Transcript: Richard Stursberg
My interview with the Canadian author and media executive
Canadians who write books, or cover books, or read books will know that something is wrong with our literary industry. But a new book documents just how far off the rails publishing has gone. My guest on the program this week is the author of that book, and he says our fundamental problem is an erosion of national identity.
Richard Stursberg is a Canadian author and media executive, and the former head of English services for the CBC. His new book is Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It’s great to have you on. I read your book with a lot of interest. I think many authors in this country will do so. For listeners who may not be familiar, the title of the book is a play on philosopher George Grant’s Lament for a Nation. This is a 1965 essay that argued that our sovereignty had been swallowed by technology, by individualism from liberalism, by American capitalism. You note that we are currently in the position where some 95% or more of Canada’s book industry is dominated by foreign multinationals. You argue that this has widespread consequences for us as a country. To start today, Richard, can you take us back to a time when CanLit was thriving? Describe for us what our literary culture once looked like.
RS: Sure. So, I divide the time periods into more or less the second half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st. If you were to go back to the 1970s, 1980s, what you had was essentially a very substantial Canadian literary culture, both fiction and non-fiction, in which people were writing books that were widely read by Canadians.
In fiction, for example, it was the period of time when, maybe it’s fair to say the canon of the most famous literary figures in Canada emerged — Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, on and on. It was important, at the time, for publishers to take risks on very young, very unknown writers, and in fact, they would take quite serious risks. For example, when McClelland & Stewart decided to publish Beautiful Losers, a Leonard Cohen book, it was described by some people as the most revolting book ever published in Canada. And many, many bookstores would not carry it because they were afraid of being sued for criminal libel — I mean, for criminal obscenity, which was then a criminal matter in those days. But nevertheless, Jack McClelland pursued it and was prepared to take whatever was required to be able to defend the book in court. Now that’s a level of daring, in terms of younger writers and fiction and where it’s going.
In non-fiction, it was extraordinary. My favourite example is probably Pierre Berton’s books on the railways. There were two of them. Each one sold, if you can believe it, 300,000 copies. Now, adjusting for population size, English Canada was about half the size it is now. That would be the equivalent of selling 600,000 books today.
TH: Astonishing.
RS: A bestseller for a history book right now in Canada? If you could make 20,000, you’d be doing well. So, there was a period where Canadian literature, most fiction and non-fiction, was widely consumed and widely spoke to a Canadian audience that was very, very preoccupied with knowing who we are and what we are doing here and how it’s all going.
If you come forward now to the first quarter of the 21st century, then, as you point out, what’s happened is the Canadian publishing industry has shrunk down. It takes now only about 5% of the market, and the rest is dominated by multinationals who are really not terribly interested in Canadian books. They’re here to sell American books, British books. And then, if there is a successful writer that has been pioneered by an independent Canadian publisher, they’re happy to steal him or her, because they can outbid them with no difficulty in terms of the advances.
But the other thing that’s happened — which is actually the result in part of that, and part of other things as well — is that the kind of non-fiction books that are being written have changed dramatically. So, if you look at the bestsellers written by Canadians, for non-fiction, the traditional issues about history, biography, culture, economics, and politics are largely gone. They have been replaced with memoir, self-improvement, how-to books, cookbooks. When you look at what’s happened in fiction, for the books that are bestsellers by Canadians in English Canada … Whereas in the past, all the Alice Munros and the Margaret Atwoods and the Mordecai Richlers were essentially literary fiction — it’s now largely replaced with genre. So, it’s romance, it’s romantasy, it’s detective stories, it’s science fiction, that kind of stuff.
The other thing that’s happened, which is interesting, is that in the second half of the 20th century, the successful novels were overwhelmingly — with maybe the exception of Michael Ondaatje — preoccupied with Canada, with Canadians. They were set in Canada, the characters were Canadian. Now that’s largely gone. Even very successful and very gifted novelists, like Esi Edugyan, for example, only her first novel was set in Canada. And since then, no. You can see this pattern through all of the successful Canadian fiction writers. Their novels are increasingly not set in Canada. If you didn’t know what was going on, you would not know that this was about Canada or that they were Canadian.
TH: Yeah, it’s fascinating. If a country’s literary culture is a country talking to itself, as you point out, we’re not saying very much right now. There’s a number of factors that have contributed to this collapse, including the nature of the book business itself, government policy, the overall cultural climate, the books themselves. We will pull all of these threads. But just to start, a lot of people in my circles blame Trudeau for this. But you point out in the book that our problems really do pre-date the Trudeau Liberals. What role did the Harper Conservatives play here?
RS: The Harper Conservatives, I think, were essentially indifferent to cultural questions. They didn’t really care, and they had a kind of tin ear for it. You may recall there was a famous crack by Stephen Harper when he was Prime Minister. There was some kind of cocktail reception, I think in Montreal, to celebrate Canadian films. He said, “Nobody likes to see all those people in their tuxedos drinking champagne at public expense.” Of course, what it really was was a kind of attack on cultural elites. That’s what it was. The effect of it was that it hit Quebec, in a way where people said, “I don’t think this is our kind of guy. We’re really, really interested in cultural questions.” You can see the difference in Quebec. So, I think it was not just an indifference, but sometimes an outright hostility.
What happened during the Harper period was that most of the rules that had been put in place to help deal with this — i.e. the structural rules on ownership — were essentially ignored. Any publisher who wanted to buy a Canadian publisher, they could do it. Anybody who wanted to set up in Canada, they could do so, whether they were Canadian-owned or not. Which was, in fact, a violation of the policy that had been pursued for many, many years. The other thing that happened was that even the financial supports that were put in place for the book industry were essentially frozen or shrunk, so that the amount of real money that was available to support Canadian books, whether from the Canada Council or from the Book Fund, shrank in real terms.
By the time that the Justin Trudeau government came to power, there was a kind of crisis, not just in books, but in all the big Canadian cultural media — whether it was television, whether it was newspapers, all this sort of stuff. And the difficulty with the Justin Trudeau people was they didn’t even seem to understand what the nature of the problem was. They thought, “We’ll throw some money at it and that’ll solve it.” Which, of course — that would not solve anything because it was a structural problem. Then what happened was things just deteriorated and deteriorated and deteriorated to the point where we are now. It’s not just that books are in trouble, private broadcasting is essentially insolvent in the country. The newspapers are in gigantic trouble, as you know better than me. The magazine industry is essentially dead. So, all the big Canadian media — at the end of Justin Trudeau’s efforts and his claims that they were friendly to Canadian culture — proved to be a total sham.
TH: Returning to this question of elites, there’s a funny paradox here. Because when you talk about the authors in this country, we’d be hard pressed to describe them as elites in any way that made sense. I mean, you talk about the book advances being between $5,000 and $15,000, and books take a couple of years to produce. Authors are not making any money. But the politics that they have embraced are elite politics. This is identity politics. It came out of Ivy League institutions in the States. I interviewed the Canadian philosopher Andy Lamey a while back for the Globe and Mail. He had that book The Canadian Mind. In it he wrote, “In Canada, we have sometimes been forced to choose between how we feel about our country and how we feel about good books.” For many years, I’ve reviewed books. At a certain point, the Canadian books that I got sent were so dull and so dogmatic as to be almost unreadable. What happened, in your view?
