Robert Barr at his desk at The Idler McClure's Magazine, November 1894
If Canadian Grant Allen really was the "busiest man in England," as he claimed, might his contemporary Robert Barr have placed second? Allen produced fifty-two books in his fifty-one years, whereas Barr managed only forty-six in his sixty-three. On the other hand, Barr also worked with friend Jerome K. Jerome as editor of The Idler, easily one of the very finest magazines, literary or otherwise, in Victorian England. I spent a pleasant afternoon last weekend with its March 1894 issue.
The cover image is by English painter Hal Hurst, one of eight – eight! – he made for the second instalment of Vernon's Aunt, a new novel by daughter of Brantford Sara Jeanette Duncan. It's followed by an uncollected Robert Barr short story titled 'Two of a Kind.'
Grant Allen makes an unwitting appearance in illustrator Scott Rankin's series 'People I Have Never Met.'
Barr returns to make a brief, yet persuasive argument in the magazine's regular feature, 'The Idler's Club.'
'Twas an enjoyable reading afternoon.
I purchased my first Robert Barr book, a first American edition of his 1909 novel Cardillac, in 1991 while hunting through the basement of a Plattsburg, Vermont bookstore. Price: US$2.00.
My second, Barr's two-volume travelogue The Unchanging East (1899), came in the early days of eBay courtesy of another Yankee bookseller. Price: US$6.00.
Years of hunting at London, Ontario's Attic Books yielded an extremely fragile unbound copy of his 1899 novel Jenny Baxter Journalist published in Toronto by Copp Clark.
I don't know what to make of it. The paper is so cheap and fragile that it was all I could do to take the photo above; I dare not read it. Price: $5.00.
At Attic, I also found the 1973 University of Toronto Press edition of Barr's 1907 The Measure of the Rule, the one novel he set in Canada. Price: $2.00.
Strange to think – strange to me, anyway – that the most I've ever paid for a Robert Barr book went to print-on-demand vulture Dodo for its reprint of Revenge!At over one thousand dollars, the Chatto & Windus true first is well beyond my reach.
Chatto & Windus, 1896
The most expensive Barr currently listed online is From Whose Bourne, Etc, published in 1893 by Chatto & Windus. Price: $1454.00. Had I the money, the Barr I would buy is a copy of the 1908 Appleton American first of Young Lord Stranleigh once belonging to Edith Wharton (with her signature). Price: $1100.00.
Not all volumes are so expensive. An Isle of Wight bookseller has listed a copy of his 1905 novel The Speculations of John Steele at £2.50.
I've found the United Kingdom a rich hunting ground for inexpensive Canadian books. This year alone, I've purchased obscurities by Louis Arthur Cunningham, Doris Hedges, Isabelle Hughes, Edward McCourt, Margaret Murray Robertson, Arthur Stringer, and Alan Sullivan. No matter the quarry, I always make a point of searching the seller's listings for Barr before completing the order. There's often something to be had for under six quid, hence my scattershot collection.
Lieutenant William Arthur Barr was one of two children born to novelist Robert Barr and his wife Eva Barr (née Bennett). Killed in action near Croisilles on 17 August 1918, aged thirty-six, he was survived by his mother and sister Laura. In this country, the loss didn't receive proper notice. Nearly a month passed before the Gazette published a report of his death – even then, it botched his name.
The Gazette, 10 September 1918
Newspapers south of the border were even slower. Foreign correspondent Hayden Church broke the news to Americans on 2 November 1918.
The following day, the story appeared on the front page of the Detroit Free Press:
Appropriate.
From 1876 until 1881, father Robert had worked for the Free Press as a reporter and editor, after which the family moved to London, where William was born.
Church's piece appeared later that same day in the San Antonio Express (again botching his name):
The headline in the 6 November 1918 edition of the Atlanta Constitution paints the lieutenant in a very different light (and also botches the name):
I think it worth noting that Hayden Church bases his reporting on "a letter received from one of those who knew him best," someone who describes the thirty-six-year-old man as being still in his twenties.
As far as I know, the Calgary Herald is the only Canadian newspaper to print Church's reporting. It did so on 30 November 1918, fifteen weeks after his death, nineteen days after the Armistice.
Had it not been for The Untempered Wind, I might never have read Judith Moore. Had I read Judith Moore first, its unlikely that I would've read The Untempered Wind or anything else by Joanna E. Wood.
Judith Moore is the author's second novel. It shares something with The Untempered Wind in being set in rural Ontario, yet features little of the small town cruelty, hypocrisy, dogmatism, and pious conceit that makes the earlier work so involving and affecting.
