Reviews
Past imperfect
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Robert Lecker resurfaces the history of the co-founder of Canada’s first literary agency
BY STEVEN W. BEATTIE
Who Was Doris Hedges?: The Search for Canada’s First Literary Agent
Robert Lecker
McGill-Queen’s University Press
ASK ANY HISTORIAN of Canadian literature to name the country’s first literary agent and the response you’ll likely get is Matie Molinaro. Founder of the Canadian Speakers’ and Writers’ Service, the Toronto-based Molinaro was at one time the only professional of her kind in the country. Her company was responsible for representing foundational CanLit authors – including Earle Birney, Harry Boyle, and Marshall McLuhan – from its establishment in 1950 through the 1970s, when other agents and authors’ representatives began to appear on the scene in force.
But McGill University professor and former publisher Robert Lecker points out that the identification of Molinaro as Canada’s first professional literary agent is incorrect. That honour goes to Doris Hedges, who in 1946 partnered with Donald Cargill Southam, of the Southam media family, and the wealthy Frenchman Jacques Teste de Merian to form what their business registration refers to as “trade and business in co-partnership as Literary Agents” operating out of the Dominion Square Building in downtown Montreal.
Hedges came from money ... [and] moved in privileged circles: as a teen, she lived in Paris, where she associated with Gertrude Stein and Isadora Duncan and danced at a party with Vaslav Nijinsky
Hedges came from money. Born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1896, she was related on her mother’s side to the prominent Dawes family, who were responsible for establishing the first Lachine-Montreal telegraph service and had connections to the Merchant Bank of Canada. Her husband was Geoffrey Hedges, the scion of the Benson and Hedges tobacco empire. Hedges moved in privileged circles: as a teen, she lived in Paris, where she associated with Gertrude Stein and Isadora Duncan and danced at a party with Vaslav Nijinsky.
Her early exposure to iconic figures in culture and the arts seems to have given Hedges an inflated sense of her own abilities and importance: once she began publishing her poetry through the Ryerson chapbook series, she pestered Ryerson publisher Lorne Pierce about what she perceived as the company’s inadequacy in properly marketing her work and hectored William Arthur Deacon, the books editor at The Globe and Mail, over the newspaper’s failure to review her. (Deacon’s pointed response indicates how little has changed between the mid-1950s and today: “Fifty years ago, poetry found a good market in Canada. I can only suppose that the kind of poetry being written has lost the ear of the public.”)