Dr Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit by Robert Lecker (Vehicule Press, 2006
Robert Lecker was born in 1951. Now that profs cannot be retired, his “life in CanLit” is probably not yet half lived. But don’t let that keep you from Dr Delicious, a lively read with some startling stories in it.
Lecker says “lecker” means “delicious” in German. He plays with a nice polarity between Professor Lecker (a sober authority figure at McGill, author of austere CanLit critical articles) and Dr Delicious (a crazy guy who had fun in class, played with his own life story, and aspired to be the wildman of Canadian scholarly publishing).
Dr Delicious is a pretty funny autobiography, but mostly it is a memoir of ECW Press, which Lecker and Jack David launched as grad students at York University in 1974. Jack David’s still running ECW, but Lecker wrote this after dropping out in 2003.
I always had an idea of ECW. It was born when grants and subsidies to scholarship and publishing were so lavish that two profs could run a publishing house in their spare time and devote it exclusively to monographs and bibliographies in Canadian literature. Those days came to an end; ECW should have died like a frog whose pond has been drained. But, I imagined, Jack David had come to like being a publisher more than a prof. So ECW metamorphosed from “Essays in Canadian Writing” to “Entertainment. Culture. Writing.” It took to putting out Shania Twain biographies and wrestling books and anything it might sell into the American market.
The facts are close to correct, but I find from Dr Delicious how absolutely unfair the characterization is. To keep ECW going for a quarter century, Lecker and David, it turns out, were constantly mortgaging their homes, maxing out their credit cards, stiff-arming creditors, ruining their marriages and their digestions. Dr Delicious is a fabulous account of what an insane business Canadian publishing is. What these two were doing was a terrible business and a heroic personal burden. They took it up and carried it for twenty-five years because of their love of Canadian literary scholarship and their thirst to make it lively, contentious, serious, and public.
Well, anyone can see the enterprise was doomed. But Lecker provides one cause of their doom I had not considered. They were publishing new scholarship not just on figures with some sizeable audience like Atwood or Robertson Davies (Lecker despises Davies’ prose, actually), but on Robert Kroetsch and Archibald Lampman and Hugh Hood. The only audience for this work was the coterie of people who shared Lecker’s and David’s deep scholarly interest in the work of these writers. Almost all of those people, the world being what it is, were and are professors of Can Lit at universities.
ECW foundered on what Lecker calls “the refusal of academics to buy academic titles.”
Lecker discovered professors will not buy books, not even books addressed specifically to them. It’s no surprise so many academics are so supportive of digital piracy. Professors are so subsidized they expect to get everything for free, and as Lecker shows, that includes the books they read. Even with books specifically designed for them and their interests, the kind ECW was publishing, professors “try to get them as desk copies or review copies.” They don’t buy them.
What a fascinating study it would be, to discover how many tenured professors in Canadian universities spend a thousand dollars a year on books in their field. On books in general, even. But whatever the actual numbers, the non-interest of his own colleagues killed Lecker’s dream of publishing cutting-edge scholarship that people might actually buy.
That non-interest nearly killed his academic career, in fact. Lecker, a dreamer of no small proportions, dreams of CanLit like an elite hockey league, where people of shared passion get together to contest, to strive to be better, to play at one’s very highest level, and to thrill the fans at the same time. Is CanLit like that?
Not so much. Lecker asks what point there is in academic conferences where no one listens, let alone responds, to new arguments. What is the point of crafting articles that go out to hundreds of journal subscribers – and elicit “a resounding silence?” Critical writing, says Lecker, goes “into the void.” No wonder Jack David prefers being a publisher. Actually, I know Jack David slightly and I know writers who admire him greatly, and I’ve even been to one or two launch parties he’s subsidized. Why shouldn’t the new, commercial ECW long continue? What does Jack David owe the university?
Lecker sticks to his professorship. His book suggests he is a odd mix of hyperactivity and reflective scholarship, someone in a constant drive both to appreciate the multiple subtleties in a paragraph by Clark Blaise, and to experience new activities, new battles, new sensations, and damn the consequences. About the time this book was published, I heard some writers inquiring about a new literary agent who had set up in Montreal and was trolling for clients. They did not know the name. It's the Robert Lecker Agency.
