Jennifer LoveGrove

Imagining Canadian Literature: Selected Letters of Jack McClelland, Edited by Sam Solecki (Key Porter, 1998).

 your gallantry in the face of overwhelming
 odds is not forgotten.  The drums roil as 
 we salute your incomparable style of 
 Effortless Heart and Toronto Soul, and 
 the One named Beauty ... You were the real
 Prime Minister of Canada.  You still are.  
 And even through it's all gone down the 
 tubes, the country that you govern will 
 never fall apart."

             - from "Letter to J. McClelland"
               by Leonard Cohen.

In 1946 Jack McClelland joined the publishing firm that his father had co-founded. Within six years he was running the place, with a nationalistic cultural exuberance that fuelled and fostered the emergence of Canada's literary canon. He published the work of Margaret Laurence, Al Purdy, Irving Layton, Gabrielle Roy, and Leonard Cohen, among others. His dramatic promotional flair, combined with his relentless dedication and devotion to publishing the best in Canadian literature, has established him as a Canadian figure of incalculable cultural significance.

Now, just over a dozen years since McClelland & Stewart's sale to Avie Bennett, Sam Solecki, editor and University of Toronto literature professor, has edited a collection of four decades of Jack McClelland's correspondence. The letters range from affectionate notes to Margaret Laurence, "you are one of the relatively small group of people whom I love and admire"(p. 279) to exasperated retorts to Earle Bimey, "You are a real horse's ass"(p. 146). Through this expansive collection, the reader takes on the role of cultural voyeur, becoming privv to both the world of the Canadian publishing industry as well as the personalities of some of Canada's best writers. At times businesslike and abrupt, and at other moments cham-ting and intimate, this book of letters succeeds in being both scholarly as well as personal. It evokes a vivid portrait of one driven by a passion for literature, with enough creative energy and public flair to sustain it for four decades, not only on the behalf of McClelland & Stewart, abut for an entire country.

Jack McClelland considers himself to be a "typical book reader"(p. vii) and states explicitly in the book's preface "that assumption often guided me in many years as a book publisher"(p. vii). Educated at the University of Toronto, he received what he calls "a cheap [postwar] B.A."(p. I)and entered the publishing industry with no tangible qualifications other than his own interest, energy and ambition. His parents advised against the decision, as it would never ensure him any amount of fortune. Undaunted, he worked from the bottom up, leaming every aspect of the business along with all of its uncertainties and exhilerations. In reading his letters, it becomes evident that part of his ultimate success as a publisher was his ability to anticipate the many aspects affecting the publishing industry, ranging from current political climate, to critical reactions and the impact of reviews, to the habits of both readers and booksellers, to dealing with moody writers.

The book is structured into time periods, charting the evolution of Jack McClelland's literary legacy. The first section is "The Forties and Fifties: The Education of a Publisher", wherein he solidifies his vision of a distinctly Canadian publishing house. It was during this time that he and Malcolm Ross established the New Canadian Library series, which reprinted in paperback Canadian classics by such writers as Morley Callaghan and Stephen Leacock. While not yet substantially diverging from what other Canadian publishers were doing, his energy and comniitment during this time facilitated the glorious success of "The Sixties: The Canadian Publishers." It was during these years that Jack McClelland invigorated McClelland & Stewart with a new group of poets and novelists, a consistent and talented group who would come to establish the company's vibrant reputation. These years were filled with "high-profile book launches and tours that became McClelland & Stewart trademarks"(p. 42). The letters to and from Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, Phyllis Webb, Irving Layton, and Robertson Davies reflect both this excitement as well as a significant amount of stress around issues of finances, censorship and the Canadian book market. He says in one particularly ambivalent letter to Leonard Cohen about his controversial novel Beautiful Losers, "It's wild and incredible and marvellously well-written, and at the same time appalling, shocking, revolting, disgusting, sick and just maybe it's a great novel"(p. 102). The range of emotions prevalent in this section of the book reflects the extraordinary growth of McClelland and Stewart during this time; within ten years they went from publishing about twenty books a year to over seventy, a tremendous leap which occasionally filled Jack with trepidation. He writes to his mentor Alfred A. Knopf, "Perhaps I am just despondent because it is January and we have about sixty titles on our Spring List. I wish we had ten"(p. II 5). The next section, "The Seventies: The Publisher as Phoenix" continues to chronicle McClelland and Stewart's presence in the public sphere, from their recurrent financial instability, to the details of a literary conference that Jack arranged on the Canadian novel one which Sam Solecki refers to as "the only conference on Canadian literature that ever generated any significant disagreement and controversy"(p. 138). The final section is "The Eighties: The End of an Era", a time fraught with the financial crises which eventually added to circumstances surrounding the sale of the company. These letters reflect Jack's gradual disillusionment with the industry. One blunt letter from Farley Mowat in 1980 summed their mood up with this vivid image:

 Shit, I feel much as you do.  Brassed off,
 fed up, fucked out and finished.  Thinking
 of abandoning this place and sticking 
 myself into Port Hope in a wheelchair and
 drinkina myself to an early grave.  The
 reasons are different, the net result
 much the same.(p. 263).