The titular character, a literal prima donna, has completed her first European tour to great success and requires rest before taking on the United States. She finds room and board with Mr and Mrs Morris, whose homestead is nestled in a hollow outside fictional Ovid, Ontario.
Why Ovid? Why the Morrises? How had Judith Moore so much as heard of Ovid? These are questions left unanswered. Mrs Morris is of no help in solving the mystery:
"She and a little
black-a-vised chap came driving up the lane one day last week, and
before I just rightly could make out what they were, he was driving off
and she was there for keeps. Next day there came a whole waggon [sic] load
of trunks."
The need of such a respite – an entire summer – is concerning in one so young and at the very start of an exciting and promising career. Might it be because Judith Moore, petite, pale, delicate, and fragile, lacks the physique of the diva commonly associated with what Mrs Morris calls "the opry?"
No, the cause of Judith's fatigue is something else entirely, and is worth quoting at length:
Blind
fools who could not see it was the passion of an empty heart, the
yearning of a solitary soul, the unutterable longing of a woman's
nature for love, that rendered her marvellous voice so passionately and
painfully sweet. She herself never suspected it; only she believed
what the doctors had told her manager and teacher, the good man who
wore such big diamonds and used such bad language, that she must have
rest, quiet, complete and absolute change. So she and this man had
come to Canada, and had driven on and on into the heart of the country
till they came to this village in the valley, and there she had elected
to stay – a caprice not nearly so extravagant, and certainly more sweet
and wholesome than the freaks indulged in by some others of her ilk.
So here she was, lying perdu, whilst her picture was in every paper
in the country, with marvellous tales of her triumphs abroad and
whispers of the wonderful treat in store for the music-lovers of
America. And her little, good-hearted manager flashed out his biggest
diamonds, swore his worst oaths, hoped the child was getting strong,
and never dreamed he was killing her.
Enter handsome Andrew Cutler. Healthy, wealthy, young, and of Loyalist stock, his land borders the Morris homestead. Andrew is literally sowing seeds when "assailed by a succession of the sweetest sounds he had ever heard – note
after note of purest melody, flung forth unsyllabled, full-throated to
the air, inarticulate but eloquent. Again and again it came, liquid,
rich, and with that pathos which perfection always touches."
Assailed again the following day, he follows the call:
"I have come," he said, half dreamily – stepping out from the shelter of
the trees.
The pale-faced singing siren changed to a startled, blushing girl, and
in swift sequence Andrew's rapt gaze altered to one not altogether
without daring.
"Oh, so I see," she half gasped, then laughed outright, looking at him
with shy eyes, but mutinously curving lips. The laugh robbed the scene
of its last illusion of mystery.
This fin de siecle meet cute begins well, but is spoiled by Judith's habiliment. Not being "up in chatelaines," the farmer's "masculine horse sense and the instinct of protection" gets the better of him:
"Why in the world do you wear shoes like these?" he asked. "And such stockings! and standing on that damp moss! You had better go right into the house and get on decently heavy shoes."
This was too much. Miss Judith Moore fancied her own feet, and fancied open-work silk hose, and high-heeled wisps of shoes. Most of all, she liked the combination. In fact, in a harmless little way, she rather liked people to have a chance to appreciate these beauties, and at the very moment Andrew spoke, she had noted his downward glance and felt a righteous peace settle upon her. To be well shod is such moral support, and, lo, this heathen, this wretch, this abominable, conceited, brazen young farmer, had actually dared to suggest a change; more than that, he had spoken of "stockings"—disgusting!
So, with a dignity that reduced Andrew to despair, even whilst it roused his ire (she was so slight to be such a "defiant little cat" he told himself), she drew herself up, in a manner to do the traditional Duchess credit, and left him, saying: "Since you don't approve of my feet I'll take them out of your way." "You mean they'll take you," said Andrew, wrathfully conscious that she was, to use a good old figure of speech, "turning up her nose at him." "You are extremely rude," she called back. "And you are a bad-tempered little thing," he answered.
Focus on footwear, flaunting of feet, and pride of pieds aside, Judith and Andrew's contentious early exchange is conventional, as recognized by Elvis Costello:
Chapter One, we didn't really get along
Chapter Two, I think I fell in love with you
Judith and Andrew's romance is a touch different in that their first encounter takes place in the second chapter. They have no contact in the third, but are very much in each other's thoughts. In Chapter Four, Andrew rescues Judith from an apple tree, setting their relationship on a firmer footing.
Pacing aside, what makes Judith Moore an unconventional romance novel is also what makes it so tedious. From the moment Andrew returns Judith's high-heeled wisps to terra firma, they walk a path free of obstruction, falling further in love with each meeting. It isn't until the ninth of the novel's eleven chapters – the last taking the form of a very brief epilogue – that anything occurs to threaten Judith's happiness.
