Dennis Lee
Dear Paul,
What can I tell you about working with Austin? We lived a block away from each other, that’s one thing—on Brunswick Avenue, near Sibelius Park in central Toronto. And for maybe three months in 1970, we were pretty much parked in each other’s back pockets.
Austin’s novels had been published by big houses. But he’d turned to Anansi with his first story collection, When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks. He showed it to us for two reasons. The accepted wisdom was that a book of short stories carried the commercial kiss of death, so doors were mostly closed elsewhere. And he had acquired a reputation as such a difficult author to deal with that (as I understood it) one or more of his previous publishers wanted nothing more to do with him. My memory is that Graeme Gibson had met him, and urged him to give Anansi a try.
So Austin passed me the manuscript—and I loved it. I read it in a kind of pure, context-free way: I’d never made short stories a focus in my reading or studying, and I didn’t pretend to know much about the history of the form, its place in Canadian letters, or really anything beyond what happened in my nervous system when I read the stories. And the freedom, the zing, the sure-footedness—along with the insight into West Indian lives in Canada, specifically Toronto—made it a done deal. Anansi had to publish this book. We were three years old, we were a writers’ press, and we were too dumb to know what would sell and what wouldn’t.
So we started honing in on specific stories right away. That may have taken Austin by surprise—I don’t know if things worked that way with his previous publishers. I can’t remember if we even had a formal contract for writers at that point; anyway, the whole focus was on making a wonderful piece of work even better. With some stories, I made only a few copy-editing suggestions; they didn’t need any work. But with others, I raised serious questions about—well, about whatever; I can’t call back the specifics now. And there were discussions about which stories to keep and which to lose, and what the best sequence would be.
In truth, it was a much lighter editing job than with many Anansi titles, where in those days we were often publishing an author’s first book. Clarke was already more accomplished than that. But from his side of things, it was probably more than he’d been subjected to elsewhere—and moreover, conducted as one writer to another. It was two scribblers, burrowing into the craft.
Austin rose to the occasion like nobody’s business. He put everything else aside, and worked on the manuscript story by story. He was far from accepting every suggestion I made, but he engaged with my questions, and did whatever rewriting he felt was called for. Did it intently, with good grace, and quickly. I also remember him telling me he had one more story he wanted to include, but he hadn’t written it yet; it might be too experimental to be acceptable. . . . He launched into it anyway, and soon enough brought it over—and it knocked me out. It was fantastic. Not only did we hustle it into the book, it became the title story.
So working with Austin was the exact opposite of everything I’d heard. He wasn’t a diva, he didn’t create childish self-indulgent scenes, he didn’t test me and others at Anansi with unreasonable demands. We did serious literary work together, and he was a class act—as much as any Anansi author I’d worked with.
And then in 1971, the book was published. It looked handsome, we were all delighted—no problems. But immediately, Austin shifted gears. He started treating me and the Anansi staff (most of them working for nothing, in our grimy basement digs) like his private help. I couldn’t believe the transformation. A lot of it was just his manner; I don’t remember any cosmic publishing showdowns. But abruptly, the laser-focused craftsman and colleague-in-words had become a jerk who addressed his close collaborators of a few weeks previous as if they were slow-witted servants. I’m sure it was a defensive reflex he’d adopted for many years by then, to cope with the racism he met in Canada. You can’t judge his behaviour apart from the mistreatment he’d experienced at the hands of bigots. So it’s understandable from that viewpoint. But after we’d worked together with such mutual respect and co-operation, it was a drag to deal with. In retrospect, I’m glad I got to see Austin at his best to begin with—as a wholly committed writer of stature. That made it a shock when he reverted to the superior airs, but some of his publishers had probably seen nothing but those airs.
Austin’s subsequent books went to other publishers, which had always been the assumption when we did Free and Young. And while we overlapped at literary gatherings from time to time, we never had an occasion to move back into that deep collaboration. Austin had a line, though, that he liked to produce at those events. It was a combo of the provocateur and the fellow craftsman. “This is Dennis Lee,” he’d say, introducing me to people I already knew. “He was my editor once.” His eyes would sparkle wickedly. “And he was the worst slave-driver known to man.” He’d wait to see if he’d baited anybody’s liberal guilt with that one. But at the same time, there was a recognition I felt too—that we’d worked hard together, in the service of a marvellous book, and it was a good thing to have shared that for a while.
Cheers,
Dennis