Towards a Canada of Light

Looking Forward: The Strange Experience of the Rev.

   Fergus McCheyne

Rev. Hugh Pedley, B.A., D.D.
Toronto: Briggs, 1913
294 pages

The cover has it that Looking Forward is "A NOVEL FOR THE TIMES," which it most certainly was, but only to those of certain Canadian Christian denominations. The proposed union of the country's Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches, then a matter of considerable debate, is its impetus. Discussions of sacerdotalism and the episcopate do feature.

Before the eyes glaze over, I rush to add that Looking Forward is also a work of science fiction, imaging a Canada in which hydroplane racing is a popular sport and airships like the Winnipeg Express whisk passengers from Montreal to the Manitoba capitol in under thirty-six hours.

The Winnipeg Express as I imagine it.
Apologies to Seth.

As the subtitle suggests, the novel's hero is Fergus McCheyne. The only son of Presbyterian pastor Rev Robert McCheyne, the young man was born and raised in Cairntable, his father's rural parish, located somewhere in easternmost Ontario (read: Glengarry County). There he was molded by his parents' faith and condemnation of everything not Presbyterian.

Old McGill, 1900

Just a small town boy, his own faith is shaken when, during his studies at McGill, he encounters students of other denominations and finds they aren't such bad fellows after all. He is shaken further when invited to attend the closing exercises of "a well-known Ladies' School" – I'm guessing Trafalgar School for Girls – where he is "confronted by the unforgettable face of Florence Atherton,"  daughter of the Methodist minister whose parish overlaps that of his father.

Fergus does his best to hide his interest in Florence, but a mother knows:

“The Methodist minister’s daughter! Oh, Fergie, what would you be doing with the likes of her? You know how your father feels, and how I feel, about these Methodists. What have we in common with them? They are all wrong in their doctrines, and what little religion they have is all sentiment and shouting.”

Frustrated, our hero finds release in attempting to solve the mystery of hibernation, a subject that has long fascinated. Evenings in which he might been courting Florence are instead spent in the spare room of his rented flat, leading to this rather chilling passage:

For his experiments he managed to smuggle in mice, kittens, and little dogs. He found it much easier to smuggle them out.

Fergus McCheyne is not the villain of this novel. Indeed, there is no villain, though things do get dark.

After many a dead dog, the experiments result in a breakthrough. Not only does Fergus find a way to induce hibernation, he creates a serum to revive the pups. It follows that the amateur scientist's next trial subject be human, but who? No monster, the young man chooses to experiment on himself. Fergus is well-aware that no one in their right mind would willingly take part and so devises a machine with battery and "automatic syringe" to inject the reviving fluid. All is to take place in a remote cavern of considerable size that our hero, a keen canoeist, had discovered on a solo expedition.

The experiment begins in late May 1902. It is meant to last no more than a week. Lest anything go amiss, Fergus has taken the precaution of leaving a letter with firm friend, Anglican clergyman Basil Manthorpe. Tragedy strikes when a squirrel disrupts Fergus's automatic syringe. An even greater tragedy has yet to occur. Rev Manthorpe is killed when the automobile in which he is riding suffers brake failure and is struck by an eastbound train in Montreal West.

The Gazette, 31 May 1913

Two old books by Montreal authors, 31 May 2025.

Fergus's letter remains unopened, hidden away in a secret compartment in Manthorpe's desk until discovered a quarter-century later by a young woman named who – wait for it – just happens to be the daughter of Florence Atherton! Now "a very sweet-faced matronly woman," Florence is married to Hugh Falconer, whom Fergus had mentored whilst the former was a senior student at McGill's Presbyterian College.   

Being a gentleman of propriety, Falconer hands the letter to Rev Manthorpe's surviving brother, who in turn shares its incredible contents. The very next morning, the two men set off for the cavern in the company of Mackenzie, a medical doctor who had been another of Fergus's friends. They expect the worst, of course, but are not so fatalistic that they don't carry a capsule containing the restorative mixture.

Frontispiece

The trio follow the letter's directions to the cavern and the hibernating man. “This is very strange,” says Dr Mackenzie, “ there are no signs of life, no pulsation, no respiration; and yet there is no sign of death. There is not the slightest evidence of decomposition. There is no odour of death. There is no shrinkage of the tissues. The skin has all the firmness and smoothness of health. I don’t know what to make of it.”

Out of caution, Fergus is brought back to the Falconer home before the restorative serum is administered. He opens his eyes to Florence's daughter, also named Florence, who has an equally unforgettable face.

In his preface, Rev Pedley acknowledges his indebtedness to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward:

Whatever opinion may be held of Bellamy’s views, no one can doubt the efficacy of his method in bringing these views to the notice of the world. To be sure, my dream is on a much narrower scale, and with a far less ambitious reach than his. That took in the entire sphere of human life; mine has to do with but a segment of that sphere. That contemplated a perfect social order; mine is content with an improved ecclesiastical situation. That beheld a new heaven and a new earth; mine looks for a Canada made better because a little more of heaven has entered into its life.

