Stranger in a Strange Land

Blantyre—Alien
Alan Sullivan
London: J.M. Dent, 1914
265 pages

Brian Blantyre is ship's doctor for the transatlantic steamer Harmonic. The position isn't at all taxing. It's rare that Blantyre has to deal with anything worse than the occasional case of mal de mer – whatever might be more serious is invariably passed on to hospitals at ports of call. A bored man, mild interest comes in attending the unwashed masses in steerage, many of whom have never so much as seen a medical man. For Blantyre, each voyage is the same as the last, until he spots Canadian beauty Stella Blake ascending the gangplank in New York Harbour.

Should that be "Harbor"?

Never mind. The important thing is that Stella stands out amongst the many, many thousands of passengers Blantyre has encountered over the years. After a few days at sea, he invites Stella and her travelling companion, spinster Aunt Catherine, to tea in his quarters. There he learns that Stella was orphaned at an early age, and that her "elderly" aunt – she is, after all, fifty – dedicated her life to raising the girl.

But Stella is a girl no longer. At twenty-five years of age, she's inherited a substantial fortune amassed by her long dead father. Blantyre has something in common with Stella in that his Anglo-Irish family once had money itself.

At the end of the Atlantic crossing, Stella and Aunt Catherine disembark at an unnamed Italian port. They spend two weeks or so exploring the countryside before a cable catches Stella in Rome: "May I come? – Brian Blantyre."

Stella's positive response owes everything to the sudden realisation that she's in love with Blantyre. Unfortunately, the impending reunion is marred somewhat by a marriage proposal from vacationing Canadian physician Stephen Ellison. Mere minutes after she declines, Blantyre arrives. I'm pretty sure they have sex:

She relaxed in his embrace. Very gently her lips were turned to his. A wordless space in which she felt only the strength of his arms, and then in the shadowed screen thrilled out a tiny voice. It rose and pulsed and paused, and ere its chain of melody broke there chimed in another and another throbbing sweetness, till the whole invisible choir scaled the heights together.

The coupling couple soon wed. With a bit of encouragement from his bride, Blantyre resigns the post on the Harmonic for a new life in Stella's hometown of Yorkton (read: Toronto). A few weeks later, Mrs Blantyre uses a minuscule portion of her inheritance to buy into the practice of a respected, elderly physician (he's even older than fifty). It turns out to be not the best of partnerships. Blantyre would've done well to consult Ellison before contracts were signed. For obvious reasons, Stella made no such suggestion.

Yorkton Toronto, 1911

A fun melodrama, right? Sadly, Blantyre—Alien is often given over to page after page of talk about industry, economics, and politics – no surprise for an author whose best known novel, The Rapids (1922), was inspired by his admiration for financier and industrialist Francis Clergue.

Stalled, the plot settles into vignettes concerning Blantyre's practice. A selfish society woman asks him to perform an abortion (he refuses). A consumptive young father pleads with the doctor to lie on an insurance

application (he refuses). In one of the novel's most dramatic scenes, Blantyre is called to the home of a man named Parkinson, who takes his own life by consuming.... what exactly? Blantyre's efforts to save the man didn't involve a search. Moments after Parkinson expires, Ellison rushes in and finds an empty bottle of aconite under the dead man's desk. If only Blantyre had known! Parkinson might have been saved!

Or maybe not.

Blantyre's failing has no consequence. Life continues apace, enriched by his relationship with Stella – but herein lies the novel's greatest flaw. That Stella loves her husband is both stated and shown. The more reserved Blantyre appears much, much more than content in the marriage; so, it comes as a surprise when, well into the novel's second half, one of their acquaintances labels their marriage a failure. It comes as a much greater surprise when, even later, Blantyre expresses the very same judgement.

It's true that no one knows what goes on behind closed doors. But Charlie Rich shared, and so does Alan Sullivan. We see enough of the protagonist's married life – which, I think worth noting, is by far the most sexually active in a Canadian novel published before Harriet Marwood, Governess – to question everything that had gone before.

I felt deceived, but not nearly so much as Mrs Blantyre.

Strange: On the newlyweds' voyage to Canada they encounter a "former Canadian Prime Minister, now in opposition" who is described as "an old-world Gallic type."

Laurier, right?

Makes sense for a novel published in 1914, except that the scene takes place three years earlier, several months before Laurier lost power.  In further conversation, the former Canadian Prime Minister is referred to as "Sir John." The only knighted prime ministers to have borne that Christian name are Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir John Abbott, and Sir John Thompson, all of whom were long dead.

Object and Access: An attractive book bound in red boards with gold type. The final two page are given over to ads for Dent's Wayfarer's Library and what was then the author's only other book.

Dent published Blantyre—Alien in both Great Britain and Canada. I take mine to be the former as its spine is stamped "DENT, LONDON". The novel was also published by in the United States by Dutton.

Blantyre—Alien can be found in the Toronto Public Library, Library and Archives Canada, and nineteen of our universities. As of this writing, three copies are being offered for sale online. The cheapest is $45.43. At US$75.00, the one to buy is inscribed by the author to a fellow member of Toronto's Arts & Letters Club.

