National Post (National Edition)
Fulford on making an institution out of something that wasn’t.
MAKING A CANADIAN INSTITUTION OUT OF SOMETHING THAT WASN’T ONE
Recently the American publishing firm of McGraw-Hill, closing down its Canadian branch, made the friendly gesture of donating to Ryerson University’s library thousands of books it had been holding since 1970. That was when McGrawHill bought out the Ryerson Press and began operating in Canada as McGraw-Hill Ryerson.
It was not, in the larger scheme of things, a toweringly important purchase. Nevertheless, when the news of it came out, all hell broke loose. It was treated in many newspapers, and on the CBC, as a cruel blow to that tender and vulnerable plant, Canadian culture.
In 1970 Canadian writers, still buoyed by the euphoria of the centennial three years earlier, were beginning to see that Canadian literature had an interesting future. They were convinced that it depended on Canadian publishers who could be trusted to issue books by Canadians.
It was outrageous that a famous and ancient Canadian imprint should be casually destroyed — and by Americans. The Vietnam War was raging, intensifying the anti-American feelings always present in Canada. Moreover, the purchase played into the widespread fear that Canadian culture would be drowned by the United States.
The death of the Ryerson Press created a controversy that made it sound like a tragedy, the end of everything decent in our land. It exploded on the front pages of the Toronto Star. The army of Canadian cultural nationalists of that era, whose default position combined fierce aggression with whining victimhood, poured out interviews, articles, and letters to the editor.
Many authors declared that they would boycott the new firm, McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Al Purdy announced he wouldn’t fulfil a contract he had made with Ryerson to edit a book of poems. A royal commission was created by the Ontario government to consider the status of Canadianowned firms. Politicians and cultural bureaucrats were asked by reporters what they were doing to fix things.
But the truth of the situation was not as clear as the nationalists apparently believed.
The Ryerson Press began life in 1829 as the Methodist Book Room, an offshoot of the Methodist Church. It issued poets like Charles G. D. Roberts and Wilfred Campbell and published Catharine Parr Traill, prolific author of The Backwoods of Canada and The Female Emigrant’s Guide.
The firm’s name, adopted in 1919, honoured an illustrious editor, the Rev. Egerton Ryerson, a Methodist minister and educator, for whom the university is also named. Lorne Pierce, the chief editor from 1920 to 1960, raised the stature of the company by publishing Frederick Philip Grove, E. J. Pratt, A. M. Klein and P. K. Page.
Those deploring the death of Ryerson in 1970 carefully avoided one aspect of the story: It hadn’t been much of a literary beacon for some years. Most of us couldn’t remember when it had last published anything that attracted attention. It poured out uniformly dull books that were never well designed and appeared on paper that defied us to read it.
Because it was now a part of the United Church, and the United Church imagined itself as the moral arbiter of Canada, Ryerson novelists were limited (one of them told me) to describing characters as totally chaste. Good writers submitted their books to the Ryerson Press only after all other publishers rejected them, and maybe not even then. Reviewers found Ryerson fiction too embarrassing to condemn and booksellers grew sick of books they couldn’t sell.
Most of their output seemed destined for a place on the Worst Seller List, a never published ranking that’s burned into memories of everyone in the book business.
It occurred to me at the time that it was possible people mourning Ryerson had never held one of its mangy little books in their hands. But cultural nationalists in that era made noise for the sake of hearing themselves, or maybe just to prove they existed.
Mordecai Richler, as usual, spoke truth when others were mute.
He wondered why anyone would want to buy a firm as mouldy and decrepit as Ryerson. Perhaps the Americans were anxious, for some reason, to collect boring, outdated Canadian institutions. If they are that foolish, he said, with luck we might also sell them the RCMP Musical Ride.