The 1927 Canada encountered by Fergus is indeed better. Poverty has been eradicated and the roads are paved with pavement:

• By this time they had turned out of the main traffic thoroughfare into a smooth-paved and absolutely dustless road... (p 124)
• With amazement he looked upon miles of paved street... (p 126)
• The locality was not unknown to McCheyne, and he remembered what it used to be – the ill-paved streets... (p 138)
• On the outskirts of Montreal, but closely knitted to it by well-paved roads... (p 154)
• Park, and drive, and terrace, well-paved streets lined with trees... (p 156)
• And it looks as if there are well-paved streets. (p 190)

There are marvels of technology and engineering like the Winnipeg Express and the much-studied, never realized, Georgian Bay Ship Canal.

A steel structure somewhat resembling the Eiffel tower sits atop Mount Royal, while Winnipeg has a mountain of its own, built and paid for by an Irish-Canadian eccentric. Two hundred feet higher that Montreal's, its summit can be reached by something called the Spirodrome. 

These advances were brought on by Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists coming together in a United Church of Canada. They even get Anglicans and Baptists to pitch in. With the squabbling amongst Protestants over, all are now able to focus on the betterment of men, women, and children. Catholics serve a useful purpose in providing friendly competition.

Looking Forward is indeed less ambitious than Looking Backward. Rev Pedley's imagination, despite its focus, is not nearly so rich and his prose makes for painful reading. This passage takes place not on the Winnipeg Express but in the engine room of the Saskatchewan, another airship, where Fergus encounters a man named Dennis Mulcavey:

“I knew a man of that name. He was foreman for the Sands Company.”

   “Sure, sorr, it’s a foine mimory ye hev. That was my father, and he’s been did these twinty years.”

   “Yes,” said McCheyne, somewhat idiotically, "have a fine memory, for I do remember your father.”

   “It’s wonderful,” said the other, “but they tell me he was a foine man, and a smarrt wan, too.”

   “Yes, a very smart one.”

   The talk then turned upon the airship, the working of the engines, the liability to accident, and the time they were making on their trip, in all of which topics McCheyne took a deep interest, and won the respect of the men by the intelligent way in which he received their information.

I'm tempted to provide further examples, but won't. What I will provide is the ultimate spoiler in revealing that the novel ends with a declaration of love, followed by a marriage. The bride is Florence Falconer – not the Florence Falconer (née Atherton) who was the love of Fergus's life, rather her daughter, who we are told looks just like her matronly mother when a young woman:

“But I have heard that twenty-five years ago you felt like this towards my mother.”

   “Yes, exactly like this.”

   “So it is because you see my mother in me that you say you love me?”

   "Yes,” was the direct, honest reply.

   “Then,” said she, all lightness thrown aside and speaking in tones that trembled with emotion, “I am honoured beyond measure by such a love.”

The mother of the woman who accepts his marriage proposal will later be referred to as "the Florence of an earlier time."

I found this disturbing.

My wife is more dismissive: "It's written by a man."  

The McCheyne/Falconer wedding is well-attended. Saskatchewan engine man Dennis Mulcavey is in attendance, as is the local Catholic priest:

McCheyne stretches out his hand, which is at once enclosed in a firm and friendly clasp. Then the eyes of the two men meet... and Fergus is conscious of the only pang that has marred this crowning day. As he looks into the young priest’s eyes he feels as if gazing one moment upon a parterre of flowers, there has the next moment been the sudden opening of a cleft, and he is looking down into a profound abyss where ice and fire are strangely intermingled; and he knows that he has had a momentary glimpse of the age-long mystery of the ecclesiastically ordained celibate life.

A strange thing to include in an otherwise joyous and happy final scene, though it did serve to remind that Fergus's experiments and long hibernation would never have taken place had only his parents been willing to accept a Methodist as a daughter-in-law.

More on Looking Forward a week this Tuesday, the one hundredth anniversary of the United Church of Canada.

Trivia: Looking Forward follows The Street Called Straight as the second consecutive novel I've read to end in with a wedding. If You Want to See Your Wife Again..., the novel I tackled before these two, ends with a marriage proposal. 

Object and Access: An attractive hardcover with olive boards and full-colour frontispiece by G. Horne Russell, my copy was purchased online or US$15.00 this past February from a Manitoba bookseller. It once belonged to Lady Inez Peterson sponsor of the Lady Inez Peterson Trophy.

 

The Sherbrooke Daily Record, 4 September 1953

As far as I can tell, the novel enjoyed one printing, but with boards of different colours (green, red, and brown). As write this, four are listed for sale online, the least expensive being US$15.75.

Move quickly! The three others range in price between US$79.95 and US$150.00.

