Showing posts with label Desmond. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Desmond. Show all posts

21 November 2011

Dyson Carter's Long Exercise in Political Pathology



Despite Moscow's best efforts, it wasn't until a decade or so after the collapse of the Soviet Union that I first became aware of Dyson Carter. Northern Neighbors, "Canada's Authoritative Independent Magazine Reporting on the U.S.S.R.", which he edited for some 32 years, was not something I saw on news stands. I didn't notice his books, including those published by the Communist Party of Canada, though they were distributed in the thousands at home and abroad.

In my defence, I point out that Carter is not found in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature or Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. He is very much a forgotten figure, as is reflected in The Canadian Encyclopedia entry, which has yet to record his death.


Further defence: Nearly all of Carter's books were published before I was born. What's more, his moment in the sun had come decades earlier. In 1940, Carter published Sea of Destiny, a much-discussed work in which he warned that undefended Hudson Bay could be used by the Nazis for an invasion of North America. The following year, months before the United States entered the Second World War, Carter predicted the development of the atomic bomb. It would, he wrote, bring a sudden end to the conflict.

The Portsmouth Times, 5 May 1940

In 1942, Carter's first novel, Night of Flame, drew considerable praise from the New York Times and the Globe and Mail. In the Ottawa Citizen, reviewer W.J. Hurlow described Carter as possessing a talent "only a little down the street from genius... We cordially hail Mr. Dyson Carter as a Canadian writer of brilliant possibilities."

Possibilities require opportunities, and for a Communist like Carter these became fewer with the advent of the Cold War. Just look what happened to Night of Flame. The 1942 first edition was published in New York by Reynolds and Hitchcock. Four years later, the novel was reissued in Canada by Collins White Circle. But by 1949, when American paperback giant Signet looked to do likewise, authorship had to be hidden behind a nom de plume.


Could Joseph McCarthy and company really be so easily deceived? Yes, yes they could.

Carter was born and raised in a religious household, surrounded by the troubled youth that his parents sought to save. In his own youth, he turned away from Christ and towards Lenin, only to see – and recognize – the lies of the Soviet Union laid bare by glastnost. In 1990, at age eighty, he wrote one friend, "I publicized so many Soviet 'achievements' that were total falsifications that I consider my 'work' an exercise in political pathology."

Dyson Carter's contributions to this country's literature are slight, and his oeuvre might hold little interest outside the world of academe, but is it not time for The Canadian Encyclopedia to acknowledge his death?

15 November 2011

A Communist's Bodice Ripper?



The Governor's Mistress
Warren Desmond [pseud. Dyson Carter]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

Oh, yes, a bodice is ripped, but I'm not so sure that this novel quite fits the genre. There's little romance in The Governor's Mistress, and passion, though present, is not as pervasive as cover copy would have you believe.

VIRILE - VIOLENT - WARM - WICKED - This was Angeline

Virile? Can a woman be virile? The OED answers in the negative. But then Angeline isn't violent either. She is warm though... and, it is implied, wicked in the sack.

Angeline – referred to as "Angel" on the book's back cover (and nowhere else) – is Angeline Paradis, a beautiful English spy who is sent into the heart of 17th-century New France. Hers, cover copy tells us, "is a tale kept out of school-books". Makes perfect sense; after all, Angeline was the creation of the author, and exists nowhere outside this book. She moves through pages populated by figures from our history... and it is here that this novel begins to falter. There is a supposition that the reader will know these men – they are all men – that is misguided. Frontenac? Yes. Radisson? Yes. But how many of us are familiar with the scandal and intrigue surrounding François-Marie Perrot, who served as Governor of Montreal from 1669 to 1684?

This Montrealer recognized his name.

That's all.

Pity the poor American reader, who I'm assuming has been taught little of the political machinations of New France. After all, it was to these folks that The Governor's Mistress was marketed. Its author, Dyson Carter, a card carrying member of the Communist Party of Canada, hid behind the pseudonym Warren Desmond only so that the novel might be sold south of the border.

The Governor's Mistress isn't so much a bad book as an irritating one. Stuff happens... but so often this takes place off-stage. When Radisson is put on trial for treason, an event that never actually occurred, he escapes the courtroom by painting his face with ghoulish features: "Thus had Radisson used the phosphorus oil he brought with him from Rupert's workshop." And thus we hear for the first and last time of Rupert's workshop.

Ultimately, The Governor's Mistress is a grand disappointment. The Harlequin set will find little in the way of romance, those seeking something spicy will be left dangling, and readers like myself who'd hoped for an oddball Marxist reading of life in New France will be met with nought but paper, ink and glue.

Object and Access: One of the publisher's more competent productions, the type is actually quite legible. I counted only two typos, which might just be a NSL best. Twelve copies are currently listed for sale online at between US$4 and US$18.29. All appear to have significant flaws, which leads me to think that mine could be the best copy out there. One copy – one – is housed by the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. After that: rien.