Our Little Life: Dressmaker Meet Cheesemonger

Our Little Life: A Novel of To-Day
J.G. Sime
London: Grant Richards, 1921
394 pages

Jessie Georgina Sime's debut novel begins with a tale of decline. In the eighteen-sixties, the residences at the confluence of O'Neill Street and Drayton Place were amongst the most desirable in Regalia. In the decades that followed, as the city's wealthy gravitated westward, the grand homes became less attractive. At the dawn of a new century they were bought on the cheap by a "Business Woman" who had them divided into small apartments:

The fact of the Buildings having begun life as a cluster of semi-detached dwelling-places explained certain odd constructions in the flats; also the many undesired intimacies—common taps of water on the landings, verandas that belonged to everyone and no one—that the inhabitants so reluctantly shared with one another. The Apartment House was the uncomfortable place it was because when it had been "made over" comfort had been the last thing in anyone's mind.

The Business Woman named the buildings the Penelope Apartments after herself, but soon found them too much to deal with. She signed the buildings over to a French Canadian in exchange a small sum to be followed by yearly payments. The French Canadian promptly flipped the property, thus setting off years of legal squabbling leading to further neglect.

The residents of the Penelope Apartments, known as "Penelopians," include labourers, drunkards, dope sellers, chorus girls, and prostitutes. They're interesting on the whole, but only two are fully drawn. What at first looks to be a novel about disparate and disreputable tenants and their interactions soon centres on the relationship between Katie McGee and Robert Fulton. 

Katie McGee lives in a modest first-storey flat on the Drayton side of the Penelope Apartments. A forty-six-year-old spinster, she makes a living as a dressmaker. Her workdays are spent in the homes of Regalia's upper-middle class, ripping apart last season's gowns so as to make use of the fabrics for the next.

Irish-born, Katie came to Regalia as a child, brought with older sister Mary by their widowed mother. Canada is the only home Katie can remember.

It is a familiar story.

Robert Fulton has a small flat on the third floor of the Penelope Apartments' O'Neill side. His story is less familiar and isn't revealed until fairly late in the novel. An English Cambridge graduate, he has somehow ended up serving at the butter and cheese counter of the Arundel Meat, Grocery, Fruit, Vegetable and Dairy Produce Market. He doesn't enjoy the work:

How Robert hated those prosperous women who came and shopped! How he detested the clipped intimations of their Canadian voices. He loathed their shrillness and their arrogance and their clumsiness of movement (it had taken his labor in the store to show him that women are more clumsy in their movements than men). He hated them from head to foot, and he felt certain that if he could see inside them he would hate them more.

Katie McGee is nothing like the women Robert serves. She'd never be able to afford the market's offerings. The same can be said of Robert. Both earn $1.50 for a day's work, the difference being that dressmaker's employers provide breakfast and lunch.

Their relationship begins in the backstory with an act kindness. Robert saw Katie struggling with a sack of coal for her flat and had insisted on carrying the burden.

Our Little Life is a portrait of a woman and man who would never known one another had they remained overseas. Katie's initial interest in Robert is as a possible partner; we first see her rushing to her flat so as to prepare a meal and herself for his arrival. She is older than Robert, Robert is "younger than his years," but still a girl can hope. A lonely woman drawn to the finer things in life, she looks up to a man who had not only received a fine education, but had once practiced a profession she had wanted for herself.

There is no envy, only awe.

It needs be said that Robert Fulton is nowhere near as interesting as Katie finds him. A bastard (historical definition), he was raised by a kindly woman who'd agreed to take on the task. Robert had wanted for nothing. Well-travelled, Robert chose Canada for his new home. He was provided with a substantial amount of money, which he promptly lost through a poor investment. Robert then looked to support himself as a schoolteacher, but for reasons left unsaid he resigned.