Related posts:

Looking Back on Looking Forward

The Strange Satanic Canada of a Future Past
The Long and Winding Street

"A good kidnapping story always has wide appeal."

On an Eminent Author's Lost Film

A brief addendum to last week's post on Basil King's 1912 novel The Street Called Straight.  

Seven Basil King novels have made it to the silver screen thus far, the earliest being a 1915 adaptation of The Wild Olive (1910). The most recent, Tides of Passion, is based on King's 1903 novel In the Garden of Charity.

One hundred years have passed since Tides of Passion – last month marked the centenary of its release – and yet I hold out hope that further adaptations are on the way.

The film called The Street Called Straight was the first of two Basil King features produced by Eminent Authors Pictures Inc. EAP, as I'm sure it was never known, was the short-lived brainchild of Samuel Goldwyn and Rex Beach. Their idea was to focus less on big stars and more on the writers who'd penned the novels upon which the films were based. Other Eminent Authors included Gertrude Atherton, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Rupert Hughes, Gouverneur Morris, and Charles E. Whittaker. and of course, Beach himself.

Moving Picture World, 21 February 1920

In the early years of Hollywood – 1919 and 1920, to be precise – this might've seemed a great idea. It certainly appealed to me... but then I thought of how I'm nearly always disappointed by film adaptations. And, really, how many people saw Fight Club for not other reason than it is based on a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk?

Moving Picture World, 6 March 1920

The man tasked with reducing The Street Called Straight, a 415-page novel to 4986 feet of film, was Edward T. Lowe, Jr, (1890-1973). He's best known, I suppose, for House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). This is not to suggest that King played no part in bringing The Street Called Straight to the screen. If trade magazine accounts are to be believed, the author was an active participant and was often present on set.

King was so keen on the new medium that he came up with ideas for future films. Earthbound (1920), his second Eminent Authors picture, was based on an original story that reflects his growing interest in spiritualism. Sadly, it is another lost silent. One-hundred-and-five-year-old reviews suggest that it ranks with The Miracle Man, Hollywood's adaptation of fellow Canadian Frank L. Packard's novel of the same name, as one of the great lost silent films.

Moving Picture World, 11 December 1920

The Street Called Straight is also a lost film. In fact, every screen adaptation of a King novel – In the Garden of Charity, Let No Man Put Asunder, The Inner Shrine, The Wild Olive,  The Street Called Straight, The Lifted Veil, The Dust Flower – is lost. And so, given that it is likely no one alive has actually seen The Street Called Straight, we rely on contemporary reviews to give some sense of what we're missing.

What surprises most is that every review describes a film that in no way deviates from the source material. Hell, Fight Club deviates from the novel. Do not get me started on 1998's The Patriot.

Screenwriter Lowe's adherence to the plot is unlike anything I've seen in a silent film. The longest description I've found, published in the 21 February 1920 edition of Moving Picture World, could serve as a summary of the novel itself:

Did that serve as a spoiler? You knew Olivia and Peter would end up together in the end, right? 

Related posts:

The Long and Winding Street
The Barefoot Fugitive and Other Mysteries
Basil King's Silent Unseen World

The Miracle Man on Paper and Nitrate Film

Not Very Occult
A Gentleman's Gentleman Cultivates a Lady
Reluctantly Revisiting Canada's Great Virus Novel

The Boy Who Cried Truth

The Calgary Herald, 26 October 1963

The Weird World of Wes Beattie
John Norman Harris
New York: Harper & Row, 1963
216 pages

Wes Beattie was born with a Woolworths spoon in his mouth; father Rupert's came from Birks. The vast difference in fortune is best explained by youthful folly and libido. Rupert had been the favourite son of Toronto's wealthy Beattie family until he had the misfortune of attending a stag party during his sophomore year at Trinity College. There he met a sixteen-year-old tap dancing accordion player named Doreen. She was so unlike the Rosedale girls he'd grown up with that he couldn't help but be captivated. Within nine months, Mr Maggs, Doreen's dad, came calling at the opulent Beattie home demanding money. Ever the romantic, Rupert thwarted the wishes of both sets of parents by marrying Doreen. She gave birth to a baby girl, and Rupert went from golden child to black sheep. Disowned, he became a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman and Doreen turned to drink. When war was declared in 1939, he was only too happy to enlist and be shipped overseas. Son Wes may have been the result of a fond farewell.

Wes Beattie never met his father, though he'd come to know all sorts of very nice servicemen who visited his mother. After Rupert was killed in Italy, his remorseful mother gave Doreen a nice payout and brought the her grandchildren into her home. Jane, the baby girl whose existence had caused the rift, rebelled, while younger brother Wes just wanted his mummy.

Backstory, all of the above is relayed in much more detail – and much more entertainingly – in the seventh of this novel's eighteen chapters. That it comes roughly half-way through the novel, speaks to its complexity.

