IN HIS UNFINISHED autobiography called My Rose Garden, Jack McClelland wrote of his utter exhaustion after 1984. The cash injection he had worked so hard for was not going to be enough. His latest warehouse sale of M&S inventory had been a disappointment: only about $600,000 worth of books, valued at about $3 million, were sold. He simply didn’t have the heart for it any longer. His decision to hand over the day-to-day running of the business to Linda McKnight had not freed him, nor could he stop interfering with her efforts to control costs or maximize income.
I reread a memo Jack wrote to Linda, outlining a strategy for publishing new poetry. He proposed a kind of subscription book club under the direction of M&S’s poetry editor, Dennis Lee. It was to be called “the Dennis Lee Editions Club” and its membership was to be garnered through mailings, direct sale by poets, and promotion to university departments teaching Canadian literature. What with the banking problems the firm was facing, this would have been just the kind of seven-page memo to drive Linda, a very sensible person with an excellent grasp on how publishing worked, crazy.
Somewhere in the midst of that dreadful time, he proposed that we merge our operations, that Key Porter invest half a million dollars in a joint enterprise and we take over the managing of M&S’s banking obligations. He would remain chairman and I would be chief executive. Much as I loved Jack and M&S, we declined. Michael and I knew that, in practice, we would have been running a gauntlet of bankers demanding repayment of their loans. We would have had to invest at least another $1 million to settle them down. Michael told Jack we simply didn’t have enough money. Perhaps he could wait a couple of years?
Then came Jack’s showdown with Linda over the licensing of some M&S books to Seal for what Linda considered derisory amounts. Since Jack owned controlling interest in Seal, he was also in a conflict of interest. Jack saw the deal as a source of fast cash for M&S. Linda suggested that Jack let her run the company, since she was president, and recuse himself as chairman emeritus. When Jack rejected her proposal, she considered her own position untenable and resigned. Her resignation made all the papers, including five consecutive front-page stories in The Globe and Mail, leaving Jack to explain to the public, the authors, and his investors what he had in mind when he instructed M&S’s president to make the deal with Seal’s publisher, Janet Turnbull.I
When Jack called me, outraged about the negative publicity, I found it difficult to sympathize. Having appointed Linda to fix M&S, he gave her no chance to do so. He still wanted to call the shots. He told me that nobody understood that selling paperback rights was not a sale but a short-term lease, that the books would still belong to M&S when the leases ran out. His banking situation, he said, now was almost beyond rescue. He could not, absolutely could not, face another showdown. He suggested that we buy M&S outright: “Get the albatross off my back,” he begged. Key Porter’s directors—Michael de Pencier, Murray Frum, Julian, Michael Rea, former banker David Lewis—spent days trying to find ways to raise the money. Michael suggested that we could have M&S declared a national treasure and raise the money to keep it whole. That approach, Jack responded, would take longer than he could accept. What with the hyenas snapping at his heels, his authors needing constant reassurance, the press—God, he hated The Globe and Mail—looking for more nasty stories, and, of course, the booze, he could not hold out much longer.
A week or so later, he called again to tell me that he had finally made up his mind. He would sell M&S to Avie Bennett. Bennett already had some shares, since he had been in the $1 million investment group. He was a real estate guy, Jack said, with a yen to do something cultural, and would I please meet with him and tell him how the book business worked. He sent me packages of current M&S financials, inventory, staff, and his assorted memos. I should make the business sound rosy and play up the part about how many interesting, talented, and famous people you meet when you are a publisher. My task, Jack said, was to help close the deal.
* * *
MY FIRST IMPRESSION of Avie was that he had scant interest in publishing but did like the idea of spending time with celebrated authors. His wife, he told me, had a passion for serious literature and had always read voraciously. She would want a role in the selection of titles.II Later, in an interview, he said he thought he had bought M&S so he could have lunch with people like Margaret Atwood. An eminently good reason, I thought, as long as you had enough money to indulge yourself.
Avie and I sat and talked in various Front Street and Church Street eateries, drinking coffee, going over inventory numbers, individual staff positions, profit-and-loss statements by season and by book, royalties and advances against royalties, and how publishing decisions were made. Most of the time he wore a bemused expression, as if all this was detail he didn’t need to know. Now and then, to prove he had been listening, he would ask good questions, such as why keep stock of books that hadn’t sold more than two copies in a whole year.
