two when the Second World War began. He and his new recruit in the educational department, Barney Sandwell, were in the elevator of a Belleville, Ontario, hotel when the operator told them the Germans had marched into Poland. Several months later, Gray received an equally profound shock in another hotel, the Palliser in Calgary: he opened a telegram to read that Hugh Eayrs had dropped dead at forty-six. For all his bluster and self-importance, Eayrs had been Gray’s mentor, initiating him into the world of books and authors, and his death was a desolating blow.

The firm too had been unprepared for losing Eayrs. Distracted by the war, London simply promoted the financial officer, Robert Huckvale, to assume command. In his memoir, Gray portrayed Huckvale, under the psuedonym “Bob Harvey,” as devoid of publishing instincts.

Called up for active service, Gray took a military intelligence course at Royal Military College, Kingston, and made captain. With his five-year-old son, John, riding on his shoulders on the way to the railway station, Gray left for Halifax and shipped out for England; he wouldn’t see his family again for three and a half years. He was posted to the newly formed II Canadian Corps as the officer responsible for counter-intelligence. In Normandy, he survived an errant bullet fired by a Canadian soldier, which singed the skin above his left ear. In Antwerp, he had his portrait taken; the surviving photograph reveals a tanned, lean, unsmiling face with penetrating, wary eyes, thoroughly stripped of boyish innocence.

The route back to the post-war world seemed to fork in two directions, writing and publishing. Gray wasn’t sure which to follow; he entertained the idea of working part-time for Macmillan and writing the rest of the time. Passing through London on his way home, he dropped in at company headquarters and broached that possibility with Rache Lovat Dickson, a Canadian who had run his own publishing house in London and was now responsible for liaison with Macmillan’s Toronto branch. Dickson discouraged the notion. He cautioned that the firm, then headed by Harold Macmillan (the future prime minister) and his brother Daniel, would think Gray wasn’t serious about the business.

Gray’s wartime experience had bred in him a skeptical mind, “an ability to check my normally intuitive or emotional response to problems.” He followed Dickson’s advice and, back home at the beginning of 1946, did indeed become serious about the business. When Huckvale offered him his old position at exactly the salary he’d been earning five years earlier, Gray objected vigorously. Huckvale reluctantly upped the offer from $4,000 a year to $4,800. Frank Upjohn, back for two months since leaving the air force, was finding the company’s lack of direction intolerable and thinking of moving on, but he and Gray pledged to stay together and work for change from within.

The firm’s lack of publishing vision was typified by its treatment of Robertson Davies. For several years, Davies had been entertaining readers of the Peterborough Examiner and the Kingston Whig-Standard with extravagantly satirical columns written under the pen name Samuel Marchbanks. Davies offered Macmillan a book-length collection of his columns, but the trade editor, Ellen Elliott, declined. Davies took the proposal to Clarke, Irwin, which agreed to publish it as The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks. Macmillan wouldn’t get another chance to publish Davies until twelve years and many successful books later.

Gray’s resolve to stay was tested on his next train journey west. Macmillan and Ryerson were revising their pre-war reading series, and Gray was travelling with Lorne Pierce to visit provincial education officials when Pierce asked, “How would you like my job?” Shouting his regrets above the rattling of the train, and flourishing a Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Gray pointed out that smoking and drinking were discouraged by Ryerson’s owner, the United Church. Privately Gray also harboured doubts about the quality of the Ryerson list.

Before 1946 was out, Rache Lovat Dickson arrived from London on a tour of inspection. Over after-dinner drinks at the King Edward, Gray and Upjohn spilled out their grievances about Huckvale, insisting they just wanted a genuine publisher to work with, someone who understood the profession of books. They waited weeks while their fate was decided across the Atlantic, but the decision went in their favour: Huckvale, the Macmillans decreed, was to retire on pension, and John Gray was to replace him. With one stroke of a British pen, the modern era in Canadian publishing could begin.

It was an ideal time to take command of a publishing house in Canada. The economy, kick-started by the war, would expand in a few years in a full-scale boom. A steady rise in school enrolments would lift the educational publishing business for years to come, and the 1960s would bring expansion in both college and trade publishing.

Gray’s first concern was building up the two most profitable areas, the agency list and educational publishing. His management team was the envy of his competitors: Frank Upjohn ran the trade department, and Barney Sandwell would take over the college and medical departments. One of Upjohn’s key salespeople was another returned serviceman and future publisher, Jack Stoddart Sr., who would later move up to become trade sales manager. As for the schoolbook department, Gray had to find his own successor.

