Jack, A Life with Writers: The Story of Jack McClelland by James King

REVIEWS reading not only for those professionally involved in postcolo­ nialism but also for the wider academic public. NO TE *This review was commissioned before Professor Levenson became review editor of English Studies in Canada. CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON / C a rleto n U n iversity James King. Jack, A Life with Writers: The Story of Jack M c­ Clelland. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1999. 435. $34.95 cloth. In 1981, plagued by debts and losses and pondering the sale of his firm, Jack McClelland was asked by his colleague Hugh Kane for a modest pension. Now seventy years old, Kane had left McClelland & Stewart to become president of Macmillan (1969-76) and had briefly rejoined the firm before his retire­ ment. Jack told his mentor and severest critic, “Throughout my career, I thought I could turn this around. So did you. You failed. So have I. I just don’t have any magic solutions” (350). For almost forty years, much of Jack’s magic had generated innovation and role-playing: first as a young naval lieutenant pretending to attack the Queen Mary, then as the publishersponsor of the infamous National Conference on the Canadian Novel at Calgary in 1978, and later as the publisher-hero, togaclad , riding down Yonge Street one cold March day with Sylvia Fraser in tow. There was another Jack, shy and reflective, nurs­ ing his asthm a and concealing his private devils, who was worn down by a profession known for its risks, and, in Canada, an in­ dustry always in transition and crisis. James King’s biography of Canada’s most famous publisher verges on tragedy with its great, flawed protagonist who in retrospect saw his publishing career as a “recipe for financial disaster” (xxiiij that ended with his departure from the family firm begun by his father in 1906. This is only one of the surprises in this book. Already well known for his literary biographies, including one on Margaret Laurence, James King utilized the volumi­ nous archives of McClelland & Stewart at McMaster University 153 ESC 28, 2002 and interviewed McClelland, his colleagues, and his authors to produce a chronicle crammed with correspondence and office memos that give a stunning first-hand view of Jack. (Some of his letters appeared in Sam Solecki’s Imagining Canadian Liter­ ature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland [1998].) Despite McClelland’s stipulation that his private life was off limits — bi­ ographies of living persons may unintentionally hint at secrets that cannot be divulged— King pulls no punches about crit­ icizing Jack’s poor financial skills and his tendency to permit the office to operate at near chaos level. Starting with an illumi­ nating preface, King tells an accurate and lively story, but un­ fortunately we hear nothing about Jack in his semi-retirement. Otherwise, the book has only minor omissions or typos; for ex­ ample, Lome Pierce was not connected with Macmillan (259), Dave Godfrey is not mentioned as the editor of the Canadian Writers Series, the ground-breaking The Trial of Stephen Truscott is inadvertently not mentioned by its title in the passage (169-74) discussing its publication, and philosophy (311) and vis-ibly (369) were left with line-end hyphens. In the 1950s McClelland decided to “create a Canadiancentred publishing industry” (xvii), and he shed the agencies that provided the financial cushion for him and so many Cana­ dian publishers. The problem always was a shortage of working capital because even good revenues could not sustain the ex­ penses of warehousing, marketing, and advances to authors. In his financial crunch of 1971 when he put M & S up for sale, the public learned of the larger crisis confronting Toronto publish­ ers, caused by inefficient management, downsizing of the On­ tario textbook market, and the aggressive entry into Canada by the multinationals. In the nationalistic outcry over the loss of Canadian ownership in the cultural industries, the Ontario gov­ ernment stepped in with loans. McClelland was saved for the time being, but continued to rely on the banks, and several cor­ porate and private investors, and raised cash by well-publicized warehouse sales. In 1985 he sold out to Avie Bennett, who in 2000 arranged a deal that...

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