The golden age of CanLit
Porter’s memoir shows our creators are just as flamboyant, talented, eccentric as anybody’s
It’s striking that it took a Hungarian refugee to showcase the best of Canada through publishing some of its finest books. But Anna Porter suggests that, as an outsider, she could see how writers and artists grapple with the vastness of our country and their place within it.
Porter, who fled Budapest with her mother and arrived in Canada half a century ago, is the renowned publisher who began her career at McClelland and Stewart, then co-founded Key Porter Books. As her hefty 480-page memoir proves, there’s hardly a prominent Canadian she didn’t know, promote, have drinks with and is now writing about. In Other Words: How I Fell in Love with Canada One Book at a Timetells the inside story of Canada’s golden age of publishing, starting amid the simmering nationalism of the late ’60s. That’s when our country began to fall in love with itself, creators were larger than life and books were not yet saleable “units” in big-box stores.
At its heart was Porter, who wasn’t much more than a proofreader when Jack McClelland hired her. But she was sharp and confident and thrilled to get paid for reading. From her first major blunder — she approved a book cover with author Ted Allan’s surname misspelled — she was soon working with luminaries such as Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler and Harold Town. A treasure trove of novels, art books and Canadiana ensued.
In Other Words is less about Porter than the writers, illustrators and photographers she worked with. Gossipy but never mean, she reveals that Sylvia Fraser leapt out of a cake at Irving Layton’s birthday party, and the “naturally shy” Farley Mowat crawled down a dinner table in his traditional kilt — with no underpants. Pierre Berton awkwardly flirted with Porter, Margaret Atwood read her palm, Earle Birney wrote her a poem and Margaret Trudeau would visit with her boys in tow. In Porter’s book, convicted criminal Conrad Black comes off a hero, poet Milton Acorn a bum, McClelland himself a brilliant visionary but ultimately a broken man.
Clearly, Porter has a special fondness for all of them and the works they created. “Publishing may not be a very profitable business,” she writes, “but where else can you spend time with such extraordinary people?”
In Other Wordsshows that our creators are just as talented, flamboyant and eccentric as anybody’s. For lovers of Canadian literature, this book is entertaining reading. For industry insiders, it’s essential.