In Montreal, a city blessed with so very many works of public art, the Monument aux Patriotes stands as one of the most poignant. It was unveiled one hundred years ago today by nonagenarian Marion Cardinal-Marion. This and other St-Jean-Baptiste Day events were covered on the front page of the 24 June 1926 edition of the Montreal Daily Star, the city's afternoon Anglo newspaper.
The reporting begins:
For all its coverage, the Star did not include a photograph of the newly installed monument that day. No Montreal newspaper did, which I expect had much to do with time constraints imposed by the technology of the time. The image at the top of this post comes from the following morning's edition of La Presse. That afternoon, the Star featured further reporting on the previous day's festivities, along with this:
Also featured is a photograph of Marion Cardinal-Marion herself, lone surviving child of notary Joseph-Narcisse Cardinal, the first of the twelve men hanged for their roles in the Lower Canada Rebellion.
The past may be a foreign country, but not entirely.
On this day, we honour those who fought for our rights in the Rebellions of 1837 and 1838, just as Manitobans celebrate Louis Riel every February. My daughter is a graduate of École secondaire Gabriel-Dumont, named for the man who was Riel's number two in the North-West Rebellion. That school is in London, Ontario, a few kilometres from the Canadian Thames. Visit the Veterans Affairs Canada website and you will find it includes a page devoted to the Gabriel Dumont Memorial.
One hundred year ago today, Quebec's Lieutenant-Governor Narcisse Pérodeau represented King George V in honouring the men who were hanged for treason under the monarch's grandmother Queen Victoria.
Montreal's Bureau d'art publique has a very good webpage about the monument. One hundred years ago, de Lormier was a bustling thoroughfare. It is less welcoming today, but that's only due to poor city planning and the rise of the automobile. Still, I encourage a visit.
"We're piling up fireworks all around — just suppose that some one, with a screw loose, should take a fancy to see them go off?"
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's longest novel, Mist of Morning meanders, but I enjoyed the meandering. It begins with a Dickensian scene. Young David Greig is brave enough to deliver a parcel to stern Widow Ridley's house. A little girl in bright red turban and Persian shawl answers:
“You boy!” said the little girl. “What do you mean
by coming to the front door? Go round to the back
directly!”
David stands his ground; he's been sent by the minister.
The boy isn't at the door a minute, but his presence echoes. Frances, the little girl's much older cousin, worries about the disruption it has caused. The old woman is already calling down from her upstairs room, certain that the mirror in the front parlor has been broken.
The little girl's name is Rosme. It is a name her aunt, Widow Ridley, dislikes intensely, but then she doesn't care for the girl herself. Like Frances, Rosme is someone she's been saddled with, all because their respective parents died.
David reappears later that afternoon, peering at Rosme over Widow Ridley's high garden wall. The girl has been pretending to be Joan of Arc, but together they become pirates, sail the waves of long grass in the unkempt grounds, plundering ships, and burying treasure until one is called in for dinner. Pirate David returns home to be told by the man he'd believed was his father that his real father has died. And so a Dickensian bookend to a childhood encounter.
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay isn't Dickens of course, but I've enjoyed her novels just the same. She wrote five in total. Mist of Morning, her third, was the only one I'd not read. As I say, it meanders. Though more than a decade passes before David and Rosme meet again, anyone up on Dickens or Mackay will know that the relationship between the two characters is key. By this point, both are living in Toronto. David is a newly-graduated engineer. Rosme, the very example of the New Woman, is the brains of a small advertising firm.
The dialogue between the two as young adults is endearing and every bit as playful as it was all those years ago in the Widow Riley's overgrown garden. What a shame then that their paths hadn't crossed a month or two earlier, before David became engaged to raven-haired Clara Sims, a fellow boarding house tenant. This is how his fiancée is first described:
Clara
was ready for bed and the loose kimono she wore had
slipped back from her white shoulders leaving them bare
above the filmy nightdress which clung to her supple
figure with less than classic scantness. Seen so she was
superbly young, beautiful, virile, and quite without a
soul.
Though she very much has the look, Clara isn't quite the classic femme fatale. She'd set her sights on David not for love, lust, revenge or fortune, but because she'd recognized in him a man who would become a stable provider. Their engagement is the resulted of a clever trap, with David as rube. It would read like a Leacock short story were it not for tragic consequences. It begins during a dark and stormy night when Clara enters David's room on the pretence that a burglar is in hers:
Still dizzy with dreams he turned, only to feel sure that
he was dreaming still. The door, the door into the hall,
had opened and was just closing, while inside it and
bright against it’s dark panels, her hand still on the
door-knob, stood a girl in a red kimono. David in his
first dizziness thought he had never seen the girl before.