Before befriending Katie, he'd devoted his evenings to setting down his thoughts on immigration with the intent of producing a volume of essays. After befriending Katie, the better part of his evenings are spent in her small flat reading lengthy passages – featured in the novel –  as she listens intently, understanding little, but always ready with a compliment.

This is the novel's great flaw.

The reviewer in the Liverpool Daily Post (14 July 1921) puts it best:

Miss Sime has much to unburden herself of about Canadian conditions and Canadian folk. subjects on which Miss M'Gee is specially voluble, while Robert is writing a book upon them in intervals of leisure from the groceries counter. The novel is long in consequence. We might fairly retitle it "Our Little Life at Great Length." To deny it merit would be unfair to the effect produced by the amazing minutæ of which it is built up. It is not tedious; you may call it a feat of entertaining prolixity.

Our Little Life is set in the final fourteen months of the Great War, a conflict that has a surprisingly small presence. Robert, who had tried to enlist, had been been "turned down":

As he had come away from that rejection he had brought with him a mind torn in two: he had felt relief... and he had felt a miserable sense that he was being forcibly turned back from the only real duty that lay before him. This double attitude of his persisted. Had he been at the War, had he waited in the terrible trenches and rushed over No Man's Land into the German trenches opposite – he would undoubtedly have been miserable. But he could not have been more miserable than he was in the Arundel Store, feeling day after day that he was degradingly safe.

At one point, Robert accompanies Katie to a sort of going away party for Mac, a Penelopian he'd never met:

Robert and Mac looked at one another. Possibly the fact that Mac limped so that he was unable to go back to the front, while Robert had never got even so far as the drill-ground in the Campus may have had something to do with it. Possibly a certain half-bakedness together with the most complete certainty in himself that Mac had may have exasperated Robert unduly: undoubtedly the question that leaped to Mac's mind the instant he set eyes on Robert, "What's he doing here? What's he done for his country?" complicated the situation.

I risk making too much of these brief passages. As with Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's Mist of Morning (1919), read earlier this year, I was paying perhaps too much attention to the march of time.

Our Little Life begins in the late autumn of 1917. The summer of 1918 is very hot. One evening, Robert suggests an outing Summer Park. He's heard customers at his counter talking about how much cooler it is there. They travel by there by streetcar moving first through a through French Canadian neighbourhood, then one populated by Eastern European Jews. Sicilian, Chinese, Syrian, Bulgarian, German, Polish neighbourhoods follow. He treats Katie to a chicken dinner and concert. It is the most magical evening of her little life.

The Armistice is to come, but not before the Spanish Flu.

Trivia I: The city in which Our Little Life takes place is referred to as "Regalia" ninety-seven times in the novel, but the Canadian reader will recognize it as Montreal. The façade slips on page 265:

By the time Beta's body had been brought back to Montreal to be buried and Mrs. Morphy's ground-floor across the court was empty and bare, it was May.

Not to worry, there's no real spoiler in the above.

Trivia II: Midway through Our Little Life, quite unexpectedly, one of Katie's clients presents her with two tickets to a talk by a touring Irish poet was is clearly modeled on W.B. Yeats. Sime first met the poet and dramatist as a girl growing up in Cheswick. In her privately printed memoir Brave Sprits (1952), she writes of  attending the poet's 1903 and 1914 Montreal lectures. 

Trivia III: The climax of the novel takes place on 7 November 1918, the day of the False Peace:

The Hamilton Spectator, 7 November 1917

Object and Access: Bound in blue boards with black type, my copy is the first UK edition. It was purchased in four years ago from bookseller in Arlington, East Sussex. Price: £17.50.

The front free endpaper features mysterious notations:

Any ideas?

The 1921 Grant Richards' British first was joined the same year by editions from F.G. Goodchild (Canadian) and Frederick Stokes (American). It would appear that none received a second printing. As I write, no copies of the 1921 editions are listed for sale online.

The good news is that the novel returned to print in 1994 when it was added to the Tecumseh Press Early Canadian Women Writers series. Used copies are just as uncommon as the Richards, Goodchild and Stokes editions, but you can purchase it today through this link to the publisher.

