PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Jack Brayley (Canadian Press), 1 May 1952. MS-2-202 38.35.
Subject HeadingsT. H. Raddall provides the Atlantic Bureau Chief of the Canadian Press, Jack Brayley, with a summary of an address he had presented at Acadia University on his impressions of the findings of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 1949-1951. Raddall notes that he felt the lowly status of Canadian literature depicted in the Commission Report was accurate and blamed poor financial prospects as a major contributing factor. The scarcity of good book stores, unfair income tax laws, high publisher percentages, and the low royalities paid by book clubs all undermined adequate financial returns for Canadian authors. He concludes his letter with a brief plot summary of his nearly completed novel, Tidefall.
|
May 1st,1952 Hello Jack, This must be telepathy or something. Not long ago when I was in Halifax on one of my semi-annual here-today and-gone-today visits, I had a hunch to call you up1 for a chat, as it was a long time since we saw each other; but of course something interfered, my wife's shopping probably, and that was that. That Wolfeville address was made without a prepared text, so there's no copy to be had. The only notes I had were of two or three quotes that I wanted to give exactly. Gist of the thing was that the Massey Report on Canadian Arts, Letters and Sciences2 disposed of Canadian Literature in a single chapter of less than 6 pages, out of 586. It reflected exactly the place that our native literature occupies, and I went on to give some practical reasons for the scantiness of Letters in Canada, chiefly financial. There are only 25 honest-to-God bookshops between Halifax and Victoria and about 100 large stores that maintain a fairly good book department. A Canadian author who depended on Canadian sales would starve to death. He has to look to the U.S. market for the greater part of his income, which lets him in for agents' fees, a U.S.tax of 15% and of course the Canadian income tax. The temptation is to move across the border where he has only one tax authority to deal with -- and the U.S. income tax is and always has been much more lenient with authors than ours. (It was not till the Year of Our Lord 1949 that the Canadian Income Tax Department admitted at last that a Canadian author actually worked for his living. Up to that time the ruling was that royalties on books were the same as royalties on oil wells, etc, and an author's entire earnings from this source were taxed an extra 4% as "Unearned Income"!). I dealt also with the general picture, the revolution that has taken place in the bookselling trade through the operation of book clubs and huge editions of "softbacks", which pay the author only a fractional royalty. (i.e. a "softback" edition of 150,000 copies pays a total royalty of $1500, which the author has to split 50-50 with the original publisher of the "hardback" edition. The U.S. tax is 15%, so the Canadian writer winds up with less than $640.) Well, Jack, I recited all this to the university people in Wolfville because I felt they might as well know the hard facts. I'm not sure that it would be wise to publicize it --from my own point of view. I mean I have to do business with publishers and book clubs here and in the States and Britain on their own terms, and a public squawk of this kind picked up by the press might do me more harm than good. I'd like to yell the whole damned thing from the house-tops but I have to recognise that I'm in a highly competitive profession that is very much at the mercy of the publishers. At the present time the U.S. publishers and book clubs are highly sensitive, because they are under a government investigation for unfair trade practices towards the retail bookshops. At the present time I'm just finishing another novel,3 title not yet decided, the scenes laid in Nova Scotia and the West Indies in the days of the great rum racket. The central char- acter is a sea-going rogue who makes a fortune, chiefly at the expense of the rum kings, and loses it when he decides to be respectable as proprietor of a coastal shipping business in Nova Scotia in the early years of the Depression. It was a game that I had a first-class chance to watch, here on the south shore, where so many of the rum-ships used to come for supplies and repairs on the old run between St.Pierre and Rum Row,4 and I met a good many of the leading characters. If you're ever down this way don't fail to give me a shout. |
|
|
1. Jack Brayley (1912-1991) was Atlantic Bureau chief of the Canadian Press.