In 1985 Avie bought Jack’s shares in M&S (but not Seal) for $1 million, paid out over ten years. He paid off all the minority shareholders and ploughed a further $1 million into the business. Given his reputation—he had always paid his debts and had even repaid his father’s and uncle’s debts after they went bankrupt—bankers had no qualms about extending loans. M&S had, I imagined, a chance to thrive again. Jack agreed to stay on in an undefined role for five years.
The Toronto Star ran a picture of the two smiling men, side by side behind an array of microphones and cameras. Avie seems happy and a bit shy, Jack looks as if he is about to start weeping. In the Getty Images photo from the same press conference, he is not even hiding the tears. Nor was I hiding mine. None of the celebratory speeches, the delighted authors I had known while working with Jack, made me feel better. It was the end of an era and all I felt was grief. I knew that Jack, though he said he was relieved he no longer carried the burden of the business, was bereft.
Avie moved M&S downtown to a new building he owned on University Avenue. Though his attachment to that dreadful building on Hollinger Road defied logic, Jack felt as if everything he had worked so hard to preserve was being upended. He complained that his office was too small and that it was next to the toilets. He held the phone up so I could hear the flushing (I couldn’t) that, he insisted, interfered with his thinking. If he kept his door open, he could tell who was struggling with diarrhea and who had prostate problems.
People who used to work for him were now seeking advice or approval from Avie. Worse, some of “his” authors were beginning to warm to Avie, who had, they believed, saved M&S.
After about fourteen months of trying to exist in Avie’s shadow, Jack called it quits. It was painful but he realized that staying would kill him. I was not surprised when he told me it was over. M&S was now someone else’s bailiwick.
For a while Jack experimented with being a literary agent. His long-time secretary, Marge Hodgeman, and his daughter Sarah helped with the day-to-day. But he confided that agenting made him feel like a procurer, a “john.” He hated soliciting money for authors rather than offering them money. He had never quite recovered from the time Peter Newman’s “Hudson’s Bay”III book went to Viking/Penguin in the UK. M&S’s offer to publish with a $50,000 advance had at first seemed acceptable, but Newman became intent on an international audience and, with it, a vastly bigger advance. Peter’s lawyer/agent, Michael Levine, was sent to tell Jack that the figure was $500,000; without it, the book would not be published. Jack was furious, and let Levine know it, but said that if anyone would pay such an amount, he would not stand in the way. With the legal path cleared, Levine showed the proposal to Viking/Penguin’s publisher, Peter Mayer, who indeed offered $500,000 for world rights. Jack put a brave face on it, writing to Michael Levine on November 30, 1982 that “It is done, sealed, I am no longer Peter Newman’s publisher in Canada.” Still, Peter had been with Jack for all his previous bestsellers, and the departure had really stung.
I used to meet Jack in the garage of his Avenue Road apartment building: there was no smoking inside. We would be standing near the automatic doors, Jack chain-smoking and regretting that he couldn’t even offer me a drink. His wife, Elizabeth, had turfed all his bottles. He had it on good authority, he told me once, that Avie had lost $2 million on M&S already. “And everyone said I was a bad businessman? Compared to Avie? I was a genius. I never lost a million in one year.” Later he told me that Peter Newman told him that Avie had lost $12 million in his “first seven years as the owner. . . . However, buying M&S had forced him to sell his shopping malls at the peak of the market, and overall he had ended up further ahead than he might have otherwise.”IV
At a funeral we both attended, a cheerful woman approached Jack as we headed for the exit. “Didn’t you used to be Jack McClelland?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” muttered Jack.
I. It was while working for Seal that Janet first met John Irving, the famed American novelist (The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, and many more to come). They married after a whirlwind romance. I remember the wedding at Bishop Strachan School chapel (her alma mater), with Robertson Davies reading the lesson, and the reception at the Badminton and Racquet Club, where John recited a Yeats poem. I had a chance to talk with one of my literary heroes, E. L. Doctorow, and Farley Mowat danced with my fifteen-year-old daughter Catherine.
II. She never did become involved in the business.
III. Company of Adventurers was published by Penguin in 1985, Caesars of the Wilderness (Company of Adventurers Volume II) in 1987; Empire of the Bay was published in 1989.
IV. Jack was going to mention this in the epilogue of his memoir, My Rose Garden.