Stories About Storytellers Read online

  “What sort of stories are they telling you, Barry?”

  He reached into his bag, the one that had held the fancy little tape recorder that was proving to be so successful at recording people without intimidating them. He pulled out fistfuls of manuscript and passed them over.

  “These are just samples of the sort of stuff I’m getting. I’m taking them with me to see Jack McClelland on Monday for lunch.”

  Right there at the table I started to read. It was a Hollywood moment, the one that never happens in real life, when a young editor reads a few pages and knows — just knows — that he is looking at an amazing bestseller, a book that will change people’s lives, change Canadian history.

  “Barry, can you let me have this material for the rest of the weekend? If you give me your number in Toronto I’ll make sure you get this material back in time for your meeting with Jack McClelland.”

  The meeting with Jack never happened. I dashed back to the Doubleday office after lunch, talked to the manager, David Nelson, about the stories, and encouraged him to read them and to show them to his father, George, a former publisher and a Depression survivor. By Monday morning I was able to make an offer to Barry to publish his book, which he accepted, and we were off on a fascinating journey together, rewriting the history of Canada from 1929 to 1939.

  We were inventing a new type of book as we went along, one that allows me now to take intelligent readers backstage, to see, in detail, how an editor and author work together on a book when the editor’s role is unusually active.

  Recently, the Chicago writer, Studs Terkel, had written a successful book, Working, which had been based on taped interviews with ordinary people. But apart from showing that ordinary people talking about their lives can produce fascinating stories, Terkel’s book — which devoted an entire chapter to one single, named speaker — was in no way a model for us.

  The unique type of book that Barry and I invented worked like this. Barry collected stories on his tiny tape recorder, promising the speakers anonymity, and simply not bothering with names. As for getting “permission,” it was all based on common sense. “I’m collecting stories about the Depression. If you care to talk about what happened to you, this little tape recorder here will pick up what you say, and you may find your story — or part of it — in my book. Okay?” (It always was okay — although one speaker later wrote to Barry to tell him that his story — much edited and condensed — was recognized by his boss, who was not especially pleased.)

  Barry would then transcribe these interviews with his “liberated” typewriter, on paper so cheap that it could indeed have come from “a Russian tractor factory.” He was a fast, inelegant typist, who resented conventions like using upper case letters at the start of sentences, and his typewriter sometimes made holes in the cheap paper, so the pages were arguably the ugliest ever submitted in the history of Canadian publishing. And there were so many pages, hundreds and hundreds of them, that they were shipped by Barry in apple carton boxes. The pages may have looked terrible, but they smelled wonderful. They stood, in a wobbly pile, about a metre high.

  Together, we soon hit on some basic rules. The stories would all be anonymous (although we broke that rule, once, to acknowledge the story by James Gray, the author of The Winter Years). Each story would be given its own title (my job, with an assist from Barry, if he had a better idea). Barry’s own voice would be heard — always in italics — only in his general introductions to the book and to the individual chapters, and in the very rare stage directions that occurred, such as (“He breaks down and cries”).

  The rest of the book would consist of first-person stories told by the ordinary men and women he encountered, told in their own words. That was key. Shortening a story to get rid of repetition (and you’d be amazed how much time we all spend repeating ourselves as we talk) or to clarify the storyline (“Oh, I should have mentioned that this was a really big guy” sometimes required the insertion of “this big guy” earlier in the story) was legitimate. Adding any words was not legitimate. Ever. Even if it was clear that the speaker was searching for the word “supercilious” to describe the relief official dealing with her mother, if that word never came up, it was never used in her story. And the shortening process sometimes left just a one-hundred-word story standing, after 4,000 words had been whittled down and thrown away.

  I found that it was like carving a sculpture. Or, at a ratio of forty paragraphs read for every one selected, it was like making pure maple syrup, the ideal Canadian comparison.

  Clearly, on a project of this apple-carton scale, none of the usual top-of-desk rules applied (and there were, in those days, no desktop rules to apply to non-existent computers, so everything was done by hand, in pen or in pencil, right on the cheap paper). I took over the front room of our house (Sally was understanding, and this was before the kids came along, which would have made it impossible). As I read each story, I would cut it, in pencil, as much as seemed necessary to leave us with a really great story, without a single word to spare. If a fine title sprang out of it, I’d add the title at the top. And alongside the title, I’d add notes on the chapters that the story might fit into.

  For instance, a selected story might be about a boy (marked KIDS, accordingly), growing up on a Saskatchewan farm lost to the drought (FARMS), so it had two potential piles to go on. Kids’ stories lay over by the window, farm stories down in the fourth row in the centre of the floor.

  In due course, the shuffling and dealing on to the floor revealed that there were enough stories for a chapter on this, but not on that, which should be combined with this theme, and so on. When the chapter themes were established, the hard work of arranging the order of the stories inside each chapter began. I recognize now that it called for the same skills that come into play as I try to find the best order for a book of short stories by Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. Each chapter had to start with a strong story, have stories with useful background information early on, then have a variety of voice, subject matter, pace, length, seriousness, or humour that in order forms a pleasing narrative arc, until the final story, which has to be strong, with a final line that will ring in your head — as when a hobo’s tale of the lonely life on the road ends with the words “I was seventeen years old.”