Wes Beattie himself is a complex character. Though just twenty-three, recent adventures have made his life such a tangled mess that he has drawn the attention of psychiatrist Milton Heber, who lays all out in a seminar attended by doctors, lawyers and social workers. Heber's assertion is that Wes lives in a "weird world" of his own making; he is a fabulist unable to differentiate fantasy from reality. Wes has been charged with two crimes, the first involving a purse he took from a car parked outside the Midtown Motel. He served two months for that offence. The second, much more serious, is the charge that he murdered his beloved Uncle Edgar for fear of being cut out of his will. Lawyer Sidney "Gargoyle" Grant, one of the attendees, is so bothered by a seemingly insignificant detail in Heber's talk that he begins his own investigation.

Grant's efforts bring such small rewards that it would be easy to write at length about The Weird World of Wes Beattie without revealing much. To detail how it all fits together would take thousands of words. Your time is better spent reading the novel.

The Weird World of Wes Beattie is not "The First truly CANADIAN Mystery" as current publisher claims, but it is one of the very best.

What's more, it will make you laugh.

About the author: The life of John Norman Harris (1915-64) is worthy of a biography; consider the introduction to the John Norman Harris fonds housed at the University of Toronto. Is the "Wooden Horse" escape from Stallaf Ludt III not enough?

The author died alone on 28 July 1964, not one year after The Weird World of Wes Beattie was published, suffering a heart attack during an early morning walk in rural Vermont. This brief bio, attached to the 13 October 1963 Star Weekly bowdlerization of The Weird World of Wes Beattie hints at what we missed.

Trivia I: Though the novel makes much about Wes Beattie facing the gallows, the last execution in Canada took place on December 11, 1962. Capital punishment was abolished for murder in 1976. In 1999, it was abolished for all other crimes. 

Trivia II:

The Globe & Mail, 14 March 1964

Trivia III: Announced by Warner Brothers in 1965 as a forthcoming Merwin Gerard production.

And still we wait.
 
Trivia IV: John Norman Harris's last address was 45 Nanton Avenue in Toronto's Rosedale, the very same neighborhood in which Wes Beattie is raised.

The house, described in the 17 September 2004 Globe & Mail 'Home of the Week' real estate column as a being of a "rambling English-cottage-style," has had several notable inhabitants. Its first owner, lawyer Edward Brown, was the son of John Brown, who became editor of the Globe after his brother George (Edward's uncle) was shot by a disgruntled former employee.

Future Pearson Minister of Finance Walter L. Gordon lived in the house during the Great Depression, only to leave after a ten percent increase in the rent. 

It was at 45 Nanton that Harris wrote The Weird World of Wes Beattie, though you wouldn't know that from the Globe piece:

In 1959, it was owned by John Norman Harris, a writer who was also a public relations officer for the Canadian Bank of Commerce, which was poised to merge with the Imperial Bank to form the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. 

Mr. Harris offered the home as a venue for the secret negotiations, and the deal was signed in a large second-floor bedroom in 1961.

Bankers in bedrooms! Meeting secretly! Do tell!

The address's connection to things literary doesn't end with Harris. Apparently, playwright Tom Hendry rented a third floor room in the 'seventies. The only reason for the Globe piece is that the house had been put up for sale by children's author Kati Rekai.

This is the house as it was ten years ago.

Note the Heritage Toronto plaque on the fence. It has nothing to do with Harris, Hendry or Reikai, rather J.J.R. MacLeod. Because it's hard to read, I share this template from the Heritage Toronto site.

A man worthy of more than this honour alone.

Object: A solidly constructed hardcover with burgundy cloth and pale orange boards. The endpapers remind that this is a HARPER NOVEL OF SUSPENSE, which explains why the back jacket features no author photo, rather promos for other novels in the series:

Love in Amsterdam - Nicholas Freeling

The Fifth Passenger - Edward Young

A Dragon for Christmas - Gavin Black

It's Different Abroad - Henry Calvin

Access: First published in Canada by Macmillan, in the United States by Harper & Row, and in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber. I see no evidence of second printings for any of of these editions, though as noted in the previous post the novel has reappeared a few times through the years, French and Spanish translations included.

The book isn't easily found in Canadian bookstores; online booksellers are your best bet. At £2, the cheapest edition is the 1966 Corgi, listed by a bookseller in Boat of Garten, Scotland who dares charge the equivalent of $35 to ship a mass market paperback to Canada.

The cheapest Faber & Faber edition – "Condition: Good" – is offered at €14.90 by a Dublin bookshop. It will ship to Canada for roughly $24.50.

The Harper & Row, with jacket, can be purchased for US$40 from a New Jersey bookseller.  

If I were a rich man, or reasonably comfortable, I'd buy the signed copy of the Macmillan offered at US$150 by a Stoney Creek, Ontario bookseller. There can't be many signed copies out there.

Underpriced, if not sold by this time tomorrow I will be greatly disappointed.

