University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2012
356 pp., illus., $45 hardcover
Ruth Panofsky’s careful cradle-to-grave biography of the Macmillan Company of Canada underlines the dilemma that faces publishers here: how to balance cultural and financial priorities. By the time Macmillan Canada finally disappeared in the late 1990s, its four presidents had spent nearly a century going through every stage of grief known to their industry — branch plant impotence, bleeding balance sheets, slumping sales, government indifference. Not to mention all those thin-skinned authors who miss deadlines, resent editors, or demand more publicity. As I came to the end, I was almost suffocated by the question: Why did they bother?
It is a question even more pressing today, when the swelling crowd of self-published authors and the receding tide of readers threaten any publisher with too much taste to produce a Fifty Shades of Grey clone.
Yet those Macmillan men did bother, and their efforts paid off. Beyond our borders, Canadian fiction is regarded as a distinctive genre. Its particular characteristics include poetic use of language, a taste for multi-generational stories (“Canadians love their grannies,” observed British biographer Victoria Glendinning, a former Giller Prize judge), and a sense of overpowering landscapes. Those traits owe much to the editorial choices made by Macmillan Canada.
What a colourful crew they were! From his appointment in 1905, founding president Frank Wise set the tone and modus operandi for the company. He recognized that the Canadian market was so small that only the sale of books from the British and American parent companies would provide any cash flow. He expanded textbook sales and copublished bestsellers by writers such as Jack London. But he also managed to slide onto his lists works he considered would help shape Canadian self-perception, including biographies and local histories.
By nature, Wise was cantankerous and rude — but it was questionable ethics rather than manners that ended his reign at Macmillans. He resigned in 1920, just in time to avoid the sack.
Wise’s successor was equally flamboyant: a witty, impulsive, and gregarious Englishman whose Rosedale, Toronto, parties were legendary. (His recreation room resembled the play deck area of an ocean liner, with drinks served from the side of a lifeboat). Hugh Eayrs’ ambitions to cultivate our literary landscape coincided with the cultural flowering that occurred here after the First World War. His bestsellers included Grey Owl’s books, Louis Hémont’s Maria Chapdelaine (in translation), and the Jalna novels of Mazo de la Roche. Within the cramped world of Canadian publishing, Macmillan Canada emerged as the industry leader — but the required superhuman effort led to Eayrs’ early death in 1940, aged forty-six.
Macmillans reached its apex with John Gray, the first Canadian-born president, who ran the company from 1946 to 1969. A more self-effacing individual than his swashbuckling predecessors, Gray helped shape a cultural identity for Canada that set this country apart from Britain and the United States — although books from those countries continued to dominate classrooms, libraries, and bookstores.
Like Wise and Eayrs, Gray nurtured his writers and took pleasure in their company, and he was deeply committed to fostering Canadian literature. He recognized that publishing is “a rough combination of art and business and guesswork” but was so committed to Canada that he turned down the chance to head Oxford University Press’s operation in New York. By the end of what Panofsky calls his “Resplendent Reign,” the Macmillan list included books by Robertson Davies, W.O. Mitchell, Adele Wiseman, Dennis Lee, Hugh MacLennan, Donald Creighton, and J.M.S. Careless.
Hugh Kane came next, but Macmillan Canada was already struggling. There was no succession plan, and the company was sideswiped by the national panic over foreign ownership. Within a few years, it was sold to Maclean-Hunter, then acquired by Gage Educational Publishing. Towards the end, editor Douglas Gibson clung to the Macmillan tradition of good books by Canadian authors (notably Alice Munro), but he soon decamped to Macmillan’s historic rival, McClelland and Stewart. The Macmillan imprint was gone by 1998.
Panofsky, who teaches English at Ryerson University, drops academic format and detachment only occasionally, most notably when she describes how the company relentlessly shafted female employees. Her constantly restated theme is that publishers are the architects of culture because they are the mediators and gatekeepers between writers and readers. She does not explore what makes a bestseller. She gives little sense of the larger Canadian publishing context as the industry expanded, with the help of government subsidies, and then contracted in the face of international pressures. She does not dwell on the gossip that always enlivens publishing events and mentions almost reluctantly that Frank Wise served a brief period in jail for forging visa documents.
Nevertheless, Panofsky has mined the Macmillan Canada archives for her picture of a company that for a century successfully straddled the profit-versus-literary-merit dilemma. And she has produced a valuable and insightful account of the way a handful of visionary men worked hard to shape a Canadian literary style and self-image.
This review appeared in the February-March 2013 issue of Canada's History magazine.
— Charlotte Gray (Read bio)
Charlotte Gray is a past chair of Canada's History Society and a past winner of the Pierre Berton Award.