WE USED TO get an average of fifty manuscripts a week, more in early January when would-be authors delivered on their own New Year’s resolutions. Of that lot, few made it to a second reading, and maybe one was eventually published. Reading them was disheartening but Jack felt it was perfect for editors-in-training. I can’t remember all our slush-pile readers, but I know Philip Marchand was succeeded by a coterie of equally talented young people: David Berry, who remembers that every inch of the floor-to-ceiling shelves was filled with manuscripts, most of them barely readable; Patrick Crean (later at Somerville House, Key Porter, Thomas Allen, HarperCollins); Greg Gatenby (founder of the International Festival of Authors); and Wailan Low, who married poet Earle Birney, went on to study law, and became a judge.
Everyone was encouraged to take home manuscripts from the slush pile, in case we missed an important new voice we should be publishing. One of Jack’s many stories of missed opportunities was Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey. The way he used to tell the story, he had read the manuscript and thought who in hell would believe such an incredible tale. Three spoiled pets traversing the wilderness in search of their home. Five million copies and a movie later . . .
My own best slush-pile find was Dennis T. Patrick Sears’s The Lark in the Clear Air; he was an original voice and a formidable new talent. Not a young writer, he had already lived a couple of hard-working lives, and his next book, Aunty High Over the Barley Mow (1977), was his last. The multi-talented Jennifer Glossop (she could edit fiction, non-fiction, illustrated books, and children’s stories) finished editing Dennis’s second manuscript after he died. Jennifer was one of my first hires. Without dwelling on the irony, she mentioned years later that she had started at M&S on April Fool’s Day, 1970.
Every evening I took home a couple of huge white canvas bags full of manuscripts and read till the early hours. Some we had already decided to publish; others had been recommended for a second read. It was the beginning of a habit that lasted for my entire life in the book business.
That’s where I read Rudy Wiebe’s huge manuscript of Big Bear in one night. I had planned to stop for a couple of hours’ sleep, but couldn’t put the damned thing down. It was riveting then and is still riveting now, though other books have been written about the great Cree chief and his defiance of white authority. Charis Wahl was appointed Wiebe’s editor, but the copy editing was farmed out to a meticulous freelancer. I had the unenviable task of presenting the author with the marked-up manuscript in Calgary. Rudy thanked me, then went to his room, and returned a few hours later with all the pencil marks rubbed out. Charis, who had disagreed with the copy editor’s work, was pleased, and Big Bear was published with Rudy’s long sentences intact.
I read Gabrielle Roy’s slender Windflower under the dim lights of our Broadway Avenue balcony. It was almost word-perfect. I read Margaret Laurence’s The Olden Days Coat and her short-story collection A Bird in the House, Brian Moore’s The Revolution Script and Catholics, Eric Arthur’s text for The Barn: A Vanishing Landmark of North America, and hundreds, no, thousands of other manuscripts during those years.
Everyone at M&S seemed to be imbued with a sense of mission, as if part of a magnificent experiment, with Jack as the exalted master magician, and the rest of us inspired apprentices. The experiment was publishing Canadian authors: novelists, poets, academics, children’s writers, historians, anthropologists, journalists, and politicians.I We published anthologies, essay collections, reprints in the New Canadian Library, art and photography books, memoirs. Despite the financial problems, we continued to publish more than a hundred books a year, and we were wildly optimistic about the fate of every one of them.
During the summer, the warehouse, which occupied most of the building, was slightly cooler than the rest of the building because it had a lot of large fans: we were anxious to preserve the books. They were the only things of real value in the building, Jack used to say. The books, unlike the rest of us, were insured.
Our editorial meetings were endurance tests. They took place in the brown-walled corner boardroom of the building, where it was almost impossible to open any windows. The marketing staff brought notepaper and the editors filed in and talked about what they were editing; they tried to get sales projections from the marketing people, who were, at best, defensive. They didn’t want to commit themselves to predictions. Peter Taylor was usually quite direct and merciless in assessing a book’s sales potential. Paul Dutton, M&S jacket and advertising copywriter (and, with bpNichol, Steve McCaffrey, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, one of the sound poetry group The Four Horsemen), often attended because he had to come up with copy.II
When Jack was there, the whole room focused on what Jack said and very few of us argued with him. One time when he was lauding the virtues of a long piece of what he considered “commercial fiction” and I suggested it was crap, he left, sweeping his papers off the table. He didn’t come back that day but he insisted we publish the “crap.”III
Each editor was expected to work on at least twenty manuscripts a year and supply each book-to-be with heartfelt recommendations for the sales department. Both Jack and Peter had a tendency to slip into grief over a lackluster list or too-low-key presentations. They wanted displays of passion and commitment.
On the brown boardroom’s wall, someone had written: “It is the duty of all good M&S employees to devise the most expeditious way to cross the river from one bank to the other. However, when you are up to your ass in alligators, it is hard to recall that your original objective had been to drain the swamp.”
