Stories About Storytellers

Publishing Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Alistair MacLeod, Pierre Trudeau and Others

Douglas Gibson

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781770900493
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

The legendary Canadian book editor presents this "remarkable, four-decade romp through the back rooms of publishing" ( Toronto Sun ). Scottish-born Douglas Gibson was drawn to Canada by the writing of Stephen Leacock—and eventually made his way across the Atlantic to find a job in book publishing, where he edited a biography of none other than Leacock. But over the decades, his stellar career would lead him to work with many more of the country's leading literary lights. This memoir shares stories of working—and playing—alongside writers including Robertson Davies, Mavis Gallant, Brian Mulroney, Val Ross, W.O. Mitchell, and many more. Gibson reveals the projects he brainstormed for Barry Broadfoot; how he convinced future Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro to keep writing short stories; his early-morning phone call from a former prime minister; and his recollection of yanking a manuscript right out of Alistair MacLeod's reluctant hands—which ultimately garnered the author one of the world's most prestigious prizes for fiction. Insightful and entertaining, this collection of tales goes behind the scenes and between the covers to divulge a treasure trove of literary adventures. "He makes his life in publishing sound like great fun." — The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“I feed my fires with quotations.” — Murther & Walking Spirits

World of Wonders was the first book by Robertson Davies that ushered me, a young editor, into his world. Its title provides a neat summary for that world in 1975, where to me everything was a little brighter, a little more surprising, and much more interesting than the everyday world offstage. It was a larger-than-life place, fully floodlit, and Davies was at its centre, ideally cast for the role of Man of Letters.

For a start, he looked like Jehovah. Not since Alexander Graham Bell — or, a mischievous thought, Karl Marx — has there been a head where flowing white locks and well-shaped beard combined so artfully to produce a leonine look, perhaps the look of the bust of Mendelssohn that adorned the piano of the house where he grew up, learning how a true artist should appear. It is impossible to think of Robertson Davies without that trademark beard.

Then there was the voice. Elderly ladies who as girls in Kingston took part in theatricals in 1932 that were directed by young Rob Davies still talked more than seventy years later about his marvellous voice, and how impressively he could use it. Over the years thousands have heard that voice resound around theatres and lecture halls all over the world. He not only performed readings from his work, he gave so many speeches that I was able to publish a fine selection from them entitled One Half of Robertson Davies (1977). He provided the title, based on the old Chinese proverb that “The tongue is one half of a man: but the other half is the heart.” (I believe that quotation is genuine; he was not above inventing scholarly origins for his titles, such as Fifth Business, for the pleasure of misdirecting academic researchers.)

Within the limits I later discovered at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he enjoyed exercising that voice. In the 1980s I once saw him use it to great effect from a stage lectern, to dispel the friendly, avuncular effect he had chosen to create at the outset. He had just begun to give a literary talk when a news photographer bustled to the front of the house and started to scuttle around his feet, popping up like a gopher to flash shots from below that were certain to be revealing nostril shots, and were blindingly distracting. Davies stopped his reading and took off his glasses. His normally beguiling voice snapped out, “Would you please not do that!” and he beamed down a terrible smile. The photographer, a member of a profession not renowned for its shyness, leaped away as if scalded, as indeed he had been.

From a surprisingly early age, even during his teenage years at Queen’s, that voice had chosen to adopt an English accent. Introducing her selection of interviews with those who knew Davies, Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic, Val Ross recalls meeting him in the McClelland & Stewart office in 1991: “He spoke with an English inflection to his vowels — remarkable for someone born in Thamesville, Ontario, who had spent seven of his eight decades on this side of the Atlantic.”

Remarkable, indeed. But then this was the boy who at Upper Canada College briefly sported a monocle, and at both Queen’s and Balliol College, Oxford, dressed in a floppy-hatted way that seemed designed to attract attention. He carried everything off with style, every stride, every gracious turn to meet an acquaintance, every introduction, every bow, and every raised eyebrow. More than one literary critic has suggested that perhaps this fine novelist’s greatest character creation was himself, the iconic figure who strolled in an old-fashioned tweed overcoat through Toronto’s Queen’s Park or the nearby campus, brandishing a cane. After his death his daughter, Jennifer Surridge, suggested that “one of the reasons he developed his personality, one of the reasons he developed a character [her word] at Upper Canada College, was he didn’t like people to learn things about his personal life.”