Related post:

The Weird Covers of Wes Beattie

The Murder of George Brown: He Died with Grit

As He Lay Dying

The Jameson Girls
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
Toronto: Nelson, Foster & Scott, 1956
240 pages

King Jameson is dying and his daughters have gathered for the occasion. Isobel has flown in from New York, where she lives with third husband Eric. Mildred too lives in New York, but with her first husband. She arrived by train.

Isobel and Mildred don't talk.

Fanny, the eldest sister, didn't have travel at all; she lives at the family home with Lily, the fourth and youngest Jameson girl. Meanwhile, King lies semi-coherent in an upstairs bedroom facing framed photographs of his two dead wives.

Hawkrest is a grand house located on a wooded crag overlooking the Niagara River. King bought it not long after the Great War, then moved his family from New York. Before the war, the Jamesons had lived in Chicago, in which King's British immigrant parents had settled.

Hawkrest was ideal for King's burgeoning business as a rumrunner. As the years passed, he began pretending that the house had been in the family for generations. King would point to its antique furnishings, collected by the former owner, describing them as objects ancestral.

The true Jameson family history is slowly revealed. The most solacious details belong to King and his second wife, though Isabel and her many marriages provide competition. In stark contrast, Fanny, the eldest Jameson girl, settled into contented spinsterhood as a child. Mildred, the third Jameson girl, obsesses over marital fidelity, while Lily...

Well, what of Lily? The baby of the family, she's the daughter of King's sexy second wife Hazel, who died behind the wheel. Lily was in the passenger seat. She barely survived and hasn't been "right" since.

The Jameson Girls is backward looking, with the real drama existing only in memory. The reader has arrived too late, and so relies on fleeting references to past events. The present, lighter and more comical, takes place under a gathering cloud. It has two stars, the most recent being American Theodore Fairfield, who is summering in the mansion-cum-B&B across the road. A bigamist gold digger who presents himself as a son of Boston's well-to-do, he sets his sites first on Fanny, then quickly shifts to Lily. She's so pretty, so doll like, so innocent, so malleable, he's afraid he's falling in love.

The second star is  Mrs Pringle, who has taken offense in being referenced as "the maid" by King Jameson's night nurse. She is not "the maid," rather "a family friend" who just happens to have taken care of the house daily, for pay, these past thirty or so years. Fanny is so fearful the insulted, indignant Mrs Pringle will leave that she has taken over most housekeeping duties.

It's not all light, of course. Let's remember there is a man dying upstairs. Of this, Mrs Pringle is well aware:

In a burst of optimism on Saturday she had bought a black hat for the funeral: I hope I haven’t gone and wasted my good money, she thought as she ran water into the sink.

Like most Kirkus reviews, its take on The Jameson Girls (1 September 1956) is very short, yet somehow manages to give away too much. I'll share only the final sentence: "For women only, a more credible than charitable chronicle - and this prying, gossipping [sic], niggling world has its authenticity as well as human curiosity."

My interest in this quote relates to an ongoing discussion with friends regarding the "target audience," and how zeroing in on a specific reader, invariably the one most likely to purchase, can alienate others.

Canadian Forum, December 1956

Nelson, Foster and Scott's promotion was gender neutral. Would the Kirkus "For women only" have brought more sales?

Who knows?

What I can say for certain is that this man is all in on a prying, gossiping, niggling world that has authenticity and human curiosity.

You will be, too.

Not quite a bloomer: This passage, in which Fanny reacts to the revelation that sister Isobel, twice divorced, is having an affair, gives some idea of Jan Hilliard's talent:

The critics rave: For all my searching, I've yet to find an unfavourable review of any Jan Hilliard novel. Vancouver Sun critic Elmore Philpott champions The Jameson Girls in his 4 January 1954 review: "It is a witty, genial, sparking satire about the three daughters of the ex-king of the Niagara river rum runners [emphasis mine]."

Did he read it?

Object and Access: One of just two Nelson, Foster & Scott titles in my collection, the other being Jan Hilliard's A View of the Town (1954), The Jameson Girls is a solid hardcover with brown boards and uncredited jacket illustration. All evidence suggests that it was a split-run with Abelard-Schulman, printed and bound in England. Neither edition was reprinted.

There has never been another.

As I write, one copy of the Nelson, Foster & Scott edition is listed online at US$19.00.

In very good condition with dust jacket, it's a steal at twice the price.

Related posts:

A Crooked Cousin in a Country Cottage

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Growing Up With Mother
Susanna Moodie's Bloomers

Three Weeks a Lady

Three Weeks
Elinor Glyn
New York: Macaulay, [c. 1924]
245 pages

I misread "IMMORTAL ROMANCE" as "IMMORAL ROMANCE," which I expect was the publisher's intent. The very definition of a succès de scandale, when first published in 1907 Three Weeks was denounced, banned, seized, and destroyed. This went on for years. Consider this Toronto Globe. story from 11 April 1911: 

Three Weeks shares something with Fifty Shades of Grey in being a novel read primarily by women. Nurse Sneed reads it to Baby Peggy in The Family Secret. A switchboard operator is shown reading it in Buster Keaton's Seven Chances.

