David Godrey was a giant of Canadian literary publishing and a Governor General's Award-winning author who established a long-running Duncan vineyard and loved to play the trumpet.
He was a fierce young nationalist in the 1960s and helped redefine the landscape of Canadian writing. He founded what grew to be one of Victoria’s largest Internet providers and taught for many years at the University of Victoria.
Godfrey lived three successful professional lives, said his daughter, Rebecca Godfrey, herself an award-winning author, citing her father’s worlds of words, technology and wine — bolstered by family life. He died on June 21 of pancreatic cancer diagnosed at the end of April. He was 76.
Born in Winnipeg to a teacher mother and lawyer father, Godfrey frequently took the train to spend summers with an uncle at Cadboro Bay, setting the scene for his eventual move.
“He always loved Victoria,” said Rebecca, the prize-winning author of Under The Bridge, based on the death of Reena Virk.
Godfrey won the Governor General’s Award for English fiction in 1970 for an experimental novel called The New Ancestors, three years after he co-founded House of Anansi with Alligator Pie author Dennis Lee. Together, they were the first publishers of Michael Ondaatje, of The English Patient fame, their project being The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. They also published Margaret Atwood’s Survival in 1972, which Anansi’s website says “was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature.” They also published about 120 other authors.
Anansi — the Ghanian word for spider god — was in keeping with two years Godfrey and his wife, Ellen, spent teaching in the West African country in the mid-1960s, where he played trumpet for its president and later helped some Ghanian musicians establish themselves in Canada.
Prolific Victoria writer Marilyn Bowering, hired by Godfrey to teach at UVic in 1979, called him “a visionary inspiration” for 35 years.
“He was a generous friend, a genius and kind,” she said. “He had a fundamental joy in engagement with life.”
Godfrey’s death is “a devastating personal and cultural loss that must, I suppose, be set against a life of extraordinary accomplishment,” Bowering said in an email.
Godfrey was determined to change the dominance by American and British authors in Canada’s English-language publishing in the 1960s, she said.
“He was an angry young man and people noticed that and sat up,” Ellen recalled. “The idea of Canadian culture seemed far-fetched. He was among those putting forth that Canadian books be taught, Canadian artists be appreciated and Canadian films be made.”
Ellen used to believe a woman’s place was in the home, where she wrote mysteries and cared for their three children.
“He was a feminist before I was,” she said.
The couple met at a party thrown by a professor at Stanford. It wasn’t so much love at first sight as “fascination at first sight,” Ellen recalled.
They left the U.S. when the war in Vietnam was raging. Godfrey accepted a teaching position at the University of Toronto, where he got his undergraduate degree.
They had three children — Jonathan, who died in an accident at 16, Rebecca, and Samuel, who works with Saanich South MLA Lana Popham.
As a dad, he was “encouraging, very enthusiastic and very devoted,” she said.
His prescient nature was much in evidence when it came to computer software and languages, inspired by Jonathan’s interest in technology, Rebecca recalled.
By 1993, his Softwords software company had 22 staff and annual sales of about $1 million, the Times Colonist reported. It has reached 100,000 users at 110 companies and educational institutions around the world.
At one point, after Softwords became CSP, it was one of Victoria’s largest Internet providers.
In 1998, he founded Godfrey-Brownell Vineyards, which closed last year.
Godfrey also founded New Press and Press Porcépic, which later became Beacholme Publishers. The company was based in Victoria for 25 years before moving to Vancouver.
Holding a PhD from the University of Iowa, famed for its writing school, Godfrey was chairman of UVic’s writing department from 1977 to 1982.
UVic colleague and author Lorna Crozier called Godfrey “an electrifying speaker” when it came to putting Canadian voices in print. “We need more passionate Canadians, writers, and intellectuals like him.”
Another colleague, Joan MacLeod, won a $100,000 play-writing prize and credited the supportive teaching of Godfrey and Bill Valgardson when it was announced. “I discovered my voice in that workshop,” she said in an email, saying that Godfrey embodied “the excellent critical eye of the publisher/editor and the heart of a writer.”
In recent years, Godfrey found much joy in his three grandchildren, creating pirate adventures and teaching them elementary gardening.
He is also survived by his sister, Margo Tooley, in Victoria and his brother, Brock, in Ontario.
