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Jack McClelland Remembered Dana Cook is a Toronto freelance editor, indexer and collector of literary encounters. His compilations have appeared in a wide range of North American newspapers, magazines and journals. |
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Thomas Raddall, novelist - Getting into publishing At the urging of the Canadian Authors Association, and of my Toronto publishers, I attended the 1946 convention of the CAA in Toronto.... John McClelland was a slim man, sixtyish, hardheaded, precise, the obvious business mind of the [McClelland and Stewart] partnership. George Stewart was the jolly good fellow, always laughing, with a large face and frame, gleaming dark eyes, and white hair.... ...they were giving "a little luncheon" in my honour at the Granite Club. It turned out to be eighteen people, among them...young Jack McClelland, who had served in the navy during the late war and was now getting acquainted with the publishing business. from In My Time: A Memoir, by Thomas Raddall (McClelland and Stewart, 1976) William Weintraub, journalist and film maker - Partying [letter to Mordecai Richler] ...Met Herman Gollob, editor of Little, Brown, Boston, at Leonard Cohen-Irving Layton party. Herman blithely told me that the incomparable funnybook, Why Rock the Boat?, by William Weintraub, will be coming out in the United States of America (how about that?) on August 21. Jack McClelland had given me the impression that it was coming out in Canada in October, but at the party Jack was too busy guzzling and pinching asses to discuss this anomaly.... (Montreal, 1961) from Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950s, by William Weintraub (McClelland and Stewart, 2001) Phyllis Grosskurth, biographer and academic - Canada Council critic None of us realized that we were on the brink of a literary renaissance, one that was galvanized by Jack McClelland. I first met him when I received the Governor General’s Award [for John Addington Symonds: A Biography]: he jumped up at the ceremony and made an impromptu speech, chastising the Canada Council for not doing more to celebrate our authors. Within a decade, thanks in large part to his encouragement, Canada was producing some of the finest writers anywhere. (Ottawa, 1964) from ELUSIVE SUBJECT: A Biographer’s Life, by Phyllis Grosskurth (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1999) Harold Horwood, journalist and novelist - Bad advice to writers ...I was working on the fifth and final draft of my first novel, Tomorrow will be Sunday.... ...I had sent it to McClelland Stewart. After a very long delay they had accepted it, and paid me an advance of $500. Then Jack McClelland had invited me to lunch, and explained the kind of revisions he thought it required. Take the sex out of it, he said, and write it as a straight growing-up-in-the-outports book. What he wanted, it seemed to me, was a sort of Newfoundland Anne of Green Gables. He also said that if I wanted to write about homosexuality, it should be something like City of Night, which I later read, discovering it to be a tiresome account of male street prostitution in an American city. I didn’t blame Jack for any of this. His job was to publish books that would help his firm escape bankruptcy. But the last thing I needed was Jack telling me which books to write. We parted amicably. I believed he was dead wrong about a lot of the advice he urged upon his writers. In spite of that he was the major force in Canadian publishing, then struggling to survive, and some years later I joined other writers in helping him to get the Molson Prize at a time when we believed he needed both the money and the psychological reassurance that the award would bring him. (Toronto, mid-1960s) from Among the Lions: A Lamb in the Literary Jungle, by Harold Horwood (Killick Press/Creative Publishers, 2000) Matt Cohen, novelist - Office libation By the time I actually met McClelland, I was utterly intimidated by his public image as a heavy-drinking chain-smoking crocodile-skinned fighter pilot turned publisher and swordsman. When I went into his office he was sitting at his desk talking on his telephone, shirtsleeves rolled up and collar open. He was sipping a glassful of clear liquid, which he kept replenishing from a thermos reputed to contain straight vodka except when he was feeling ornery, at which times it was filled with grain alcohol. He waved me to sit down, terminated his conversation, and turned to me saying, "So, you’re the new hotshot." He squashed the cigarette he was smoking into an overcrowded ashtray and started a new one. Not to be outdone I began rolling a cigarette of my own, my shaking hands spraying tobacco all over his rug. "Well, I haven’t read it [Johnny Crackle Sings], but I hear it’s great and that’s all I need to know." (Toronto, early 1970s) from Typing: A Life in 26 Keys, by Matt Cohen (Random House, 2000) Floyd Chalmers, journalist and editor - Lacked business competence Jack McClelland, head of McClelland and Stewart, the largest Canadian-owned book-publishing house in the country, approached me on at least two occasions to sell out to M-H [Maclean-Hunter]. He brought in financial statements, and they offered a sad and uninviting picture. I could not propose to the board that we should include McClelland and Stewart in the M-H empire. Jack was certainly the most aggressive and imaginative of Canadian publishers, but he had no matching competence as a business executive. He told me frankly that if he could sell McClelland and Stewart, he would retire from the publishing business completely. We had no one in M-H who could replace him; the future of McClelland and Stewart without Jack McClelland did not look promising. (Toronto, mid-1970s) from Both Sides of the Street: One Man’s Life in Business and the Arts in Canada, by Floyd Chalmers (Macmillan, 1983)
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