Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 237

As expected, rumours of a ghostwriter grow, fuelled in large measure by Globe & Mail columnist John Barber naming Roy MacGregor as the phantom. Short hours later, the description was scrubbed with "ghostwriter" changed to "editorial consultant". This "editor's note" has been appended to the story online:

Roy MacGregor acted as an editorial consultant on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hockey history book. An earlier version of this story referred to Mr. MacGregor as a "ghostwriter."

I repeat my belief that Mr Harper wrote the forthcoming book himself. Yep, everything except the title... and he might just get around to that, too.

Not to say that some polishing was in order... or that it wasn't done by another hand.

No, I suggest that Mr Barber's piece contains something significant that is being overlooked in all this speculation over the spectral:

The Prime Minister had no role in choosing a publisher for his book, according to Toronto lawyer Michael Levine, who brokered the deal. "These were all my decisions, these were not his decisions at all," Mr. Levine said, adding it was "extremely important" to achieve North American distribution for the English-language edition. "Obviously, we’re in a very transitional time in the publishing business here, and I talked to everybody, but I felt this was the best deal for him because of the enormous commitment on both the American and Canadian side of the border," Mr. Levine said.

An observation:

Last February, a few days before the decision was to be made, Bruce Westwood of Westwood Creative Agency – Mr Levine is Chairman – told the Toronto Star that it was the prime minister who would choose the publisher: "There’s a lot of interest in the book. We are in negotiations. We have to go with [Harper’s] decision."

Emphasis mine.

A query:

To what does Mr Levine refer when he speaks of the enormous commitment on both the American and Canadian side of the border? I'm going to say that it's Simon & Schuster. Conspiracy theorists will say that all begins with Republican consultant Frank Luntz, who in May 2006 advised our new Conservative Party to feed on Canadians’ love of the game.

Full disclosure: I've paid many a bill as a ghostwriter myself. Make of that what you will.

Note: In writing this piece I was twice logged out "from another location". Again, make of that what you will.

Related posts:

Ignatieff's Ink and Harper's Hockey Book
The Harper Hockey Book Watch (Updated!)
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Eight, Day 253
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 39
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 222

Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 236
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 27
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 77
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Fin (et raison d'être)

Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 222

A big tip of the hat and nod of respect this fine weekend to journalist Stephen Maher for doggedly pursuing a story which so many others picked up, dropped, allowed to escape and subsequently forgot. I refer, of course, to our prime minister's long promised history of the earliest days of the Dominion's national winter sport.

Last we heard – eleven months ago – the book had been subject to a bidding war. Mr Harper himself was to have chosen the winning publisher on 1 March 2012, but as noted on year nine, day 39 of this watch, no publisher stepped forward to claim victory. The prime minister's representative in this matter, Westwood Creative Agency, was similarly silent. Thanks to Mr Maher we now know that the lucky girl was Simon & Schuster Canada. Publication will take place sometime this year.

Today's news raises questions. The first concerns the participation of Greg Stoicoiu, a researcher who, like Preston Manning's George Pepki, has next to no web presence.

Mr Stoicolu has posted a few pleasant sketches on the Elboya Heights Community Association's Facebook page and had a whimsical cartoon published in the March 2012 edition of the Society for International Hockey Research's online Bulletin.* I should add that he is also amongst the dozens of people thanked for providing information on movie exhibition in Reel Time: Movie Exhibitors and Movie Audiences in Prairie Canada, 1896 to 1986, just out from Athabaska University Press.

Given the prime minister's day job and self-imposed constraint which allowed the history a mere fifteen minutes work a day, Mr Stoicoiu's contribution must be very substantial. Skeptics have raised the spectre of ghostwriters. I've never been a believer myself, and am more than willing to take the word of Bruce Westwood, founder and president of Westwood Creative Agency. As reported in Mr Maher's article:

“Remember this has not been ghosted,” he [Bruce Westwood] said. “This is Harper’s writing. It’s surprisingly good.”

Surprisingly good. How's that for hype!

Never mind. What really caught my eye was Mr Westwood's comment that he's read only parts of the manuscript.

Only parts? Of what most certainly will be one of the biggest Canadian books of the decade?

It is finished, right?

* With the news, some are again making a big deal of the prime minister's membership in the Society. Once more, I point out that membership is open to anyone with thirty bucks to spare.

Related posts:

Ignatieff's Ink and Harper's Hockey Book
The Harper Hockey Book Watch (Updated!)
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Eight, Day 253
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 39

Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 236
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 237
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 27
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 77
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Fin (et raison d'être)

A Lionel Shapiro Cover Cavalcade

Either you hit the jackpot or get nowhere. There are much better writers than myself who can't even get to first base for coffee money.

– Lionel Shapiro, 1956

Having endured all 351 pages of The Sixth of June, I doubt I'll ever find the strength to open another Lionel Shapiro book – but if I do, A Star Danced, Gertrude Lawrence's 1945 "autobiography" will be the one. The English chanteuse maintained that the words were her own, but credit really belongs to Lionel Shapiro, ghostwriter.

A Star Danced was not the war correspondent's first book. The previous year saw They Left the Back Door Open, a rushed, but worthwhile piece of reportage on the Allies in Italy.

