THE MOST SATISFYING manuscript I read during my early Seal years was Graeme Gibson’s Perpetual Motion. Determined to include it in Seal’s list, I promoted it to M&S.
Graeme and I had some strange conversations about why Jack had not offered to publish Graeme’s first book, Five Legs. Graeme’s theory was Jack’s literary tastes did not include innovative writing. My theory, at the time, was that M&S had simply misplaced the manuscript and when it was discovered at the bottom of the slush pile, Jack was too embarrassed to admit it. When I asked Jack about it, he claimed he had not read the manuscript; he could hardly keep track of all submissions.
By the time the book was published by Anansi in 1969, Dennis Lee had spent months working with Graeme to make sure that it was the best it could be. “He forced me to think more clearly about my intentions, about the implications of my work, than I had previously thought possible,” recalled Graeme about Dennis’s editing.
We used to go to an uninspiring restaurant on St. Clair Avenue, across from Seal’s equally uninspiring office, and talk about writing and writers, about the Writers’ Union and its aims, about why Graeme had co-founded the Writers’ Development Trust, and his determination to broaden its mandate. He had been a close friend of Scott Symons at a time when Scott needed friends, but Graeme severed their relationship after Scott’s poisonous attacks against women writers, particularly Alice Munro, Marian Engel, and Margaret Atwood, in the 1977 West Coast Review. He was a friend of Matt Cohen’s and interested in Matt’s travels in Europe and the direction Matt’s new novels would take.
I am not sure what led us into a discussion of Joseph Roth, but I know he was astonished that I hadn’t read The Radetzky March, and he gave me a copy of the book. Roth had been a citizen of the Hapsburg Empire in its dying days, a journalist, novelist, essayist, with an uncanny prediction of the future as he surveyed the crumbling empire. Years later, when I met the last almost-emperor-king, Otto von Hapsburg, in Pocking, a suburb of Munich, I discovered that he too was a Roth fan.
Perpetual Motion was the story of a man so obsessed with the invention and building of a perpetual motion machine that he destroys everything else that could lend his life meaning. The setting is nineteenth-century Ontario but the scope of the novel is man’s single-minded fascination with machines and industry to the exclusion of nature and humanity. It was an ambitious work that I have returned to from time to time during the years since because the book’s message and its anti-hero’s overweening determination seem like a parable for our times.
Reviews were mixed. A number of the usual reviewers had no idea what to make of the book. Some gave it a pass, a few attacked it for being dense, Bob Fulford panned it, but those who liked it made up for the others. Graeme and I had become friends along the way. He is generous, warm, a great storyteller. I remember him at our cottage, sitting hunched over in the bunk room our children shared, singing “Greenland Whale Fisheries” to help them go to sleep. An odd choice, I thought, but it worked.
When he finished writing his next book, Gentleman Death, Graeme’s most moving, saddest, yet most humourous book, he told me he would not write fiction again. He had now said all that he wished to say about the human condition, about creativity, the absurdities of aging, the futility of writing fiction in a world gone crazy, and about mortality. He felt no desire to say more.
In chapter 10 of Gentleman Death, Graeme’s protagonist writes an average of two hundred words a day. “But here’s the point, in the time it takes me to find my two hundred words over a hundred species of plants and animals become extinct. In case you’re interested, that’s thirty-six thousand a year . . . It’s a sickening thought.”
It was Graeme who introduced me to John Livingston, whose One Cosmic Instant: A Natural History of Human Arrogance we published at M&S. John explained the title: “one cosmic instant,” assuming a twenty-four-hour clock representing the time of the earth’s existence, is the approximate time of man. Yet—and that was the point of the book—humanity has wrought such devastation on the earth that we will end by destroying it. Our unbridled greed and hubris have led us to believe that we are the sole owners of our cosmos, above all the other life forms which we domesticate or kill in our rush to propagate our own species. As a result we destroy nature and, eventually, ourselves. I did not need convincing. I had seen the plastic, the oil slicks, the dead fish in the ocean and in Lake Huron.
Later at Key Porter, my next publishing adventure, we published his Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication. The Toronto Star’s reviewer said that “if you buy only one book this decade let it be Rogue Primate.” It won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.
Graeme, an early supporter of the World Wildlife Fund, also introduced me to Monte Hummel, its executive director. His very modest office was also on St. Clair Avenue. Monte looked like a sixties hippie—long hair, faded jeans, colourful shirt, sandals—and he was utterly committed to conservation of life on earth. He talked very fast, almost breathlessly, of the need to preserve small life-sustaining organisms essential to the eco-system. But it was the large animals that potential funders of WWF found attractive, which was why I suggested a book about polar bears and other Arctic wildlife. It was the first of many books we published as fundraisers for World Wildlife.
I became a member of the WWF board and supported Monte’s vision for more than twenty years. In time, Key Porter would be known worldwide for its books about the environment.