Lunar Attractions; or, The Leacock I Like

Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: Gundy, 1915
282 pages

My introduction to Stephen Leacock came through a copy of Laugh With Leacock belonging to my father. A squat mass market paperback, it sat on peach crate shelving in our basement. As a child, I was drawn to its cartoon cover.

 No pun intended.

Montreal: Pocket Books, 1946
First published by Dodd, Mead in 1930

The scene depicted comes from "The Hallucination of Mr. Butt," which in turn comes from "Afternoon Adventures in My Club," which first appeared in book form in Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy, which I read for the first time last week.

Made me laugh.

"The Hallucination of Mr. Butt" is one of seven tales the narrator tells of fellow club members. Butt (his first name is never disclosed) sees himself as a most generous and self-sacrificing person, ever ready to assist others. In the episode covered, he's setting out to help the Everleigh Joneses:

“Isn’t it rather late to go there?” I protested.

     “My dear fellow,” said Mr. Butt warmly, “I don’t mind that a bit. The way I look at it is, here are these two young people, only married a few weeks, just moving into their new house, everything probably upside down, no one there but themselves, no one to cheer them up,”—he was wriggling into his raincoat as he spoke and working himself into a frenzy of benevolence,—“good gracious, I only learned at dinner time that they had come to town, or I’d have been out there days ago,—days ago-”

The night is cold, and rainy, and dark, but after knocking on several doors – "‘Do you know where the Everleigh Joneses live?’ They didn’t. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘go back to bed. Don’t bother to come down.’" – Butt succeeds in finding the newlyweds' house. At the club the next day, Butt shares what followed:

"Hullo," I called out; "it’s Butt." "I’m awfully sorry," he said, "we’ve gone to bed." "My dear boy," I called back, "don’t apologize at all. Throw me down the key and I’ll wait while you dress. I don’t mind a bit."

     "Just think of it," continued Mr. Butt, “those two poor souls going to bed at half past ten, through sheer dullness! By George, I was glad I’d come." ‘Now then,’ I said to myself, ‘let’s cheer them up a little, let’s make things a little brighter here.’"

Butt visits the Everleigh Joneses on a near-daily basis, rolling up his sleeves to help them settle in – "got the pictures up first—they’d been trying to put them up by themselves in the morning. I had to take down every one of them—not a single one right." Ultimately dissatisfied, he has them move to a downtown flat – "I like an apartment far better than a house" – when tragedy strikes:

“'He’s ill—some sort of fever—poor chap— been ill three days, and they never told me or sent for me—just like their grit—meant to fight it out alone. I’m going out there at once.” From day to day I had reports from Mr. Butt of the progress of Jones’s illness. “I sit with him every day,” he said. “Poor chap,—he was very bad yesterday for a while, —mind wandered—quite delirious—I could hear him from the next room—seemed to think some one was hunting him—‘Is that damn old fool gone,’ I heard him say. “I went in and soothed him. ‘There is no one here, my dear boy,’ I said, ‘no one, only Butt.’ He turned over and groaned.

That's not the end of Everleigh Jones, nor is it the conclusion of the story. Much as I like "The Hallucination of Mr. Butt," it is far from the best in Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy; it isn't even the best of "Afternoon Adventures in My Club." That distinction belongs to "The Spiritual Outlook of Mr. Doomer," whose titular character is first depicted looking gloomily out the club library's windows. He is a man saddened by, as he puts it, "the sense of the irrevocability of death and the changes that must come after it.” “You think of these things a great deal, Mr. Doomer?” the narrator asks.

“I do,” he answered. “It may be that it is something in my temperament, I suppose one would call it a sort of spiritual mindedness. But I think of it all constantly. Often as I stand here beside the window and see these cars go by”— he indicated a passing street car —“I cannot but realise that the time will come when I am no longer a managing director and wonder whether they will keep on trying to hold the dividend down by improving the rolling stock or will declare profits to inflate the securities. These mysteries beyond the grave fascinate me, sir. Death is a mysterious thing.”

"The Hallucination of Mr. Butt" is the only story from Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy to feature in Laugh With Leacock, which according to the back cover of my father's copy is "the cream of Stephen Leacock's humor [sic]." It is also the only story to make it into The Leacock Roundabout, Laugh With Leacock's successor.  

New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956

What I've coming to realise is that my taste in Leacock is markedly different than those of the anthologists. As the covers of Laugh With Leacock and The Leacock Roundabout suggest, the stories contained provide good-natured laughs; black humour has no place.