  Each chapter, in other words, had to be arranged like a short story collection, which in a sense it was. The skills of editing fiction and editing non-fiction constantly overlap, as young editors are sometimes surprised to hear.

  As for the overall shape of Barry’s book, the order of the chapters posed a major editorial challenge. Obviously, stories from the early years of the Depression needed an early position, while later stories — about taking part in the Regina Riot or joining up to fight in the Spanish Civil War — deserved a place further on in the book. But, most important, we were dealing with our readers’ minds, bringing them stories when we thought that they’d be ready for them. We knew, for instance, that the chapter on “Rough Justice” (where a greedy landlord in the Maritimes was tarred and gravelled one night for trying to raise a widow’s rent, or where two cheating employers in Edmonton were badly beaten up and robbed) would shock people if it came too early in the book. After reading many chapters of decent people being badly treated without fighting back, however, the reader was primed for the “Rough Justice” chapter, cheering on the resisters.

  Finally, I was able to pick the paper-clipped chapters off the floor, and deliver the messy manuscript to a printer. And here is a piece of history. In those days, children, people typed manuscripts, then they were edited with marks in pen or usually pencil, and then they went to people called “typesetters,” who retyped the whole manuscript, from beginning to end. In this case, the ill-typed, heavily edited manuscript was so illegible that the typesetter/printer (Bob Hamilton, whom I worked with later) pleaded with me to set up shop in their building so that I could translate the constant tricky words right on the
spot.

  And there — if I had any doubt about the power of the stories in the book — I received inspiring confirmation of the book’s appeal. The typesetters — hardened old pros — simply could not get enough of Barry’s stories, and talked excitedly about them over coffee and lunch. It was clear that we were on to a winner. So clear that we actually set Barry to work on gathering stories about the Second World War — for a book later entitled Six War Years — long before we published Ten Lost Years in the fall of 1973.

  I’ve gone into great detail here about the editorial role in piecing Barry’s books together, but let me be clear that I was the junior partner in all this. The historian Christopher Moore has stressed what stands out about Barry’s achievement. “He really had a gift for engaging interviewees, and getting them to open up; not everyone who goes out with a tape recorder understands how vital that is. And he really did the work.” That forty to one ratio stood him in good stead as he produced a string of bestsellers with other editors.

  During the summer of 1973, while I was attending the AGM of the Canadian Author’s Association, I told the assembled authors that they should get ready to work with new technology. In this case the new technology I was talking about was not a computer but Barry’s tiny portable tape recorder. In my role of cocky young editor, I told them about the surefire success of the forthcoming book Ten Lost Years, which was going to open up the new field of “oral history.”

  Listening to my bold predictions was Hugh Kane, the head of Macmillan of Canada. When all of these predictions came true, he was the moving spirit behind the staid and very respectable Macmillan deciding to hire the cocky kid to be their editorial director at the age of thirty. So working with Barry and Ten Lost Years had a huge impact on my career.

  A less permanent impact was to make me an academic authority in the field of oral history. My experience shaping Ten Lost Years (and Six War Years in 1974) established me as the Canadian publisher of oral history. As a result I was invited to give a serious paper on oral history at the Canadian Learned Societies’ Conference in Montreal in 1975, and later it was published — gasp — in a scholarly journal in Australia devoted to oral history. I like to think that there may be historians on the banks of the Murrumbidgee who to this day are quoting me as the unchallenged Canadian expert on oral history.

  In publishing terms, because I knew how much work was involved in creating a successful oral history book, I was able to steer clear of many people who thought that their new tape recorder was an Aladdin’s lamp route to a book. Later I did publish successful books by Bill McNeil, based on his successful CBC Radio series “Voice of the Pioneer.” I even published three books with the unstoppable Allan Anderson, Remembering the Farm and Salt Water, Fresh Water and Roughnecks and Wildcatters.

  Allan was an old CBC hand and a heroic “lost weekend” drinker. When I wrote his obituary in Quill & Quire, his family forgave me for joking that if he knew the country like the back of his hand, “it was because the back of his hand had come in touch with so much of it.” And when I say “unstoppable,” I mean it. He once returned, chastened, from a national publicity tour. He confessed to me that on a live, thirty-minute Calgary TV show the host introduced him and got to ask the question, “Allan, why did you write Remembering the Farm?” Twenty-nine minutes later the host, despairing of arm waving, had to bellow an interruption, “I’m sorry our time is up

  . . . we’ve been talking to . . .” Allan had talked unstoppably straight through the entire half-hour show.

  I developed the theory that Allan was a successful interviewer because people, desperate to stop his chattering flow, in self-defence would start to blurt out amazingly revealing stories.

