Showing posts with label Textbooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Textbooks. Show all posts

04 February 2019

Margaret Millar Simplified and Spoiled



The Listening Walls
Margaret Millar [abridged by George McMillin]
New York: Falcon, 1975


The Listening Walls
Collected Millar: The Master at Her Zenith
Margaret Millar
New York: Syndicate, 2016

I'm a great fan of Syndicate Books' seven-volume Collected Millar. Not only did it return all twenty-five of the author's novels to print – most unavailable for decades – it did so in attractive volumes and at affordable prices. The only criticism I have seems to be shared by pretty much everyone familiar with the set: the print is too darn small. My middle-aged eyes can manage, but given the choice I'll reach for an old mass-market paperback any day. This is why I was quick to splurge 25 cents on a Falcon edition of The Listening Walls spotted at a charity shop last month. In my haste, I didn't notice this small print on the cover:


There's irony for you. Or is it? Alanis Morissette has still got me confused.

Edited and abridged "for young people and adults who want to read books of mature content with greater ease and enjoyment," Falcon Books meant nothing to me. Interior copy informs that they were "especially recommended as supplemental readers in junior and senior high school courses;" happily, they weren't used in mine. If my 25¢ copy of The Listening Walls is anything to go by, the abridgements stripped much of what made their originals worth reading. Consider the opening paragraph to Margaret Millar's The Listening Walls:
From her resting place in the broom closet Consuela could hear the two American ladies in 404 arguing. The closet was as narrow as the road to heaven and smelled of furniture polish, chlorine, and of Consuela herself. But it was not physical discomfort that disturbed her siesta, it was the strain of trying to understand what the Americans were arguing about. Money? Love? What else was there, Consuela wondered, and wiped the sweat off her forehead and neck with one of the towels she was supposed to place in the bathrooms at exactly six o'clock.
Now, here is the Falcon abridged version:
From the broom closet, Consuela could hear the two American ladies arguing in Room 404. The closet was small and smelled of furniture polish and cleaning fluid, and of Consuela's own body. But it was not the tiny closet and its smells that disturbed her siesta – her afternoon nap. It was the argument she was hearing through the wall. She strained to hear what the Americans were arguing about. Was it money? Was it love? What else could it be? Console wondered about it and wiped the sweat off her forehead and neck with one of the clean towels she was supposed to put in the bathrooms.
Things are spelled out – "404" becomes "Room 404," "chlorine" becomes "cleaning fluid"  – and subtleties are missed. What spoils
Consuela's siesta (not necessarily an "afternoon nap," says my OED) is not the sound of the two American ladies arguing, but that she can't quite make out what they are saying. Gone is the description of the closet, Consuela's "resting place," as being "as narrow as the road to heaven," and with it the first hint of her religious beliefs and their influence on the plot.

The two American ladies are friends Wilma Wyatt and Amy Kellogg. The pair have travelled from San Francisco to Mexico City on a girls' getaway. Poor Wilma has been having a particularly tough year that has included divorce (her second), the loss of both parents in a plane crash, and a bout of pneumonia. It's now September. Can it get much worse?

Yes, it can.

Wilma is unhappy with everything – herself most of all – and is itching to bicker and bully. Amy tries to make the best of it, all the while reminding herself that husband Rupert had warned the trip was a mistake. Gill, Amy's big brother, called her an imbecile. Things deteriorate further when Amy discovers that Wilma bought a handcrafted silver box engraved with Rupert's initials. Why would Wilma do that? And why would she hide the purchase? The fighting escalates and Wilma storms off to the hotel bar.

That evening, Wilma dies of a fall from their hotel room balcony.


The Listening Walls has less to do with Wilma's death, and whether or not it was murder, than it does the mystery of Amy's subsequent disappearance. Rupert gives Gill a letter from Amy in which she writes of her need to be alone for a while. Gill, who had already found things were "damned peculiar," hires a private detective, and Rupert starts making mistakes.

The Listening Walls shares The Master at Her Zenith, the third volume of the Collected Millar, with Vanish in an Instant, Wives and Lovers, Beast in View, and An Air That Kills. By far the weakest novel of the lot, its flaw lies with the nineteenth and penultimate chapter, in which one character explains his actions throughout the previous eighteen. Amounting to several dense pages – uncharacteristic of Millar – it reads like an information dump. This same scene in the abridgement is less irritating in that there is less to explain. The keen-eyed will have noticed that the Falcon opening paragraph quoted above is actually longer that the original; so, how did abridger George McMillin make the novel shorter? The answer is that he slashed dialogue to the bone, and cut entire scenes. In order to bridge the gaps, McMillin added some passages of his own. In fact, the passage quoted on the back cover is entirely his own work:


I've hidden the first character's name because it misleads. The character is not a murderer and would never think to murder. The passage is just another example of McMillin's misunderstanding of the novel.

Much has been made of the novel's ending, beginning with the dust jacket on Gollancz's first UK edition:


Sort of spoils things, doesn't it?