She was startlingly strange — all red and white with black
hair tumbled about her shoulders. White face, red lips,
red drapery over something white, from beneath which
a white foot peeped. A midnight dream of a girl, with
dark eyes and —.
There's that kimono again. While reading the novel I became entangled in women's clothing. There are so many descriptions providing clues as to just when the novel takes place. A discussion over at Clothes in Books was of great help. Another indication is David's work on making an aeroplane engine that would enable commercial air travel. We learn eventually that it is the autumn of 1913 when Rosme and David reconnect. Storm clouds of the coming Great War begin to gather, casting a gloom over the last quarter of the novel, introducing elements of intrigue and betrayal. A man is shot to death.
The murder didn't come as a shock – not after the author's previous novels. The plot of The House of Windows, her debut, involves the abduction of a child. In Up the Hill and Over, her second novel, it's drug addiction. Reducing Mackay's novels to short strokes doesn't do justice. They are not message novels, nor are they thoroughly dour. Her characters are for the most part perfectly pleasant and kind. There are more moments of levity than gloom and despair. I'm just sorry that there aren't more Isabel Ecclestone Mackay novels to read.
Mist of Morning isn't her best – that would be Blencarrow – but it was a happy place to land. What's more, it has a happy ending, with Rosme and David uniting in the end, just as we knew they would.
Will they live happily ever after?
Well, let's just say that the novel ends in the final days of July 1914 and leave it at that.
Favourite passage: Two women in the novel run Toronto boarding houses, the most interesting being Rosme's Madam Ramses, an unfortunate woman cursed with a masculine appearance and a sixth sense. She's described in entertaining detail, but this picture of Mrs Carr, David's landlady, takes the cake:
She was a frosty person with a grim eye. Her aspect was calm, her mouth tight and her nose suspicious. Long ago there had been a Mr. Carr but he had departed to a better world and left no traces. Perhaps he realised that Mrs. Carr had been intended by the discerning fates to be the widowed keeper of a select city boarding-house. Her eye alone had marked her out for this.
Trivia: Late in the novel, David invites Rosme to accompany him on a canoe excursion on Toronto's Humber River.
These words were published six years after Pauline Johnson died. Mackay was a close friend of the poet and oversaw publication of the posthumous Legends of Vancouver.
Object and Access: A block of a book in grey cloth with black type and design. Sadly, my copy lacks the dust jacket. It was purchased online in 2020 from an Ottawa bookseller. Price: US$23.00. The front free endpaper features a the address label of Helena Jones.
I remember these labels from elementary school. They were like tape and came in a red transparent plastic case that wasn't much different than a tape dispenser except that one had to lick the labels like a stamp.
Sunburst Phyllis Gotlieb New York: Fawcett, 1964 160 pages
Sorrel Park is no place to live, but this wasn't always so. A smallish city not far from Chicago, it was once a place of industry and well-paying jobs. During the "Open-The Door-In-Eighty-Four" policy, immigrants from Western Europe flooded in until it all went horribly wrong. First came the 1994 nuclear reactor explosion and resulting deaths. The federal government was quick to impose a press ban, the city was sealed off, martial law was imposed, the old coal plant was fired up, and the rest of the country continued on as before.
Shandy Johnson was born in Sorrel Park on June 3rd, 2011 to second generation Americans. Her father's family came from Denmark, changing their surname from Jensen along the way. Shandy's mother was named Mary O'Brian; as might be supposed, her family immigrated from Ireland. Until the explosion, Mary cleaned the offices at the nuclear facility, after which she was transferred to the coal plant. Shandy's father worked in both, even after being being struck on the back of the head with hot material. The wound would never close.
Shandy's birth, seventeen years after "the Blowup," came as a surprise. Her parents had assumed they'd been rendered sterile, but here they were in their forties with a baby girl. The joy they experienced as parents was short lived: "I was three and a half when they died, and since I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old, that means I can't have really known them for more than two years..."
The novel begins on Shandy's thirteenth birthday. A strong-willed, savvy girl, she spends much of it evading capture. It didn't begin this way. Shandy had been celebrating the day with a vanilla cone and licorice stick when spotted. Shandy is a target because she is unusual. "I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old," suggests something, don't you think?