“Charisma embraces; style excludes.” — Question Time

Certainly it seemed to me that later in his life, as the beard grew snow-white, he used the Jehovah image as a protective shield. It failed miserably (blew up in his face, you might say) on the opening night of the Stratford Festival — he was a perpetual member of the board, and took his supportive duties seriously — when a bold woman emerged from the crowd outside the theatre to give his beard a tug, turning to report happily, “Yeah, it’s real!”

I was partly to blame for a later incident in Winnipeg. He had been reluctant to undertake the full national tour to promote his latest novel. Was it really necessary? he wondered. I found myself forced to point out that his friend and rival, W.O. Mitchell (who loved touring) had been setting the country — and his new book sales — on fire, while his own sales languished in comparison. So he gamely agreed to go on a pre-Christmas cross-country promotional tour, and, as luck would have it, at the end of a tiring day of interviews he ran into a waitress (evidently not a student of the best Canadian writing) who received him raucously: “Hey, are you Santa Claus?”

“No, madam,” he responded. “But I have sharp claws!”

Novelist Timothy Findley was a friend who watched the public performance over the years. At the grand celebration of Robertson Davies’ life that we held in Convocation Hall in Toronto the week of his death, he perceptively suggested that perhaps only the Davies family knew how much it cost him in emotional energy to keep up the role of Robertson Davies.

Very early in our working relationship, which deepened over the years into a friendship as we worked on eight books together — my copy of The Cunning Man is inscribed in his fine italic hand “For Douglas Gibson (‘my partner frequent’) Sairy Gamp a.k.a. Rob Davies.” — I caught a glimpse of this, a peek behind the costume. We were together in a side room at the Art Gallery of Ontario, about to face a crowd of perhaps 400 people assembled to hear him read from his new novel, World of Wonders (or possibly The Rebel Angels). I was to introduce him, and was pacing nervously around the room where he and I waited, as the hum of the assembling audience rose in our ears. My twitchy pacing took me close to the stolid figure of the author, and I was astonished to hear that composed, Jehovah-like figure uttering low, shuddering breaths.

I stopped pacing, and looked at him in disbelief.

“Butterflies?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, mournfully.

“Still? After all these years, and all the hundreds of speeches?”

“Yes,” he added, gravely. “Always.”

This was a revelation, and a very encouraging one. Even Robertson Davies got really nervous before a speech! Further questions revealed that he thought it essential to be keyed up before a performance. And for him, the ultimate professional, every reading or lecture or speech was just that, a performance. He had too much respect for the craft of the performer — lecturer, actor, singer, musician, or magician — to wander on unrehearsed and unprepared and unexcited. But those shuddering breaths! Who would have thought it, or even believed me, when he swept confidently onto the stage, like a galleon under full sail.

“How fully does one ever know anybody?” — Murther & Walking Spirits

The quotations that punctuate this essay, like the one above, come from James Channing Shaw’s selection, The Quotable Robertson Davies, which I published with pride in 2005. That wide-ranging book, with comments from “Academia” alphabetically all the way to “Youth,” seems to me to provide two very important lessons about him. First, that he wrote a great deal, on many subjects; a book full of selected quotations from a slim, narrowly defined body of work would make little sense. Much more important, it shows that from his early years as a writer Davies sprinkled his plays, essays, and novels with witty epigrams and shrewd comments on the strange ways that human beings behave. A writer who is striving to produce epigrams (such as the apposite line “A great writer must give us either great feeling from the heart or great wisdom from the head”) is very different, I suggest, from a writer who just gets on, unambitiously, with telling the story or making the case. Davies liked to aim at the role of oracle, and the selection of quotations show how often he hit the mark, giving the readers of his novels memorable flashes of wisdom to ponder.

“Whom the gods hate they keep forever young.” — Fifth Business

From his earliest years, many of his friends were aware that he was exceptional. Some even tended to store his letters, confident that a great future — of some sort — awaited him. They were not to know that he had several lives to live before he found his greatest role.

Robertson Davies: Man of Myth is the title of Judith Skelton Grant’s masterly 1994 biography. Her opening paragraph gives the perfect summary of his career — or, more properly, his careers:

While he was growing up, his father, Rupert, a newspaper owner and editor, moved the family from the village of Thamesville to the town of Renfrew and later the city of Kingston, all in Ontario. Davies was educated at Upper Canada College in Toronto, Queen’s University in Kingston, and Balliol College in Oxford. A brief career as an actor was followed by more than twenty years as a journalist (he was both a columnist and editor of the Peterborough Examiner), and for another twenty years he was master of Canada’s first graduate college and a professor of drama at the University of Toronto.