Of course, neither did so, although the book does contain a smattering of references to Jack McClelland's rather prolific drinking, though never without an undertone of dignified wit and literary charm.

Jack's philosophy behind the company was that McClelland and Stewart published "authors, not books"(p. xiv). His relationship was not with a product, a cultural commodity, but rather with literature itself and those who created it. This dedication to the writers and their work is what fuelled Jack McClelland's publishing momentum, and not the unstable finances. In fact, there is very little in the book about McClelland and Stewart's eventual financial decline. Instead, the collection offers the reader Jack's personality and passion, and how these traits were manifested in his relationships with writers, with Canada's policy markers and politicians, and with the public. "His loyalty to his writers was legendary," writes editor Solecki, and this loyalty lends a charming, respectful and playful element to many of the letters. The same affectionate loya ty a so encourages writers to remain with McClelland and Stewart, as evident when Phyllis Webb was consideringthe withdrawal of herpoetry manuscript:

 If you want the script back, say so in
 your next letter and 1;11 airmail it to
 you the day your letter arrives.  But I
 do wish you would think it over very
 seriously.  The sensible course would be
 to sit on the manuscript and make whatever
 possible improvements you can in it over
 the next eight to ten months, but maybe
 there comes a time when one doesn't want
 to be sensible; or maybe too we are the
 ones not being sensible and the manuscript
 is right as it stands.  The decision is
 yours either way; regardless of the
 outcome, I still love you dearly!(p. 60).

On the other hand, Jack's loyalties occasionally turned feisty when provoked by matters such as Leonard Cohen's panic after the publication of the controversial Beautiful Losers: "migod, Leonard, it is a bonehead time for you to lose your cool head on this thing"(p. 108), or by Earle Birney's frequent antagonism; "you, after Christ knows how many years, remain blissfully ignorant of everything but your own paranoia"(p. 146). This type of foray into the emotional nature of the relationship between writing and publishing is what engages the reader most, whether Jack is reassuring or reprimanding "his" writers. He is rather like an ideal parent to them; he is by turns stem, loyal, and affectionate. In fact, Solecki refers to publishers as "the midwives of culture"(p. xi), a metaphor which perfectly suits Jack McClelland's fostering of an important body of Canadian literature.

His promotional tactics and his outspokenness give Jack McClelland a larger-than-life persona, one that was frequently present in the Canadian media. For the launch of Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, he organized an actual divining contest, and to promote Sylvia Fraser's The Emperor's Virgin, the pair "rode up Yonge Street in a chariot during an unexpected spring snowstorm"(p. 24). For publicity tours, Jack sometimes wore his "CanLit" jacket, made of fabric printed with a collage of book covers. In fact, Robert Fulford aligned Jack's public self with a "ringmaster in a threering circus"(p. 4 1). Margaret Atwood called him a "swashbuckling pirate", emphasizing that "He took chances on authors, published them with fanfare, and promoted them in daring and original ways"(p. i). His flair for promotion helped to keep his writers in the public sphere, and McClelland and Stewart came to be a Canadian household name. Also included in the collection are examples of his correspondence with Canada's politicians, journalists, policy-makers, critics and scholars. He was influential and vocal about literary criticism, awards juries and arts-funding policies. During the early 1980s, he wrote to then-Governor General Edward Schreyer regarding the Governor General's Literary Awards, which in his opinion had "failed lamentably"(p. 272), and the letter was published as a column in MacLean's magazine. He publicly asks:

 But please consider what your lunkhead
 judges have done! ... I won't even mention
 the authors that they have failed to
 include in the poetry category because
 that situation has already been categorized
 on the CBC as a national disgrace.  Have
 the rules and the policies been changed?
 Is the purpose, now, to deliberately stir
 up controversy?  Or is the purpose to
 denigrate the Governor General's Literary
 Awards to such a degree that the program
 can be quietly discontinued in the
 future? (p. 273).

However, he also knew when to stay out of the media. During a period of discouraged ambivalence in the early 1960s,joumalist and critic William A. Deacon requests an interview with McClelland on the state of Canadiana publishing, and he reluctantly declines. He states honestly, "I have in the last six months or so become quite disenchanted with the Canadian publishing business. I am glad to say I am beginning to recover from my gloomalthough not entirely-but during this period I have been disinclined to say anything on the subject that I would want to read in public print"(p. 69). Furthermore, Jack McClelland rarely chose to respond to unfavourable reviews of McClelland and Stewart books, excepting one scathing letter to the Toronto Star.