The novel can be read here – gratis – thanks to the good folks at the Internet Archive.

A Gentleman's Gentleman Cultivates a Lady

The Dust Flower
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1922
350 pages

Basil King wrote the two best novels I read last year. The first, The Thread of Flame, is about a wealthy American who loses his memory and identity to shell shock on the Great War battlefields of France. He manages to make his way home to the United States, where he finds work as a labourer, and comes to embrace his new, modest life. The later novel, The Empty Sack, also features a wealthy American man

who has been transformed by the conflict. In this case, grave injury results in spiritual awakening, and he looks to better the lives of a less fortunate woman and her family through marriage.

The Thread of Flame was published in 1920. The Empty Sack was published in 1921. My expectations for The Dust Flower, Basil King's 1922 novel, were high. Though the book disappointed, it did so in an unexpected fashion.

The Dust Flower begins with a flap between New York lawyer Rashleigh Allerton and his fiancée Barbara Walbrook:

She was standing over him, high-tempered, imperious. "So it's come to this," she said, with decision; "you've got to choose between a stupid, vulgar lot of men, and me."
     He gritted his teeth. "Do you expect me to give up all my friends?"
     "All your friends! That's another matter. I'm speaking of half a dozen profligates, of whom you seem determined – I must say it, Rash; you force me to it – of whom you seem determined to be one."

Rash had shown up the previous evening after having had a drink at his club and Barbara isn't at all happy. She removes her engagement ring, fully expecting Rash to beg for forgiveness. But he doesn't:

"I picked up a book at the club the other day."
     Not being interested, she made no response.
     "It was the life of an English writing-guy."
     Though wondering what he was working up to, she still held her peace.
     "Gissing, the fellow's name was. Ever hear of him?"
     The question being direct, she murmured: "Yes; of course. What of it ?"
     "Ever hear how he got married?"
     "Not that I remember." "When something went wrong – I've forgotten what – he went out into the street with a vow. It was a vow to marry the first woman he met who'd marry him."

Rash, being rash, does just that, proposing to Letty Gravely, a penniless, homeless young woman he encounters on a Central Park bench. She's assured that the marriage would be nothing more than a business relationship; its purpose is to wring Barbara's heart. "I'm not looking for a wife," he tells Letty. "I only want a woman to marry – a woman to whom I can point and say, See there! I've married – that."

This reader thought those words would bring an abrupt end to the conversation, but Letty is unworldly and impressionable. After much urging, Rash convinces her to marry him that afternoon. By the following morning, both are regretting their union. Rash considers suicide, before rushing off to tell Barbara what he's done. Meanwhile, Letty, left alone in the Allerton mansion on East Sixty-seventh Street, "only a few doors from Fifth Avenue," finds a friend in Steptoe,  Rash's elderly butler and valet. A foundling of uncertain parentage, the servant raised himself up from the gutter and sees an opportunity to help Letty do likewise.

Steptoe and Letty, as depicted by Pruett Carter
in the October 1921 issue of Good Housekeeping.

Letty's education under the old man brings some unexpected comedy to the novel. I say "unexpected" because I can't remember humour of any sort in other King novels. Steptoe isn't nearly as refined as he believes, and his first attempt at being Henry Higgins very nearly fails when he mistakes a parade of models in an exclusive boutique for ladies come to cast haughty, disapproving glances at Letty:

The spectacle grew dazzling, difficult for Steptoe to keep up with. He and Letty were plainly objects of interest to these grand folk, because there were now four or five of them. They advanced, receded, came up and studied them, wheeled away, smiled sometimes at each other with the high self-assurance of beauty and position, pranced, pawed, curveted, were noble or coquettish as the inner self impelled, but always the embodiment of overweening pride. Among the "real gentry" as he called them, there had unfailingly been for him and his colleagues a courtesy which might have been called only a distinction in equality, whereas these high-steppers.... 

Good Housekeeping, November 1921

More than laughs, the thing that really sets the The Dust Flower apart from other King novels – the six I've read, anyway – is simplicity of plot. Where their stories are intricate and so very, very clever, things here progress much like the reader might anticipate. Rash is forced to choose between the woman to whom he was engaged for no good reason and the "wife" who proves to be a kindred spirit. In other King novels the answer wouldn't be at all clear, but here King follows Hollywood convention. I think it worth noting that the silent screen adaptation of The Dust Flower coincided with the novel's publication in book form.

The Gazette (Montreal), 29 July 1922

I don't expect that anyone reading this review will bother with this novel. No flower in the dustbin, it may be the least interesting of King's twenty-two books. My recommendation – because the man is worth reading – is to begin with The Empty Sack. The Thread of Flame comes next.

My first read of the year, I'm hoping The Dust Flower will end up as the most disappointing.

Trivia: Rash follows fellow wealthy Manhattanite Chipman Walker of King's 1914 novel The Letter of the Contract in planning revenge on a woman by turning to drink. Neither man is able to follow through.

Object: A bulky hardcover with four illustrations by Hibbert V.B. Kline, including that used on the jacket. I purchased my copy last month from an Albany bookseller. Price: US$19.50.

