Goya'S Dog (39 page)

Acknowledgments

The painter and writer Wyndham Lewis spent an unhappy wartime exile in Toronto, and his novel
Self-Condemned
, along with his letters and the comments of his biographers, suggested much of what happens to Dacres in the first half of
Goya's Dog
—together with the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz's simultaneous, similar experiences in Buenos Aires, recorded in his amazing
Diary
. Dacres shares some attitudes with these men and uses some of their expressions, but he is not a portrait of either of them. I should note that the “suicide” scene comes from Chamfort, and I think it was Fr. Rolfe who was ferried out of his hotel room in bed; Ovid grumbled definitively about the natives in his letters from Pontus. And so on—

The photographic collections of the City of Toronto Archives and the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library gave me a sense of place and period, as did the latter's archive of Toronto newspapers. Memoirs, biographies, and works of history also helped, particularly Gunda Lambton's
Sun in Winter
, Ian Miller's pamphlet
Toronto's Response to the Outbreak of War, 1939
, Herb Franklin's
Street Stories of Toronto
, as well as W.G. Hardy's novel
The Unfulfilled
. I took much from Peter Campbell's essays on the practice of painting, as from
Related Twilights
by Josef Herman and
The Art Forger's
Handbook
by Eric Hebborn, among other books on art from my father's library.

An Ontario Arts Council Writers' Reserve Grant, sponsored by
Exile: The Literary Quarterly
, bought me much-needed time as I began writing. Thanks to the members of the Bloor West Writers' Group, who read the entire novel in draft and provided unfailingly perceptive comments, as did my friends Martha Batíz, Stephen Brooke, Leon Lukashevsky, and Micah Toub. Amy Black gave superb advice and guidance at every stage. Many people helped; apologies if I've omitted you here.

My thanks to everyone at Penguin who put so much effort into making this book a success, including Lucy Mastrullo, Lisa Rundle, the unflappable David Ross, Stephen Myers, and many others, particularly my diligent and courteous copy editor, Jonathan Webb. Thanks, also, to David Adams, whose brilliant editorial insights, curtailed too early, were of the greatest benefit. Nicole Winstanley was always encouraging, always inspiring, and made this a better book in a thousand deft ways—thank you, to the perfect editor. Finally, my agent Martha Magor—the best, calmest, most perceptive friend a writer could have—saw something in this novel before anyone else, helped guide it to its final shape, and worked tirelessly to find it the ideal home. What thanks can suffice?

—D.T.