I've worked as an anthologist myself, so understand the constraints, one of which is length. Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy begins with "Spoof."

At twenty-four pages, it's by far the longest piece. It appealed to me not only for the passages of Spoof Leacock provides, but as a satire of publisher marketing:

This novel represents the last word in up-to-date fiction. It is well known that the modern novel has got far beyond the point of mere story-telling. The childish attempt to interest the reader has long since been abandoned by all the best writers. They refuse to do it. The modern novel must convey a message, or else it must paint a picture, or remove a veil, or open a new chapter in human psychology. Otherwise it is no good. SPOOF does all of these things. The reader rises from its perusal perplexed, troubled, and yet so filled with information that rising itself is a difficulty.

Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy was a gathering of fairly recent magazine pieces and previously unpublished work intended to capitalise on the Christmas market. And, because it was the 1915 offering, the Great War intrudes for the first time: "The War Mania of Mr Jinks and Mr Blinks," "Last Man Out of Europe," "Sidelights on the Supermen," and "In the Good Time After the War." The last, which also happened to be the final piece in the collection, imagines the post-war as a time of great cooperation, in which political differences are non-existent. It is the weakest piece, while "Last Man Out of Europe," ranks amongst the very best. Here, Parkins, yet another member of the gentleman's club tells of the days of horror he and travelling companion Loo Jones suffered in trying to leave the continent. In Hungary when war was declared, the pair made for the nearest railway station:

“They said they’d sell us tickets. But they questioned us mighty closely; asked where we wanted to go to, what class we meant to travel by, how much luggage we had to register and so on.”

They reach Genoa only to find that it is three days until the next steamer to New York:

"Stuck it out as best we could: stayed right there in the hotel. Poor Jones was pretty well collapsed! Couldn't do anything but sleep, and eat, and sit in the piazza of the hotel."

Cutting, but not dark; it stands in such contrast with Leacock's later writing about the Great War. In our own darkening days, I recommend "The Boy Who Came Back" from The Hohenzollerns in America (Toronto: Gundy, 1919). 

An unfocussed post, I know, but then this book, like so many Leacocks is a bit of a grab bag. "Our Literary Bureau" made me laugh out loud; "Weejee the Pet Dog" is, I hope, the worst thing I'll read by the man.

My point is that there is so much more to Leacock than Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and anthology servings. Seek out the long out-of-print volumes. As with any writer, the most popular isn't necessarily the best.

Object: A nicely-proportioned hardcover, very typical of its time. My first Canadian edition was purchased three decades ago at the annual McGill Book Fair (held in Redpath Hall, mere metres away from the university's Leacock Building). Price: $1.00. At the end of the volume is found three pages of advertisements for the author's other books: Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, Behind the Beyond, Nonsense Novels, Literary Lapses, and Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. These are followed by an advert for The International Studio magazine.

Sadly, but unsurprisingly – it was published in 1915, after all – my copy lacks its dust jacket (above).

Should I have expected more for a dollar?

It once belonged to a G.R. England. Going through the 949 Englands in the 1921 census, I find Gordon England (age 19), Gaspard England (age 21), George England (age 51). Gosselin England (age 71)... and that's just Quebec.

Access: Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy enjoyed several Canadian, British, and American editions before going out of print in the 'twenties. It returned in 1964 as #46 in the New Canadian Library, and remained in print well into the 'eighties. I once purchased a copy with the third series design at Eaton's in downtown Montreal, not 100 meters from the university at which Leacock taught.

Used copies of are both plentiful and inexpensive. If you've got the cash, the one to buy is offered at US$150 by a Milton, Ontario bookseller. It has the dust jacket.

Related post:

Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?

Professor Leacock Sets the Stage

A Woman Who Did

The Untempered Wind
Joanna E. Wood
Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1994
354 pages

In Henry James Morgan's Types of Canadian Women, published in 1903 by William Briggs, Joanna E. Wood is described as a "well known Canadian novelist."

She is not today.

She was not a half-century ago.

She was not a century ago.

"Meteor-like" is the word Barbara Goddard uses to describe Wood's career. In fact, it ended the very year Types of Canadian Women appeared.

The novelist was all of thirty-five.

Joanna E Wood was twenty-six when The Untempered Wind, her first novel, was published. Its heroine, Myron Holder, has had a child out of wedlock; she is "a mother, but not a wife," and so suffers the scorn of Jamestown, the small Ontario village in which she was born and raised. Myron's own mother is dead, as is her father. Her unloving grandmother is very much alive and shares a modest house with Myron and her baby boy.