Access:  The Dust Flower first appeared serialized in Good Housekeeping (September 1921 - April 1922)with illustrations by Pruett Carter. I much prefer Carter's illustrations. This is his imagining of the very same encounter between Rash and Barbara depicted above by Kline:

The University of Prince Edward Island, in Basil King's home province, does not hold a copy of The Dust Flower. It can be found in five Canadian universities, but not one of our public libraries. Once again, Library and Archives Canada fails.

At the time of this writing, only one copy of the Harper first edition was being offered online. Stamped "Property of U.S. Government," purchase at your own risk. Price: US$15.00. As far as I've been able to determine, the only other edition is a long out-of print Grosset & Dunlop cheapo. The Harper first edition can be read here – gratis – courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rarte Book Library and the invaluable Internet Archive.

Related posts:

The Great Canadian Post-Great War Novel?
A Man Forgets His Identity (but not his manners)
The Termination That Dare Not Speak Its Name

The Globe 100 179 of 1918

One month after the Armistice, the post-war world is in many ways unrecognizable. Consider this from the front page of the December 7, 1918, Globe:

The Austro-Hungarian Empire is gone... and so too is "The Season's Best Books in Review," the Globe's annual gathering of the year's finest titles. I was a fan of the latter (not the former), writing about it here, here, and here.

"Recent Books and the Outlook," the successor to "The Season's Best Books in Review," made its debut in that same December edition of the Globe. Though similar in appearance and length – five pages – there is a marked difference in tone, as evidenced in this early dig at our tardy allies to the south: "Of war books there is still a large output, but the situation has changed. Those dealing with actual fighting, on either great or small scale, have had their day in Canada, but they are still at high tide in the United States, which entered the war about three years later and consequently are so much behind in that respect."

A second dig follows from someone described only as a "competent critic," who notes that war verse hasn't nearly so plentiful as in previous years: "War became a mere business when the United States entered into the arena with their slogan, 'We've got four years to do this job.' No poet could become enthused over a job. This cessation of singing was inevitable, for the war had gone on long enough and had deteriorated into a debauch of mutual slaughter."

And yet, the war dominates Poetry, the first of the ten "Recent Books and the Outlook" sections:

The Volunteer and Other Poems - Herbert Asquith
Fighting Men of Canada - Douglas Leader Durkin
Canadian Poems of he Great War - John W. Garvin, ed.
Spun Yarn and Spindrift - Norah M. Holland
In the Day of Battle (revised) - Carrie Ellefscottn Holman, ed.
Poems and Plays, Volume 1 - John Masefield
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - John McCrae
War - Ronald Campbell Mcfie
The Little Marshal and Other Poems - Owen E. McGillicuddy
Gitanjali and Fruit Gathering - Rabindranath Tagore
Songs of an Airman and Other Poems - Hartley Munro Thomas
Canadian Twilight and Other Poems - Bernard Freeman Trotter
Rough Rhymes of a Padre - Woodbine Willie

"Special attention should be paid by all lovers of poetry to the work of the late Lieut. Bernard Trotter of Toronto," writes the competent critic. This may explain how it is that Trotter's book, published in in 1917 and praised in that year's "Season's Best Books in Review,"  holds a spot in this 1918 list.

Miss Holland's collection is described as "a distinct advance in Canadian literature, both in craftsmanship and haunting charm," but my eyes were drawn to this relatively lengthy review of Douglas Durkin's The Fighting Men of Canada:

To be perfectly fair to Durkin, "hell" appears eighteen times in The Fighting Men of Canada, but only once does it follow "yell":

Nevertheless, this review is something new. "The Season's Best Books in Review" was all about the Best Books, but here the Globe is including what its critic thinks is one of the worst. Of the 179 books cover in "Recent Books and the Outlook," not one is given nearly so savage a beating as The Fighting Men of Canada.

The anonymous critic does have his prejudices, as exposed in his praise of War by crazy* Scottish eugenicist Ronald Campbell Macfie, M.A., M.B., C.M., LL.D.:

We Canadians dominate the Poetry section – eight of the thirteen titles! – but falter horribly in other categories. Just two of the twenty Children's titles are Canadian, and we're completely shut out of Biography, Art, Travel and the newly-minted Reconstruction section. Our second best showing comes in Fiction, in which we manage just twelve of seventy-two titles:

The Unknown Wrestler - H.A. Cody
Battles Royal Down North - Norman Duncan
Harbor Tales Down North - Norman Duncan
The Three Sapphires - W.A. Fraser
The Fugitive Sleuth - Hulbert Footner
The Chivalry of Keith Leicester - Robert Allison Hood
The Romance of Western Canada - R.G. MacBeth
Three Times and Out - Nellie L. McClung
Willow, the Wisp - Archie P. McKishnie
The Islands of Adventure - Theodore G. Roberts
Beautiful Joe - Marshall Saunders
The Cow Puncher - Robert J.C. Stead

No word of explanation is given for the inclusion of Marshall Saunders' 1897 novel Beautiful Joe. You'll note that Norman Duncan weighs in with two titles, despite being two years dead.

