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THE DENT YEARS

1926–1930

“Twenty Years a Warrior, Twenty Years a Chief, and Twenty Years an Elder of the Tribe”

Clara Thomas recalled hearing True use the above quotation in conversation with a young woman who was sitting next to her on a flight back to Toronto from Ottawa. With minor variations in wording, it became True’s favourite way of describing her lifetime of experiences.

True’s decision not to accept the scholarships from Bryn Mawr marked the beginning of her years as a warrior. They were to prove to be years of triumph, hard times, disappointment, inspiration and personal loss.

Although she taught at several periods in her career, had definite opinions about teaching and derived considerable satisfaction from inspiring her students, True never regarded herself as a teacher. Teaching was only a marketable skill that she used when unable to earn a living as a writer.¹ Clara Thomas never heard her talk about teaching and noted that “I don’t even know how long she taught...” She continued, however, that she knew “she had been at Dents for awhile.” Doris Tucker similarly remembered little conversation about teaching, but did remember that “She always talked about Dents. She’d talk about her years there so I always felt that that was...a very important part of her working life.” True, herself, later noted that “although my interests did not at first lie in that direction, I have spent most of my life in business,”² Hired in the summer of 1926 to sell books in the Toronto showroom and to screen all submitted manuscripts and decide which ones should be further reviewed by the firm’s Managing Director, Mr. Henry Button, True rapidly undertook many other responsibilities. By the time she left the company in 1930 she was “responsible for all display advertising, catalogues and circulars, special exhibits, entertainments and stunt publicity... supervision of manufacturing in Canada and much of the correspondence with our London headquarters regarding Canadian manufacturing... check[ing] copyrights, look[ing] up illustrations...considerable editorial work... read [ing] proof of authorized texts and other important books...bookkeeping...supervis[ing] our...record of stock in London, our two Vancouver depositories and our two Toronto depositories, solv[ing] stock and sales discrepancies which hinder the preparation of royalty reports, ...prepa[ring] the annual budget and annual report... act [ing] as office manager, selecting and training new staff, representing the Managing Director on occasion and, most importantly, selling...on the road, working up educational authorizations, from Charlottetown to Victoria.”³

A later interviewer wrote that “in those days, it was possible to publish books at a reasonable cost and have them authorized for certain grades for a certain number of years” and quoted True as saying,

This was big business and I was the first woman to be in it. It involved spending four to eight weeks in a province at a time and becoming acquainted with ministers of education, deputy ministers, and superintendents and principals of normal schools [Teacher Colleges], and people with the power to advise the department of education, the textbook committees. This sort of thing. It was a big job. I was terrified. I was not really a saleswoman. I had lots of confidence in my...teaching, but I had never done anything like this before. At first I used to go back to my hotel room after each visit and try to work my courage up before I’d go out to the next one.⁴

Terrified she may have been but she didn’t let it stop her. A copy of a letter sent to Mr. Button in 1927 by D. McIntyre, the Superintendent of Winnipeg Schools and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Province of Manitoba, praised her selling abilities.

I congratulate you on having so capable and tactful a representative as Miss Davidson. She made a very excellent impression on the people she met here. She pointed out to me most tactfully that the appearance of the name of your house on the book lists was not as frequent as the merit of your books would justify, a position that I felt could not well be denied.⁵

Drawing of the Dent office, Aldine House, in Toronto. Courtesy Reeta Wright

J.M. Dent and Sons was a British company, headquartered in London, dealing mainly in classics, encyclopedias, and school texts. The Canadian Branch Office was located in a converted house on Bloor Street in Toronto. True’s secretary from those days, Reeta Wright, remembers it as “a beautiful building...with a beautiful library... and a lovely overgrown back garden with a trellised path surrounded by rose bushes...[it was] the only place I ever worked, right out of Business College, [I] felt very lucky that I had such a lovely place to work.” The house stood somewhat alone “there wasn’t much along Bloor there” on the north side of Bloor Street, “just across the road from McMaster University [now the Royal Conservatory of Music] and the stadium was just at the corner.” The office had a small staff. Mrs. Wright remembers only “the Managing Director and his Secretary, True and me, the caretaker and that’s about all.” She also remembers it as a generally friendly, but not chummy, office. “Mr. Button called her [True] Davey all the time...he called me Tiny Tim...they treated me like family...indeed Mr. Button wrote me a letter advising me when I was getting married...telling me the problems I might face...I said he was talking to me like a father would and he said ‘I feel like that about you.” She said that True didn’t talk about her personal life at all, but neither did she, “it didn’t seem appropriate at the office.” She mainly remembered True being “wrapped up in her business world and her book sales...True and I got along alright. She’d tell me what she wanted and I’d just go and do it....I did as I was told. I guess I was kind of young and green then too...she was just herself and I was just myself...she was just my boss and I got along with her...those were happy years with True.” They didn’t take lunch together. Reeta often ate hers alone in the back garden and she couldn’t “ever recall True eating even.” She did remember True sending her a letter during one of her selling trips out West in which True had said “I bragged about you like a hen with one chick.” She couldn’t recall any of True’s family visiting her at work and certainly no male friends. They did a lot of correspondence with MacMillan’s and other publishers and there were constant reports to be typed to the London office.