When first published in 1894, The Untempered Wind proved a critical and commercial success, encouraging three printings, each featuring the same ten illustrations. The frontispiece was used on the cover of the Tecumseh edition:

Had I been involved in its publication, I would have chosen one of the illustrations depicting Myron. This is my favourite:

Still, I understand the selection. Myron may be the protagonist of The Untempered Wind, but more pages are given over to those so quick to pass judgement. Mrs Deans, the most prominent, leverages her employ of Myron as an act of sacrifice and charity: "I feel a duty to have her here, but it goes ag'in me, Mr. Long [the ragman] it does that; but there, we all have our cross and we must help along as well as we can." Other women of the village visit Myron's grandmother on the pretence of providing sympathy. Each hopes to be the one who uncovers the identity of the child's father, but not even old Mrs Holder knows his name.

Not everyone in Jamestown condemns Myron; some are too drunk to care, while others are oblivious to her situation. This reader was struck by young Bing White, an elfish lad who today's reader will recognise as displaying all the early interests and obsessions of a serial killer:

There was something hideously repulsive in this boy's secret cruelties, horrible to relate, sickening to contemplate. But the creatures he tormented, maimed, killed, knew neither anticipation nor remembrance; the "corporeal pang" was all.

A boy drawn to blood, including his own, Bing is unique in nineteenth-century Canadian literature, as is Jamestown. The village stands in stark contrast with the surrounding farmland as a place poisoned by an atmosphere of envy, greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy:

The Jamestown people, in making a pariah of Myron Holder, were not urged to the step by imperative feeling of hurt honor or pained surprise. Such faults as hers were not uncommon there; but never before had the odium rested upon one only. Besides, there had always been some "goings on" and some "talk" indicative of the affair. In Myron Holder's case, the Jamestown people had been caught napping. In such eases a marriage and reinstatement into public favor was the usual sequel, arrived at after much exhilarating and spicy gossip, much enjoyable speculation, much meditation upon the part of the matrons, and much congratulation that all had ended so well.

Myron is ostracised for not following that well-trod path. After a time, she comes to have a friend in Homer Wilson, by far the most intelligent person in Jamestown, whose ambitions have been crushed by manipulative, guilt-inducing parents. 

The Untempered Wind was first published the year before The Woman Who Did by fellow Upper Canadian Grant Allen. The latter, also a story of an unwed mother, was a succès de scandale. Wood's novel didn't raise as much stink, but it was a success. The three printings by original publisher New York's J Slewing Tait and Sons were followed in 1898 by an Ontario Publishing Company edition.

Together The Untempered Wind and The Woman Who Did stand as two of the most remarkable Canadian novels of the nineteenth century.

Neither was so much as mentioned in my CanLit classes.

Object and Access: A trade paperback with introduction by Klay Dyer, The Untempered Wind is the seventh volume in Tecumseh's essential Early Canadian Women Writers Series. I purchased my less than pristine copy eight years ago at London's Attic Books. Price: $2.23. It's available from the publisher at $17.95 (plus postage) through this link.

Current Literature, November 1894

The Tait and Sons first edition can be read online here, but this scan of the third printing – reproduced in the Tecumseh edition – is much easier on the eyes.

As of this writing, only the Tecumseh edition is listed for sale online.

Related post:

Getting to Know the Woman Who Did

Valentine's Day Cathode Ray Tube Afterglow

               Better than dreaming, look and you'll find
               Even more than the romance that's in your mind

For the morning after the night before, this four-decade-old advert for Harlequin's Superromance series.

That voice!

My wife identified it immediately as belonging to Luther Vandross. Further research reveals that Vandross co-wrote the song. 

I'm a fan.

It's interesting to note that the four titles representing the "4 NEW TITLES EVERY MONTH" were published over a seven-month period.

I wonder how they were chosen.

Abra Taylor wrote two of the four: Taste of Eden and River of Desire. Real name Barbara Brouse, she was the very first Harlequin Superromance novelist. Her Toronto Star obituary, found here on the Brouse family website, is provides an all too brief portrait of a remarkable woman.

Related post:

Loving the Mayor of Toronto 

The Prince Classics Robert Barr (Monsarrat mentioned)

 

A brief follow-up to last week's post on One Day's Courtship and The Heralds of Fame.