Looking Back on Lot's Wife

Lot's Wife [La Femme de Loth]
Monique Bosco [trans John Glassco]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1975
151 pages

De temps à autre, un mot, une phrase, entendus malgré moi, me frappent comme un autre soufflet immérité.

– La Femme de Loth, Monique Bosco, 1970

There was a time in this great land when translations of French-language books were published with near exclusivity in hardcover. There were no second printings and there were no paperback reissues. I'm thinking of titles like In Quest of Splendour (Pierre le magnifique), Orphan Street (Un Chaîne dans la parc), and The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel (L'épouvantail).

Lot's Wife met the very same fate.

I was a child when La Femme de Loth was published. I was an adolescent when it appeared in English translation. I was adult when I first read Lot's Wife. I was an older adult when I wrote Monique Bosco to ask about her working relationship with the translator. This was when I was working on A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of John Glassco. The letter I received in response was generous and gracious. She'd had very limited correspondence. Though they were both living in Montreal they'd never met.

I never met Monique Bosco, either. She died two years after posting that letter, just short of her eightieth birthday.

Author photo on the jacket of Lot's Wife.

I wish our correspondence hadn't ended there. She was a remarkable woman and this novel is one of the best to come out of 1970s Quebec. It was an extraordinary decade.

Lot's Wife opens with the narrator addressing a physician. These aren't the very first lines, but they are my favourite:

You're used to passing terrible sentences on people. Your technique is remarkable. First deliver the blow: the illness may be fatal. Then announce the remedy: amputation. The solution is hailed with positive joy. Those condemned to an imminent death are equally "reasonable." As a reward, the pretty joys of the invalid world are danced before them.

Though not obvious at first, the physician was her married lover. He's ended their decade-long affair and has sent her off for two weeks in Venice to recover, as if from surgery. What we're reading is the narrator's writing. She's writing because she cannot sleep. She cannot do anything but write. The text, disjointed and at times confusing, consists of 240 numbered segments that skip back and forth in time. The shortest, not more than two or three sentences, tend to be self-revelatory. The longer touch here and there on past events in her life. The total is addressed to her former lover.

She was the unwanted child of a Jewish mother and Catholic father, both blessed with good looks she did not inherit. Her earliest memories are of Paris. As clouds of the Second World War begin drifting westward, the small family relocates to New York. This proves a disaster for two reasons, the least of which has to do with her parents' broken English and inability to find employment. The second has to do with a dark episode she had always kept hidden.

Fortunes change with a chance encounter with a family friend. This results in relocation to Montreal where the narrator's parents thrive while striving to avoid any and all news of the country they left behind.

As the narrator grows into womanhood and the Nazis occupy Paris, her parents show the first signs of middle-age. Self-absorbed, they cling to what remains of youth with such desperation that they attempt to recast their daughter as more of a friend than a child. Their campaign is cut short when both die in an automobile accident on the way back from a ski trip in the Laurentians. Their adolescent daughter survived because she'd been left alone in their Montreal apartment.

Much of what the narrator writes she's told no one, not even the physician. She shares it now through her writing – the humiliations and horrors of a short-lived marriage included – though she knows it won't make a difference. The only person she has ever loved, the person she still loves, has cast her aside. She goes over her past because she cannot imagine a future. She doesn't want a future:

God was right. Those must be saved who value life enough to flee, following their noses, letting flames devour the wreckage behind them. Lot and his family. His daughters are young, their life is all before them. But for the old wife, it is her whole past that is being swallowed up. So she turns her head, trying to see what is happening – and what has happened. She looks back, breaking the commandment. Poor old woman. In the Bible you have no name. Lot's wife, that was enough.

It's not until the second half of the novel that the narrator reveals that her name is Hélène. The physician's name is Pierre. She was not his wife, though she very much wanted to be.

