The Burgess Shale by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Margaret Atwood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781772123043
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press

The poster for The All-Star Eclectic Typewriter Revue.

The first, the All-Star Eclectic Typewriter Revue, took place possibly in 1974. Or maybe 1975. Or it could even have been 1976. A poster for it exists—it is hanging on one of my walls. (For the very youthful: posters, in that age before the internet, were one of the ways we got the word out about events. We used to sneak around at night and staple them up on hoardings, and place them in bookstores. Where are the posters of yesteryear? On the internet, if anywhere.) The month and the date are on this poster, but not the year, so I don’t know exactly which year it was.

The Revue was a fundraising evening put on by the assembled prose writers of English Canada in aid of the Writers’ Union, which had just been formed in 1973, again with the help of F.R. Scott and his constitution-writing skills. One reason it was formed was the absence of literary agents. Writers had no one to represent their interests—the interests of writers, as opposed to those of publishers, readers, and libraries. The three latter felt in their hearts that simply being read was honour enough for a writer: no money need be forthcoming. The writers, on the other hand, took the quaint and possibly dangerously Communist position that what they did was work, and they ought to be remunerated by those making use of that work.

Plus ça change. Those holding the view that writers’ work is like air, to be had for the breathing, now include assorted internet pundits and a great many universities, those bastions of freedom of speech and fair dealing. But I digress.

The Writers’ Union itself was an aftermath of the Ontario Royal Commission on Book Publishing, held in 1972. And the Commission was a response to the sale of The Ryerson Press— a venerable institution, and one of the few Canadian-owned publishers—to the US firm of McGraw-Hill in 1970, which caused an outcry in the writing and publishing communities. Several young writers, Graeme Gibson among them, scaled the statue of Edgerton Ryerson in Toronto and draped it in an American flag. This caper—and the attendant poster, stapled upon hoardings—made the newspapers. Writing and publishing had come to seem very important to the country’s image of itself: it was deemed crucial to have a homegrown publishing industry that would publish books by Canadians and about Canada.

That wasn’t self-evident in 1959, but by 1969 it was an accepted attitude. The generation of 60s writers had helped to create that attitude, for better or for worse. For worse? Yes, there is always a worse. No rule makes it so that just because a book is by a Canadian and published in Canada, it is therefore well written and engrossing. But never mind: every country produces work that is ultimately not of much interest, so why should Canada be an exception?

Thus, in the mid-70s, there was the infant Writers’ Union, and, as always, it was in pursuit of cash to keep itself going.

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