Shapiro turned next to fiction with The Sealed Verdict (Doubleday, 1947), "the tale of Major Lashley, whose reward for his brilliant and successful prosecution of a German war criminal was an official commendation... and an unexplainable feeling of guilt." One 1948 wire service story puts the first printing at 250,000, while another reports that Paramount had paid as much as US$200,000 for the rights. Though Walter Winchell thought The Sealed Verdict had the makings of an important film, no one was particularly taken by the results. The Bantam movie tie-in, which was never reprinted, marks the last time the novel saw print.

For Winchell, Torch for a Dark Journey (Doubleday, 1950) was "better than his first click The Sealed Verdict," but this time Hollywood didn't come calling. However, the novel did make it to the small screen in a 1950 Philco Television Playhouse broadcast. A California bookseller currently lists a souvenir of the effort, an inscribed copy of the first edition:

Signed for Delbert Mann - to whom I am greatly indebted for an incisive job of direction in the first dramatization of this book - and for whom I confidently predict an immense future in the world of dramatic arts. Lionel Shapiro, Nov. 24, 1950.

Mann was director of the television adaptation. His future in the world of dramatic arts wasn't exactly immense, but he did win the 1955 Best Director Oscar for Marty. And the further dramatizations? Still we wait.

Published in 1951, the Bantam edition enjoyed no second printing, though the uncredited cover image was recycled for by Corgi three years later.

Seen here through the fog of war in 1958, what Doubleday peddled as "a truly tender love story", Fontana pitches as a blood and guts war novel. In fact, The Sixth of June has just one battle scene, and it barely covers ten pages. Did I mention there are 351 pages in all? I read them all.

The Gazette, 6 August 1955

John Glassco, Ghostwriter

Relations and Complications
H.H. The Dayang Muda of Sarawak
London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1929

Bibliographer M. Clark Chambers lists Relations and Complications as Kay Boyle's first book. Although I take exception, we would at the very least agree that it is not the work of the Dayang Muda of Sarawak.

Née Gladys Milton Palmer, of the Huntley & Palmer biscuit empire, Her Highness led the most extraordinary life. Oscar Wilde, Alphonse Daudet and John Ruskin dined at her family's table, as did her godfather George Meredith.

George Meredith with the Dayang Muda's mother, undated.

A woman of amazonian beauty, in 1904 she married Bertram Brooke, whose grandfather, having wrestled approximately 125,000 square kilometres of Borneo from the Sultan of Brunei, was the first White Rajah of Sarawak.


It's not at all difficult to see what encouraged publisher John Lane to draw up a contract for the Dayang Muda's biography. Unforeseen was the sad fact the lady was anything but a memoirist. As Boyle describes it, “her valiant attempts to relive the memories of all she had been, or had not been, served no purpose except to stun her into silence.” And so, the Dayang Muda hired Boyle as a ghostwriter.

Just how many of these words rightfully belong to the American author is a matter to be debated. In her revised – bastardized, really – edition of Robert McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together, Boyle writes that the then-18-year-old Glassco, hired to type the manuscript, "inserted in the mouths of the long-dead great additional flights of repartee and far more brilliant bon mots than I had managed to invent alone.”

Robert McAlmon tells all through his roman à clef The Nightinghouls of Paris, in which Sudge Galbraith (Buffy Glassco) works with Dale Burke (Kay Boyle) on the final draft of the Princess of Faraway's story:

The new script of the memoirs was beautiful, for Sudge typed well and got the manuscript up with professional competence. Later, when the book appeared it had a slight success, but anybody knowing the Princess knew that all the dainty wit and bright malice in the book were Sudge’s. Dale had furnished Irish gaiety and wit here and there, but she admitted that Sudge slipped in the best cracks. He had a talent for drawing old dames and gents with cruel caricature, and while his contributions to the book were trivial, the memoirs were so trivial that Sudge’s contribution took on profundity.

Late in life, Boyle wrote Chambers that of the seventeen chapters, she had had nothing to do with the final two, believing that these had been written by Glassco and forgotten poet Archibald Craig, the Dayang Muda's cousin.

In his own Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco claims to have been nothing more than the typist. Typical of a man given to humility and self-abasement; typical also of one who took delight in literary subterfuge.

Object: A fairly thick book consisting of 271 pages and 29 plates, ending anti-climactically with a further six pages of advertisements for other John Lane titles. My copy seems to have suffered from a horrible skin condition (now in abeyance).



Access: Uncommon. Worldcat lists only seven libraries that hold copies – all in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Canadians and Malaysians are out of luck. Only two copies are currently listed for sale online. Though damaged, the cheaper is priced fairly at €275. Those with even deeper pockets will want to consider the more expensive volume. Offered by a Maryland bookseller at US$750, it features Boyle's signature and telling comment: "This was the hardest writing I have ever done." A man with pockets full of lint, for years I kept an eye out for an affordable copy. In all that time, I spotted not one in a dust jacket (which I'm beginning to believe did not exist). I bought my copy for US$85 from a California bookseller in the long, hot summer of 2004.

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.