She has only herself to blame.
Judith writes a letter to her manager asking to be released so that she may marry Andrew.
Released from what exactly? There is no contract, but innocent Judith feels an obligation towards this "little black-a-vised man with big diamonds [and] profane tongue" for recognizing her talent and taking her under his wing after her widowed father died . She writes that she will understand if he wishes her to return to the stage.
The manager shows up at the Morris homestead the very next week, accompanied by a French maid "of the real Parisian stripe," and Judith is whisked away without Andrew knowing.
There is no spoiler in sharing the conclusion; it's pretty much as one would expect. Judith is sent out on out on the American tour singing her little heart out. In New York, she surprises with a song, unaccompanied by orchestra, seemingly of her own composition:
For the peace which you crave;
For the end of your quest;
For the love which can save;
Come! Come to me!"
Hundreds of kilometres away, "in the silent spaces of a virgin forest," a heartbroken Andrew is thinking of Judith:
Where was she? It was not her wish that he should know. He hoped her little feet trod pleasant paths. Oh, Judith, Judith! Then, explain it as we may, or leave it still a mystery, there came to him, faint, aëry, bodilessly, the words of a song—a song that ended in a plea, "Come! Come to me," and when it died away, Andrew Cutler sprang to his feet with a cry that echoed far between the icy tree trunks of the forest, "I come, I come." And that same night, at the same hour, at the same pulse of the hour, Judith Moore, with a look of ineffable joy upon her face, fell fainting upon the stage.
Judith Moore has a remarkable, entirely avoidable flaw in that Andrew is portrayed as a reader. "He's got a crank on books–took that off his mother," Mrs Morris says to Judith after the meet cute gone bad. And yet Andrew has no idea what has become of his love, despite her tour being covered by the papers.
Andrew returns from the virgin forest to Ovid, where he learns, quite by chance, that the swarthy manager lives in New York. And so he purchases a train ticket:
As the Canadian trains reach New York, the morning papers come aboard. Andrew bought one of each, and sat down turning them over with tremulous hands to search for a sign. He had not far to seek—"JUDITH MOORE DYING, THE END APPROACHING." That was what he read in big "scare head" type; that, and its narrations in the other papers, with the usual platitudes telling of the "short but bright career," and so on. With the calm of despair he searched for definite information as to where she was. It seemed every one knew so well that definite detail was superfluous. But at last, in a different part of the paper, he found: "In the corridors of the Brittany Hotel last night, Miss Moore's manager, who had just left her bedside, said all hope was gone." The train was in New York, slowing up in the Grand Central station by the time he found this.
Andrew reaches Judith with hours to spare.
Marriage follows.
FIN
I laid down my cheap print on demand paperback with a sigh. The Untempered Wind, the author's first novel, is so very good, as is her third, A Daughter of Witches (1899). Judith Moore lands between the two with a dull thud. The disappointment is made all the worse with the knowledge that Wood produced just one more novel, Farden Ha' (1902). Apparently, it takes place in the Scottish mining town in which the author was born.
Types of Canadian Women Henry Morgan, ed Toronto: William Briggs, 1903
Perfectly put, I remembered those words from when I first read them. What I did not recall is Goddard's discovery of two Wood novellas published in the New York pulp magazine Tales from Town Topics. The earlier, A Martyr to Love (1897) "recounts the adventures of a femme fatale ironically wounded in her heartless conquests." The later, Where Waters Beckon (1902) "draws symbolically on Niagara’s whirlpools and local Indian legends as the setting for a dark tale of a woman married off to a madman by her father and later destroyed with her lover, an engineer developing hydroelectricity."
I'd purchase print on demand editions of either in a flash.
Farden Ha', too.
About the epigraph:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning never wrote a poem titled 'Fashioning a Pipe,' the words are taken from her poem 'A Musical Instrument' (1860) beginning with the first two lines of the second stanza. From there, we skip to the second word of third line of the third stanza, ignoring the opening "And."
The epigraph includes twenty of the poems forty-two lines (in whole or in part), ignoring structure, adding and deleting punctuation, touching down here and there. It reminded me of nothing so much as a K-tel album track.
Object and Access: A floppy paperback, so poorly designed that the spine is blank.
Judith Moore was first published in 1898 by the Ontario Publishing Company. It has been out of print ever since. The novel entered public domain in 1978. It is available for download here courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
I've never come upon a copy of the Ontario Publishing Company edition in the wild. As I write, two are listed for sale online at $160 and $250 respectively. Judging by the sellers' descriptions, the least expensive is the superior copy.