My favourite appearance is in an oft-censored scene from the 1930 Mickey Mouse short The Shindig. 

Horace Horsecaller, Clarabelle Cow's date, pulls on her tail to announce his arrival. The bell around her neck rings, naked Clarabelle hides the book beneath straw and then gets dressed. I will not comment on the scene in which Mickey pulls on Minnie's bloomers because this post is about Three Weeks, which is far more family friendly.

The premise of Three Weeks is simple. Handsome, blonde, twenty-two-year-old son of privilege Paul Verdayne, "young and fresh and foolish," has fallen for Isabella Waring, secretary to his mother, Lady Henrietta.

And why not!

Isabella shares his passion for sport and the sporting papers, happily washes his terrier Pike, and is in every way an equal partner in the hunt. All is good until "one terrible day Paul unfortunately kissed the large pink lips of Isabella as his mother entered the room."

Lady Henrietta, is horrified; not so Paul's father:

"Let the boy have his fling," said Sir Charles Verdayne, who was a coarse person. "Damn it all! a man is not obliged to marry every woman he kisses!"

Lady Henrietta begs to differ – to her a kiss seals a betrothal – and so she is quite horrified at the prospect of a "daughter of the middle-classes" being brought into the family. Son Paul is is soon sent on a three week tour of the continent "for his health."

The first of three memorable scenes centres on Paul's final meeting with Isabella:

Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little distance, but for the lady's scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to distinguish her sex.
   "Good-bye, old chap," she said "We have been real pals, and I'll not forget you"
   But Paul, who was feeling sentimental, put it differently. "Good-bye, darling," he whispered with a suspicion of tremble in his charming voice. "I shall never love any woman but you — never, never in my life."
   Cuckoo! screamed the bird in the tree.

Paris bores Paul because he can think of nothing but Isabella. The same is true of Lucerne, until one fateful evening, whilst dining alone, he is seated at a table in view of another lone diner. This is the novel's greatest scene. In its eleven pages there is but one word of dialogue –"Bon" – the rest consists entirely of descriptions of the two people dining at separate tables. One, a woman, is seemingly oblivious as to Paul's presence, while Paul is all too aware aware of her. He is at first judgemental ("Who could want roses eating alone?"), then irritated ("The woman had to pass him — even so close that the heavily silk touched his foot.), and then unsettled:

Her face was white, he saw that plainly enough, startlingly white, like a magnolia bloom, and contained no marked features. No features at all! he said to himself. Yes — he was wrong, she had certainly a mouth worth looking at again. It was so red. Not large and pink and laughingly open like Isabella's, but straight and chiselled, and red, red, red.

    Paul was young, but he knew paint when he saw it, and this red was real, and vivid, and disconcerted him.

Try as he may, Paul cannot help but compare Isabella to this woman. Whether Paul falls in love with the woman then and there is up for debate; that he does fall in love with her is not.

But who is she?

The "lady" – by my count the descriptor is used nearly two hundred times – is never named. An older woman, perhaps ten years older, the lady is very much the dominant in their relationship. She initiates Paul into the ways of love and Paul responds in the manner of most twenty-two-year-old heterosexual males. Three evenings pass between five-star hotel dining and sin on a tiger skin:

This is the scene that made Elinor Glyn famous. It is the scene that inspired these lines of verse (sometimes attributed to George Bernard Shaw):

                                   Would you like to sin

                                   With Elinor Glyn

                                   On a tiger skin? 

                                   Or would you prefer

                                   To err with her

                                   On some other fur?

It's the scene for which she is best remembered today – and it is not at all what I expected. 

Look carefully  and you will see that

is followed by this:

There is no sex in Three Weeks.

How disappointing!

The best scenes now past, Three Weeks shifts its focus to the lady's teachings on the nature of love and, well, nature. These lectures, coupled with extensive travel itinerary, consume much of the middle-third. It all seems a bit slow and repetitive, but the pace picks up in the third period.

What impressed most wasn't the plot, rather the author's ability to mine the male mind. This is best demonstrated in Paul, but extends to Sir Charles and his friend Captain Grigsby, both of whom display unhealthy interest in Paul's relationship with the lady. 

Three Weeks is an immortal romance. It lives on in that it is read, though perhaps not as a work of literature. What I know for sure is that it is in no way immoral. 

Object and Access: A bulky red hardcover with four plates of scenes used in promoting the 1924 Hollywood adaptation. I do like the jacket; not only does California girl Aileen Pringle as the lady feature, the rear flap and cover have advertisements for other Glyn titles.

Three Weeks enjoyed sales in the hundreds of thousands. It is not at all hard to find, which is not to say that I've ever come across a one in a Canadian bookstore. I blame Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney.