All this, she notes, fails to include his lives as a playwright, and above all as a novelist, the life that brought him world fame.

“Canada . . . the Home of Modified Rapture” — The Lyre of Orpheus

Davies knew only too well that world fame was dangerous for a Canadian. He was all too familiar with the Canadian “tall poppy” syndrome, where those standing above the crowd are likely to be cut down; he had been a tall poppy most of his life, from the days when the Polish kids in Renfrew, a town he hated, used to beat up the smart kid who lived in the big house. One of his favourite stories was of attending a Vancouver cocktail party when the momentous news was shouted into the room that Lester Pearson had won the Nobel Peace Prize. The wondering silence that followed was broken by an older woman who rattled the ice in her glass fiercely as she declaimed, “Well! Who does he think he is?”

Alice Munro understands these things well. In 1978, when I published Who Do You Think You Are?, a title that resonated with Canadians, the American and the British publishers (alarmed by the fact that Malcolm Bradbury had recently used the same title) preferred to publish the book with the meaningless title The Beggar Maid. Rob was amused by this, and sympathetic to Alice, whose work he admired. Later he was kind to his fellow author from Ontario at a PEN event in New York in 1986. Alice recalled him inviting her for a drink. “And,” she says in Val Ross’s book, “it was like being with a member of my family. It was very comfortable. I felt so relaxed! And he was making me relaxed, of course, by letting me have the sense of our being alike, from small-town southwest Ontario.”

Then, the Alice Munro touch.

“Yet we are not really alike. We come from different classes. I was the kind of girl who would have come to do his mother’s ironing . . .”

“You can’t really form an opinion about somebody until you have seen the place where they live.” — The Cunning Man

In July 2008 Jane and I went on a literary tour of Southwestern Ontario (designated “Sowesto” by Greg Curnoe, an artist based in its centre, the city of London). We first visited Alice Munro country, following the old pioneer Huron Line from Stratford to Goderich, and paying special attention to the stretch of flat farming country watered by the many-branched Maitland between her birthplace in Wingham and her current home in Clinton. We roamed around her father’s old haunts at Blyth, where we saw a play based on a Munro short story, and we had dinner with Alic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• STEPHEN LEACOCK (1869–1944): Professor, Humorist, and Immigration Agent
• HUGH MacLENNAN (1907–1990): Teacher, Novelist, Essayist, and Cottager
• R.D. SYMONS (1898–1973): Cowboy, Writer, Artist, and Conservationist
• HAROLD HORWOOD (1923–2006): Newfoundlander, Novelist, Naturalist, and Neglected Genius
• BARRY BROADFOOT (1926–2003): Newspaper Guy, and Oral Historian
• MORLEY CALLAGHAN (1903–1990): Novelist, Short Story Writer, and Torontonian
• W.O. MITCHELL (1914–1998): Character, and Creator of Characters
• ROBERTSON DAVIES (1913–1995): Man of Letters, Oracle, and Ugly Duckling
• JACK HODGINS (1938–): Islander, Teacher, and Inventor of Worlds
• JAMES HOUSTON (1921–2005): Artist, Author, Hunter, and Igloo Dweller
• CHARLES RITCHIE (1906–1995): Diplomat, Diarist, and Charming Dissembler
• PIERRE TRUDEAU (1919–2000): Prime Minister, Author, and Haunting Icon
• MAVIS GALLANT (1922–): Short Story Writer, Canadian, and Parisienne
• PETER C. NEWMAN (1929–): Refugee, Journalist, and Power-Seeking Missile
• BRIAN MULRONEY (1939–): Boy from Baie Comeau, Prime Minister, and Author
• ROBERT HUNTER (1941–2005): Greenpeace Founder, Writer, and Very Merry Man
• ALISTAIR MacLEOD (1936–): Teacher, Fiction Writer, Stone Carver, and Dancer
• PAUL MARTIN (1938–): Successful Businessman, Very Successful Finance Minister, and Prime Minister
• PETER GZOWSKI (1936–2002): Writer, and Voice
• VAL ROSS (1950–2008): Journalist, Author, and Maker of Rules
• ALICE MUNRO (1931–): Not Bad Short Story Writer
• Epilogue: “What Happens After My Book Is Published?”
• Afterword and Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright