MY DAY-TO-DAY CONTACT at Bantam was the dapper Welshman Alun Davies, their designated hitter for all international markets. Alun was charming, argumentative, always well-informed about the world’s book markets and about who was doing what to whom and why, including the sexual proclivities of employees from London to Sydney, from New York to New Delhi. He had once worked in Canada for Longman’s and thought he had a good grounding in what Canadians wanted to read. As a Welshman living all over the world, he thought nationalism, particularly that of the cultural kind, was a passing fad.
When I agreed to take over Seal in 1979, Alun was in Australia. Later, when I met Bantamites from Australia and the UK, I discovered that their Alun problems were pretty much the same as mine: he tended to know more about what they were doing than they did. In fact, I liked him rather more than many of them seemed to. Alun, I thought, had shown remarkable resilience when dealing with the Lucy Maud Montgomery estate’s implacable lawyer, Marian Hebb, and with Kevin Sullivan Productions’s Anne of Green Gables series.I But he had a penchant for countermanding my decisions, sometimes as if by accident, other times after long perorations on how certain kinds of books (Matt Cohen’s, for example) never worked in mass market paperback. To illustrate a point, he would cite examples from other countries. I discovered from colleagues in those other countries that he did pretty much the same there, using Canadian examples. They sometimes called him “the wily Welshman.”
In an effort to find those elusive commercial fiction writers (we were thinking of Blatty, Benchley, and L’Amour), we thought Richard Rohmer was an ideal candidate. His first novel, Ultimatum, had been at the top of the bestseller lists. Plus, he was a war hero. He had flown 135 missions and taken part in D-Day. As a young fighter pilot on a field mission during the invasion, he had reported seeing Field Marshall Rommel in a German staff car. Headquarters sent a Spitfire to strafe the car, thus wounding one of the Germans’ top commandants. He was now a lawyer, an honorary lieutenant general of the Canadian Armed Forces, chief of the Canadian Reserves, honorary adviser to the Canadian Defence Staff, an advocate of culture, former chair of the Royal Commission on Book Publishing, a Conservative political insider, and a recipient of numerous honours and awards, including Commander of the Order of Military Merit. He was tailor-made for the M&S-Bantam promotion machine.
However, his potboilers, Exxonoration, Exodus/UK, Separation, and so on, were short-lived, despite Bantam’s marketing moxie. Richard didn’t care about style. He wanted to get his stories told and his ideas out. The writing (hasty, since he dictated the novels) and the characters (wooden) were of little interest to him.II
I remember Richard coming to my office one day to tell me that he had analyzed bestsellers and now realized that his books needed to have more sex scenes. Since he had no idea how to write them, he wanted me to refer him to some well-written sex in other books that he could use as a guide. Seriously.
We experimented with thrillers like Ian Slater’s Firespill and Leo Heaps’s The Quebec Plot and several exceptional mysteries by L. R. Wright,III who had won the Edgar Award for The Suspect.
I also tried historical fiction by commissioning a series called The Canadians that promised a “gripping saga of the conquest of a continent,” as well as the ensuing “consuming loves and raging hates, fierce loyalties and unyielding vows of revenge.” The books sported what we thought were stirring titles, like Bloodbrothers, Patriots, and Birthright. Because they sold well, author Robert Wall, who had five children and a not-too-well-paid teaching job at a university, kept them coming at the rate of about one a year.
I had failed to persuade George Jonas and Barbara Amiel to come to Seal with their By Persons Unknown, about a famous murder case in Ontario, but George did give me the chance to publish his novel Final Decree, a thoughtful exploration of a simple immigrant’s deterioration in the “new world.” It was not, however, in any sense commercial.
Looking back, I suspect that neither Jack nor I had the right instincts for commercial fiction. With literary fiction, even if it sells fewer than five thousand copies (the number Jack thought we should be able to sell of Matt Cohen’s and Adele Wiseman’s novels), you have the satisfaction of a book of lasting value. With commercial fiction, more often than not, you have published something with only a few months of shelf life.
Since Jack and I wanted to increase the number of new Seal books, I had to reach outside the M&S lists.
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I THOUGHT I would finally have a chance of attracting W. O. Mitchell. I already knew him from Banff, where he had been friendly, and I enjoyed our talks about his retinue of young Canadian writers. He was magnificent when he had an audience, a natural storyteller with a plethora of tales, some of which found their way into his books, while others did not. I was particularly fond of the one—true or not—about Joe Clark, long before his brief stint as prime minister of Canada, sitting in an outdoor crapper while W. O. and other pranksters tied the wooden shack to a pickup truck and towed it away, leaving the déshabillé Joe and the toilet behind.
W. O. would never publish with M&S while Farley Mowat was one of our stars because he and Farley had not been on speaking terms for decades. W. O. believed that he had helped the young Mowat get published both in Canada and the United States and that his good deed was rewarded by Farley’s “churlish” denial that such help had existed.IV In a Saturday Night article, Farley had accused Bill of rejecting his stories that would later become The Desperate People and advising him to write simple boy-meets-girl romances. In the 1981 NFB film In Search of Farley Mowat, Farley repeated the accusation. I don’t know what really happened but I suspect that, as with most things in life, there is more than one version of the truth.
I was then and still am an avid fan of the way W. O. talks his way into readers’ hearts with just a few words early in his stories and never lets go. Of all his books, my favourite is How I Spent My Summer Holidays, the compelling, terrifying tale of a young boy robbed of his childhood.
We bought paperback rights to five of his books—Jake and the Kid, Who Has Seen the Wind, The Kite, The Vanishing Point, and How I Spent My Summer Holidays—from his hardcover publishers, Macmillan. The advance of $125,000 seemed like a lot at the time, but it turned out to have been a good investment. Mitchell barely needed promotion. At sixty-seven, he was at the pinnacle of his career both as a writer and as a performer. He gave readings to packed houses across the country, his white hair flying, his voice rising and falling as the story required, enjoying the applause, getting ready for the next tale.
Sometimes when he was in Toronto, he would drop by our home, pour himself a drink, and settle into a living room armchair, stretching out his long legs, leaning his head back, telling stories. My kids loved them, as did his wife, Merna, who had heard them all before but still enjoyed these occasions to listen again. His voice had such range, from a whisper to a high pitch to a gravelly rant, that I could hear it from outside even before opening our front door.
I experimented with non-fiction, to see if we could establish a non-fiction line without buying the rights from another publisher. Jimmy: An Autobiography was such an experiment. Convincing Bantam that Jim Pattison was a “big name” had not been easy, but I got lucky when Bob Hope called him “a sort of Lee Iacocca with frostbite.” They certainly knew Iacocca.
Most people west of the Rockies knew Jimmy by reputation. Thousands shopped in his Overwaitea stores, travelled on his ferries, listened to his radio stations; hundreds of thousands knew of his Ripley Entertainment and had heard of his modest early start as a used-car salesman. Jimmy, ghosted by journalist Paul Grescoe, was beautifully written and had a great golden cover with Jimmy grinning while he adjusts his bow tie.
It’s interesting to see how often interviewers asked him when, having achieved all that success, he was going to retire. He had not given the matter a single thought. Nor had he done so ten or so years later when I visited him in his Vancouver office. He was still a man in a hurry. His impressive collection of photographs covering one whole wall was still missing a few presidents, prime ministers, and corporate kings. To mark the occasion of showing me his city’s skyline, he played some tunes on his trumpet. He seemed ageless and tireless. You can watch a 2015 video of Jimmy playing “Happy Birthday to You” at the hundredth anniversary of his Overwaitea Food Group.
He stayed married to the woman he had fallen in love with more than sixty years before, and though he may have been the richest man in Canada, he lived in the house they had bought when they first became parents. He saw no reason to change.
We spent a weekend once on his yacht, Nova Spirit, cruising along the BC coast. There was never a quiet moment. Jimmy loved to hear good conversation and tried to engage his guests in a variety of activities. I suggested he should try “writing” his own book, one giving business advice to future generations, and I made the mistake of mentioning that he might be retiring soon. He looked at me with concern about my sanity: going strong at eighty-four or so, he was excited about some new venture, pleased with the expansion of his Ripley’s franchise, and looking forward to another trip to Walmart’s head office in Bentonville, Arkansas. He liked the way the Waltons operated. I wonder whether he still does.
I asked Gordon Pinsent, writer of the original Rowdyman, to turn his successful CBC television Christmas special, A Gift to Last, into a novel. He was an accomplished performer, charming, erudite, a fine writer, a delight to watch and listen to, but my God, did he ever find it difficult to finish that book. Alun Davies started suggesting that we should just cancel the contract rather than keep postponing publication. In the end, though, Gordon did deliver and the book was, of course, a national bestseller.
I. By coincidence, in 2003 Julian defended Marian Hebb when Sullivan Entertainment sued her and the Montgomery estate for libel.
II. Among the Rohmer oeuvre that the indefatigable Jennifer Glossop edited was the unfortunately titled Balls, which made everyone snicker rather than consider Richard’s prescient warnings about the growing reliance on fossil fuels and the possibility of a US grab for Canada’s natural resources.
III. L. R.’s nickname was Bunny. Her mysteries are being reissued by Felony & Mayhem Press.
IV. While W.O. was fiction editor of Maclean’s, he also helped Alice Munro, Alistair MacLeod, and Ernest Buckler, among others.