Shortly before the war, he’d plucked a young woman from the clerical ranks and added her to his department. Gladys Neale had trained to be a teacher at what was then called normal school, but she accepted a pay cut to work at Macmillan for $12.50 a week – the minimum wage for women – simply because, like so many before and since, she wanted to work with books. During the war years, Huckvale had appointed Miss Neale acting manager of the schoolbook department. Without the benefit of a mentor on staff, she wrote Huckvale a memo explaining that she needed to travel across the country to learn about curriculum in the various provinces. To her astonishment, he agreed.

Respectable women didn’t travel alone in the early 1940s, and on her first trip, Neale was accompanied by Ellen Elliott. Ever after, Neale went by herself, the lone woman among the publishers’ travellers criss-crossing the country. Although the provinces were making few curriculum changes during the war, she managed to persuade Huckvale to publish several new textbooks.

Gray’s return bumped Neale back down the ladder, the usual fate of women who had done men’s jobs in wartime. When he moved upstairs, Gray again appointed her acting manager of the schoolbook department and hired a new traveller, with the intention of promoting him over Neale’s head once he’d learned the ropes. It turned out, however, that the man was more inclined to academic life than to publishing, and he left the firm. When Neale later asked Gray if he thought she’d have put up with being demoted again, he replied, “Well, why not, if you respected him and admired his work?”

The reply left her speechless. “I’m quite sure, looking back,” she said years later in an interview, “that I would not have stayed.”

But by 1950, Gray had confirmed Gladys Neale as manager on a permanent basis: the first woman, after Ellen Elliott, to hold such a senior position in Canadian publishing without owing it to a husband’s influence. Neale would become one of the most successful and respected educational publishers of her generation. “I always said,” she recalled nine months before her death in 1999, “that I made my contribution to Canadian culture, because it was the revenues of the schoolbook department which enabled John Gray to do his trade publishing. So I took a little credit.”

Gray once confessed he’d thought Neale wouldn’t be up to the job because of the impropriety of her sitting up late, drinking and talking shop with male educators. She told him tartly, “That’s not the way we do business these days. I accomplish just as much talking to people in their offices.” But drinking was considered such an integral part of the profession that, after her promotion, Neale adopted the rule that, at a business lunch or dinner, she’d never take more than one drink: “I felt I had a reputation to uphold.” Colleagues and competitors alike knew her as a formidable woman who grew more so with age. Within the company, male employees learned to keep their distance. Jim Douglas, who sold Macmillan books across the west from 1958 to 1971 before founding his own publishing house, described her as “a powerful lady in every way.”

Gray’s long-term support was vital to Gladys Neale’s success, but if he counted on her to operate the schoolbook department, he also exacted a personal price. One of Neale’s most profitable projects was a series of Canadian spelling books, developed to replace a series from Macmillan in New York, which had become a separate company in 1950. Her series sold so well that its authors earned a lot of money; one bought a new car and a mink coat with her share of the royalties. Neale had contributed materially to the books’ contents, and the educator who served as the general editor of the series recommended that she too receive a royalty. But John Gray forbade it. If Neale had a personal stake in these books’ success, he declared, it might lead her to neglect the rest of her list. She conceded in an interview that his point may have been valid in principle, yet he’d allowed a male staff member to accept royalties on a Macmillan book.

Gray practised a similar double standard in the matter of employees furthering their education. After putting in two summers at Columbia Teachers’ College in New York, Neale requested a year’s sabbatical to complete her degree in education. Gray raised objections: she’d be seduced by life in New York, she’d be hired by an American publisher, a year was too long to leave her position unfilled. Although the company had assisted men in her own department to improve their education, she stayed home.

Gladys Neale was a pioneer at a time when women customarily remained in the lower echelons of the industry. By promoting her to head a division, and later appointing her to sit on the Macmillan board, John Gray joined, however reluctantly, the vanguard of social change. “It took him some time and hard thinking,” Neale recalled, “but he finally did right as far as I was concerned.”

With Macmillan’s various departments in capable hands, Gray could turn to rebuilding the trade list. Two world wars and the Depression had involved him in great events and reinforced his love of reading history. Seeking historians who could write for a general audience, he found a source close by in the University of Toronto, whose history department had been supplying Macmillan with authors since the 1920s.

Gray set the bar high by contracting with Donald Creighton – already the author of a work of mythic scope, Dominion of the North – to publish his magisterial, two-volume biography of Sir John A. Macdonald. In 1952 Creighton’s John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician outsold all other Macmillan trade titles and received the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction; Frank Upjohn told Quill & Quire the book had even outsold John Steinbeck’s East of Eden “by a nose.” The sequel, John A. Macdonald: The Old Chieftain, won the award for 1955. Creighton, Carl Berger has stated in The Writing of Canadian History, inspired his fellow scholars to make political biography the dominant form in Canadian historical studies, and a spate of biographies soon followed: J.M.S. Careless on George Brown (Macmillan), William Kilbourn on William Lyon Mackenzie (Clarke, Irwin), Kenneth McNaught on J.S. Woodsworth (University of Toronto Press), George Stanley on Louis Riel (Ryerson).

