A FEW WEEKS after I was hired at M&S, I discovered how to spell Ted Allan’s name. Unfortunately it was too late. We had been preparing a revised edition of The Scalpel, the Sword, the biography of iconic doctor Norman Bethune, by Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon. It had been an arduous task, as Ted and his co-author no longer spoke to each other and both wrote longish, abusive letters complaining about each other’s lack of professionalism. Several times the project dropped off the schedule and was revived only after Jack’s mollifying talks with both authors. Sydney lived in East Berlin at the time and Ted lived in London. Both had been die-hard Communists. Sydney was still a true believer,I but Ted had wobbled after Soviet troops attacked Hungary in 1956.
I had okayed for press the redesigned (several times, because the authors couldn’t agree) cover of the book. It was not until Ted Allan received his author copies and yelled on the phone at me that I discovered the mistake. His name was misspelled. The books had rolled off the press with “Ted Allen” on the cover.
Ted was a celebrated playwright, novelist, and short story writer (he had been published in The New Yorker), a Communist-Republican journalist and volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He’d been on the Hollywood blacklist during the 1950s McCarthy era and was a close friend of Jack’s close friends Mordecai and Florence Richler. One of Mordecai’s early novels, A Choice of Enemies, draws on the people both he and Ted had known in London’s world of expat Canadians eking out a living. Ted had been the most successful of them all.
Ted had every reason to assume that editors and designers at M&S would be familiar with his name, especially as this was a revised edition of an already successful book (I confess I had not previously heard of the famous doctor). Bethune had also been a Communist and a surgeon who, like Ted, had volunteered to help the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. He operated close to the front, perfecting a method of blood transfusions for the critically injured. It was the same method he used later in China, operating on Mao’s soldiers in 1938 and in 1939 during the Sino-Japanese War.
Ted was apoplectic. He demanded to talk to Jack.
Jack ordered me into his office while the two of them talked on the phone. As was his habit, Jack leaned as far back in his chair as the back wall would allow, his feet planted on his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his top button undone, tie askew, a full ashtray close to the hand holding a cigarette. The office was clouded in blue smoke.
After patiently listening to Ted for what seemed to me at least twenty minutes, Jack inhaled deeply and said, “Ted, I have just shipped twenty thousand copies of your book and I can tell you we are not about to reprint because of one small mistake. Perhaps you could change your name.”
Then he laughed. Ted, a future winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, did not laugh. He kept talking and shouting so loudly that I could hear him where I sat meekly near the door.
Jack listened. Then, astonishingly, he said, “Picky, picky, picky, Ted,” and hung up.
Later, when I saw the Academy Award–winning film Lies My Father Told Me, I understood Ted better. It’s a warm, delightfully quirky heartbreaker of a story based on Ted’s long-ago childhood in Montreal. Ted wrote the original script, and he even played a bit part as Mr. Baumgarten, one of the old Jewish characters. I felt a connection: both our grandfathers had been storytellers.
I spent hours with Ted to see if he could turn the film’s story into a novel, but he was too busy on scripts—he was working on four or five at the time—so the novelization was ultimately written by his son, Norman. You can read the whole novel on Norman Allan’s website. There you can also find Ted’s delightful children’s book about a squirrel-mouse who is a retired acrobat, Willie the Squowse.
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YEARS LATER TED used to visit me at Key Porter Books, the company I would co-found. He complained about the 1990 Bethune film based on his book and screenplay, about Donald Sutherland’s ego, and about the damage done by the Cultural Revolution in China. He had found Mao’s wife, the actress Jiang Qing, terrifying when she was in power and pathetic afterwards. He liked to talk about the difficult story of his life.II He had been shocked by Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, the speech that revealed some of Stalin’s purges, the murders of fellow Communists he no longer trusted. Ted still felt terrible guilt about testifying against a comrade at his trial by fellow Communists in Spain in the 1930s. He had sworn false testimony in the belief that his words would help heal a rift in the Party.
My own feelings about Stalin and Khrushchev (and Lenin and Marx and even Engels) had been consistent since I’d first heard their names as a child in Hungary. My mandatory lessons about the birth of Communism, about the Great Leader, Stalin, and the shiny-headed Mátyás Rákosi failed to improve my first impressions. Vili and his friends joked about them all, but only where they were sure no informer would overhear them. I suspect Ted liked to tell me about his own Communist sympathies because he felt he needed to explain himself to someone who had witnessed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
I. Andreas Schroeder wrote in Founding the Writers’ Union of Canada that Gordon came to Canada every year for the AGM to take notes and, presumably, report back to the Stasi. He stopped coming in 1976 after a union motion condemning the Soviets for persecuting writers.
II. Ted’s story in This Time a Better Earth is worth a serious read. It describes his difficult childhood, and his guilt about having taken his beloved sister to an asylum for the insane. It evokes a time of heroes who fought for a cause they believed was right and worth dying for. Not enough has been written about the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of Canadian volunteers in the International Brigades that fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.