New York: Berkley, 1983
Years earlier, not long after Shandy was born, dozens of Sorrel Park teens, offspring of the men and women exposed to radiation from the explosion, went on a violent rampage. It lasted no more than a few hours, but was devastating just the same. Much of the downtown lay in ruins, thanks entirely to newly awakened telepathic and telekinetic powers. It was only through dumb luck in the form of a freak accident that authorities were able to round them up. They've lived ever since in "the Dump," a prison compound equipped with a device that shields the outside world from their abilities. What sets young Shandy apart is that her mind cannot be read by those imprisoned in the Dump. She is a mutant amongst mutants, and thus of great interest to the government.
I've never been one for stories in which radiation exposure brings the superhuman – something to so with having seen film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at an early age, I suspect. It's probably the reason why the Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four never really appealed.
The Hulk #1, May 1962
Yet Sunburst did appeal. It would be enough to say this all comes down to Shandy, but all the characters are brilliantly drawn. There's Jason Hemmer, who first spots the girl. He is the one mutant who cooperates with the authorities, and so is tasked with finding others. Colonel Prothelo was assigned to Sorrel Park in the aftermath of the Blowup. The son he fathered in Sorrel Park instigated that night of destruction. Cigar store owner Ma Slippec is a fleeting character, but just as fully formed. It was she who took in the orphaned Shandy, provided a modicum of stability, and introduced her to bootlegging in what is a dry city.
Of course, at the centre of it all is Shandy, a tall, awkward looking girl who is bothered by her flat chest. She longs for adolescence to really kick in, all the while worrying that she'll also develop abilities that will lead her to incarceration the Dump.
Sixty-two years ago, Fawcett positioned Sunburn as "A Science Fiction Classic of Tomorrow," and here we are in that past's tomorrow. While we don't have superhuman mutants, we do have government and corporate surveillance, suppression, manipulation and brutality. Sunburn is a classic of today.
About the author:
Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom)
Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom) was born in Toronto one hundred years ago today. She attended the University of Toronto (BA, 1948; MA, 1950) where, I'm guessing, she met her husband (see: Dedication).
As far as writing goes, she was known first a poet. In 1961, John Robert Colombo's Hawkshead Press published her a pamphlet of verse. Sunburst landed in 1964, the very same year as Within the Zodiac, her first book of poems.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964
Phyllis Gotlieb is remembered more as a writer of science fiction than as a poet. Her bibliography features twelve books in the genre, including A Judgement of Dragons for which she received the inaugural Aurora Award.
New York: Berkley, 1980
Phyllis Gotlieb died in Toronto on 14 July 2009 at the age of eighty-three.
Dedication:
Kelly is the author's husband, Calvin Carl Gotlieb, CM FRSC (27 March 1921 - 16 October 2016), considered the father of Canadian computing.
Of Phyllis Gotlieb's twenty other books, the one I'm most interested in reading is Phyllis Loves Kelly, (Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries, 2014), a posthumous collection of poems written to her husband over the course of their sixty year marriage.
Object and Access: A typical Fawcett Gold Medal mass market paperback original in excellent condition, it showed no sign of having been read before I got to it. I took good care.
The novel first appeared, abridged, in Amazing Stories (March - May 1964).
Two years after the Fawcett, Coronet published the first British edition.
When cropped, the image looks like a 'sixties LP I'd buy in a second.
Other editions followed in Australia from Eclipse (1969) and the United States from Berkley (1978). In 2002, Insomniac Press published the only Canadian edition to date as part of its Bakka Books series.
The novel is currently available from Wildside Press of Cabin John, Maryland.
The six-decade-old Fawcett first edition is cheap in more than one way. Prices listed online range from US$6.00 to US$19.00. Condition is not a factor. At under twenty-one dollars, two signed copies of the Insomniac edition tempt, but the one you really want is a copy of the Fawcett the author inscribed to Miriam Waddington (and was subsequently owned by Maurice Forget, OC). It is being sold for $36.00 by a Gatineau bookseller.
Sunburst has been translated into French (Psycataclysme) and German (Die Geißel des Lichts).
