A golden age for literature
Taking a close look at the curious case of famed Canadian publisher McLelland and Stewart
Two recent happenings have brought the story of McClelland & Stewart, Canada’s venerable publishing house, back into the news and public attention. The two events were the death of Avie Bennett (1928-2017), who owned and ran M&S for 15 years, and the appearance — almost simultaneously — of Elaine Dewer’s investigative study, The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada’s Best Publisher and the Best Part of our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational (Biblioasis).
That news took me back to the 1970s when McClelland & Stewart was in the Canadian catbird seat and extraordinary things were happening in the field of Canadian writing. “Those were the days, my friend” when the flamboyant Jack McClelland frequently made headlines in his management of Canada’s leading literary publisher.
Dewer’s book is an attempt to critique the “handover” or sellout of a once great and culturally important Canadian publisher. To my mind at least, the recent changes in ownership scarcely merit such investigative concern. Times have clearly changed. Dewers’ subtitle describes her ‘take’ in a nutshell. In dwelling on the machinations that led to the sale of M&S to German media giant Bertelsmann AG, she tends to ignore the long and many-sided saga of Canadian cultural enterprise and self-invention over the last half century. Hers is an expose without context; moreover, it is a story without a villain. Where for instance is Penguin Books in her probe. Though an international firm, Penguin Canada, like many other firms, promoted many Canadian writers during the heyday of M&S and they did their work well.
That long view began with a small Toronto publishing operation started up by two ambitious young men trained by the Methodist Book and Publishing Company. McClelland & Stewart grew slowly over the decades into the largest publishing firm in English Canada; hence, it was primed to take the lead when, in the late 1960s, our country experienced its remarkable Renaissance of literary output.
By the early 1970s (and in the wake of our optimistic Centennial celebrations) Canada was suddenly blessed by a range of fine writers and their impressive books — Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Al Purdy, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Kroetsch, Farley Mowat, Thomas Raddall, Michel Tremblay, Tomson Highway, among many others, took the lead and told a variety of stories that Canadians from coast to coast could identify with and hold dear. M&S was the publisher of many of their books.
It was a golden age. With the increasing attention to Canadian culture came government grants to support publishers and new sources of income for authors. Universities like Trent held frequent public readings and literary conferences, and they invited writers to stay for extended visits. In the midst of this rich period of growth stood Jack McClelland. He was like the maestro of a many-ringed, cultural circus. He became famous for his publishing stunts and promotions. The newspapers loved him. His authors loved him. It was, however, always a struggle to survive financially, even for M&S.
Jack first put the firm up for sale in 1971; later he would deem it “an albatross.” Few observers at the time realized that, though Jack was a lovable carnie and a great guy, he could be a poor businessman; for all his success in wooing authors to his team, he made some bad deals over the years. Take, for instance, his promise to allow Peter C. Newman to leave the firm for Penguin Books without any fuss or penalty just as Newman’s selling power was about to hit overdrive with his new Hudson Bay Company books.
The recently publishedcorrespondence between Jack McClell and and Margaret Laurence reveals much about his personal complexity and his occasionally wrong-headed decisions. Despite large government grants and the splendid roster of writers at his command, the firm was always on the edge of financial trouble. Jack ran the firm from 1952 to 1985 before selling it to real estate mogul, Avie Bennett.
The Avie Bennett era was certainly less flamboyant. Armed with a love of reading and Canada, but with no previous experience in publishing, Bennett took over the struggling firm and ran it for 15 years. Yearly he poured his own money into keeping the business afloat. His quiet care and attention ushered in a second golden age for the company. All the while, however, the book business in general was, in Roy MacSkimming ’s words, “stagger[ing] under tsunamis of change” that undercut small book stores, saw the arrival of E-books, and brought new words like “platform” (as in Internet platforms) into contemporary parlance.
Little wonder that Bennett opted to retire. The business world of publishing had become much more complicated during his tenure. In 2000 he arranged “a most unusual deal”—he sold MMM & SSS to the University of Toronto. U of T received 75 per cent of the firm’s worth, while Random House Canada got the other 25 per cent. RHC agreed to run the publishing operation while the University became a kind of benevolent trustee, though in truth the financial assets were no big prize. Bennett described the deal thusly: “To achieve the survival of one great Canadian institution, I have given it to the care of another great Canadian institution.” It was a curious step toward a complicated future.
Only later — in 2012 — did Random House acquire U of T’s portion, but long before that time Bertelmann’s had bought out Random House. The deal put an end of sorts to the longstanding saga of Canadian government protection of the country’s publishing industry.
How bad was all this for M&S? How bad was it for the country? Had a major cultural asset been allowed to fall into international hands? How devious was the deal and how sloppy was the process? Had Bennett, and then the University of Toronto, managed a clever end-run around the Canadian government’s attempt to protect an invaluable “cultural asset?” This is certainly Dewer’s argument, though she does admit that she has not found any real villains in the deal.
I am inclined to be less upset at this strange set of changes. ‘Bigwigs and bureaucrats’ there were aplenty in the process, but history confirms that M&S was a vital cog in the growth of Canadian culture in the twentieth century. In fact it continues to perform as such, though it now works as a separate imprint under the Bertelmann umbrella.
Nevertheless, I see our writing culture as extraordinarily alive, though the publishing sector is still small and vital; it was, in fact, never large. As a close observer of the Canadian literary scene, I confess that I am regularly heartened and at times astonished by the growth of our literary culture in this brave new century. Indeed, I can scarcely keep up with the emergence, year by year, of new writers of fiction, drama, poetry, television and film in this country. Looking at the Canadian publishing business only from an M&S perspective, those two golden ages — first under Jack McClelland and then under Avie Bennett, provided a firm base for the development of our literary culture today.
We know now what we can achieve as a country and we can see that our writers, new and established, are achievers of the first order. Government subsidies will likely continue because, in a country with a relatively small population, they are helpful and often necessary in various sectors of the publishing business and in all the other creative industries. The creative army is busily at work in all parts of the country, even as the new world of SVOD (streaming video on demand) redefines the creation and distribution of cultural products around us.