RIP

Of the seventy-two  Fiction titles reviewed, the only one I've read is Robert Allison Hood's The Chivalry of Keith Leicester:

Not exactly a glowing recommendation.

Ah, hell, I didn't think all that much of it either.

Nineteen-eighteen wasn't exactly a banner year for Canadian books. No wonder our competent critic was so grumpy:

The problem of Vers Libre has fallen into neglect of late, but this mongrel form of expression has left its mark upon even some of our most orthodox poets. It is to be hoped that with the cessation of German atrocities, the atrocities committed on the fair muses by the super-vers-librists will go to the junk-heap of junkerdom.

He'd have been grumpier still had he known what the post-war would bring.

* An excerpt from Macfie's 1917 essay "Some of the Evolutionary Consequences of War":

(cliquez pour agrandir)

Related posts:

The Season's Best Books in Review - A.D. 1917:

The String of Canadian Patriotism is Fingered

The Season's Best Books in Review ‐ A.D. 1916

The Season's Best Books in Review – A.D. 1915;

Featuring the Best Canadian Book Ever Published

Robert W. Service's Revised Christmas Miracle (with the poet's forgotten reading instructions)

Much of this past weekend was spent in preparation for Christmas, but I did manage a couple of hours with the December 1918 edition of Maclean's. The first to hit news stands after the Armistice, it makes for very interesting reading. The opening piece, a column titled "The Business Outlook," reminds that Maclean's started out as The Business Magazine. It begins:

Peace came with a suddenness that has left the world a little breathless. Men of discernment had predicted from the very first that, when Germany once began to crack, the end would follow within a short period. But who was there bold enough at any time before September of the present year to stand out and say that the break-up would have come before the New Year?

I doubt Maclean's editor Thomas B. Costain saw the break-up coming. How else to explain American John J. Pershing instead of, say, Sir Arthur Currie, on the magazine's first post-war cover? Even the advertising department appears to have been caught off guard:

"Now That the War is Won" by Lieut-Col J.B. Maclean, is the only article that looks to have been commissioned après la guerre. And it's very short. Other articles include "An Unsolved Mystery: A Story of Warfare Under the Earth" by Lieut C. W. Tilbrook and an interview with the U.S. Secretary of War conducted by Pvt Harold R. Peat (Mrs Peat has an article of her own in the "Women and Their Work" section). Fiction fairly dominates the issue, with short stories and serialized novels by W. Victor Cook, W.A. Fraser, Allan C. Shore, Arthur Stringer and Alice Muriel Williamson. Sadly, Shore's "Santa Clause in Petticoats" isn't nearly as titillating as its title, but Stringer's story is fantastic.

All this fiction! As the advert suggests, something to take a soldier's mind off the grim realities that he faces:

The same could be said for those on the home front, though neither would've found escape in 'The Wife' by Robert Service, the issue's only verse. I thought I knew the poem, but I was wrong. An unfamiliar note at the end had me hunting for my copy of Service's Ballads of a Bohemian (1921), in which 'The Wife' was reprinted. Sure enough, the note isn't there – and there are other significant differences:

THE WIFE

[Maclean's, December 1918]

"Tell Annie I’ll be home in time
To help her with her Christmastree."
That’s what he wrote. . . Now hark the chime
Of Christmas bells—and where is he?
And how the house is dark and still!
And Annie’s sobbing on my knee. 

The page beside the candle flame
With cramped and cruel type was filled;
I read and read, until a name
Leapt at me. . . Oh! my heart was stilled!
My eye crept up the column, up
Unto its hateful heading: KILLED. 

And there was Annie on the stair:
"And will he not be long?" she said.
Her eyes were stars and in her hair
She’d tied a bit of ribband red;
And every step was Daddy’s sure;
Till wearied out, she stole to bed. 

And in the quiet of the night
Alone I decked the Christmas tree.
On every little ticket bright,
My tears were falling bitterly;
And in the street I heard them call.
"Another Splendid Victory." 

A Victory! What care I now?
A thousand victories were vain.
Here in my ruined hearth I vow
From out my black abyss of pain,
I’d rather, rather red defeat,
And have my man, my again. 

Aye, cowering by my cold fireplace,
My orphaned child upon my knee,
What care I for their Empire's pride,
Their pomp and power beyond the sea?
I'd gladly see it lost and lost
Could that bring back my dead to me. 

"But come, my dear; we will not wait.
Each tiny candle pink and white.
We'll set aglow—he may be late,
And we must ave all gay and bright."
(One makes mistakes. I’ll tell myself
I did not read that name aright.) 

"Come, Annie, come, We two will pray
For homes bereft of happiness;
For husbands fighting far away;
For little children fatherless.
Beside the shining tree we'll pray:
"'Oh, Father dear, protect and bless. . . Protect and bless. . .'" 

*  *  *  * 

What’s that? A step upon the stair!
A rush! The door thrown open wide!
My hero and my love! He's there,
And Annie’s laughing by his side. . .
I'm in his arms. . . I faint. . . I faint. . .
"Oh, God! Thy world is glorified."