Interior view of the showroom and office of Aldine House. True and her secretary worked in the alcove part-way up the steps leading from the showroom. Courtesy Reeta Wright

They worked the standard office hours of the time, 9-5, six days a week. Mrs. Wright remembered True’s hours as being “pretty regular. She was there when I got in in the morning. We didn’t waste too much time. We’d get right down to work and of course I was taking dictation and then I’d be typing it out and she’d be on the phone. She was on the phone a lot of the time...talking to other publishers...I didn’t pay any attention to what she was saying, I was too busy.”

Mrs. Wright and her husband remembered True as being “fairly mannish in her ways, and sharp with her tongue, but she never lambasted anybody—she would just catch you up if she thought you were wrong.” She was “so kind of plain...anything but beautiful,” dressed in “suits, plain, mannish. To me she always looked the same... slim and tall [with] short hair, just like a brush cut.” If True got upset “she really didn’t spare her language. If she felt like swearing, she’d swear. Unusual then, but she was slightly mannish in some of her ways...but she was a born developer and promoter, so yes, so she wasn’t shy in her mannerisms, but we got along great.”⁶

I suspect that True felt it desirable to seem “mannish” while serving as Canada’s first female publishers representative, just as at other times in her career, she would use her feminity where it seemed appropriate or useful. Also, she was still trying to assess herself and her future. Among the clippings in her files are several from this time period with headings like, “How to Get On with the Crowd,” “Break the Ice of Loneliness,” “Your Emotions Can Make You Sick,” and “Twelve Things to Avoid if You Want to Be a Success.”⁷

Certainly she impressed her male colleagues. Among her papers was a little card from the President of the MacMillan Company of Canada in which “HSE” has written:

We have a young lady in view,

To whom an apology’s due,

We admit—thought with pain

That we rifled the brain

That is almost too good to be True.⁸

This rare casual photograph of a relaxed and laughing True (in centre) was taken in the overgrown rose trellis area behind the J.M. Dent offices at Aldine House. Also shown is her secretary, Reeta Wright (front). The third woman was the secretary to the firm’s Managing Director, Mr. Henry Button. Courtesy Reeta Wright

In those years True had to learn many hard lessons about the business world; lessons she didn’t feel she had been taught at home or at school. In 1930 she condensed some of these lessons into a paragraph in a book review published in The Business Woman.

‘My face is my fortune, sir,’ she said, and it was all very well for the little girl in the nursery rhyme to say so; but most of us are less fortunate. We must carve out the fortunes for ourselves, if fortunes there are to be; and many of us have about as much idea of how to go at the matter as we would have of how to attack an actual block of marble with hammer and chisel. Men seem to have some sort of instinct in these things—I am sure no lad ever approached an employment officer in a bank with the statement that he would love to work in a bank because he was so fond of money...Yet scores of...girls...have come to me during the years of my connection with the Dent Publishing Company, pleading for a place on our staff because they were so fond of books...⁹

True may not have started out wanting to work in publishing, but she came to believe that she was doing worthwhile work, especially when it encouraged the development of Canadian literature. During a talk she gave in 1928 she said, “that Canadian publishers were fostering Canadian literature at a financial sacrifice...[and that] anyone who did anything to promote Canadian literature was doing a service to his country...Canadian literature could do a lot for the Dominion. It would help to unify the vast areas that are now more or less separated...Everyone could not travel and the next best method of familiarizing oneself with conditions and people in other parts of a vast country was to read about them.”¹⁰ True already had a skillful speaking presence; the newspaper report of her talk noted that she “spoke in a humorous vein.”

