IN JUNE 2000, after fifteen years, Avie Bennett announced the sale of McClelland & Stewart. Ostensibly he was donating seventy-five per cent of the company to the University of Toronto and selling twenty-five per cent to Random House. For those of us who had been making our living in the book business, there was no mystery about who was the real buyer of the “house that Jack built”: Random House was in control from the first day and the more than $5 million they paid for their twenty-five per cent stake in the company was about what its total value would have been. The university’s role was window dressing designed to make the deal palatable to a government not yet ready to repeal its ownership rules for publishing companies. Knowing Bertelsmann, which had owned Random House (including Doubleday) since 1998, I know there was no chance that Random House would let the university actually control M&S. Nor did it appear that the university had any desire to do so.
What I found offensive was that between 2000 and 2011, millions in federal and provincial subsidies continued to flow to M&S as if it were still Canadian-controlled, when it was fully controlled by Random House, itself a subsidiary of the massive German conglomerate, Bertelsmann AG.
The deal had been pre-approved by the Liberal government after skilful lobbying by Avie and, probably, Rob Pritchard, then University of Toronto president. Civil servants and agency heads administering the grants and tax credit programs held their noses and continued to dole out the money. I talked with several of them. A few deplored the situation and acknowledged that the deal should never have been approved. Some regretted that their hands were tied: they had to give M&S as many government grants as it would have been entitled to under Avie’s ownership, though they knew that the firm had effectively changed hands. One officer of the Canada Council said, defensively, that he was following orders “from above.” A charming man in the Privy Council Office said that as far as he was concerned, the takeover had made no difference: M&S was still publishing the best Canadian writers, so who cares about ownership?
I had wanted to raise funds for a chair in Canadian literature in Jack McClelland’s name, but the price tag the University of Toronto put on such a venture—a minimum of $1 million—was just too steep, so I settled for a writer-in-residency in his name at Massey College. Peter Munk contributed to the fund. Avie Bennett did not. John Fraser, master of Massey at the time, helped, and the Jack McClelland writer-in-residence program was established. It has hosted such writers as Shani Mootoo, David Bezmozgis, Camilla Gibb, Tomson Highway, Jane Urquhart, and Barbara Gowdy. The 2015–2016 Jack McClelland writer-in residence was novelist Rawi Hage. Jack would have approved.
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JACK MCCLELLAND, THE prince of publishers, the man who invented Canadian author publicity tours, who “had lent his bravery and confidence to a whole generation of authors,”I and my friend, died on June 14, 2004. He was, as Gabrielle Roy wrote, “one of the few left of the breed of friendly publishers who genuinely love their writers.” He would have been pleased that his life was over. The last few years had been terribly difficult, and eighty-one was an age he had never intended to reach.
The funeral was private but there was a memorial service at the stately Granite Club on Bayview Avenue. It was low-key, sombre, quiet, not the kind of event Jack in his heyday would have wished as a send-off. But Leonard Cohen was there, paying tribute to his publisher and friend, who, he said, was “an open heart in Toronto.” Poet and novelist Anne Michaels wrote in thestar.com that November about Jack: “the visionary, a man who had given himself over to a task, something bigger than himself—in this case, the passionate belief in, and support of, Canadian literature.”
As for me, I went home and cried.
I. Margaret Atwood in the University of Guadalajara’s Homage Edition, 1996.