Oh, Little Man!

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:

Arctic Rendez-vous - Keith Edgar

The Cannibal Heart - Margaret Millar

Crazy to Kill - Ann Cardwell [Jean Makins Pawley]

Death Be My Destiny - Neil H. Perrin [Danny Halperin]

Dirty City - Michael Young

Frustration - Henry C. Clayton

The House in Brook Street - Ronald Cocking

The House on Craig Street - Ronald J. Cooke

He Learned About Women - Ted Greenshade

The Invisible Gate - Constance Beresford-Howe

Love is a Long Shot - Alice K. Doherty [Ted Allan]

Mr. Ames Against Time - Philip Child

No Place in Heaven - Laura Warren

Pagan - Jack Romaine [Tedd Steele]

Perilous Passage - Arthur Mayse

Sin for Your Supper - Milton Douglas

Soft to the Touch - Clark W. Dailey

Strange Desires [Strange Desire] - Alan Malston [Alan Marston]

Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street - Al Palmer

This was Joanna - Neil H. Perrin [Danny Halperin]

Torch of Violence - Gerald Laing [Tedd Steele]

Toronto Doctor - Sol Allen

The Winter of Time - Raymond Holmes [Raymond Souster]

More than any other year! 

From Tangled Torment to Tepid Romance

Carried by Storm
May Agnes Fleming
New York: Carleton, 1880
400 pages

The first sentence holds a promise of things supernatural:

Miss Ventnor is Olga Ventnor, fairest of all the beautiful women in Carried by Storm. The house, known as "the red farm-house," is just one of many rentals on John Abbott's vast estate. His home, "Abbott Wood," is far more lavish:

A grand Elizabethan manor, with turrets, and peaked gables, and quaint, vine-clad stone porches, and painted windows, with stone mullions.
   It is new, and it looks three hundred years old at least, and reflects some of its seeming grandeur and antiquity upon its master, perhaps. And Mr. Abbott needs it. He is painfully new.

A novel could be written about John Abbott.

At first, Carried by Storm looks to be Olga Ventnor's story, reaching back in time to when she was a girl of ten living outside the New England town of Brightbrook. The only child of Colonel Ventnor and his fragile yet exquisite wife Mrs Ventnor, Olga is "the very last daughter of the house, born, if ever embryo belle and heiress was yet, with a golden spoon in her mouth." The colonel is adamant that his inherited riches remain in the family, so arranges for his pre-adolescent daughter to wed her artistic post-adolescent cousin Frank Livingston. Oh, and aren't his parents proud! Says Frank's mother:

"You need never lower your family, nor slave yourself to death painting pictures now, my dearest, dearest boy! Olga Ventnor’s fortune must be simply immense – immense!"

Age eighteen, Frank doesn't take it too seriously:

“All right, mother,” says Frank, still grinning; “and when is it to be – this week or next? Or am I to wait until she grows up? I am on hand always; when you want me please to ring the bell."

Nevertheless, flippant Frank has no issue with being dispatched to Brightbrook for the summer to woo his ten-year-old Olga. Once there, he acts as a babysitter, playing games and drawing pictures to amuse his pretty little cousin.

The following summer is very different. Olga, now eleven, is irritated by Frank. Her cousin doesn't spend nearly as much time with her, breaks promises, and stumbles into Ventnor Villa in the wee hours. Frank tells her that he's been spending time in town when in fact he has been partying down at the red farm-house. Frank is sweet on eighteen-year-old Lora, one of the two shapely dark-haired daughters of violent, ne're-do-well drunk Giles Sleaford. There's music and dancing and lager and whisky and codfish chowder and barbecue rabbit and more lager and more whisky.

A third girl, an awkward twelve-year-old redhead, also lives in the red farm-house. The townsfolk refer to her as "Sleaford's Joanna," taking her to be the man's youngest. The name could not be more appropriate; Sleaford considers her as his property, Sleaford's property, supposedly rescued from a gutter somewhere. Sleaford's Joanna is nothing more than an unpaid servant, a slave, and is beaten daily:

That he has not killed her outright in one of his fits of fury is not due to him, one of the Sleaford boys or girls generally interfering in bare nick of time. Their drudge is useful, they do not want her beaten to death, or the prying eyes of the land brought to bear on their rustic household.

How different her life is from Olga Ventnor's!

Later that same summer, the two girls cross paths in the woods one particularly dark evening Olga is lost and frightened. Seeing Olga, so pretty, her hair so golden, dressed in such fine and expensive clothing, Joanna is consumed by jealousy. That the Ventnor girl, raised in such privilege, is so weak, so helpless, and so fearful breeds hatred.