Gray’s love affair with Canadian history and politics continued to enrich the Macmillan trade list right through to the 1980s: from Frank Underhill’s In Search of Canadian Liberalism and Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s Federalism and the French Canadians to Ramsay Cook’s studies of Canadian and Quebec nationalism, former prime minister John Diefenbaker’s memoirs, and Christina McCall’s Grits. By chronicling the national drama in an authoritative yet accessible manner, these and other Macmillan titles made a major impact on Canadians’ knowledge of their country. Macmillan published Gray’s own historical work, Lord Selkirk of Red River, in 1963; meticulously researched and elegantly written, the book earned Gray the University of British Columbia Medal for best Canadian biography of the year.

And yet John Gray’s best-known authors were neither historians nor politicians but novelists. Some he inherited from his predecessors, others he pursued and won, so that most of Canada’s leading fiction writers of the 1950s published with Macmillan. A few were already known internationally: Mazo de la Roche, Morley Callaghan, Hugh MacLennan, Ethel Wilson, Robertson Davies. Working with novelists let Gray live closer to his feelings and produced some of his warmest friendships.

In 1951 Callaghan completed The Loved and the Lost after the long hiatus since More Joy in Heaven in 1937. The new novel was set in the Montreal underworld, which Callaghan had come to know by mixing with boxers and gangsters in a bar and grill on Dorchester Street. Gray and Upjohn decided to launch The Loved and the Lost at Montreal’s tony Ritz-Carlton Hotel, inviting guests such as Frank Scott from McGill and the city’s mayor, Camillien Houde. At Callaghan’s request, they also invited the proprietors of his Dorchester Street hangout, who had everyone back to their establishment afterwards for dinner and more drinks. As Callaghan’s son Barry told it in Barrelhouse Kings, everyone had such a wonderful time that the jovial mayor, famed for his underworld contacts, insisted the great writer sign his “golden book” of distinguished visitors at city hall. Gray and Upjohn piled into Houde’s limousine with Callaghan and his wife, Loretto, some newspaper cronies, and the oversized mayor, and were chauffeured to City Hall at 2 in the morning. Having forgotten his keys, Houde ordered his driver to break in through a window, and the signing was enacted in the mayor’s chambers, sanctified by the ceremonial passing of a silver flask.

Gray and Callaghan lunched regularly in Toronto for years afterwards, and in 1959 Macmillan published a handsome hardcover edition of Callaghan’s masterly short fiction. Morley Callaghan’s Stories contained the author’s own selection of work previously published in The New Yorker and in two earlier collections. It was the most important book of short stories published in Canada to that point and for years afterwards. But Gray sometimes confided to colleagues that, as much as he admired Callaghan, he felt more comfortable with other Macmillan authors who were less prickly and combative and, frankly, more British: Ethel Wilson, the Vancouver-based novelist who had grown up in England, or Robertson Davies.

Gray had long coveted the prolific Davies as an author, but he was reluctant to poach him from Clarke, Irwin, which had published all of Davies’s fiction, non-fiction, and drama. In 1958, however, Davies and Clarke, Irwin had a falling-out over the rights to his next novel, A Mixture of Frailties, the third in what is now known as the Salterton Trilogy. Davies had acquired a New York agent, Willis Kingsley Wing, who proceeded to sell Canadian, American, and British rights separately, to maximize the return to Davies and to himself. Previously Clarke, Irwin had held world rights to Davies’s books, controlling sales of foreign editions; now the company insisted that the option clause in Davies’s contract for his previous novel gave it the right to do so again. Legally it was a groundless position, but rather than sensibly cut a deal with Wing for Canada only, Clarke, Irwin declined the manuscript.

When Gray caught wind of the dispute, he promptly negotiated Canadian rights to A Mixture of Frailties for publication later in 1958. It also appeared from Scribner’s in New York and Weidenfeld and Nicholson in London. Davies wouldn’t produce another novel until Fifth Business twelve years later, when the great outpouring of his later period began, but Macmillan would continue publishing him until Gray’s retirement and beyond. Meanwhile Gray and Davies enjoyed a friendship based on their shared anglophilia and a common taste for history and literary gossip.