One of the more demanding parts of her job seems to have been the rejection of manuscripts. Some were easier to reject than others. She told the Kiwanians that “it was unnecessary to read a whole manuscript in order to determine whether it was publishable or not. Very often one page was enough to settle that point. Sometimes, she said, she saved up half a dozen offerings and dealt with them over the weekend.” She also found that many would-be authors had unrealistic expectations of possible financial returns, telling them “of a young girl who brought in a novel and without waiting to ascertain whether or not it would be published demanded a 50-50 split with the firm. That meant, if the book retailed for two dollars that the authoress would get a dollar while the publishers would have to give a discount to the bookseller, pay the expenses of writing and marketing and accept what was left as profit.” The book wasn’t accepted so “there was no need to haggle over financial details.”¹¹

Other times it was harder. Reeta Wright remembered that “she hated to disappoint them, especially the younger people that would expect some reaction she couldn’t give.” One of True’s short stories, written around this time, included a character, Maridell, the daughter of a minister, who had to assess a book submitted by a minister who reminds her very much of her father.

This photograph was taken around 1930 when True travelled to England where she represented the Canadian Managing Director, Henry Button, at the English head office of J.M. Dent and Sons. Her secretary, Reeta Wright, remembered her as looking “very mannish” with her short hair. Courtesy David Cobden

...Maridell left the “Pilgrims of Peace” as long as she dared. Finally, one day, “I daren’t read this manuscript,” she said to her chief, “I wish you’d take a look at it.”

He glanced through a few pages. What Maridell brought him was usually well worth serious consideration. Thus it took him a few minutes to realize the nature of the work. Then he threw it down, amazed, infuriated. “Putrid!” he roared. “Hopeless! What do you mean by asking me to read such tripe? Shoot it back.” Then as she hesitated, “What’s the matter? Don’t stand there looking like a sick cat! “

“I felt sorry for him,” she murmured lamely. “He was a minister— from the country.”

Her employer exploded, “If we were to weep over every fool that thought he could write, the world would be flooded...Pah! Take it away. It makes me sick just to look at it.”

What could Maridell do? Sometimes one grew very weary of working in a publishing house, but she supposed there were unpleasant features about any job. She shrugged her shoulders and dictated a letter.¹²

During her years at Dents, True worked on several books and is sometimes credited as the author [more accurately the editor] of a childrens’ book, Canada in Story and Song. She also wrote poetry and short stories, several of which were later published.

While working at Dents that she had her first real contact with the left-wing intellectuals who later inspired her to join the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.). J.M. Dent & Sons published the Canadian Forum during her years there so she had the opportunity to meet several of its contributors, including historian Frank Underhill and law professor Frank R. Scott who later formed the League for Social Reconstruction. The League was a major influence on the founding of the C.C.F. and played a large role in the writing of its declaration of principles, “The Regina Manifesto.” The philosophy of their magazine, described as “avowedly nationalist and progressive, and usually on the left of the spectrum on political and cultural issues”¹³ was familiar to True since it mirrored the “social gospel” ideals popular in the Methodist church of her childhood and which formed much of the philosophy behind the C.G.I.T. which had influenced her teenage years. The social gospel “sought to apply Christianity to the collective ills of an industrializing society...and held an optimistic view of human nature and entertained high prospects for social reform. By W.W. I it had become a principal informing principle of social reform.”¹⁴. The movement had particularly strong support in western Canada, where it was led by charasmatic leaders like James Shaver Woodsworth.

In 1930, True reached the pinnacle of her publishing career when she was sent to England, on behalf of the Canadian office, “to negotiate financial arrangements and expedite the preparation of various text books.”¹⁵ She resigned her position with the company almost immediately afterwards, leading to speculation as to what happened during that business trip to London that caused her to leave what had been, thus far, an exceptionally successful career.

Clara Thomas felt that True was “always very restless...things never really did satisfy her. She was always going on, looking ahead.” It does seem that True was never satisfied with any position for very long and certainly not with one where she couldn’t reach the top. But her decision was prompted by more than restlessness. In her 1930 resume she listed as her “Reasons for Wishing to Leave—[the] Impossibility of specialization in so small a firm, and thus impossibility of any further development whatsoever, except that of succeeding Mr. Button, remote by 20 years, and unlikely even then in view of my sex and the conservative feeling of our London principals.”¹⁶ This final phrase provides some idea of what was likely said to her at the London head office. Dents would not have been unique in their resistance to the idea of a woman advancing to become a managing director. After all, the Supreme Court (then still in Britain) had only recently ruled that “women were persons under the law” and thus eligible for appointment to the Canadian Senate.

However discouraged True may have become about her chances in the publishing field, she remained confident enough to state clearly what were then considered decidedly feminist demands. Describing the “Type of Position Desired” she wrote “something which will use all my energy...in which having the strength, perseverance and courage of a man, I shall be permitted to go as far as a man of parallel ability.”¹⁷