WE TOOK BABY Julia to Georgian Bay when she was only a couple of weeks old. Our prefab was finished; we had running water and, amazingly, even electricity. Catherine was already a swimmer, and she loved the lake. That summer Julian’s stint as president of the Ex ended, so I didn’t have to appear on site wearing “appropriate” clothing and didn’t have to make polite conversation or pour tea for the ladies.
The Hunt was still in good shape—it’s on its last breaths now—and Julian used to drive it at great speed across the lake to Charles’s cottage. Catherine called him Uncle Chawas and loved exploring all the gadgets at his home, while Charles explained how everything worked. Charles was then putting the finishing touches to his most successful book, Act of God. He was under no illusion that these books were literature or that they had staying power; he thought they were entertainments, in the same way that some of Graham Greene’s books were entertainments. He plotted them much as he might have planned a complicated puzzle.
He was so determined that the story be plausible and the settings authentic that he had gone to the Vatican, managed to gain entry to the Pope’s apartments, and visited all of Israel’s Christian Holy sites. I thought that this attention to minutiae was supposed to distract him from the hard truth that his Christian faith had failed, that he no longer believed in God. It was a great relief for him when the manuscript was finished and he no longer had to grapple with its dark centre.
US rights to Act of God were auctioned for $200,000, a large amount in the late 1970s. Bantam Books’ Marc Jaffe had been the successful bidder, ensuring that Charles would get excellent treatment on both sides of the border. Charles and I were feted at the Westbury Hotel by a coterie of senior Bantam people. There was a sumptuous dinner with very expensive wines, since Charles professed to know a lot about wine.
Despite the nasty reviews, the personal attacks on “a failed evangelist,” and persistent interview questions about Charles’s early days with preacher Billy Graham, the book sold well in both the United States and Canada.
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AMONG MY MOST bizarre memories of 1977 is Irving Layton’s sixty-fifth birthday party at Casa Loma, the fairy-tale castle in the middle of Toronto. There were elaborate preparations. Jack, Sylvia Fraser, Aviva, and I had several secret meetings to plan what was to be a surprise for Irving. Julian was tasked with delivering the unsuspecting Irving to the venue. He had persuaded Irving that an Ontario government minister wanted to consult him on some matter of policy—the sort of flattering pretext Irving found irresistible. It’s astonishing that none of the more than a hundred invited guests breathed a word about the event. Irving was genuinely astounded and not immediately pleased when Julian ushered him in through the massive oak doors to be greeted by people shrieking “Happy birthday!” But he quickly warmed to the occasion.
There was music and there were speeches, including a long encomium from Moses Znaimer, whom Irving had taught at Herzliah School in Montreal. Irving, Moses said, had convinced his class that only poets and poetry mattered. The rest of the world was useless. Moses ended his speech with “Irving, you have ruined my life. Because of you I feel worthless.” After the speeches, a giant cardboard cake was wheeled in. Sylvia Fraser, in a backless red dress, leapt out of its white centre and everyone sang “Happy Birthday.”
Moses had come with a camera crew, who recorded the entire over-the-top evening, so I assume there is a film of it somewhere. I wonder if it includes some footage of the rather lonely figure of young David Layton,I lost in the crowd, trying to figure out how he fitted into the picture of general conviviality.
Another strange memory of that year and the next is reading bits of Leonard Cohen’s new, unnamed manuscript. He had been sending in parts of what he sometimes referred to as My Life in Art, a title he mercifully abandoned. The manuscript was rank with disappointment, bitterness, and desperation. Part of the desperation, as I wrote to Jack, was Cohen’s apparent fear that he had little or nothing left to say, that he was no longer a lover and not yet a priest. He wrote of impending death and the embarrassment of having so few ideas. He kept adding to the manuscript and changing some of the prose and the poems, though the tone of bitterness and anger stayed. In one memorable passage he wrote: “Death to this book or fuck this book and fuck this marriage. Fuck the twenty-six letters of my cowardice. Fuck you for breaking the mirror and throwing the eyebrow tweezers out the window . . .”
Now and then he still referred to the manuscript as My Life in Art, and though I know he worked on it for several years, it felt like something he had dashed off in a moment of fury. The lyrical poems like “All Summer Long” were easy to overlook in the thicket of anger and loss. I thought Death of a Ladies’ Man was an infinitely better title for what he wanted to say. Jack hated it, but we set type and designed alternative cover treatments. Leonard always had his own ideas for covers and wanted to see the options.
We were in Montreal for the new Montreal International Book Fair, an event Jack had imagined would bring together publishers, writers, agents, and booksellers from all over the world.II He had rented a suite of rooms alongside the pool, so that bookish partygoers could recover in the water after too much smoke and too many drinks.
Cohen had not wanted to be part of the scene, so we sat on the carpet in the corridor outside the suite and looked at covers, paper samples, and pages with different type treatments. He was very quiet, sombre really, as he examined each cardboard-backed design, then picked one with a few adjustments. Looking at the book today, I think it is the perfect jacket for this deeply unhappy work: creamy brown with old-fashioned black type and a gold-embossed drawing of two intertwined figures, a winged man and an equally winged (though somewhat squashed) woman, purporting to represent the spiritual union of the two sexes. It’s a reproduction of a woodcut in the 1550 Rosarium Philosophorum.
By 1978 Cohen had become an international celebrity. Hundreds of thousands turned out for his concerts, and the voice Jack had thought was a handicap had become his trademark. Though the book was still an expression of misery, it sold reasonably well and continues to sell still. The critics were harder on it than they had been on his previous books, and even the well-meaning took exception to the inexplicable prose commentary he had added to the poems.
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I WAS HAPPY that Aritha van Herk’s Judith won the inaugural Seal Books First Novel Award in 1978. She was the right kind of writer to become an international star. She was only twenty-five years old and as feisty as her heroine. It was also the right kind of book: an unusual setting (an Alberta pig farm) and a fine literary style. I loved the novel, Jack loved the book and the chance to present the award in a way that would attract maximum attention. Peter Taylor created a giant cheque that hung high on a billboard outside Place Bonaventure so as to provide cameras with a good view both of the presentation and of Jack and Aritha balancing precariously over the attending groups of critics and usually (but not on this occasion) jaded media types. There were publishing offers from around the world.
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ONE OF THE last books I worked on at M&S was Landmarks of Canadian Art, edited by Peter Mellen, whose Group of Seven book had been my education in Canadian art. Landmarks was also an outsized, expensive art book with 150 reproductions. Every work was chosen by our specially appointed panel of experts, “each one in the forefront of his or her area of specialization.” As it happened, however, it was a group of warring individualists, each with a different idea of what was great Canadian art.
The one notable exception to the wars was Jean Sutherland Boggs, former director of the National Gallery of Canada, and Harvard University professor of fine arts. Though she was tough and opinionated, she was also a peacemaker and an enthusiast. She may also have been somewhat preoccupied because she was about to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she wanted the selection settled before she started her new job. Long before then, I’d decided that I couldn’t do it all when it came to publishing—at least not well enough to make sense of my days and nights.
I told Jack I would quit as soon as he found a replacement. Instead, he wrote me a long letter (September 14, 1978) suggesting a number of scenarios for my future. His preferred option was for me to take over running Seal Books (its corporate name was McClelland-Bantam Limited). While I pondered the options, I would certainly stay both on its board and on the M&S board.
I. David Layton wrote his own book about his improbable childhood, Motion Sickness. In spite of its tough though affectionate portrayal of his mother, Aviva gave the book her wholehearted support.
II. He had been one of its founders, and though the fair has changed some over the years, it is still an annual event, now called Salon du Livre de Montréal.