Monique Bosco published seventeen volumes in her seventy-nine years, consisting of novels, short story collections, and verse. La Femme de Loth is the best known, having received the 1970 Governor General's Award for French-language Fiction. A half-century after publication, Lot's Wife remains the lone translation of her work.

More, please.

Dedication:

Trivia: Curiously, McClelland & Stewart rejected Lot's Wife as the title of the translation and kept pushing the nonsensical The Woman of Lot. The pressure was such that in desperation Glassco offered an alternative: You Found Me Beautiful.

The critic's rave: Glassco's translation was well received. The only negative review I've found came from Pat Barclay. In the 19 July 1975 edition of the Victoria's Times-Columnist, Barclay writes that it "brings with it the whiff of the original French in its clipped yet dramatically effective phrasing. I found it dreary, depressing, almost maudlin – yet at the same time impressively well planned and presented."

The critic concludes:

Two things:

It's Hélène, not Helene.

No committee "one mad spring day in 1970, decided to select Lot's Wife [here I assume the critic means La Femme de Loth] as the winner of a Governor General's award [sic]" for the simple reason that La Femme de Loth was released in the autumn of that year.

Object and Access: A slim hardcover with black boards and a jacket by David Shaw. Does the woman depicted not resemble Margaret Atwood?

As I write, five copies are listed online with prices beginning at $9.95. Mine was purchased in 1999 from The Word in Montreal. Price: $60.

La Femme de Loth was first published in 1970 by Robert Laffont. I was surprised to learn that the novel is no longer in print. It was last published in 2003 by Bibliothèque québécoise.

Related posts:

A Novel That Killed a Novelist?
Langevin's Masterpiece; McClelland's Disappointment

Lost in Translation

Fun With Translation!

Day fourteen of Women in Translation Month and I've yet to participate. What with car troubles, appliance breakdowns, other unforeseen expenses, and health issues (not mine), it has been a summer of distractions. All is capped by the most violent and most frequent thunderstorms I've ever experienced. The most recent passed not two hours ago.

In lieu of a review, I present something light.

Published in 1974, They Won't Demolish Me! is Sheila Fischman's translation of Roch Carrier's Le deux-millième étage, which had been published the previous year. It was her fourth translation of Carrier. Many more have followed.

Thirteen of the eighteen Sheila Fischman translations of Roch Carrier in my collection.
Floralie, Where Are You? appears twice. The first is a copy signed by the author.
The second belonged to John Glassco and bears his signature.

Le deux-millième étage isn't one of Carrier's best-known works, but I think of the translation often as it contains a nod and a wink to her friend and fellow translator John Glassco. This comes on page 68 of They Won't Demolish Me! 

The original French, which appears on page 88 of the 1973 Éditions du Jour edition reads:

Such a subtle change, one letter for another. Having written Glassco's biography and editing his selected letters, I'm certain it was done with both great affection and a sense of fun.

How could she resist!

Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years: A Top Ten Tuesday List

Tuesdays begin like any other day. I rise before the sun, make a carafe of coffee, then return to bed to read The New York Times on my laptop. My wife has made me promise to wake her with news that Donald Trump is dead. The Environment Canada website is next, followed by The Globe & Mail. I then take a tour of my favourite book blogs. On Tuesdays I make a point of visiting That Artsy Reader Girl. For six years now, Jenna has been hosting Top Ten Tuesday in which she suggests topics to we fellow bookish people. A few examples: 

Books I Disliked But Am Glad I Read

The Longest Books I've Ever Read

Books I'd Give Different Titles To 

Much as I've enjoyed the responses, I'd never participated. This changed with today's prompt: Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years.

It was interesting to revisit summer reads from years past. Published in 1872, James De Mille's The American Baron was the oldest. I Am Not Guilty was by far my favourite of the ten titles. Read in 2019, I liked it so much as to return it to print the following year as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet series.

I was less impressed by the author's 1949 Harlequin Lost House, which is not to suggest that there aren't others deserving revival... Well, maybe just one. Long time readers will know which:

2025

A Japanese Nightingale

Onoto Watanna [Winnifred Eaton]

New York: Harper, 1901

2024

The American Baron

James De Mille

New York: Harper & Bros, 1872

2023

The Weak-Eyed Bat
Collected Millar: The First Detectives
Margaret Millar
New York: Syndicate, 2017

2022

Lost House
Frances Shelley Wees
Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1949

2021

One Day's Courtship and The Heralds of Fame
Robert Barr
New York: Stokes, 1896

2020

The Darling Illusion
Margerie Scott
London: Peter Davies, 1954

2019

M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty
Frances Shelley Wees
New York: Doubleday, 1954

2018

Doors of the Night
Frank L. Packard
Toronto: Copp Clark, 1922

2017

Caught in the Snare: The Sequel to Edith Percival
May Agnes Fleming
New York: Street & Smith, [c. 1917]

2016

The Mystery of the Folded Paper
Hulbert Footner
New York: Collier, n.d.. 

For the record, I'm currently reading Lot's Wife, John Glassco's 1975 translation of La femme de Loth by Monique Bosco.

As I write, Donald Trump is still alive.

Related posts:

A 'Japanese' Nightingale: Winnifred Eaton at 150

A Red, White and Blue Baron: For Minnie's Sake
Margaret Millar's Muskoka Murder Mystery
Dope. Danger. One Doll.
Double Fantasy
They Fell in Love With the Actress
Domestic Suspense in Small Town Ontario
Familiar to Hundreds (including Mike Myers?)
Soldiering On With Edith Percival
Cheese! What a Story!

Between Exhaustion and Expression

Shackles
Madge Macbeth
New York: Waterson, 1927
282 pages

The first three pages of Shackles take the form of a letter written by the author to her friend Aimée. Do not read it before the novel itself! It contains a doozy of a spoiler.

Shackles is the sixth of Madge Macbeth's thirteen novels and has a novelist as its main character. This was almost enough for me to set it aside.

Are novelists really so common?

The novelist at the centre of Shackles is Naomi Lennox. She lives in a fairly comfortable house with barrister husband Arthur and semi-invalid relation Uncle Toby. There are no children, which given Arthur's nocturnal expectations is something of a miracle. 

Uncle Toby has recently returned from a trip south where he was surprised and extremely pleased to encounter people who new his niece's writing. He was even asked for an interview with one of the local papers! Arthur is not so impressed – in fact, is not impressed at all. A selfish, petulant, and stubborn man, Arthur resents the fleeting minutes his wife finds to steal away to her desk and is dismissive of the results.  

Shireen Dey is Naomi's closest friend. She too is a novelist – a very successful one. Her home life is quite different. Husband David, who she calls "Doolydear," not only takes care of the house but manages her career. He has recently sold the rights of one of her novels to the motion picture people. Lively, full of life, and aware of her limitations as a writer, I quite liked Shireen until she exposed herself as a racist. This occurs in an exchange which pretty much encapsulates Arnold's views of his wife's writing. Arnold speaks first:

"Man’s sphere throughout the ages seems to me to have been one of protection, provision. My simple philosophy is expressed in the idea of service. So far as I can see it, men have served their women faithfully – even to paying the supreme sacrifice in times of war. Is it too much to expect – say fifty per cent service in return?”

   “I admit,” Shireen answered, “that there are too many women in whom the commutual sense, the reciprocal sense, is lacking. They want to eat their cake and have it, too. Like the slaves in the South, they achieved freedom too suddenly. They don’t know how to use it. Mentally, physically, economically, they are parasites. They will not last. Think of the others, however; of the women whose mental development and chosen sphere of endeavour – whose creative ability – justifies them in demanding the identical type of freedom that is accorded men. What of the woman artist, musician, decorator, physician, lawyer? Suppose, to drive home my argument more clearly, you were a novelist, would you not claim the independence necessary to pursue your vocation?”