Antoinette de Mirecourt or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing Rosanna Leprohon Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973 200 pages
Antoinette De Mirecourt, or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing Rosanna Leprohon Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989 334 pages
Six summers ago, I made slow progress through Armand Durand; ou, La promesse accomplie, the French translation of Rosanna Leprohon's 1868 novel Armand Durand; or, A Promise Fulfilled. It made some sense to take on the challenge. As I noted at the time, the author's novels had been far more popular in French than in the original English. Consider The Manor House of De Villerai, which first appeared in 1859 and 1860 issues of the Montreal Family Herald. Le manoir de Villerai, E.L. de Bellefeulle's translation, was published as a book in 1861, then enjoyed four more editions, the last being in 1925. It wasn't until 2014, a full 154 years after the end of its run in the Family Herald, that The Manor House of De Villerai finally appeared in book form. Credit goes to academic publisher Broadview Press.
In the late 'eighties I began collecting Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts titles. Antionette De Mirecourt, sixth in the series, was purchased upon publication, taking advantage of the ten percent discount offered by my employer, a library wholesaler. I preferred the bland, jacketless hardcover editions because they seemed more substantial. Must add that the paperback editions, released simultaneously, weren't particularly attractive.
This year being one dedicated to women writers (see my New Year's resolution), I decided, at long last, to read what had been Rosanna Leprohon's most popular novel amongst anglophone readers.
But which copy?
I've owned the first New Canadian Library edition for some time. Where did I buy it? When did I buy it? Somehow, its purchase is nowhere near as memorable as the CEECT edition. Might this have something to do with the ten percent discount?
The decision was easy. Madame Leprohon's title is Antoinette De Mirecourt, not Antoinette de Mirecorte, as the NCL edition would have you believe. What's more, the heroine's name is misspelled throughout the text. I would later discover that a significant spoiler appears on the front cover.
I still don't know what to make of the author portrait on the back cover.
The novel begins in November 1763, nine months after the Treaty of Paris, with Antoinette De Mirecourt's arrival in Montreal from her widowed father's Valmont seigneury. On the edge of seventeen, she has been invited by her cousin Lucille D'Aulnay to pass the winter at her elegant rue Nôtre-Dame home. Cousine Lucille is older and her husband older still, though by how much is left up to the reader's imagination. A contemplative man, Monsieur D'Aulnay devotes his days to philosophical works. Lucille's tastes run more toward romantic novels and sentimental verse.
Theirs was an arranged marriage.
Young Antoinette has always been intrigued by the structure of the union, so "with her childish inexperience, rich, poetic imagination, and warm, impulsive heart," wastes no time in asking Lucille whether she was in love with her husband when they wed:
"Oh dear, no! My parents, though kind and indulgent in other respects, showed me no consideration
in this. They simply told me Mr. D'Aulnay was the
husband they had chosen for me, and that I was to be
married to him in five weeks. I cried for the first
week almost without intermission. Then, mamma
having promised me I should select my own trousseau
and that it should be as rich and costly as I could
desire, a different turn was given to my feelings, and
I became so very busy with milliners and shopping,
that I had not time for another thought of regret, till
my wedding day arrived. Well, I was happy in my lot, for Mr. D'Aulnay has ever been both indulgent
and generous; but, my darling child, the experiment
was fearfully hazardous, – one which might have resulted in life-long misery to both parties."
"Remember Antoinette," concludes Lucille, "that the only sure basis for a
happy marriage, is mutual love, and community of
soul and feeling."
Is the D'Aulnay marriage happy? Not that this reader could see, though it is comfortable. Monsieur D'Aulnay is content to spend his days and nights surrounded by books, while his wife delights in being surrounded by men in uniform. The departures of the gentry to la vielle France and the retreat of the seigneurs to their seigneuries has left a social void that Lucille happily fills with English officers. Chief amongst these is Major Aubrey Sternfield. Monsieur D'Aulnay thinks of him as a "long-legged flamingo," but Lucille and sees an altogether different man:
A
tall and splendidly-proportioned: figure – eyes, hair
and features of faultless beauty, joined to rare powers
of conversation, and a voice whose tones he could
modulate to the richest music, were rare gifts to be all united in one happy mortal.
So say all the ladies.
Though Antoinette had been raised on a seigneury, she is all but overcome by the decor, perfume, gauzy dresses, and music of the contra dance of a Montreal soirée. I get it. This was Montreal when I was her age:
Major Sternfield, "handsome as an Apollo," pursues Antoinette. His success is such that the capture of her heart precedes the first letters Antoniette receives from Valmont. One contains a mild bloomer:
The first,
which was from her father, was kind and affectionate;
spoke of the void her absence made in the household; told her to enjoy herself to her heart's utmost
desire; and ended by warning her to watch well over
her affections, and bestow them on none of the gay
strangers who might visit at her cousin's house, for
assuredly he would never under any circumstances
countenance any of them as her suitors.