My copy was purchased earlier this year from a Northampton, Massachusetts bookseller. Price: US$45.00 (w/ a further US$ 30.00 for shipping).

Related posts:

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn
Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's
Guelph: City of Galt, Gay, Glyn, Graves, and Girdles

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images

Destination: Montreal

Of This Day's Journey
Constance Beresford-Howe
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947
240 pages

A second novel, Of This Day's Journey followed the author's debut by a little over a year, during which she earned her MA and had begun work on a PhD. Beresford-Howe was all of twenty-four years old when it was published.

Camilla "Cam" Brant, the novel's protagonist, is also all of twenty-four. The earliest pages take place as she's preparing to leave Blake University, somewhere in New England, for her Montreal home. Cam had been hired a year earlier as a seasonal lecturer in English and has been living with the wonderfully-named Olive Pymson, spinster secretary to Andrew Cameron, Blake's tall, lanky president.

Of This Day's Journey is divided into three parts – Morning, Afternoon, Evening – each featuring a different narrator; plain Miss Pymson, the most endearing and attractive, is the first. It was quite unlike her to open up her home to Cam, but she'd been taken by a sudden urge to shake up her life. The two hit it off from their first meeting, an unlikely duo with a shared taste for dry humour.

The second part, Afternoon, is told by Cam herself. The shift in perspective is an eye-opener. For example, Job Laurence, whom Olive had thought a good match for her new housemate is seen with fresh, younger eyes as a physically unattractive man who is much older than herself. It's to Beresford-Howe's credit, I think, that Cam's narration is slightly less engaging. She is, after all, a different person. In this middle part we learn that Cam's reason for leaving Blake has to do with her love for the older – but not Job Laurence old – Andrew Cameron. This should not come as a surprise to the reader; in Morning, Miss Pymson provided enough hints. The front flap of Dodd, Mead's dust jacket isn't nearly so subtle.

The Gazette,
10 May 1947

Lastly, in Evening, we have Andrew – not as seen by Olive Plymson or Cam Brant – rather as how he is: a man exhausted by obligation and responsibility. He abandoned his academic pursuits and interests in order to steer Blake, an institution co-founded by one of his great-grandfathers. Homelife centres on care for his once-adulterous wife Marny. Her series of affairs was brought to an abrupt end by a car accident. Who knows whether the child she was carrying – the child she lost – was Andrew's. Now confined to a wheelchair, Marny refuses to leave the house, and so her husband must attend functions stag... functions also attended by Cam.

The only possible happy ending to such a scenario would have Marny succumb to her infirmity, thus freeing Andrew to be with Cam. But Beresford-Howe, all of twenty-four, was already too good a writer for such contrivance. Of This Day's Journey is far superior to her debut, The Unreasoned Heart (1946).

Beresford-Howe's third novel, The Invisible Gate, was published the month she turned twenty-seven. She'd almost completed her PhD by that point. Given her trajectory, I'm betting it's the best of the three.

Object and Access: A hardcover bound in grey boards with uncredited dust jacket. I purchased my copy, the American first edition, five years ago from a Rochester, New York bookseller. Price: US$9.94 (w/ US$18.00 shipping).

A British edition was published in 1955 by Hammond & Hammond (above). There has never been a Canadian edition.

As of this writing, two copies are listed for sale online, the cheaper being a jacketless copy of the Hammond & Hammond being sold at £17.50. The other is an inscribed edition of the Dodd, Mead edition:

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Poor. 1st Edition. HARDCOVER W/dj; NF/poor, 240pp. SIGNED.inscribed by author ffep. Newspaper sad [sic] for this title laid in. First edition. Please email w/questions or to request picture(s); refer to our book inventory number.

Tempting, but at US$49.00, with a further US$53.00 for shipping, I'm taking a pass.

Related posts:

Constance Beresford-Howe Memorial Plaque

Celebrating Constance Beresford-Howe
Passion Over Reason in a Bland Bachelor's Lap
About Those Butt-Ugly Laurentian Library covers

O Lucky Man!

You Never Know Your Luck: Being the Story of a

   Matrimonial Deserter
Gilbert Parker
Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914
328 pages

The dust jacket invites comparison with The Right of Way, Gilbert Parker's 1901 runaway bestseller, but I would have gone right ahead regardless. Both novels centre on married men who, brought down by vice, go missing. In The Right of Way that man is Charley Steele, Montreal's most feared lawyer and closet drunkard. Whatever you may think of him, Charley is not a matrimonial deserter. What happens is that he goes slumming, gets into a bar fight, and receives such a blow to the head that he loses his memory. It takes the talents of a world-renowned French surgeon to set things right, by which time the lawyer has been declared dead and his wife has remarried.