Becoming Hugh MacLennan’s publisher involved Gray in a more complex relationship, professionally and personally. Gray sought out MacLennan in 1946 at a Canadian Authors Association meeting, where they agreed on the iniquity of publishing contracts from the author’s point of view: a rare stance for a publisher. Their formal association began after MacLennan, disappointed by sales of his third novel, The Precipice, sought publishers for his next book. In the United States, he left Duell, Sloan and Pearce and found Little, Brown. In Canada, he left William Collins Sons and found John Gray.

Along with Callaghan, MacLennan was the most admired Canadian novelist of the day, yet he was barely scraping by financially. Facing mounting debts from his wife’s illness, he was desperate to make Each Man’s Son both a critical success and a bestseller. MacLennan’s American editor, Angus Cameron of Little, Brown, conferred with Gray on reshaping the manuscript, and MacLennan relied heavily on their responses as he revised. During the editing, MacLennan became close to Gray, sharing his ambitions for his work and his ideas about literature, history, and society. In fact, MacLennan depended on his publisher’s judgment so much that Gray urged him not to lose touch with his own instincts: “I think a publisher’s vantage point should permit him, and his job occasionally require him, to tell an author what course the publisher thinks he is making in relation to his public – never (or almost never) in relation to his art.”

Gray functioned as both MacLennan’s publisher and his editor, also working with Frank Upjohn on the marketing of Each Man’s Son, released in 1951. In addition to print ads, the campaign featured an excerpt in Saturday Night, a profile in Liberty, radio ads, an appearance as Morley Callaghan’s guest on the CBC Radio quiz show Now I Ask You, point-of-sale posters and postcards, specially bound reviewer’s copies, and launch parties in Toronto and Montreal.

MacLennan received $1,500 as an advance against Canadian royalties, a respectable sum at the time; the American advance was $3,000. Gray was unsuccessful in interesting his parent company in taking British rights, but he placed the novel with Heinemann. In its first year, Each Man’s Son had Canadian hardcover sales of 10,000 copies: a major success, but not as big as MacLennan had hoped. Despite favourable American reviews and a Literary Guild selection, American sales also disappointed him. Gray explained to his author that the advent of television was combining with movies and paperbacks to erode the market for serious fiction. To his friend William Arthur Deacon, MacLennan wrote: “At least Each Man’s Son settled one question – nobody can live by writing novels in Canada at the present time.” He requested early payment of his royalties in order to pay for his wife’s recent hospitalization, and Gray responded immediately with a cheque. MacLennan, who had produced six highly praised books including Barometer Rising and Two Solitudes, still had to resort to teaching at McGill and writing for magazines and the National Film Board.

Gray provided practical, moral, and editorial support when MacLennan threw himself into perhaps his finest novel, The Watch That Ends the Night, amid the emotional turmoil before and after his wife’s death. Published in 1959, The Watch That Ends the Night sold resoundingly well: 18,000 copies in Canada by the end of the first year. In the United States, it was published by Scribner’s, stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for several months (where it kept company with Doctor Zhivago, Lolita, From the Terrace, and Mountolive), and was bought by the Doubleday Book Club and Hollywood. In the United Kingdom, it was issued by Heinemann. The overall response to the novel was, in fact, far better than Gray’s own cautious predictions: anxious to cushion MacLennan from further blows, he’d warned him not to set his hopes too high.

Under those conditions, it was no surprise that most writers were discouraged from producing more than a book or two. “But,” Gray asked, “will a national literature achieve solidity or stature when built out of a succession of first and second books?” His proposed solution: grants for professional authors. Buying writers time to write, he argued prophetically, would help them produce their best work.

Despite those constraints, Gray continued to pursue authors he admired, such as W.O. Mitchell, who hadn’t yet followed up on his 1947 debut novel, Who Has Seen the Wind. At the Kingston conference, one of Gray’s editors, Kildare Dobbs, met a young woman from Winnipeg named Adele Wiseman, who gave him the manuscript of her novel about Jewish immigrants on the Prairies. Gray agreed with Dobbs’s enthusiastic assessment of the book, and Macmillan published Wiseman’s The Sacrifice the following year, with an American edition appearing from Viking. It won the twenty-eight-year-old author a Governor General’s Award.

Gray wasn’t always so prescient. Fatefully, he turned down a proposal from Malcolm Ross, the distinguished critic and head of the Queen’s University English department. Publishers were partly responsible for the absence of Canadian literature in schools and universities, Ross told Gray, because they put Canadian fiction beyond students’ reach, issuing it only in hardcover editions, then letting it go out of print. The solution was both simple and daringly ambitious: an inexpensive paperback reprint series that would include all the Canadian fiction worth preserving.

