AS I MENTIONED, Dudley Witney and I became friends through his M&S books. After The Barn, I had commissioned The Lighthouse (Alan EdmondsI and I wrote the text) and Summer Places with The New Yorker’s illustrious Brendan Gill. I have no idea how Dudley had talked Brendan into writing the text, let alone spending a great deal of time roughing it in Canada’s cottage country. His natural habitats were New York and East Hampton. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, a Yale graduate, a film and theatre critic, a “Talk of the Town” feature writer, an architecture critic, an attendee at formal parties with celebrities, he had been writing for The New Yorker for more than forty years. He was a patrician presence, tall, thin, with an aristocratic nose and a seemingly inexhaustible store of anecdotes, hilarious and embarrassing stories about people like Dorothy Parker, Buster Keaton, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Plimpton, Georges Simenon, and Man Ray. He was also the author of some fifteen books and an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose buildings he delighted in showing me in New York.
What could have hooked Brendan was the architecture of grand old summer places in the United States—the Biltmore House, Boldt Castle, for example—rather than our prefab in Georgian Bay. But he didn’t complain about the rain, the food, or the narrow bunk beds. Dudley and Brendan became inseparable friends. Dudley was the only outsider at Brendan Gill’s eightieth birthday party and perhaps the last to talk with Brendan about his dying.
* * *
DUDLEY’S NEW BOOK was going to be about ranches. He had cajoled historian and journalist Moira Johnston, with six previous books to her credit, to write the text. Moira, I thought, had been a little bit in love with him, a fate she would have shared with several other talented women of his acquaintance.
Dudley was an unusual man, comfortable anywhere, so long as he liked the company—even when that company was his own. He had spent years living out of a single suitcase, spending nights in friends’ homes or in his car. When he decided to photograph ranches, he drove his ancient Russian Lada throughout the US heartland, where no one had ever seen a Russian car before and few had ever met an Englishman, let alone one with a passion for ranching. He was a hit with the ranchers, as he had been with cottagers, farmers, and lighthouse keepers. He had a mischievous sense of humour and, while he took his work seriously, he was unable to take himself seriously. He became friends with people he found interesting and a few who were almost as unusual as Dudley himself. He spent a lot of time with artist and philanthropist Nelje Doubleday (yes, that Doubleday family) in Wyoming, with novelist Marian Engel in Toronto, with the great bird artist Fenwick Lansdowne in BC, and with us and our daughters in Georgian Bay.
The Ranch: Portrait of a Surviving Dream was designed by Ken Rodmell and edited by Ramsay Derry, a former editor of Robertson Davies, in Key’s cluttered boardroom over coffee and beer, but mostly long discussions about life. Ken, Ramsay, and Dudley were all happy philosophers.
When we were about halfway, Ken prepared a mock-up of the first hundred or so pages—much as M&S had done for The Barn and Roloff Beny’s Persia—and I flew to New York and Boston to see if we could sell US publishers on joining our print run. In the end we presold so many copies to Doubleday that they paid for our entire printing. I remember taking the same presentation to Woodward’s in Vancouver and talking them into taking a chance on a book I feared would be ignored by the Eastern media.
Later we commissioned Dudley to produce Railway Country: Across Canada by Train and An American Journey by Rail. And last, my personal favourite Witney book, The Moorlands of England, the book that took Dudley home to his first love: the landscape that had also inspired the Brontë sisters.
Having established a bit of a base and a reputation, we found it easy to publish Malak Karsh’s Canada: The Land That Shapes Us; The Northwest Passage with Ed Struzik and Mike Beedell; Freeman Patterson’s The Last Wilderness: Images of the Canadian Wild;II Dudley Witney’s Canada: Railway Country and An American Journey by Rail; and Fred Bruemmer’s The Arctic World. Foreign publishers loved our big illustrated books and bought them in large enough numbers that we felt shielded from the unpredictability of the Canadian market.
Even at home, we became known for photographic books. We commissioned Malak Karsh to produce books about Ottawa and the Parliament buildings. Malak was Yousuf Karsh’s less famous but no less talented brother; his images of Ottawa make it seem like a city where you would actually want to live. In the spring he would lie among the tulips to get the best views of the flowers. In the winter he photographed skaters on the Rideau Canal. At eighty-three he was still climbing scaffolding to get close to the Parliament buildings’ gargoyles.
Born in Armenia, bearing the burden of memories that defy Turkish denials of the genocide, Malak was inordinately proud of his adopted country. I remember his induction in the Order of Canada and the celebration that followed in the Senate chamber. “I have had the chance to portray the magnificence of Canada, and something of the indomitable spirit of the people who are fortunate enough to inhabit it,” he said. I knew how he felt.
I. Yes, the same Alan Edmonds who had starred in Live It Up.
II. Our first printing was 30,000 copies, a significant number even in 1990.