NOTE.—The author wishes it understood that the sentiments expressed with reference to duty and the war are to be taken as an uncontrollable outburst in the first moments of bereavement, and not as in any sense an expression of opinion.

THE WIFE

[Ballads of a Bohemian, New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1921]

"Tell Annie I’ll be home in time
To help her with her Christmas-tree."
That’s what he wrote, and hark! the chime
Of Christmas bells, and where is he?
And how the house is dark and sad,
And Annie’s sobbing on my knee! 

The page beside the candle-flame
With cruel type was overfilled;
I read and read until a name
Leapt at me and my heart was stilled:
My eye crept up the column—up
Unto its hateful heading: Killed. 

And there was Annie on the stair:
"And will he not be long?" she said.
Her eyes were bright and in her hair
She’d twined a bit of riband red;
And every step was daddy’s sure,
Till tired out she went to bed. 

And there alone I sat so still,
With staring eyes that did not see;
The room was desolate and chill,
And desolate the heart of me;
Outside I heard the news-boys shrill:
"Another Glorious Victory!" 

A victory. . . . Ah! what care I?
A thousand victories are vain.
Here in my ruined home I cry
From out my black despair and pain,
I’d rather, rather damned defeat,
And have my man with me again. 

They talk to us of pride and power,
Of Empire vast beyond the sea;
As here beside my hearth I cower,
What mean such words as these to me?
Oh, will they lift the clouds that low’r,
Or light my load in years to be 

What matters it to us poor folk?
Who win or lose, it’s we who pay.
Oh, I would laugh beneath the yoke
If I had him at home to-day;
One’s home before one’s country comes:
Aye, so a million women say. 

"Hush, Annie dear, don’t sorrow so."
(How can I tell her?) “See, we’ll light
With tiny star of purest glow
Each little candle pink and white."
(They make mistakes. I’ll tell myself
I did not read that name aright.)
Come, dearest one; come, let us pray
Beside our gleaming Christmas-tree;
Just fold your little hands and say
These words so softly after me:
"God pity mothers in distress,
And little children fatherless." 

"God pity mothers in distress,
And little children fatherless." 

*  *  *  * 

What’s that? – a step upon the stair;
A shout! – the door thrown open wide!
My hero and my man is there.
And Annie’s leaping by his side. . .
The room reels round, I faint, I fall. . .
"O God! Thy world is glorified."

The original is better, don't you think? The note's disappearance speaks volumes to the differences between wartime and peacetime.

A note of my own: Lest anyone complain that the title of this post spoils the final stanza of 'The Wife,' I point out that this C.W. Jefferys illustration accompanied it's appearance in Maclean's:

Related posts:

Great War Christmas Verse from a Century Past

'Christmas 1916' by Robert Stanley Weir

A Century-Old Prayer for Christmas

Timely Verse from Christmas a Century Past

Miss Machar's 'The Call of Christmas - 1914'

The Dustiest Bookcase: I is for Irwin

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

They're in storage as we build our new home.

Patience, please.

Kak, The Copper Eskimo

Vilhjalmur Stefanson and Violet Irwin

New York: Macmillan, 1924

253 pages

Yes, I is for Irwin... and not for Stefansson. My reason for buying this book has everything to do with her and nothing to do with him. To be honest, I'm not much interested in Kak, the Copper Eskimo – I bought it because I saw it. The Violet Irwin book I really want to read is her first novel, The Human Desire (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1913). I've never come across a copy and have never read a review. All I know about The Human Desire comes from advertisements for the 1919 Hollywood adaptation.

Silent films took great liberties with source material. I don't know how faithful Hollywood's 1919 Human Desire was to Irwin's novel, but I'm interested in finding out.

The McGill Daily
10 October 1919

I've seen dozens of films at The Imperial – my favourites being The King of Comedy and After Hours – sadly, I was seven decades too late for Human Desire.

Fun fact: Kak, the Copper Eskimo was never adopted by Hollywood, but it was translated into Yiddish: Ḳeḳ - der ḳleyner esḳimos (Ṿilne : Naye yidishe shul, 1939). The only copy of which I know is held in New York at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.

Related posts:

The Critical Age: Thoughts on a Film I'll Never See

A Wild Olive of Nitrate

Jazz Age Castaways in a Lost Film

Gloria Swanson's Subway Scene

The Promise of a Man, a Mother in So Much Pain

Blencarrow
Isabel Mackay
Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1926
307 pages

The author's final novel, published two years before her death, Blencarrow begins in a sunny, lighthearted manner:

Euan Cameron, aged twelve, sat upon the fence and bent a darkling eye upon his father at the woodpile. The woodpile was in the Cameron's back yard, and the Camerons' back yard was in Blencarrow, and Blencarrow was a small, but exceedingly important, town somewhere around. So now you know exactly where Euan sat.

Do not be deceived. Blencarrow fits in with Mackay's other novels: The House of Windows (1912), dealing with child abduction and worker exploitation; Up the Hill and Over (1917), about mental illness and drug addiction; and The Window-Gazer (1921), in which post-traumatic stress disorder and racism figure.