Ross’s proposal was visionary in a way scarcely comprehensible today. The paperback revolution still hadn’t arrived in Canada. Even in the United States, quality paperbacks, led by Doubleday’s Anchor Books, had only recently begun to emulate the success of Penguin Books by making serious literature available at affordable prices.

Gray’s answer to Ross was sympathetic but hard-headed. He approved the motive, but he was adamant about declining the risk. “We’d lose our shirt!” Ross remembered him saying. Gray couldn’t see paperbacks, with their narrow profit margins depending on long print runs and high sales, ever succeeding in Canada, especially when the target market of Canadian literature courses didn’t even exist. But in Ross’s view, it was a chicken-and-egg situation. He took his proposal to Jack McClelland, who possessed the riverboat gambler’s instinct that Gray had admired yet feared in Hugh Eayrs. In 1958 McClelland & Stewart launched the New Canadian Library, the heart of the CanLit courses that burgeoned in the decades to come.

According to Kildare Dobbs, John Gray was uncertain of his own literary judgment and sought a favourable consensus among his editors before committing to a book. When Sheila Watson submitted The Double Hook, Dobbs admired it, but other in-house readers found the novel too difficult or obscure. After Macmillan declined, M&S published it in 1959, and today it is considered a classic. Other novels that slipped from Macmillan’s grasp included Jack Ludwig’s Confusions and Jock Carroll’s The Shy Photographer, which offended house sensibilities. Carroll, like another Canadian, John Glassco, wrote fiction too steamy for Canada circa 1960; both writers published in Paris with censorship-defying Olympia Press, publisher of Beckett, Genet, Henry Miller, and The Story of O.

Dobbs was an accomplished writer himself, one of several who worked under Gray. Educated in Ireland and England, he began trade editing and production under Frank Upjohn in 1953. Gray wanted him to work on schoolbooks, but Dobbs with his Cambridge degree and Gladys Neale with her normal school training didn’t hit it off, and Dobbs remained in trade. After several years, Gray applied to Dobbs the dictum from which there was no appeal: all Macmillan editors must have some commercial savvy instilled in them by hitting the road to sell books.

Dobbs considered Gray’s maxim “nonsense, a salesman’s idea of publishing”: salespeople always want a book to repeat last year’s success, whereas an editor looks for the next big thing. Following several disastrous weeks of slogging across the west with the Macmillan trade list, Dobbs returned gratefully to editing. He was ably assisted by Richard B. Wright, a refugee from the advertising world and a would-be novelist, whose substantial body of fiction would begin with The Weekend Man in 1970 and continue through Clara Callan, winner of multiple awards thirty-one years later. The two were joined by Leo Simpson, an Irish-born literary satirist who worked variously in sales, publicity, and editorial at Macmillan before publishing five works of fiction between 1971 and 1996. When Dobbs moved on to journalism in the early 1960s, he was succeeded by another novelist, James Bacque.

Even while employing young writers, Gray preserved customs from Macmillan’s imperial past. Tea time was observed in the office every afternoon. “We drank thin tea from thick cups,” Bacque remembered. For many years, an aging telephone receptionist sat in her cubicle responding to each caller in an English accent; promptly at the close of each business day, she’d yank the connections out of the old-fashioned switchboard, heedless of cutting off conversations in progress. There was a proofreading unit headed by Hugh Eayrs’s sister, a small Englishwoman with a fondness for gin, who occasionally consulted Dobbs on fine points of editorial usage. He recalled a conversation that began, “Can this author be allowed to have an unfinished sentence, Mr. Dobbs?”

“Oh yes, Miss Eayrs, it’s okay.”

“Do you know, Mr. Dobbs, since my brother died, you’re the only man in this building with any brains.”

“Thank you, Miss Eayrs.”

“And you can call me Winifred.”

“Oh, Miss Eayrs, I wouldn’t dare!”

One of Dobbs’s duties was to attend Mazo de la Roche’s Christmas Eve soiree at the Forest Hill home she shared with her companion, Caroline Clement. “Mazo would say things like, ‘A writer needs a public, Mr. Dobbs,’ very stiffly. I could see her wondering, ‘How can I entertain this young man?’ And she’d get out her photo album and say, ‘Now that’s Harold and that’s Lady Dorothy and this is Mr. Daniel’ – the Macmillans, you know. They were all great pets of hers.”

Macmillan’s trade sales manager, Donald Sutherland, had arrived from Oxford University Press in 1957 to replace Jack Stoddart Sr. when Stoddart left to run General Publishing. A fervent believer in American-style marketing, Stoddart had tried to modernize what he considered Macmillan’s prissy, old-fashioned approach to selling books. Sutherland was a more traditional sort, an anglophile not enamoured of sharp sales techniques. He was also a bona fide scholar, having worked as a curator of Chinese art and archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum. Beneath his urbane, courteous demeanour, Sutherland could be eccentric; while presiding over a sales conference, he’d take notes in Mandarin so that others couldn’t read them.