 One of your book reviewers, Robert Fulford,
 recently revealed in print that he was a
 school drop-out at age thirteen.  This
 confirmed my suspicions of a good many
 years ... Now that Mr. Fulford is regularly
 employed, it seems to me that he should make
 up for his lack of formal schooling by
 investing in one or more of the excellent
 adult education courses now available.
 (p. 228-9).

His sardonic wit prevails throughout the book, as does his legendary and consistent nationalistic vision. At the core of his publishing philosophy was his desire to establish a body of Canadian literature that would remain at the centre of the Canadian identity. His cultural nationalism was tireless and essential, particularly during his early years at McClelland and Stewart, when the Canadian literary identity was still unrealized. In the late 1950s, he writes, "we are Canadians ... if we want to continue to be Canadian for very long we can't follow a course of passive acceptance of everything American and everything that seems easy"(p. 30). It was during this time thathe andMalcolmRoss began to create the New Canadian Library, which printed paperback editions of what they considered Canadian "classics." Titles in this series include books ranging from Morley Callaghan's More Joy in Heaven to Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. This series began to establish Canada's literary canon; educators began to use the books in literature courses, and many of the out-of-print books were frequently reprinted. Jack wrote to Robertson Davies regarding the series, "I agree with you that the NCL gives a fairly impressive picture of the writing that has been done in this country"(p. 71). He also arranged the infamous literary conference in Calgary in 1978 that set out to determine the hundred greatest Canadian novels. The conference caused substantial dissent amongst many writers and critics, particularly since the majority of writers present at the conference were those published by McClelland and Stewart. Despite the lack of consensus among participants, the proceedings generated national attention on the idea of canonical writing, tinged with a bit of literary controversy.

Jack McClelland never shrank from conflict, and was always the first to admit any mistake on his part. When McClelland and Stewart actually lost Margaret Atwood's manuscript of The Edible Woman for two years, he replied:

 Ours is an incredibly sloppy, inefficient
 organization.  So is every other
 publishing house that I have ever had any
 dealings with.  That's the way it is. 
 The one point in which we differ with many
 houses, however, is that it has always
 been our active policy that the author is
 the most important person we deal with,
 and that the author's interests are more
 important than ours(p. 155).

He also adamantly defended the company's anti-censorship stance, particularly in reference to Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. One reader from Ontario wrote to Jack to protest the publication of the sexually explicit novel, saying "I don't know who Mr. Cohen is, I wish him no harm, but he must be a sick man to write such garbage-and you made a grave error of judgement when you allowed his writings to bear the stamp of McClelland and Stewart Ltd."(p. 111). Jack responded promptly, with grace and interest, outlining Cohen's accomplishments and reputation, as well as his own stance against censorship, finally suggesting that the man examine "the 'pulps' in the newsstand instead of attacking the work of a serious writer"(p. 113).

The controversy avoided in this collection of letters is that of the eventual financial decline of McClelland and Stewart. There are passing references to monetary crises and the ensuing pressures, but it is never discussed in detail or at length. More could certainly have been included about the sale of the firm and the consequent changes, but would have esulted in a different kind of book. Instead, Imagining Canadian Literature focuses on profiling a pioneer in the Canadian publishing industry, and documenting his important legacy. The enthusiasm with which Jack McClelland approached the publisher's role is the same enthusiasm generated int he reader of his correspondence. Reading these letters is like eavesdropping on his conversations, especially since he dictated them aloud, sometimes, he admits, late at night, drunk and slurring. And now, as the nature of communications in publishing and in general is drastically changing, such collections of letters may be the last of their kind. Just as Jack's correspondence represented a large and detailed volume of his communication, the equivalent today is being replaced by emails, voice mails, conference calls and taxes. Reading Imagining Canadian Literature is an act of cultural voyeurism, one that is thereby tinged with nostalgia, both for the evocative feeling of rifling through someone else's letters, and also for the, earlier days of some of Canada's great writers.

Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland succeeds because Jack's personality barrels through the text and into the reader's consciousness. His wit and generosity in terms of energy, time, passion and humour has driven not only this book, but also the publication of many extraordinary and important works of Canadian literature. Perhaps Margaret Laurence best encapsulates his contribution to Canada's culture: "Please do not ever underestimate what you have done in your years as publisher, Jack. Damn near singlehandedly, you transformed the Canadian publishing scene from one of mediocrity and dullness to one of enormous interest and vitality"(p. 282).

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