(I've yet to read Mackay's 1919 novel Mist of Morning.)

Named after the fictitious town in which the action is set (see: Woodstock, Ontario), Blencarrow focusses on four children as they grow into adulthood. Euan is the least interesting. I blame his family.

 The worst that can be said about the Camerons is that grim patriarch Andrew finds no contentment in his achievements. Contrast Euan's home life with that of best friend Garry, who is being raised in the Anglican manse by a benevolent uncle, Reverend James Dwight, and housekeeper Mrs Binns. Garry's mother is dead; there's no mention of his father. Euan and Garry's sometime friend Conway de Beck – Con-of-the-Woods – lives with his aunt, a Theosophist, who is something of an outcast in Blencarrow. Con doesn't care; he's happier in the woods, hence the nickname.

All three boys are attracted to Kathrine Fenwell. She isn't the prettiest girl in Blencarrow – that would be her sister, Gilda – but she has by far the strongest character. Kathrine needs this as the daughter of the town drunk. Owing to his good looks and pedigree, Blencarrow had once considered her father, Gilbert Fenwell, a man of great promise. Shortly after the death of his own father, the respected Colonel Fenwell, Gilbert took his healthy inheritance to the big cities, where he invested in "Big Business." He married Kathrine's mother, Lucia, and began construction of what was to have been the grandest house in all of Blencarrow:

It was not so much a house as a half-house, the front half benign-existent save as a tracing on a blue-print. The back half, arrested abruptly in its normal growth, had remained fixed, as by some strange enchantment, in all the ugliness of outraged proportion. At first, scaffolds had decorated it, but, bit by bit, the scaffolding had disappeared and nothing had taken its place. No steps below, no eaves above, broke the wide flatness of is face. The front door was not properly a front door, but a door leading into a hallway that was not there. The windows were not windows really, but glassed-in entrances to dining-rooms and drawing-rooms – which lived and had their being in a fourth dimension.

The lengthy description, one of my favourite Mackay passages, ends:

It stood well back in its neglected garden, the ghost of something once new and fresh and promising, On its strange, flat face was a negation of all hope. It was a house which had given itself up.
     Blencarrow had given it up also. While the scaffolding still stood, Blencarrow had pointed it out to strangers as "the unfinished Fenwell place." But this they did no longer, for a thing which never will be finished is the most finished thing of all.

The odd appearance of Gilbert Fenwell's house, "the town's only curiosity," serves as a reminder that Big Business "wiped him off the financial map as a child rubs out a name on a plate." Work stopped,

The Globe & Mail
14 December 1926

 and he returned to Blencarrow as a man who had left his money and promise behind: "Gilbert Fenwell, as a possibility, had ceased to be, but Gilbert Fenwell, as an actuality, lived on."

If only he hadn't.

Gilbert doesn't figure nearly so much in Blencarrow as Kathrine, Euan, Garry, and Con-of-the Woods, but his influence on the plot is greater. As a young child, Gilda is sent away to live with her aunt after having being beaten by Gilbert. Her forehead bears a scar that she hides with her long red hair. He takes his failings out on his family. He beats Lucia. He beats Kathrine. His poison is pervasive. All too real, I can't think of another character like him this early in our literature, nor can I think of anything similar to this exchange between Kathrine and her mother:

"Gilda doesn't care for anyone in any way – except you, of course," she added hastily, as she saw the tightening of her mother's face.
     Lucia laid down her sewing. Into her eyes had come the strange blank look which Kathrine had grown to dread.
     "No," she said softly. "You can't have it both ways. If Gilda cares for no one, why would she care for me? And that is justice, too. I hated her you see."
     "You hated Gilda?" – in wonderment.
     Lucia nodded. "Before she was born I hated her. I would have denied her life if I could. I had come to hate life so! To pass it on seemed a horrible thing... horror... all horror –" 

A remarkable passage in a remarkable novel, it leads me to ask again how it is that we've forgotten Isabel Mackay.

Bloomer: As in life, there's humour to be found in even the darkest of tales. Blencarrow is no exception. Its plot is governed by effects wrought of domestic violence, and yet there are chapters reminiscent of Stephen Leacock. My favourite involves the decision of the Presbyterian Ladies' Affiliated Societies of Mariposa Blencarrow to organize a "Festival of Nations." However, the greatest laugh comes in the form of a bloomer found on the ninety-fifth page. This occurs as young Garry begins religious studies with the goal of becoming a celibate Anglican clergyman like his Uncle James. In this pursuit, he finds a role model in Prof Adam Harmon, leading to this, um, exchange, which begins with Harmon's words of advice:

"Keep your mind clear as long as it is clear... Fill it with the spiritual things you love. Hold fast through everything to the decision you have made. Nothing can conquer you – except yourself."
     "Oh, I think I've got myself well in hand," said Garry cheerfully.

Object and Access: A bland green hardcover sans dust jacket (which I've never seen), as far as I know it's the only MacKay book to be attributed to "Isabel Mackay" and not "Isabel Ecclestone Mackay." I purchased my copy in 2013 from bookseller Grant Thiesen. Price: US$7.99. In reading it, I came across this bonus:

The Thomas Allen edition was a split-run with Houghton Mifflin. It appears there were no others. Blencarrow can be found at Library and Archives Canada and sixteen of our university libraries. The Woodstock Public Library excluded, Canada's public libraries fail us.

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Laura Salverson's 'For Canada' for Canada Day

A poem – and prayer – by Laura Salverson, from Wayside Gleams, her only collection of verse, published in 1925 by McClelland & Stewart.

For Canada 

               Grant us, O Lord, within the coming year.
               Some vision of our noble destiny... 

*  *  *  * 

               Give unto us the strength to face anew
               Adversity and sorrows... or again
               Good fortune, with that valiant humbleness
               Which ever marks a depth of inward grace;
               Grant us, we pray, sincere, courageous hearts.
               Wide sympathies, with minds that seek to see
               In giving joy, and pride in honest toil,
               In beauty, truth, and good for all mankind;
               For every race, for every land, we pray;
               Lift them, O God, from out enthralling thought
               And prejudice, that they, directing, find
               Thy presence manifest on land and sea.
               But last, O Lord, for this is our Canada
               We crave Thy blessing and eternal aid;
               Keep her fair soul unflinching, aye, and true
               That she, among the nations, may arise.
               Made string with the greatness from the fount within,
               Imbued with love that knows not any death,
               This gracious land, so young, so little tried.
               O'er-shadow her with Thy own righteousness.
               That she may stand a New Jerusalem
               Where man, by giving much, may gather more;
               Where thy same speech and creed of kindliness
               At last take root to flourish far and wide,
               Till thereon in very truth become
               The citadel of justice on earth.  

*  *  *  * 

               Grant us, O Lord, within the coming year,
               The vision of our final destiny —
               A nation worthy of her ancient dead —
               A fabric perfected from deathless dreams.

In 2014, I bought this first and only edition of Wayside Gleams for one dollar. The dust jacket features an advert for eight other McClelland & Stewart books.

I haven't read one.

How 'bout you?

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'O Canada! beloved native land...'
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Two Hurrahs for the New Dominion

Charles G.D. Roberts' Dominion Day Collect

Root Beer for a Sober Fête de la St-Jean Baptiste

The visage of Louis-Joseph-Paul-Napoléon Bruchési, Italian-Canadian Archbishop of Montreal, dominates the first page of this 1898 Souvenir de la fête de la St-Jean Baptiste, but the most prominent spot belongs to the English firm of Newball & Mason, which placed this ad at the very top of the front cover:

I'd long been aware that root beer was once promoted by teetotals – Hires sold it as the "temperance drink for temperance people" – but had never seen the beverage described as the "Biere de Temperance."

Don't like root beer? Newball & Mason had other drinks to lure one away from that ol' demon alcohol: botanic beer, hop ale, ginger beer, ginger ale, horehound beer, and Devonshire Cider were just six.

Looking through the many ads in the Souvenir, I see no other teetotals.

Newball & Mason's address – 943 St-Laurent – was razed in the 'seventies to make way from the Ville-Marie Expressway. I'm betting the Nottingham, Angleterre firm had long since vacated the building.

Bonne fête!

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La Fête: Il y'a 100 ans

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'Ô Canada! mon pays! mes amours!'

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Encore!

Dorothy Dumbrille is Accepted By the Communists

All This Difference

Dorothy Dumbrille

Toronto: Progress, 1945

208 pages

Progress Books, publishing arm of the Communist Party of Canada, announced April 15, 1945 as the publication date of Dorothy Dumbrille’s All This Difference. I’ve found no evidence that the novel hit the shelves on that day, that month, or in the three months that followed. The earliest reviews — and there were many — are from early August of that year. I can’t help but wonder whether its delay had something to do with the publication of Two Solitudes, which occurred a few weeks before All This Difference was to have been released. 

MacLennan's novel was received not as a book of the season, but a book for all time. Globe and Mail literary editor William Arthur Deacon’s April 7 review begins: 

Spectacular as was Canadian achievement in the novel in 1944, Hugh MacLennan of Montreal has opened 1945 with greater power. In light of Two Solitudes, the excellence of Barometer Rising diminishes to the level of an apprentice piece. The promise of the first book is justified abundantly in the second. Considering style, theme, characters, craftsmanship, significance and integrity, Two Solitudes may well be considered the most important Canadian novel ever published. 

The English press praised the book, as did the French, and sales were strong. By that October, MacLennan’s novel had sold 45,000 copies and was in its sixth printing. I can’t say I’ve ever visited a used bookstore in this country that didn’t stock a copy. And yet, though I kept an eye out, it was years before I first saw a copy of All This Difference. The first was at the home of my Montreal friend Adrian King-Edwards, owner of The Word bookshop. A couple of years later, I spotted another on a dollar cart outside Attic Books in London, Ontario. I haven’t come across another since.