Both Dobbs and Sutherland felt affection and respect for John Gray, but they were well aware that he could be paternalistic, testy, unjust at times. As the years passed, Gray showed an increasing distaste for any sort of conflict; he was reluctant to dismiss staff, and even when reconciled to the necessity of firing someone, he often delegated the odious task to others. Dobbs remembered offering to do the deed on one occasion, but Gray insisted on doing it himself, then procrastinated so long that the unfortunate employee wasn’t informed until Christmas Eve. Gray also began avoiding the company of authors he found difficult. Sutherland assumed responsibility for the care and feeding of high-strung thoroughbreds in the Macmillan stable such as Creighton, Callaghan, and even MacLennan. Gray’s employees observed wryly that the undercover work he’d done during the war was the opposite of publishing.

The most enduring John Gray story is of an incident towards the end of his career, on one of the rare visits to Canada by Sir Harold Macmillan. Gray organized a dinner in Macmillan’s honour at the King Edward Hotel and invited the media to cover the former prime minister’s speech. Still the colonial boy, Gray introduced Macmillan at such interminable, fawning length that a reporter, frantic to make his deadline, bawled out, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, man, get on with it!” Eyewitnesses remember Gray being so flustered that it was several minutes before he could compose himself and finish the introduction.

And yet Gray relished his post at Macmillan, with all its perks and prestige. Occasionally he’d invite a junior colleague to play hooky with him, taking an afternoon off to attend an antiquarian book auction; at lunches he favoured the midday whiskies and Martinis then in vogue. It was thought that Rache Lovat Dickson coveted his job, but Gray wasn’t about to oblige him by moving aside, and when Dickson finally returned to Canada, it was to retire and write his memoirs of the London publishing world. Both Dickson and Gray were involved in setting up St. Martin’s Press, which became a well-known New York publisher. After the American branch of Macmillan broke away in 1950, the parent firm created St. Martin’s to be its American subsidiary, and Dickson appointed a man to run it. When his appointee faltered, Dickson asked Gray to find a replacement; Gray chose his long-time right hand, Frank Upjohn.

Gray didn’t like “big timber” standing too close, in Kildare Dobbs’s phrase. He always seemed to be grooming some young up-and-comer to be his successor, only to dash the expectations he’d created. Dobbs remembered a line of Gray’s: “We’re standing in your light.” It might have meant “The company is holding you back,” but to Dobbs it signified “I wish you’d leave.” Dobbs did leave, to serve as managing editor of Saturday Night and later books editor of the Toronto Star, but he didn’t hold a grudge: “I loved the man. I thought he was wonderful company.”

After Dobbs, Jim Bacque was pegged as a potential successor. Bacque appreciated Gray’s mentoring, but over time he began to feel like “the parakeet on the admiral’s shoulder.” Towards the end of his seven years at Macmillan, Bacque concluded that the firm was too rigid in its ways to risk the creative publishing he was itching to try, and he began talking up ideas for a fresh new publishing venture, which would eventually take the form of New Press. When Gray caught wind of this, he sniffed treason and called Bacque on the carpet. The result was Bacque’s departure in 1968, a bruising experience mitigated only years later when the men met by chance and Gray praised the New Press publishing program.

Jim Douglas was also shaped by his years with Gray. After creating a Vancouver-based sales agency in 1957, Douglas handled trade sales for Macmillan and McClelland & Stewart, working closely with both Gray and Jack McClelland, but it was Gray he regarded as his mentor. “At M&S,” Douglas recalled, “it was jackets off, very informal. And it was ‘Jack’ and ‘Hugh’ [Kane, M&S vice-president] to the whole staff. At Macmillan, almost no one called John Gray ‘John.’ He and Frank Upjohn both kept their handkerchiefs up their sleeves.” On the editorial and production side, Macmillan had its controls firmly in place, ensuring that its books were thoroughly copy-edited and proofread. M&S titles, on the other hand, were notorious for sloppy editing and proofing, having been rushed through the system by a harassed and overworked staff. By the early 1970s, M&S was churning out a hundred new titles a year, some of which Douglas found “embarrassing,” while Macmillan was producing half as many, twice as carefully.

In 1967 John Gray distilled nearly forty years’ experience in an essay for a special “Publishing in Canada” issue of George Woodcock’s quarterly, Canadian Literature. The essay was marked by a concern for the writer as much as the publisher; Gray understood in his bones how thoroughly their difficulties intersected. With qualified optimism, he revised his statement of twelve years earlier, when he’d detected no mutual economic benefit in the relationship: “The publisher’s ‘no net profit’ has at least become ‘a possible profit’.” And he pointedly distinguished between companies that were merely jobbers of foreign-authored books and those that published original work. Developing Canadian literature, he wrote, “could not have been done quickly or well by those interested only or chiefly in the selling of other publishers’ books.”

Arguably the most important title Gray published towards the end of his career was Fifth Business, first in the succession of brilliant late novels that secured Robertson Davies’s international reputation. (Millions of copies of his works are now in print.) And yet, surprisingly, although Gray had been Davies’s publisher for over a decade, he waffled before committing to the book. When Davies delivered the manuscript at the end of 1969, Ken McVey, one of the editors, was not impressed. McVey wrote in his report that only Davies’s name on the manuscript might save it from rejection. Another editor, Ramsay Derry, had exactly the opposite response: he “just knew this was a wonderful book.” When Gray himself read the manuscript, he was satisfied Macmillan should indeed publish it, with some changes, but he remained strangely unmoved by the novel’s power. He was not alone. Scribner’s, which had published Davies previously in the United States, had rejected the novel, and both Viking in New York and Macmillan in London were dragging their feet.

Over drinks at the York Club, Gray and Alan Maclean, managing director of Macmillan in London, met with Davies to explain their hesitation. “What are all these changes you want me to make?” Davies asked them in exasperation. “Should I change my men to women? Do you want me to put the beginning at the end?” But at bottom, the publishers’ concerns were nothing he couldn’t manage, and the meeting ended with an agreement to publish in fall 1970. Fifth Business appeared to enormous critical acclaim and commercial success, particularly in the United States, where early reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune were ecstatic. The book made bestseller status in both the Times (briefly) and the Toronto Star, the country’s only bestseller list at the time, where it remained for forty-two weeks. Davies’s writing career was resoundingly relaunched.

Men of letters such as Davies – like branches of British publishers such as Macmillan – were out of style in the cultural politics of 1970; Fifth Business didn’t win the Governor General’s Award, which went to a more experimental work, Dave Godfrey’s The New Ancestors. The Zeitgeist celebrated the new and the radical, and nothing was newer at that point than Godfrey’s edgy, iconoclastic style. But Davies’s sequel to Fifth Business, The Manticore, won the award for 1972 over Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. The honour came just in time to be a fitting conclusion to Gray’s career.

During Gray’s final year at Macmillan, the company changed into something very different from the firm he’d known. Having failed to identify a younger successor in whom he felt confidence, Gray had chosen in 1969 a veteran publisher of his own generation as second-in-command, Hugh Kane. For the better part of two decades, Kane had occupied a similar position under Jack McClelland, but moving from M&S to Macmillan was like sailing out of constant, life-threatening storms into calm seas. Seasoned, respected in the trade, Kane must have seemed to Gray an obvious choice to succeed him.

Kane was a trade publisher and hard-driving marketer in the M&S tradition, and his natural inclination was to reinforce the Macmillan trade program, injecting greater panache into the company’s promotional efforts. Shortly after his arrival, Fifth Business was launched at a party aboard a floating restaurant at the foot of Yonge Street, the spot where Boy Staunton, one of the novel’s characters, had driven off the pier and drowned. Some of Kane’s new colleagues, however, were less than thrilled by his arrival. Donald Sutherland’s life was made difficult by Kane’s usurping his authority as head of the trade department. Gladys Neale found Kane dismissive of her schoolbook program, with, she felt, insufficient appreciation of educational publishing and its importance to the bottom line. But those internal stresses were supplanted in 1972 by a common enemy.

In London, the knowledge that Gray would soon be retiring set the Macmillan directors to wondering if they wanted a Canadian branch at all. It was a question they’d sometimes put to Gray personally, and for twenty-six years he’d been answering them in the affirmative, shoring up their confidence in their distant outpost. Gray’s son, John, by then a journalist, later recalled that visiting head office was a mixed blessing for his father: “He loved being there, and was probably more respectful than he should have been. But he was constantly having to prove it was worthwhile having a Canadian operation. In the end they left him alone to run his own show, but he always had to check in.” With their trusted lieutenant leaving, the owners finally decided it was time to cut Canada loose. In Neale’s understanding, they needed the cash.