Julian Symons liked the ending, as did I. Had it not been for publisher hype, I expect Anthony Lejeune would've liked it, too. Reviewing the novel in 1959 for the Times Literary Supplement, he writes:
Miss Millar knows how to make her story-line twist like a snake. It is not her fault that the publishers, in big letters on the jacket, promise "as smashing a last sentence as we can recall!" That promise is not fulfilled. The final twist is surprisingly unsurprising.
More recently, Jon Breen wrote in the 18 April 2005 Weekly Standard: "Millar brings off a trick that is rarely attempted and even more rarely accomplished: withholding the final surprise to the very last line of the novel."

Foreknowledge that the final line brings surprise ruins the ending... and I've done so here. Apologies.

George McMillin liked the last sentence enough to leave it untouched.

At four words, it could hardly be shorter.

Trivia: For a "textbook" publisher – their description, not mine – Falcon proved itself particularly inept. The author biography is incorrect in describing Millar's It's All in the Family as a mystery. Students are told that her husband is "known professionally as Ross MacDonald," and not Ross Macdonald.


Objects: A study in contrasts. The Falcon is a slim mass-market paperback numbering 141 pages; the Syndicate is a bulky trade format paperback of 560 pages. The latter includes an introduction by Ross Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan.

My Falcon copy was once the property of the Smiths Falls District Collegiate Institute.


Access: The Listening Walls was first published in 1959 by Random House in the United States and Gollacz in the United Kingdom. Editions by Corgi (1961), Dell (1964 & 1967), Orion (1974), and International Polygonics (1986) followed. In 1980, Curley published a large print edition.


Used copies listed online range in price from US$1.60 (International Polygonics) to US$349.26 (Curley). At US$50.00, the copy to buy is a Random House first edition (with review slip) offered by a Florida bookseller.


The novel has enjoyed at least eleven translations: French (Les Murs écoutent), Spanish (Las paredes oyen), Danish (De lyttende vægge), Finnish (Seinillä on korvat), Swedish (De lyssnande väggarna), Norwegian (Piken som lyttet), German (Die lauschenden Wände), Italian (La scatola d'argento), Polish (Śmierć w hotelu), Japanese (耳をすます壁), and Korean (엿듣는 벽).

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19 January 2015

Max Braithwaite's True First



We Live in Ontario
Max Braithwaite and R.S. Lambert
[Agincourt, ON]: Book Society of Canada, 1957

Yes, we do! In fact, we arrived seven years ago this week.

Max Braithwaite lived in Ontario, too. He's usually thought of as a Saskatchewan writer, but this province was his home for more than five decades. "I felt like I was born in the wrong place," Braithwaite once said. "Finally I got the hell out of Saskatchewan." The man best remembered for Why Shoot the Teacher? put it this way: "I was a writer, not a teacher, and I figured life's too short to do something you don't like in a place you don't want to be."

Any agent would cringe.

We Live in Ontario was rescued from the books left behind at the end of our public library's most recent book sale. It was an unexpected find. The title doesn't appear in any Braithwaite bibliography. It predates Voices in the Wild, the book regarded as his first, by five years.


We Live in Ontario was not co-author R.S. Lambert's first. A seasoned pro with over forty books to his name, Lambert is one of those worthy writers who have been snubbed by The Canadian Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and W.H. New's Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. And so, I direct you to Wikipedia – yes, Wikipedia – which has a not so bad article on the man. A fascinating figure, you'll be intrigued. Guarenteed.

I've been meaning to read these Lambert books for years:
  • The Prince of Pickpockets: A Study of George Barrington, Who Left His Country for His Country’s Good (London: Faber & Faber, 1930)
  • When Justice Faltered: A Study of Nine Peculiar Murder Trials (London: Methuen, 1935)
  • The Haunting of Cashen's Gap: A Modern "Miracle" Investigated (London: Methuen, 1935)
  • Propaganda (London: Nelson, 1938)
  • For the Time is at Hand: An Account of the Prophesies of Henry Wentworth Monk of Ottawa, Friend of the Jews, and Pioneer of World Peace (London: Melrose, 1947)
Instead, I read We Live in Ontario.

Because it was there.

An elementary school textbook, We Live in Ontario explores the province through the eyes of Newfoundland's Baxter family as they settle into a new home "not far from Hamilton." Mr Baxter works for the Greenway Machine Company. Mrs Baxter sets the table. Jenny skips rope. Billy asks questions.

There's no real protagonist, but the Baxter boy does guide the plot. Bill's Ontario is a land of wonder. After breaking a lightbulb, he spends a full afternoon trying to wrap his head around the fact that its replacement will cost just twenty cents. How can that be?

Ask your father.


Mr Baxter is as good as his word. Bill not only visits an electric light bulb factory, but a farm, a bank, an airport and Niagara Falls. The family descend to the depths of a Sudbury nickel mine and help catch fish on a boat out of Port Dover. It's all quite educational.



I learned a lot. Did you know that lightbulbs were once made in Ontario? Electric irons, too. And clothing, refrigerators and farm machinery. Imagine!

