Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland

Sarah Robertson is the trade, scholarly, and reference editor of the
Canadian Book Review Annual.

Jack McClelland’s remarkable association with McClelland & Stewart
began in 1946 and ended in 1985, the year he sold control of the company
to Avie Bennett. Spanning the years 1949 to 1982, this collection is a
lively distillation of McClelland’s correspondence with politicians
and policymakers; with New Canadian Library editor Malcolm Ross; and
most especially with Canadian writers, including such M&S notables as
Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, Earle Birney, Al Purdy, Brian
Moore, Irving Layton, Norman Levine, Gabrielle Roy, and Leonard Cohen.
About 65 percent of the letters are McClelland’s; those of his
correspondents account for the rest.

This is not a scholarly edition. The editor is decidedly minimalist in
his use of headnotes and footnotes. While his approach makes for an
appealingly uncluttered text, there are occasions when further
explication would have provided some welcome orientation. In addition to
brief introductions to each of the book’s four sections, Solecki
contributes a general introduction, and the preface is by McClelland
himself.

In his dealings with authors (a conspicuous few of whom were equipped
with oversized egos), McClelland was diplomatic but no pushover. Only
the hypercritical and royalty obsessed Birney was capable of eliciting
from his publisher bouts of unvarnished epistolary rage. More
characteristic of the McClelland style was the blend of tact and
outspokenness he brought to bear on a professional feud involving Purdy
and Harold Town.

Over the years, McClelland’s hopes for Canada’s publishing industry
waxed and waned. In a 1974 letter to Richler, he confidently predicts
that the forces of nationalism will result in an erosion of foreign
ownership in the industry. A mere four years latter, in a letter to
Pierre Berton, he seems resigned to a manifestly different reality:
“As a post nationalist, ... I believe in Canadian unity and the
survival of the country, but I am no longer satisfied that it can be
achieved with the freight of any consideration of economic and political
independence.”

A highlight of this volume is McClelland’s correspondence with
Laurence. In one letter, he vents his disgust at the failure of The
Stone Angel to capture a Governor General’s Award (“It’s a goddamn
disgrace”). Their mutual admiration and respect is evident even as
they wage battle over his promotion of a list that ranked the 100
“greatest” Canadian novels. Fittingly, it is Laurence who pays
tribute to McClelland in a postscript: “He is a Canadian pioneer. He
has risked his life for us, Canadian writers.”