   Arnold observed that unless he were one of the great masters of literature, he could not imagine himself engrossed with the business of writing, at all. Comparatively few men, he ventured, devoted themselves exclusively to literature of that sort.

   “In other words,” Shireen cut in, “you mean to imply that they do something useful as a regular profession and scribble as a hobby or a pastime?”

   “That expresses pretty closely what I mean."

Would it surprise you to learn that Naomi has a lover? She's been seeing Hugo Main. A man of strong opinions on all sorts of things, he's really quite a bore. The best that can be said of Hugo is that he admires Naomi's intellect. Whether there is more to the attraction is uncertain; the two never share anything more than a kiss and an embrace. Hugo pressures Naomi to run away with him to New York, promising to be her own Doolydear.

Can she do it? Will she do it? What Naomi wants most is the freedom to work on The Book of the Hour, her second novel. She takes a bold first step one night remaining at her desk when Arnold expects her in bed. The second step comes in engaging a maid. What with the money brought in through her writing they can afford it. Besides, her hire, Jennie McQuaig, will free up time to be more productive and bring in more money.

It is impossible to read Shackles today without thinking of A Room of One's Own (1929). Is it not remarkable that the novel was published three years earlier? How has it escaped Virago's notice?

Macbeth writes in the book's opening letter:

Woman is passing through a cultural transition. Instinctively, she is bound to the old order of things; intellectually, she clamours for the new. And vacillating, she stands between them.

That doozy of a spoiler concerns the ending. Were it not for the letter I wouldn't have seen it coming. 

See if you don't agree.

Trivia: In the January of last year, I put together a list of the very best Canadian novels of the 1920s. I held it to nine because I'd yet to read Douglas Durkin's The Magpie (1923) and Barney Allen's They Have Bodies (1929); one of the two was sure to make the cut. I've since read The Magpie. Sure enough it made the list, rounding out the top ten. Shackles too deserves a spot. In adding it, I'm bumping Madge Macbeth's pseudonymous roman à clef The Land of Afternoon (1924).

The list as it now stands (in chronological order):

The Thread of Flame - Basil King

The Empty Sack - Basil King

The Wine of Life - Arthur Stringer

The Hidden Places - Bertrand W. Sinclair

Pagan Love - John Murray Gibbon

The Magpie - Douglas Durkin

"Cattle" - Edith Eaton

Shackes - Madge Macbeth

Blencarrow - Isabel Mackay

All Else is Folly - Peregrine Acland

I'm certain there'll be more changes. Despite my decades-old interest in Allen – see my reviews of The Toronto Doctor (1949) and The Gynocologist (1969) – I still haven't read They Have Bodies.

Object and Access: Yellowing pages bound in tan cloth, I purchased my copy in 2019 as part of a lot. It once belonged to Emma Bailey, but which Emma Bailey? The 1921 Canadian census records thirty Emma Baileys living in Canada. The 1931 census features twenty-seven, which narrows the field very slightly. 

As my copy is the first American edition, there is a possibility that Emma Bailey may not have been living in Canada. The true first edition was published in Ottawa in 1926 by Graphic. A Toronto bookseller has two copies for sale online, both with dust jackets, both at $250. So as to encourage a sale, I'm sharing an image of the one I'd choose.

My birthday is in twenty-four days.

The least expensive jacketless copy is listed at US$41.50. As I write, just one Waterson copy is listed for sale online. At US$72, it too lacks a dust jacket. 

Shackles returned to print in 2005 as part of the Tecumseh Press Early Canadian Women Writers Series. Twelve years later, Invisible Publishing followed with its own edition. Both are still available, meaning that after many decades out of print today's reader has two editions from which to choose.

Shackles can be read online here thanks to the good folks at the faded page.

Related posts:

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s
The Great War and Its Discontents

Our Strangest Novel?
Still Strange (if a little less so)