AFTER A TUMULTUOUS but exciting decade, I was still imagining that we could expand Key Porter Books. In 1991 we had an opportunity to acquire the inventory and contracts of publisher Lester & Orpen Dennys, a prestigious literary house run by Malcolm Lester and Louise Dennys. The strange saga of that acquisition began with Christopher Ondaatje, Michael Ondaatje’s older brother. He was a member of Julian’s investment club, the Canyon Club, a group of fifteen seemingly macho guys who invested a small (about two thousand dollars each) amount in a fund that the money-making wizard members could spin into enough gold to provide food and wine for the group in fine restaurants and occasional trips with wives to warm places in the winter or golfing destinations in the summer. I was one of the wives.I Christopher was one of the dross-into-gold spinners. Tall and spindly with a sharp-edged nose, he had an intense look when he was interested in something. There is a striking portrait of him in London’s National Portrait Gallery, donated by the man himself. When he wasn’t interested in what you were saying, he just walked away.
On those Canyon Club trips, Christopher often discussed publishing with me, including how he had built Pagurian, his tiny book publishing venture, into a profitable corporation with assets of more than $300 million and growing. He also talked about his childhood in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and the English private school he had to leave when his family lost its fortune. He talked of his alcoholic father, an almost mythic figure who, though loved and revered by both his sons, had managed to drink away their inheritance.
When the family’s funds withered, Christopher and Michael’s mother moved to London to escape the scandal. She made ends meet by running a boarding house. Christopher came to Canada determined to reverse his father’s legacy. He had represented Canada in the four-man bobsled team at the 1964 Olympics, but that was not the only kind of success he sought. He co-founded Loewen, Ondaatje, McCutcheon with two other Canyon members: Charles Loewen and Julian’s former brother-in-law, Fred McCutcheon. The firm specialized in research-based investment banking and, while Charles did most of the heavy lifting, Christopher was its swashbuckling financial genius.
Not surprising then that Christopher’s hero was the adventurer-writer Richard Burton. He had a portrait of Burton in his dining room, and his plans for the future, he told me, included following in Burton’s footsteps.II Why he had wanted to buy a small literary publishing house was mystifying. L&OD had famously published (in Canada) Italo Calvino, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, P. D. James, Don DeLillo, Graham Greene, Martin Amis, as well as Joy Kogawa, Sandra Birdsell, Josef Skvorecky, Alberto Manguel, to mention a few. They also had a prestigious history list with books like The Illustrated History of Canada and Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s None Is Too Many. But that could not have been the reason Pagurian bought L&OD. A few industry insiders thought he wanted to have his own book published by a respected house; others guessed that he was impressed with Louise’s British literary credentials, including the fact that she was Graham Greene’s niece.
It was easier to see how Malcolm and Louise walked into the deal. They had cash-flow problems of the type most publishers encounter when they hold too much inventory. Plus they had been charmed (who wouldn’t be?) when Christopher had flown them to Bermuda and given them the royal Christopher treatment. I still remember the late summer day in 1988, in the Roof Lounge of the Park Plaza, when Christopher and Louise announced the deal to the press.
The honeymoon lasted only a few months. Christopher sold Pagurian to Hees, a holding company controlled in a hugely complicated way by Peter Bronfman and Jack Cockwell. He then moved to the UK, where he became known as a prominent philanthropist and was awarded a CBE.
Tim Price, chairman of Hees, said the firm had no desire to run a publishing house. Having concluded that publishing was “a very difficult business,” they decided to shut it down. That move would save them the cost of paying outstanding debts.
In 1991 we acquired what was left of L&OD in a series of negotiations that were as tough as they were baffling, given what an infinitesimal portion of Hees’s holdings—it had grown to about $500 million by then and L&OD’s gross income was less than $1 million—were involved. I once asked Peter Bronfman when we both served on the Alliance Board why his group had taken such a rough stand on this company, when they could have been generous or waited until they found someone to buy it as a going concern. He told me that while he, personally, had been sympathetic—he said he liked Malcolm—he had agreed long ago to stay out of all Hees corporate decisions. That approach may have been a colossal mistake for several reasons, but those belong in another book.
A good question at the time would have been why I thought it was a good idea to buy the L&OD assets. There are two answers: first, because I thought we needed variety in our backlist. A strong backlist, I had learned at M&S, would give us ballast for years when we couldn’t get the bestsellers we needed. Jack had always reasoned that the backlist was his company’s real strength and he had taught me most of what I knew about the business. The second reason was my admiration for what Malcolm and Louise had built. Our deal with Hees guaranteed that all L&OD authors would be paid their outstanding royalties. Then Key Porter could ensure that their books would continue to have a life. Most of the authors were willing to sign on with us, though some of them would not commit to future titles.
One of the most valuable projects we acquired was The Story of Canada by Janet Lunn and Christopher Moore, illustrated by Alan Daniels, a project that Phyllis Bruce, with infinite patience, nursed to completion. I remember her trying desperately to urge Daniels to deliver the last of his spectacular drawings.
The book won all the awards available for Canadian children’s books and went into several printings and editions. Janet was shy, thoughtful, and not keen to do the kind of publicity that we had planned for her, but she went, accepting most of her appointments with grace. She also agreed to edit our Canadian Children’s Treasury, a big illustrated book that, like The Story of Canada, went through many printings—about one hundred thousand copies sold when I last looked. For it was also another foray into the door-to-door sales market we had entered with our first big Canada book, Canada: A Celebration. There were, then, several unusual characters running operations that sold books through large offices, leaving a sample book with the receptionist and returning to deliver the books bought and collect the money.
We reissued most of the L&OD novels, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker winner The Remains of the Day, Joseph Skvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls, and one of Graham Greene’s least successful books, Monsieur Quixote. Taking over their list felt like dressing in someone else’s Sunday best, but it was satisfying to see the books thrive, and we designed a new L&OD imprint for the international fiction list in honour of the little company that disappeared. We added new titles by Norman Levine, Sylvia Fraser, and Matt Cohen.
Louise, Malcolm, and I had long meetings and a few lunches at Biagio’s to try to find a way for them to join us, but the discussions faltered (we didn’t have enough money) and Louise accepted an offer from Knopf Canada, an imprint of Random House, to become its publisher. Some L&OD authors followed her. I was not unsympathetic, but a few of the departures were painful.III
P. D. James, for example. I had been a P. D. James fan since I read her first Adam Dalgliesh mystery, Cover Her Face, and I had hoped that her three mysteries could be the beginning of a KP mystery line. We met in her agent Elaine Greene’s quite charming London office decorated with photographs of authors, shelves of books, and a low table heaped high with manuscripts. Elaine offered tea and was impeccably polite but equally emphatic in her determination that the mysteries, together with new books Phyllis (the P in P. D.) was going to write, would go to Louise. Their relationship, she argued, was important to Phyllis and she simply could not begin with someone new. Though the agent agreed that our contracts were binding, she said that as a publisher who cared about authors, I should let her client go. To add a nice touch to the general moral suasion, she said she had read and enjoyed Hidden Agenda.
I agreed reluctantly and remained P. D.’s constant fan, reading each of her books as it came along.
I. Strangely, several wives took up religion: a few became Protestant pastors, others Catholic philosophers who argued for the admission of women into the priesthood.
II. His 1996 book, Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton 1842–1849, the Indian Years is fascinating not only for what it reveals about Burton but also for what it reveals about Christopher.
III. Louise Dennys went on to publish some extraordinary books, including Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River and Avenue of Mysteries, and several P. D. James and Alberto Manguel titles.