Twelve-year-old Joanna comes very close to stabbing eleven-year-old Olga to death that night. It's a good thing she doesn't because the woodland encounter sets in motion a series of events that change Joanna's life for the better. Thanks to kindly Geoffrey Lamar, John Abbott's stepson, she receives a private education from Miss Rice, the tutor at Abbott Wood. Leonora Abbott, Geoffrey's dainty, very pretty young half-sister, endears herself to the gutter waif such that Joanna feels no desire to murder her. Mrs Abbott praises Joanna's lovely singing voice and bestows a steady stream of adornments, most of which are appropriated by Lora and her sister Liz. John Abbott avoids her like the plague – which one I'm not sure – but why? Geoffrey and his mother wish Joanna to live with them at Abbott Wood, but Giles Sleaford will not allow it. John Abbott is relieved by the refusal. Again, why? Might the answer also solve the mystery as to why Brightbrook's wealthiest man allows such a disreputable man as Sleaford on his land? Where is Sleaford getting his money from, anyway?

Joanna reaches adulthood, despite all the beatings. Newspaperman George Blake has fallen in love with her, proposes, and suggests they run off to New York to get married. Joanna accepts, but only because she sees elopement as a means of escape.

In 1906, pulp publisher Street & Smith severed Carried by Storm in two, then sold the second half as Love's Dazzling Glitter, "a sequel to Carried by Storm." Being twenty-six years dead, the author had no say in the matter.

  

A very clean cut, I regret to say that it makes perfect sense. Love's Dazzling Glitter opens with a chapter titled a 'The New Life Dawn' ('In Which Joanna Finds Her Fortune' in the original). Here, Joanna, newly arrived in New York, rises and then descends from her rented attic room:

Joanna's new dawn is so bright as to be disappointing. She has run away from kind, supportive fiancé George Blake and has taken lodging with washerwoman widow Mrs Gibbs and her shoe-shining son. She has no money, but manages to cover room and board by handing over an expensive crimson wool shawl she'd stolen from Liz. At first, Mrs Gibbs dismisses the young woman as yet another come to New York with dreams of becoming a star of the stage. But Joanna surprises:

“I intend to work,” she says steadily, “there is no kind of housework, I think, I cannot do. I am very strong, and very willing. I can wash, iron, cook – I have done it all my life.”

Joanna never washes, irons or cooks, again.

While ironing, Mrs Gibbs hears Joanna singing to her infant, fatherless daughter and decides that she must introduce her new tenant to Prof Ericson, whose bedding she washes. Not only is Prof Ericson "a teacher of music and singing," his bother is a theatre empresario!

Joanna is an immediate sensation. No longer "Sleaford's Joanna," as "Jenny Wild" she tours North America and Europe, receives a second marriage proposal, inherits a vast estate, and most happily, is reunited with the long-suffering mother she had never known.

Disappointingly, the red farm-house is not haunted. One character is stabbed to death in an upstairs bedroom – no points for guessing who; a half-point for guessing the murderer – but no apparition appears. A weak case may be made that Carried By Storm features something of the supernatural in the form of an otherworldly guiding hand. Might this explain the remarkable series of coincidences in the final chapters? 

Joanna's second marriage proposal comes from Frank Livingston. In a different way, it is also his second marriage proposal – the first was rejected by Cousin Olga. Frank sees Joanna off on another tour and is returning to his studio in Manhattan when a young woman is struck down at his feet by two runaway horses. Though he doesn't recognize her at first, the victim is little Leonora Abbott, now all grown up. In rescuing her, he is reunited with his old friend Geoffrey Lamar... who is now a physician, which is handy considering, you know, his sister. John Abbott now dead, the doctor, his mother, and his sister, abandoned Abbott Wood long ago, having learned that Sleaford's Joanna is the true heir to the man's fortune. They've been searching for her ever since! Frank Livingston brings that hunt to an end. That very same day, Joanna just happens to spot one of Sleaford's sons working for the railroad; it is through him that se learns she is an heiress.

An odd novel from an unconventional novelist, I do recommend Street & Smith's Carried by Storm. Love's Dazzling Glitter is a definite pass. 

Of the eight Fleming novels I've read to date, this is by far the most disappointing; not that this dissuades me from reading the remaining thirty-nine.

Trivia (not really): It is mentioned in passing that Colonel Ventnor (ret'd) "had served with distinction in the far West." Those familiar with the history of the American West in the mid-nineteenth century may take issue.

Object: A well-constructed hardcover purchased two years ago for ten American dollars from a bokseller in New York State. The novel itself is followed by eight pages of publisher adverts for volumes by A.S. Roe, Allan Pinkerton, Augusta J. Evans, Celia E. Gardner, Josh Billings, Julie P. Smith, M.M. Pomeroy, Violet Fane, Miriam Coles Harris, Marion Harlon, Mary J. Holmes, Mrs E.P. Miller, Capt Mayne Reid, and others. Not one name was familiar to this reader, but I am intrigued. Ten May Agnes Fleming novels also feature.

Access: According to Susan Dorward's invaluable 'A Working Bibliography of Texts by May Agnes Fleming,' Carried by Storm was first published in 1878 and 1879 editions of the New York Weekly and the London Journal. It first appeared as a book in 1879, published in New York by Dillingham. My Carleton edition followed the next year. As far as I can tell, Street & Smith's 1906 two volume Carried By Storm/Love's Dazzling Glitter marks the last time the novel was in print.  

Related post;

Falling Hard for May Agnes Fleming