It is a story of redemption. Charley does not return to Montreal, his mansion, his vast wealth, and his beautiful wife. He'd married Kathleen for her looks, but she is now wed to a man who loves her back. Charley recognizes the private pain and public sensation that would result in reappearing Lazarus-like.

Shiel Crozier of You Never Know Your Luck is a lesser man. He begins the novel as J.G. Kerry, living a modest life in an Askatoon (read: Saskatoon) boarding house run by young Kitty Tynan and her widowed middle-aged mother. Shiel's true identity, that of a married Irish baronet, is revealed through his testimony as witness to a murder involving the Macmahon Gang. Gus Burlingame, the lawyer for the defence, holds a grudge. He was turfed from the boarding house after Shiel caught him groping Kitty.

Munsey's Magazine, April 1914

Pretty Kitty has a thing for Shiel. It's easy to see why. Handsome, personable, fun, and smart as a whip, he's seems the most eligible bachelor in Askatoon – that is until Burlingame gets him on the stand and has him disclose that he has a wife overseas. Before Kitty can digest the revelation the Macmahon Gang strikes again! This time, the target is Shiel himself. He survives a gunshot to the gut through the good work of the local physician, known affectionately as "the Young Doctor."

Munsey's Magazine, April 1914

While recovering, Shiel summons the doctor, Kitty, and Mrs Tynan to his bedside, where he expands upon the revelations revealed during the trial. The scene, which takes the entirety of the sixth chapter, is depicted in two not dissimilar illustrations by George Wright (above) and William Leroy Jacobs (below). 

You Never Know Your Luck
Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914

Shiel speaks of his privileged birth, his education at Eton, his education at Oxford, and his education at London's Brooks's Club, where he was introduced to the Crozier family's long history of placing wagers on just about anything. Taking up the tradition, Shiel starts on a track that will lead to the loss of his inheritance, but not before he marries heiress Mona (maiden name not provided). His bride had encouraged him to change his ways. Shiel promised he would, only to bet the last of his fortune on a horse named Flamingo at Epsom Downs. What happened next was tragedy, no doubt inspired by Emily Davison's death at the 1913 running.

The Daily Sketch, 7 June 1913 

Like George V's Anmer, Flamingo was brought down by a woman stepping onto the racecourse, though this action had nothing to do with the Suffragette cause.

In an instant, Shiel is rendered nearly penniless. Because he hasn't the fortitude to face his spouse, he makes for the colonies, but doesn't escape before receiving a letter from Mona. Shiel's been carrying it, unopened, ever since.

The Right of Way ranked amongst the ten bestselling novels in the United States in both 1901 and 1902. It was adapted once by Broadway and thrice by Hollywood.

You Never Know Your Luck didn't make nearly so big a splash, though there was a 1919 Sunset Pictures production starring House Peters and Mildred Southwick. Alas, 'tis another lost silent film. Very lost. The only image I've found comes courtesy of this advert in the 16 December 1919 edition of the Beaver, Pennsylvania Daily Times. 

The reason The Right of Way did so well and You Never Know Your Luck not falls on Shiel's shoulders. He is a matrimonial deserter; there's no getting around this, it's right there on the title page.

The appealing, charismatic character we encounter in the novel's early pages is exposed on the stand. Though he's portrayed as having got the better of Burlingame when on the stand, he never managed to restore his reputation with this reader. And yet, Kitty's love endures, as does Mrs Tynan's. The novel's most interesting passage involves an awkward exchange in which daughter and mother reveal to one another that they are in love with the same man. Parker really pushes things when the deserted wife, still very much in love with her husband, arrives in Askatoon.

It is in Shiel that the fault lies.

Parker treads terrain that is similar to that of The Right of Way, but here his footing is nowhere near as sure. This time out, his hero is far too flawed.

The poorly composed seven-page epilogue – too wordy, too flowery – concludes with the marriage of the novel's most likeable character. It is not a happy ending. There's uncertainty, some of which stems from the fact that the groom has a vice of his own. And the bride? Well, she's in love with another man.

It's in these last few pages that the novel redeems itself.

Bloomer:

Object: Purchased seven years ago for six dollars, far more than I usually pay for a Parker; but just look at the thing!

First, there's the dust jacket, which has somehow managed to survive these last 110 years. Next we have four colour plates and illustrated endpapers by William Leroy Jacobs.

Access: You Never Know Your Luck first appeared in the April 1914 edition of Munsey. Much was made of it at the time.

Munsey provides nineteen illustrations, the first depicting Kitty Tynan:

My Bell & Cockburn edition is the Canadian first. Torontonian George H. Doran published the American first. Online seller Babylon Revisited Rare Books, whom I've dealt with in the past – and so, can recommend – has the two best copies on offer. Both Doran firsts in uncommon dust jackets, they're going for US$85.00 and US$125.00. Condition is a factor. The only Bell & Cockburn edition is offered by a Manitoba bookseller. At US$6.00, it is also the least expensive. 

Related post:

Born Again Infidel