  Barry, by contrast, in his low-key, what-the-hell way, was a very easy guy to talk to — in a coffee shop, a bar, on a train, or in all the places he struck up a conversation/interview, often being invited home to continue it. He was born for the role, and I know that when he visited our Doubleday office in Toronto, people really liked him. One of our sales guys liked him so much, in fact, that later in Vancouver he confided in Barry that he was travelling from hotel to hotel in his western territory, accompanied by two very lovely, very sexy French-Canadian identical twins. Barry confirmed to me that he had met the glamorous young ladies in question, but admitted that — even as a highly skilled interviewer — he had not found a way to discover the details of the arrangement the three of them enjoyed.

  Ten Lost Years was a phenomenal success. It flew off the shelves, to the extent that its success provoked articles wondering how on earth a book by an unknown author, about the Depression, for God’s sake, could have such a success.

  I have an answer. Many of the stories are so good you will never forget them. The book is still in print forty years after it appeared. The hardcover edition sold more than 200,000 copies and the paperback has sold much more than that. But here is why I use the word “phenomenal.” In every other case, when a hardcover book is brought out in paperback, for half the price, all sales of the hardcover stop dead. In this case, long after the paperback edition of Ten Lost Years had come out, Doubleday was still reprinting the hardcover!

  Why? I think I know. Word about the book was spreading slowly to people who bought very few books and never looked at book reviews. But they had known the Depression, and they had heard that this was a true and honest book about their lives, their times — and they wanted it. And to them — people of their generation — a book was a hardcover book.

  I worked with Barry — in precisely the same way — to produce Six War Years 1939–1945: Memories of Canadians at Home and Abroad (1974), which was also designed by the brilliant Brant Cowie. I even continued to see it through for Doubleday after I had left to work at Macmillan.

  In his Introduction to Six War Years, Barry took a typically modest stab at explaining why the book was important. “Wars are for generals to fight,” he said, “and we keep things going in the few yards around us that we call our own. . . .” Later he wrote, “these stories, amazing though they may be, happened to the ordinary anonymous people you pass on the street every day. . . . This is not my book; it is your book, and I am passing it on.”

  The academic historians, of course, did not like what he was doing. To them, he was dealing in legend and superstition, stories that had no written records to prove their reliability. Pierre Berton, whom I published, ran into the same hostility and ignored it, taking comfort in his giant sales.

  History itself came to Barry Broadfoot’s aid when in 2010 there was a court case concerning Robert Semrau, a Canadian soldier accused of killing a badly wounded Taliban prisoner. A smart journalist recalled that there were stories about this sort of thing in Six War Years. They would never have made it into regimental histories or officially documented accounts, yet the anonymity of Barry’s books produced two stories worth recalling in this context.

  There is the story of Jan, a Jewish kid between age twelve and fourteen who spoke German and acted as an interpreter when a Canadian major was interrogating a sneering captive German lieutenant.

  “There were five of us in the room of this house, the major, me, the guard, Jan and the prisoner. The major says to me, ‘We’re not going to get anything out of this shitheel.’ And Jan, without a word, grabs up the major’s Luger, which is lying beside him on the cot where the major is sitting, and bam, he blows this Jerry’s head off. I mean, what there is left of a head, well it wouldn’t fill a can of soup. Don’t mean to be crude. There’s blood all over the place. Everywhere.

  “What are going to do? Shoot the kid? You don’t court-martial him. No the major says, ‘We’ll forget this ever happened,’ and the guard and I agree.”

  The second story concerns a group of Canadians holed up for the night in trenches not far from the Germans. Out in no man’s land someone is screaming, on and on.

  “It went on for two hours and it seemed like ten. You see, we tho
ught he’d die. Not often did they last that long. But this one wouldn’t die.

  “Finally a guy says he is going out there. He’s an Indian, and I think he was from around Cochrane, near Calgary, or maybe his name is Cochrane. An Indian — he gets killed about a month later. Anyway, the lieutenant doesn’t say anything and this Indian slips out and Jeezus! It is one dark night and I ask the lieutenant if we should ask for a couple of flares just to help him, and he says no.

  “In about fifteen minutes, all of a sudden the screaming stops. Just like that. Like shutting off a tap. A light switch. In about five minutes this Cochrane comes back and he says, ‘Damn it to hell. What a shitty way to earn a living.’

  “The sergeant after a while asks who it was out there, and Cochrane says he doesn’t know. Well, was it one of our guys? Cochrane says he doesn’t know. Was it a German? He says how the hell should he know.

  “Then — and you might not think there are some very moving moments in a war in the mud and wet and shit — but Cochrane says, ‘All I know was that there was a dying soldier out there and I just put my hand on his forehead and said a little prayer and then I put the knife right into his throat. I was just helping a poor soldier along the way.’”

  After Six War Years (another huge success, though without the long-running stage play that keeps Ten Lost Years rolling along), Barry brought out seven other books. For me, the most impressive was Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame, about what Canada did to its Japanese-Canadian citizens during the war. He told me that he didn’t expect to make any money from it. He was writing it as a matter of conscience, writing out of his own shame at our behaviour.