MY PROMOTION OF Susan Renouf to president of Key Porter Books in 1999 was akin to Jack’s appointment of Linda McKnight in 1978. I needed someone with experience, talent, and love of the business to run it so that I could focus on dealing with the nasty new challenges that had crept up on us.
We celebrated our twentieth year in the book biz with most of the staff and many former staffers, many of our authors, a few booksellers (some of them had already given up in face of the Chapters onslaught), candlelight, wine, Scotch for Farley and Foth, and, in acknowledgement of the future, a couple of agents. More than a hundred people came to our house, Bob the barman was ensconced in the alcove near the window, our daughtersI served hors d’oeuvres, and Julian played some doleful music and helped fill the glasses. I toasted our two exciting decades and did not mention my fear that the next decade would not be one to celebrate.
We took out some ads, printed a catalogue with a gold patch, and launched one hundred books, including Farley Mowat’s Walking on the Land, Josef Skvorecky’s When Eve Was Naked, Daphne Odjig’s retrospective art book, and Fotheringham’s Last Page First (a reference to his having been the king of the back page of Maclean’s for more than twenty years). We trumpeted our authors’ awards, including Zsuzsi Gartner’s for All the Anxious Girls and Eric Wright’s Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man.
With a sense of optimism for our children’s future, we published Dennis Lee’s new poetry for kids: Bubblegum Delicious, illustrated by David McPhail.
We had already reprinted his Alligator Pie, the collection of children’s poems that had swept the country when my children were little and has successfully endured through four more decades and counting. Even our grandchildren can recite poems from it, as can most kids and their parents.
My favourite of all Dennis’s children’s poems is “The Cat and the Wizard,” illustrated by Gillian Johnson. I can recite it all if a child is interested in hearing to the end, and I absolutely love the last two lines:
The wizard is grinning.
The wizard is me.
Yes, I do think the wizard is Dennis.
I have been an admirer of Dennis Lee since I first read his “Civil Elegies” in the 1970s, a brilliant, complex poem worth rereading to draw out its many meanings and its sadness. As with so much of his poetry, it reflects a hopelessness in the face of the devastation wrought by humanity. The ending suggests that a new beginning is still possible, but that was in my last reading of Civil Elegies and that ray of hope may have vanished in later versions. Dennis has—for me—a maddening habit of rewriting poems even after they are published.
Mark Dickinson, who has been writing a book about Dennis’s work, told me, “Writing poetry for Dennis is like praying—a never-ending act of prayer. In this sense, his never-ending rewrites are part of a conversation between him and God.” When he was very young, Dennis had wanted to be an Anglican minister.
Anansi has published his cataclysmic, difficult poetry collection Un. It is a lament for the earth itself. The title, says Dickinson, refers to the work of the German-language Jewish poet Paul Celan, who asked whether it is possible to reclaim the language after the Holocaust.
Dennis himself has stood the test of time. He hasn’t changed much since we first met at Anansi years ago. He is still rumpled and abstracted, still wears those owlish glasses. His forehead is higher but his hair still flops on the sides and he still has that little beard and that impish (some describe it as dark) sense of humour. When I last saw him in a downtown Toronto restaurant, he offered that same look of amused attention he gave me the first time we met. But he no longer smokes his trademark pipe or the occasional cigar.
I just recently read his long love poem Riffs. It may be told in another man’s voice, but it feels highly personal and, whatever he may tell his fans (and I am a Lee fan), Dennis is himself talking with longing and erotic joy: “We swam into/ paradise easy . . . / That was in the flesh . . .” It’s Dennis at his best. Not the Dennis of Alligator Pie or Bubblegum Delicious, but Dennis wistful and in love, and mourning the loss of love.
I. In 1997, when my daughter Julia introduced herself to June Callwood in Victoria, she said that June might not recognize her without a tray of food held high under her chin. From an early age, she and her sister usually served drinks and food at book launch parties at our home.