Chipmunk Len Peterson Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1949 299 pages
Claude Widgewood specializies in buns at Toronto's Modern Baker. He's an expert at adding just the right amount of cinnamon. The other bun-makers aren't so exacting. They don't care. There's no better employee than Claude, and yet he's afraid of being dismissed. Proulx is the problem. Claude considers this co-worker a Communist intent on spreading the Red Octopus's tentacles into his workplace. Leaving for home at the end of his shift, a notice of a union meeting is thrust into Claude's hand. He hides it in his coat pocket, fearful that Mr Cadenza, the bakery owner, is watching. Is he? What about Mr Spidafora, the Assistant Manager?
Claude tries to rid himself of the notice on the crowded streetcar home. Sliding it from his coat, he lets it loose to drop on the floor. It does not. The sheet is wedged between himself and an elderly woman with purple hair. She gives him a look when he tries to shimmy it loose.
Chipmunk may be a comedy, but its humour is dark. The eyes of Messrs Cadenza and Spidafora are a definite concern, but Claude's greater worry is the tall man in trench coat standing idly outside the bakery cleaning his fingernails with a comb. Claude is almost certain that he's with the Special Branch of the Mounties investigating subversive activities.
The chill of the Cold War permeates. Whether at the bakery, traveling to and from the bakery, or drinking in a tavern with his friend Mott Kilsoonski, Claude is on edge. It is a mistake to drink so much:
When sober, Claude idolizes Kilsoonski. The man fought in Italy, the man was wounded in Italy, while Claude never even made it overseas:
The first Medical Officer who examined him said he had shoulders like a bird, and all those who examined him afterwards agreed; he had the narrowest shoulders they had ever seen.
The war three years in the past, Mott is a rising talent in the boxing world. He defeated Andy Anzopoulis in his most recent fight at the Gardens.
Mott is one of the three most important people in Claude's life. His friendship with the boxer extends back to pre-war years when the big man rescued him from a bunch of mean-talking thugs. Claude's relationship with young tough Nick Yakyuchuk, the most recent, came about when he volunteered with the "Great Big Brothers." The baker is meant to provide moral guidance and an upstanding male role model. Nick has just returned from a juvenile detention centre. Nick's mother, a prostitute, is intimidating because she is such a good looking woman. Claude is ever wary, thinking that she will make some sort of move. Besides, he has a wife.
This is the novel's most unbelievable ingredient.
The marriage between Claude and Faustina Widgewood is unlike any other I've encountered in Canadian literature. He's as small as she is large, but that isn't it. Faustina is cold and distant, sometimes pushing him away. Then there are times she draws him so close that her knitting needles poke. They wrestle in their marital bed – brutally and violently – but slight Claude always wins and Faustina is satisfied.
It's tempting to dismiss Claude as so many do – as a weakling – but there is strength in his imagination. This muscle he has exercised since childhood in picturing his father, a soldier passing through on way to the Great War... or so his mother told him. As a child, he came up with a believable story about his "widowed mother." It has served him well. Though he has altered it slightly over the years, this is the one Faustina knows.
Of course, it is that same imagination that is the greatest source of torment.
Chipmunk is a first novel. After publication, Len Peterson spoke of his plans for a second novel, but it never appeared.
I can see why.
In a 16 August 1955 letter to Norman Levine, Jack McClelland responds to a the former's Times Literary Supplement piece titled 'Canadian Writers Come into Their Own.'
McClelland has this to say about Levine's praise for Len Peterson: "as a novelist in the Canadian scene, [Peterson] is hardly worth mention. He hasn't produced a book-length script for about seven years, and even at that he probably showed more promise than anything else."
Chipmunk does show promise. It is one of the strongest debuts I've ever read.
Len Peterson was first and foremost a playwright. At thirty-two, his age when Chipmunk was published, he was also English Canada's leading radio dramatist. The CBC paid so much better than McClelland and Stewart.
A man has to make a living.
Claude Widgewood would tell you as much.
About the title:
About the novel:
Trivia: A Len Peterson-scripted CBC Radio adaptation aired in March 1950.
Object: An attractive hardcover in navy blue cloth. The jacket design, superior to most published in 'forties Canada, is credited to German immigrant Robert Langstadt (1912-1987). Nearly everything I know about the artist is found on this McMaster Museum of Art page. It is well worth a read.
My copy was purchased online two years ago from an Ontario bookseller. Price: US$15.00.
Access: McClelland & Stewart did not reprint. There have been no other editions. Seventy-seven-year-old copies are listed online for as little as fifteen Canadian dollars. At $100, the most expensive is inscribed by Len Peterson to author and academic Sylvia De Vrenet. If you have the money, this is the one to purchase.
Read for the 1949 Book Club hosted by Karen and Simon.
Other titles from 1949 covered at the Dusty Bookcase:
A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's UP, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