There were two leading suitors: McClelland & Stewart and the Toronto communications conglomerate Maclean-Hunter. Jack McClelland saw in Macmillan a desperately needed source of profit from educational publishing, where he was weak, in addition to a wonderful trade backlist. But it was only a year since an emergency loan from the Ontario government had saved McClelland from having to sell M&S, and it was difficult for him to arrange the necessary financing. In his formal offer to purchase Macmillan, he proposed to finance the deal by making a public offering of shares in the merged company – a prospect that paled, for the Macmillans in London, alongside Maclean-Hunter’s solid cash offer.

One can only speculate how different the future of Canadian publishing would have been if McClelland’s bid had trumped Maclean-Hunter’s. The merged company might have become the well-capitalized, diversified Canadian-owned publisher that the country had always lacked. Hugh Kane had tried his damnedest behind the scenes to deliver Macmillan into McClelland’s hands, and the two old cronies would have had a shot at running a publishing house with sufficient economies of scale, for once, to succeed. Instead, as John Gray prepared to step out, Kane had to reconcile himself to working for Macmillan’s new masters.

It has never been entirely clear why Maclean-Hunter wanted to own Macmillan. The corporation published magazines, which might have been a source of book content; it also operated an illustrated book division and a very small schoolbook division, and since 1970 it had held a minority interest in New Press. But aside from folding its schoolbook division into Macmillan, Maclean-Hunter didn’t take advantage of potential synergies. On the one occasion it attempted rationalization between Macmillan and New Press, imposing a computerized order fulfillment system, the result was a fiasco for both houses. According to Neale and Sutherland, Macmillan was virtually shut down, unable to ship orders for four to five months, and lost not only a disastrous quantity of business but a previously sterling reputation for service. “And then, of course,” observed Neale, “Maclean-Hunter blamed us because we didn’t make a profit.”

Maclean-Hunter could never reconcile its expectations of profit with the realities of book publishing. Even in the States, book publishing profits are chronically below corporate targets, as conglomerates from RCA Victor to Viacom to Time Warner have discovered. And it was inevitable that Hugh Kane wouldn’t last under the new regime; he was an old-fashioned “bookman,” not up to Maclean-Hunter’s notion of an efficient modern executive, and he had actively campaigned against its takeover offer. Before Kane returned to M&S in 1976, Maclean-Hunter installed a succession of younger CEOs above him to turn the company around. None could perform the trick as quickly as the corporation demanded.

At Maclean-Hunter’s request, John Gray remained on the Macmillan board after his retirement in 1973, and the firm continued to publish many of his authors. Gladys Neale continued to preside over the schoolbook department, with Douglas Gibson, recruited from Doubleday Canada, installed as editorial director of the trade division. Fine new fiction writers such as Alice Munro and Jack Hodgins were coming on board; the former publisher at House of Anansi Press, Dennis Lee, who had acted as an editorial adviser to Hugh Kane, emerged in 1974 in a new incarnation as a wildly inventive and popular poet for children with Alligator Pie. But Gray was uncomfortable watching his old firm struggle under Maclean-Hunter’s stewardship. The media empire was too philistine to care deeply about books, too beholden to the profit motive to conceive of publishing as he saw it: a lifelong commitment to investing in books of quality.

Fortunately Gray had set to work on his autobiography. Fun Tomorrow is a high-spirited portrayal of publishing in a vanished era, with a small gem of a war memoir embedded at its core; it remains out of print at the time of writing, waiting to be reissued in paperback by some enterprising publisher. Unfortunately Fun Tomorrow stopped at the point when Gray took up the reins at Macmillan after the war; although he intended a sequel, he never seriously began it. He had contracted cancer, and his oncologist told him in late 1977 (accurately, as it turned out) that he had just eight months to live. His son offered to tape his father’s recollections as the basis for a second volume of the memoirs, but Gray demurred, reluctant to breach the privacy of living colleagues and perhaps also to reveal too much about himself.

In the meantime, Fun Tomorrow was going through production. Its editor, Doug Gibson, knowing how gravely ill Gray was, thought to spare his author the usual tasks of checking proofs and worrying about publication details. But when Gray sent him “a hurt letter,” Gibson realized that this author, more than any, needed to be fully involved in the publishing process. He began including Gray every step of the way, down to the wording of the jacket blurb and the advertising copy.

When the book went on press, Gray was dying. The printer was Hunter-Rose, headed by Guy Upjohn, Frank’s son. Upjohn pulled out all the stops, and Gibson was able to put a finished copy of Fun Tomorrow into Gray’s hands as he lay in his hospital bed. Deeply appreciative, Gray shared the precious moment with his family. Two days later, he died, “the most respected and best-loved figure,” as his colleague Marsh Jeanneret called him, “in English-Canadian book publishing.”

3GRAY’S LUCK

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GRAY’S LUCK