The province I know is a very different place.

Object: A 226-page textbook with two-colour illustrations by Robert Kunz.


His works swings so wildly between the competent and incompetent that I can't help but wonder whether he didn't farm some of them out.


Access: Non-circulating copies are held by nine of our libraries (five of which are in Ontario).

Anyone looking to buy a copy – there is no reason why you should – will find three listed online. All in crummy shape, they range in price from US$10 to US$55.84. Had I not grabbed my free copy it would've been pulped.

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24 May 2013

The Year of Grade School Readers, Cute Kittens and Dead Anglos Hanging in the Streets of Montreal



That would be 1968, the very same year in which Canadian Notes & Queries made its debut. It was my honour to become the first contributor to 'CNQ Timeline', a new feature in which writers reflect on a specific year in Canadian literature.

Nineteen-sixty-eight just happens to be the year in which I learned to read. This was my first book:


Surprises and Mr. Whiskers, its sequel, seem of a different world. This illustration captures Jack, the protagonist, travelling in the family car without seatbelt!


But then 1968 was a different world, wasn't it. Those too young to remember should consider this headline from the Vancouver Sun:


That 'B.C. Mother of Three' would be Alice Munro, who took home the 1968 Governor General's Award for Dance of the Happy Shades, her first book. In the 'CNQ Timeline' piece I refer to that years's GGs as the most disastrous in the awards' history. I'll happily take on anyone who thinks otherwise.

Takers?

The first book I ever read from 1968 was Bruce Powe's Killing Gound. The cover to that edition, published in 1977 by PaperJacks...


...was much more tame than the original, pseudonymous Peter Martin Associates edition.


Not my 1968. Not the Canada I knew then. Not the Canada I know now.

I'm being polite here. My less than polite writing on Killing Ground can be found in magazine itself.

Subscriptions – a mere $20 – can be had here.

Related post:

28 August 2012

Collecting Norman Levine (Arts '48)



A collector writes today in response to my column in the new Norman Levine issue of Canadian Notes & Queries: "You mentioned that you asked Levine if you could use one of his stories in an anthology. Was it ever published?"

Indeed it was. The story in question, "My Karsh Picture" was included in Classics Canada, Book 2 (Prentice-Hall Canada, 1994), the second of six ESL textbooks I co-edited with Patricia Brock.


Looking it over all these years later, I see that the story appears between Daniel David Moses' "King of the Raft" and "April Fish" by Mavis Gallant; selections by Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Irving Layton, bonnet-babe Susanna Moodie and a bunch of other CanLit names also feature.

Must admit that despite my great admiration and appreciation, I've never really collected Levine's work myself. I have only five of his books, my favourite being a copy of the Porcupine's Quill Canada Made Me, which he inscribed nineteen years ago at Westmount's Double Hook Bookstore.


My most cherished Levine items are those I inherited from my father: the 1947 and 1948 issues of Forge, McGill's University's literary magazine.



These three issues feature some of Levine's earliest published work, most of it uncollected: the poems "Myssium", "Circles", "It Was a Dull Day", "Autumn" and "A Dead Airman Speaks"; the short story "Our Life is to Be Envied"; and "Prologue", which would today be described as creative non-fiction. Levine served as Poetry Editor in the 1947 issues and was elevated to Editor for the lone 1948 number.

Old McGill '48
He and my father attended McGill at the same time and were in the same faculty and graduating class. I don't know that they ever encountered one another. I like to think so. Both R.C.A.F. vets, they had a good deal in common.

Old McGill '48

11 October 2010

Thanksgiving Day Advice


from Good Reading, Second Reader (Toronto: Educational Book Co., 1931)
"Prescribed for supplementary reading in British Columbia"

06 September 2010

04 August 2010

Lovell's Legacy (and Its Besmirching)



John Lovell was born two hundred years ago today. The most important Canadian publisher of the nineteenth century, I suppose he's best remembered for his directories, much valued by genealogists, but his contributions to the country's literature should not be overlooked. The man published Mrs Leprohon, François-Xavier Garneau, Joseph Howe and Charles Sangster, as well as Moodies Susanna and John. Lovell's Literary Garland was not only the first magazine of its kind in British North America, it paid.

Then there are the illustrated books. Today, Hunter's Eastern Townships Scenery, Canada East (1860), William Notman's Portraits of British Americans (1865) and Canadian Wild Flowers (1869) by Catharine Parr Traill, cannot be had for anything less than four figures. More modest in intent is Lovell's Advanced Geography for the Use of Schools and Colleges (1880), which features some very beautiful images of Canada, convincing evidence that the Earth is a sphere and one truly cringe-worthy illustration.


It's been a while since I've seen a proper copy of Lovell's Advanced Geography on offer. The only current listings come from booksellers flogging print on demand abominations. Here's one from the UK, UK:


Black and white, no illustrations... What sort of dog's breakfast, one wonders, will OCR software vomit forth after scanning these pages:


The mess that is the bookseller's description probably provides a clue.

Yours for a mere £28.73 (plus shipping).