A third letter arrives shortly thereafter. Composed by Monsieur De Mirecourt, it serves to inform Antoinette that she will be marrying Louis Beauchesne, her childhood playmate. What follows is uncomfortable. Louis himself has delivered the letter. While Antoinette, an only child, has great affection, it is as a brother. Louis, who has siblings, knows that his love for her is very different than the one he feels for his sisters. What remains hidden in their encounter is this: Antoinette accepted Sternfield's ring.
Lucille has been living vicariously through her cousin. Whether under the influence of romantic prose and poetry or the regrets of her own arranged marriage, she has pushed Antoinette into the major's embrace. This secret engagement is known only to the betrothed, and of course Lucille D'Aulney.
Antoinette De Mirecourt and Aubrey Sternfield are married at the D'Aulay residence during a particularly stormy winter evening. The master is in his library, entirely oblivious to anything happening elsewhere in this house. Regimental chaplain Doctor Ormsby is the officiant. Lucille is troubled by his appearance and manner. All is so different from her Catholic faith, but she's keen on seeing it through.
After the ceremony, Antoinette makes an uncharacteristic stand insisting that her new husband that will keep their union secret until it is blessed by her own church. Sternfield readily agrees. As we shall see, the major has his reasons. The evening becomes even more dramatic with the unexpected arrival of Antoinette's father. He is, of course, ignorant as to what has transpired, and so is too late in laying down the law, employing another mild bloomer:
"I forbid you child, to, have any intercourse, beyond
that of distant courtesy, with the men I have mentioned; and if you have entangled yourself in any
disgraceful flirtation or attachment, break it off at
once, under penalty of being disowned and disinherited."
What's unstated is that the "gay strangers" with whom Antoinette is not to partake in "intercourse" are the English. This is perfectly understandable. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham had taken place just four years earlier. The capitulation of Montreal was a year after that.
A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762 Thomas Davies, 1762
I'll say no more for wont of spoiling, except to recommend Antoinette De Mirecourt to lovers of nineteenth-century romance, lovers of gothic romance, and to any Montrealer who share a love of reading. I was born in Montreal two hundred years after the novel is set and one hundred years after it was written, yet its past was not a foreign country. Descriptions of the island, the weather, and the climate are recognizable. This passage raised a smile:
It was the first really good sleighing of the season,
for the few slight falls of snow that had hitherto heralded winter’s approach, descending on the muddy
roads and sidewalks, had lost at once their whiteness
and purity, and becoming incorporated with the liquid
mud, formed that detestable, combination with which
we Canadians are so familiar in the spring and fall,
and which we recognize by the name of “slush.”
And here I'd assumed that "slush," like "smog," was a twentieth-century term.
Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon (née Mullins) 12 January 1829, Montreal, Lower Canada 20 September 1879, Montreal, Quebec
Rosanna Leprohon has much in common with her darker, even more successful New Brunswick contemporary May Agnes Fleming, whose Wedded for a Week; or, The Unseen Bridegroom I read earlier this spring. They may not have been sisters under the skin exactly, but they were cousins. Both were adept at writing complex plots involving romance, marriage, duplicity, nefariousness, and death. If you've enjoyed the company of one you'll like spending time with the other. And so, I've ordered a copy of The Manor House of De Villerai.
God bless our academic publishers.
Bloomer (not mild):
"God bless my soul. Miss De Mirecourt!" he
ejaculated, involuntarily starting back.
Trivia (not really): The first sentence has it that the novel takes place "in year 176–, some short time after the royal standard of England had replaced the fleur-de-lys of France." As editor John C. Stockdale notes in the CEECT edition, this can only be 1763: "The year is confirmed by the fact that Madame D'Aulnay's St. Catherine's Eve party was held on a "Thursday" night; in 1763 St. Catherine's Day was Friday, 25 November.
Fun fact: Janet Friskney's New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2007) tells us that The Manor House of De Villerai was once considered for inclusion in the New Canadian Library.
Object and Access:Antionette De Mirecourt was first published in 1864 by John Lovell & Sons. A second printing followed the very same year. Such is the sorry state of Canadian literature that a first edition can be purchased online for a mere $255.
Interestingly, the Lovell edition was the last until 1973 when both McCelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library and the University of Toronto Press's Reprint Library of Canadian Prose and Poetry returned the novel to print.
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 and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