So begins my review of All This Difference, posted yesterday at Canadian Notes & Queries online. You can read the whole thing here:

Dorothy Dumbrille's Communist Manifestation

Her second novel, but first to be published in book form, it's a highly ambitious work, as reflected in this publisher's advert:

The Globe & Mail
4 August 1945

I stopped short of describing All This Difference as "great," but had so much to say that I never got around to discussing the book's appearance. The bland jacket does it a disservice, particularly in light of the illustrations within. Each of its twenty chapters opens with a line drawing by self-taught Glengarry artist Stuart McCormick. Montrealers will recognize the Museum of Fine Arts.

The only other edition of All This Difference followed eighteen years after the first. Lacking the McCormick illustrations, it came from a very different publisher.

Toronto: Harlequin 1963

As I point out in the review, All This Difference was the very last Harlequin published before committed itself to romance... which is not to say it didn't try to sell the novel as a romance.

It also holds the distinction of being the only "HARLEQUIN CANADIAN."*

Wish they'd kept that up. Would've made my work a whole lot easier.

* My friend bowler informs that one other title, Kate Aitken's Never a Day So Bright, also bears the "HARLEQUIN CANADIAN" label.

Related post:

Dorothy Dumbrille's Easter Prayer

Wither the Nurse Novel?

Much of this past weekend was spent reading Backstage Nurse, a W.E.D. Ross novel published in 1963 under his "Judith Rossiter" pseudonym. The book is 220 pages long, the print is of good size, and yet I'm nowhere near finished. I'm taking time to pause and consider because Backstage Nurse is my first nurse novel. By great coincidence, it was also the author's first nurse novel. He went on to write fifty-six more.

Rightly or wrongly, I've always associated the subgenre with Harlequin. However, if the back cover of Backstage Nurse is anything to go by, it had some pretty significant competition.

Must say, Jane Corby's Staff Nurse doesn't do much for me, but doesn't Dr. Jeffrey's Awakening sound interesting? And what about Jane Arden, Space Nurse?

Sadly, Avalon is no more; Amazon bought it for its backlist in 2012. Its last nurse novels – Everglades Nurse and Nurse Misty's Magic – were published in 1987, by which point the Harlequin nurse novel was long a thing of the past.

The rise and fall of the Harlequin nurse novel is reflected in this bar graph I put together over the weekend:

cliquez pour agrandir

I do like a good bar graph – "an understatement," says my eye-rolling wife – but this one doesn't give a complete picture. As with Avalon's "NURSE STORIES" – Susan Lennox's Doctor's Choice, for example – not all nurse novels published by Harlequin had "Nurse" in the title. "Hospital" featured frequently, and "Surgeon" sometimes, but the most prominent after "Nurse" was "Doctor."

As I've discovered, more often than not, doctors are the object of a nurses longing.

Interestingly, the first doctor to appear in a book published by Harlequin was a woman; the beautifully-named Serenity Parrish, heroine of Joseph McCord's His Wife the Doctor (1949), the publisher's thirteenth title. No longing nurse in this one, sadly.

The first nurse as heroine doesn't appear until Registered Nurse by Carl Sturdy (Charles Stanley Strong), which was published in 1950 as Harlequin's forty-seventh book.

As far as I've been able to determine, the heyday came in 1961, which saw forty-eight Harlequins featuring nurses as the main character.

The last new Harlequin to feature "Nurse" in the title was Roumelia Lane's Nurse at Noongwalla, which hit the racks in January 1974:

Alex had always been fascinated by Australia and went out there from England to get a job as a nurse. 

There she met the autocratic boss of a logging camp, Grant Mitchell, who told her, "There's no padding around in this job, Miss Leighton. Just dust and drought and a twenty-four-hour day." 

She would show him she wasn't scared of hard work, or of him!

And she did. She showed him.

Curiously, in the early 'eighties, Harlequin revived several of it's old nurse titles – General Duty Nurse, Queen's Nurse, Resident Nurse, Nurse Barlowe, Nurse Templar, Nurse Aide, Nurse in White, Nurse of All Work, A Nurse is Born, Nurses Are People, The Nurse Most Likely, and Staff Nurse (not Avalon's Jane Corby classic) – in its short-lived Harlequin Classics Library and even shorter-lived Harlequin Celebrates series.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the nurse novel continued on without a hiccup in Harlequin's Mill & Boon imprint. It does to this day in M&B's Medical Romance series. Released just last year, my favourite title is Kate Hardy's Mummy, Nurse... Duchess?:

The duke and the single mom! 

Nurse Rosie Hobbes knows charming men cannot be trusted. Visiting pediatrician and sexy Italian duke Dr. Leo Marchetti is surely no exception! Her toddler twins are now the centre of her life, and she expects Leo to run a mile when he meets them. Instead his warmth leaves her breathless!

Not just a doctor, but a duke. Sexy to boot! Looks like he showed her!

Are we on the cusp seeing a nurse novel revival? I ask because select titles in the Medical Romance series have begun appearing in Canada, though only in bastardized "LARGER PRINT" editions.

Yes, bastardized.

Look what they've done to Mummy, Nurse... Duchess?

Mommy?

I blame Rupert Murdoch.

Commercial break:

Related posts:

Covering Up the Past

Hard Lessons in Publishing