In Other Words by Anna Porter

Author:Anna Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I. We usually celebrate their birthdays together and they both hate having birthdays so close to Christmas.

Michael’s World

EARLY IN 1980 my mother lost her job when the firm where she had worked as a draftsman was sold to a larger firm and the company sought what they called economies of scale. After some weeks of contemplating her future, she decided to take a few years off and volunteered to help look after Catherine and Julia. We agreed that this would give us a chance to travel without anxiety about a babysitter. By and large, we had been lucky with babysitters, but not always, and I was plagued with guilt every time I left on another business trip.

Julian and I signed up for a Butterfield & Robinson cruise up (not down) the Nile with a group of friends, including George and Martha Butterfield, pioneers of luxury travel, Peter Worthington, his wife Yvonne, Bill Graham,I and his wife Cathy. We could afford to join them because Julian had had a good year in law, including a famous obscenity case about Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, and we could leave the kids in my mother’s care.

It was a slow, peaceable journey that took us back some three thousand years to a time when the pharaohs ruled the known world and had the power to command armies of slaves to build monumental structures to remind them of death. There is nothing quite like walking through the ruins of an ancient civilization, in some ways not unlike our own, to put your life into perspective. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (“king of kings / look upon my works ye mighty and despair”) had helped me when I was struggling with English during my last year of university in Christchurch (earning a meagre living in a stamps shop, attending school at night). I was then still very much a Hungarian refugee, dropped into a foreign land, trying to figure out how to exist. What saved me was reading poems and stories that offered a more universal experience. Now, on this floating hotel, out of my ordinary existence, I was drawn back into the appeal of stories, some of which I had read before, some of which were new, and many not yet written. I knew I wanted to be back in publishing, not the limited Seal kind I had just signed up for, but publishing the way Jack had first taught me—the only way I knew—where you publish authors, not just books, and certainly not “units,” as the Bantam boys used to refer to books at sales conferences.

When we returned to Canada, I decided to talk to Michael de Pencier (Julian had known him since the University of Toronto, and Michael and his wife, Honor, were the only friends from Julian’s former marriage who attended our wedding) about publishing books, and Michael, a magazine publisher, seemed mildly interested. He confessed that he had once asked Jack how long it would take him to learn the business and Jack had said about ten or fifteen years.

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