ONE OF THE conditions of the sale of M&S to Avie Bennett had been that Jack could not compete with his own firm; he was not to write or edit any books except those commissioned or signed by M&S. When he got an offer from HarperCollins to edit a couple of anthologies, Avie told him he couldn’t do so unless he wished to break their agreement. That would mean, Jack told me, that he would not be paid the balance of the $1 million. In a letter to HarperCollins, he wrote that Avie considered even anthologies to be in breach of their agreement. In a short letter to Key Porter’s Phyllis Bruce on October 2, 1989, Jack explained that “the stakes are too high and it ain’t bloody well worth it” to put the balance of his payments for M&S at risk.
Jack now realized that, although it had almost killed him, he still loved the business. He felt he had been involved in something vital: the publication of significant creative artists at a time when Canada came into its own in the literary world. All his close friends had been writers, and without them, he didn’t know how to be. He was in mourning.
I had been trying to talk him into writing a memoir. He would have all his papers to rely on for memories, and his daughters and Elizabeth would help. At one point he consulted former M&S editor Lily Miller about a few pieces he had prepared but not finished.
I offered $50,000 for his autobiography, but he thought he would see if he could get more from someone else. His title, My Rose Garden, harks back to an often told Jack fable: It’s a lovely, sunny evening, the birds are singing, no clouds in the sky; you decide to take a walk in your pretty garden; along the path the air is perfumed with roses. Suddenly you step on a rake. That, in a nutshell, is book publishing.
We talked a lot at our home in Toronto and at the McClellands’ Muskoka cottage, planning chapters, trying to shape the story. He found it hard to focus. The vodka failed to fill the void of no longer being Jack, the publisher. Elizabeth’s efforts to hide the liquor failed, as did his voluntary stint at the Addiction Research Centre, then at Bellwood. He resisted the tone of forced piety, the references to “higher power or divine guidance.”I It was, he thought, boring, and the staff indulged in quasi-religious prattle. He found it about as beneficial to him “as Christian Science and about as logical.” He called me after Bellwood to tell me that he had been sorely tempted to lead a resistance movement of the “inmates”; that he disagreed with the centre’s conclusion that he was an “arrogant cynic.” If he had been a cynic, he would not have been able to run a publishing company for so many years, as publishing requires huge doses of optimism.
Though he still had friends, he felt lonely. He and Elizabeth spent some winter months in Florida so he could swim in the mornings and try to work on the book in the afternoons. We met there for coffee (not drinks). He was tanned and much fitter than the exhausted Jack I had known over the past few years. But when I told him the sun and the water were obviously good for him, he warned me never to believe the obvious. “I usually look better when I am seriously ailing,” he said. “Actually, I am near death.” Jack was a bit of a hypochondriac and tended to develop symptoms of diseases he heard or read about, but in this case he was probably right. Not long after our meeting he fell into the pool and would have drowned had it not been for a pair of observant young women who happened to see him fall.
He told me later that he didn’t think Avie would allow him to publish the autobiography with another publisher. But, he said, he had offered Avie a choice: if he insisted it must be published by M&S, Jack would write atrociously nasty things about Avie; if he let him “off the hook,” Jack wouldn’t even mention Avie’s name. “You will publish a book that you will hate or you will not publish a book that will have no hard references to you,” he told Avie.
I don’t know whether this story is true, but it sounds like Jack.
He never finished the memoir, though there are pieces of it languishing in the McMaster University Archives.
Instead, some years later, Key Porter published Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland, edited by Sam Solecki. The book captures his tone and his extraordinary ability to be a friend, an editor, confidant, and tireless supporter of his authors. He wrote long, emotional letters to each of them, responding to their needs, worries, concerns. He had even agreed to tell an author’s wife that her marriage had failed when her husband, the author, could not bring himself to do it.
In a verse letter Leonard Cohen told Jack:
You were the
real prime minister of Canada. You still
are. And even though it’s all gone down
the tubes, the country that you govern
will never fall apart.
I. From Jack’s notes on the Bellwood experience.