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IN 1969 JACK asked me to work with Peter Mellen, a very young professor of fine arts at the University of Toronto, who was planning a big book on the Group of Seven. They were Canada’s iconic landscape painters, the first to portray Canada as it really is—a rugged Northern country. Their artistic ambition had been to produce something “strong and vital, and big,”IV like the land itself. It would be hard to imagine a more appropriate education in what was quintessentially Canadian than this project. The art of the Group of Seven was very different from European paintings I had seen in galleries in London and Paris: more dramatic, wilder, less restrained even than the work of the Impressionists. In my earliest experience, Hungarian art had been mostly storytelling, detailed, and representational, portraying scenes from Hungarian history.
The Group of Seven was designed by Frank Newfeld with the young David Shaw, who would succeed him as M&S’s art director.
My copy of the book has a finely penned note of thanks from Peter for my “help and patience” and A. Y. Jackson’s shaky signature. It was appended when Jack and I drove to Kleinburg to meet with Robert and Signe McMichael of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. A. Y., one of the founding Group of Seven artists, was in residence at the time. Polite but preoccupied, he was at work on a large painting near the open door of one of the rooms of the building.
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MY FIRST M&S sales conference was also an education in Canadian geography. The reps came from every region of the country, and our editors knew how to make sure that each one of them took away something from the conference that would spur their sales efforts on behalf of individual authors. I remember Jim Douglas (later co-founder of Douglas & McIntyre) scribbling notes and Allan MacDougall (later of Raincoast, the Canadian publisher of the Harry Potter books) throwing paper airplanes at Scott McIntyre, and Keith Andrews (from Montreal) with his handlebar moustache, who wore his bowler hat for the entire day. It was well known that no bookseller, department store, or chain store book buyer could give a rep more than two minutes to present a book, so key words, regional angles, comparisons to known bestsellers were vital. The editors, of course, took at least ten minutes to present each title to the general irritation of the salespeople. Delighting in my discovery of the Seven plus Tom Thomson, I took even longer to talk about The Group of Seven.
Most reps dozed part of the day, but not our Alberta rep, Ruth Fraser. She had been an editor herself and had presented her books to other reps, so she understood how difficult it was for someone close to a book to sum it up in only two minutes. She had spent years working with Maria Campbell editing Halfbreed, Maria’s revelatory memoir of sexual abuse and poverty, followed by alcoholism, drugs, and prostitution. Ahead of its time, the book drew attention to the racism, brutalization, and oppression of Métis women in Canada and led the way to changes both in government policies and in Métis self-perception.
Since its first publication in 1973, Halfbreed has become a classic, taught in schools and debated among scholars, though as I read about the thousands of Indigenous women who have been murdered or disappeared during the past forty years and counting, it seems not to have made enough of a difference.
Ruth Fraser had been a student of W. O. Mitchell,V a multi-talented spinner of tales in many forms. She was a “facilitator” at W. O.’s weird but very enjoyable writers’ workshops at the Banff Centre. It was Ruth’s idea to invite me as a young publishing professional to read and comment on the bits and pieces emerging from the workshops.
The writers were all young and enthusiastic. They found W. O.’s approach, which he called “freefall” and others called “Mitchell’s messy method,” somehow liberating. It certainly eliminated performance anxiety and writer’s block. Students were told to start typing or writing whatever came to their minds and eventually a story would emerge. Words would float out of their subconscious, and often those words would be the right ones to express what they were reaching for. To test the theories on young would-be writers, he had them read what they had written to other, equally inexperienced and uncritical students. Then he added a few “professionals” to the mix. That was my own baffling role, but I loved it—not so much because of the experience of hearing and reading those young writers, but because of the mountains.
The first time I saw the Rockies, I was thunderstruck. On the way to Banff, I had to ask Ruth to stop the car and let me out to look at them. I was spellbound and I have never tired of the sight. Hungary’s mountains, the Carpathians, have lodged mostly in Romania since the end of the First World War, so I didn’t have a chance to see them till many years later when my daughter Julia and I went in search of our ancestors. New Zealand’s Mount Cook is a long way from Christchurch, Wanganui, and Wellington, where I spent my teen years. Okay, so Mount Cook is impressive, but not as massive, wild, breathtaking as the Rockies. Once I’d been there, I pined every year for another chance to go to Banff.
Fortunately for me, Ruth and I remained friends and she managed to invite me several times to the workshops—usually when my friend and novelist Sylvia Fraser was also there as a professional writer.
I. I spent a day in a car with former cabinet minister Judy LaMarsh in 1969. We had just published her book, Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage, and we were travelling to dozens of interviews. By coincidence, I did the same job for her in 1979 during my last weeks at M&S and her last weeks of life. She died in December that year. The first trip she had talked about how much she loathed Pierre Trudeau, the second about not wasting even an hour of whatever time we had. Changing the world was not a quick task and women had a long way to go.
II. More central to his career, Paul was a poet. Their early performance pieces were always well attended. The group stopped performing after bp died, but Paul went on to perform alone and with other groups in various countries. When I last talked with him, he was on his way to the Lvov music and poetry festival.
III. I won’t mention the author’s name. No point in hurting her feelings, nor in being sued for libel.
IV. From the “manifesto” of the Canadian Art Club.
V. W. O.’s work has stood the test of time. Readers wanting to know why could start with Who Has Seen the Wind and, if they love the book, go on to read the others.