WHEN SHE WANTED to talk with me about something, Marian Engel preferred to come to our home, as did many M&S authors, rather than take the long drive to Hollinger Road. She was usually gentle and kind but assumed a tough, no-nonsense pose when in company. The effort often required her to have a large drink to fuel her courage. At one of our book launch parties she took a strip off Attorney General Roy McMurtry over the divorce laws (unfair to women); at another, she challenged one of Julian’s lawyer friends on how lawyers handled rape cases (not well).
She often had two cigarettes going at the same time.
She was asked once whether she wrote women’s books. She answered: “I hate hearing them referred to as women’s books because it makes me think of women’s magazines of the old kind—women without brains. I don’t write for that kind of woman.” But at least the novelists she admired, such as Gabrielle Roy and Margaret Laurence, were no longer referred to as “lady novelists.”
Marian felt perpetually under-appreciated. Reviews were at best ambivalent and at worst unpleasant.
In 1975 she separated from her husband, Howard, a CBC producer and later author of the Benny Cooperman series of private eye mysteries. Benny, the unkempt Jewish gumshoe who lives in Grantham and eats chopped-egg sandwiches, became a fixture on our bookshelves. I still have them all.
I suggested to Marian that she might like to contribute something to a book of Canadian ghost stories. She said she couldn’t do that, but she did offer us a really strange short manuscript about a woman who has a very passionate, though not entirely satisfying, affair with a bear. It was an unusual, often quite funny, and rather disturbing story, but also a literary tour de force. Its original shorter version had been destined for the Writers’ Union fundraising book of pornography, based loosely on Naked Came the Stranger, the 1969 American literary hoax written by twenty-four journalists.
The Union, being impecunious, had numerous fundraisers, but the only one I remember is the All-Star Eclectic Typewriter Review, where Jack McClelland, with cape and fangs, danced across the stage as Jack the Knife, five women with wigs and beards appeared as the Farley Mowat Dancers, and Berton belted out “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”
I sent copies of the manuscript to people I thought might say something positive about it and most of them did. Margaret Laurence, Adele Wiseman, and Margaret Atwood (she had read the earlier version as well) loved it. Irving Layton thought it was brilliant. When I asked Jennifer Glossop, then M&S’s most senior editor, to take it on, I was worried that she would find the sex too graphic or too offensive. In a long memo dated November 25, 1975, I suggested a plain white, classy front cover, nothing garish, several quotes praising the novel, and the line “a novel that may shock . . .” Jennifer wasn’t shocked, finished editing the manuscript in three weeks, and the resulting book, Bear, became a huge success. It was hailed as a new kind of Canadian book by critics and fellow writers. Roy MacSkimming gave it a rave in the Star. It won the 1976 Governor General’s Award for Fiction.
Interesting to recall that the jury for that year was composed of Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro. Atwood and Munro, like Margaret Laurence, had always been very supportive of other Canadian writers; Mordecai had not. He seemed quite dismissive of the idea of a national literature. And even if there was one, he had no desire to belong to it. Although he liked some Canadian works—Morley Callaghan’s short stories and Robertson Davies’s novels, for example—his literary heroes were not Canadian. They were American, like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, or English, like Kingsley Amis and Muriel Spark, great writers who had written funny and emotionally strong books. He thought the greatest writer of our time was Evelyn Waugh. Mordecai had derided cultural frontiers in art as a “patriotic production.” Having been in Quebec during the FLQ incidents of 1964, he had seen the burning of Canadian flags. If that was patriotism, he said, he wanted none of it.
He didn’t believe in special treatment for writers. He was damned if he would admire a book because its author was Canadian. But he did like Bear.