Prince Classics is new to me, but has quickly become my favourite print on demand vulture. I have it to thank for the introduction to Dutch artist Jac Mars (1919-1992), whose illustration graces the cover of its edition of this Robert Barr novella.

"One Day's Courtship" first saw print in syndication; The Detroit Free Press, for which the author had once worked, was one of the newspapers that paid for the privilege. Set in nineteenth-century Quebec, the novella starts out as social commentary, moves to adventure, and ends as a love story. Jac Mars' illustration, which first appeared in the April 1962 edition of Woman's Realm, has nothing to do with Barr's story. There are no embraces, but one can imagine. My wife, a thirty-year veteran of the fashion industry, informs that the clothing is all wrong, and finds equal fault in Prince Classics' bind-up of "One Days Courtship" and Barr's 1894 novel In the Midst of Alarms:

To those who prefer In the Midst of Alarms on its own, Prince Classics can provide. The image they use, W.T. Brenda's Woman Riding Zebra, first saw print on the cover of Life (30 November 1922).

I remind that In the Midst of Alarms is set in 1866 and concerns the Fenian Raids across the Niagara River into what is today southern Ontario.

No zebras figure.

Longtime readers may remember my disappointment with In the Midst of Alarms. Barr is shaping up to be one of those writers who run hot and cold with me. I didn't think much of One Day's Courtship and The Heralds of Fame (1896), but remain enthusiastic about Revenge!(1896), The Unchanging East (1900), and The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont (1906). Prince Classics offers an edition of the last of these three: 

Don't know about that cover. Valmont looks like a down-on-his-luck gumshoe, whereas Barr describes our hero as "dressed in elegant attire, as if he were still a boulevardier of Paris." Here's Valmont, as depicted in the frontispiece of the first edition:

And then we have Prince Classics' pairing of The O'Ruddy (1903) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895). The latter is familiar to millions as Stephen Crane's great novel of the American Civil War. The O'Ruddy is the novel Crane was writing when he died. Robert Barr picked up his fallen pen and finished the novel. 

I've yet to read The O'Ruddy or The Red Badge of Courage, and so step out on a limb in describing the cover of Tekla (1898) as the most incongruous amongst Prince Classics' Barr offerings. A historical romance it's set in the thirteenth century.

Of all Barr books offered by Prince Classics, the one that most tempts is A Woman Intervenes (1896), but only because it recycles a painting by Tom Dunn. 

It was commissioned for the Pocket Books edition of Nicholas Monsarrat's The Story of Esther Costello.*

I'm getting on, but am not so old as to be familiar with the bibliography of Nicholas Monsarrat. It turns out that The Story of Esther Costello was the author's follow-up to The Cruel Sea. When published, in 1952, the novel caused some pearl clutching. Five years later, The Story of Esther Costello was adapted by Hollywood in a film starring Joan Crawford and Rossano Brazzi. From what I understand, the synopsis Wikipedia editor Sky Captain provides is equally applicable to the novel:

With her marriage to womaniser Carlo Landi (Rossano Brazzi) in ashes, wealthy and childless Margaret Landi (Joan Crawford) finds an emotional outlet in patronizing a 15-year-old deaf, dumb, and blind Irish girl named Esther Costello (Heather Sears). Esther's disabilities are the result of a childhood trauma and are psychosomatic rather than physical. As Costello makes progress with Braille and sign language, she is seen as an example of triumph over adversity. Carlo gets wind of Margaret's new life and re-enters the scene. He views Esther as a source of cheap financial gain and arranges a series of exploitative tours for her under a mercenary manager Frank Wenzel (Ron Randell). One day when Margaret is absent from the Landi apartment, Carlo seduces and rapes the now 16-year-old Esther. The shock restores the girl's sight and hearing. When Margaret learns of her husband's business duplicities and the rape, she consigns Esther to the care of a priest and a young reporter who loves her (Lee Patterson). Margaret then kills Carlo and herself.

Good God.

The Vancouver Sun
4 December 1957

If the November 1896 review is anything to go by, Barr's A Woman Intervenes isn't nearly so unpleasant:

I'm keen on reading one of the two.

You can guess which.

* My thanks to Jim Stephenson for identifying the Avati painting. Thanks also to my old pal Chris Kelly, who suggested the former had been used to illustrate a book titled Backstage: My Life with Clarence Darrow, the Amnesiac, and the Red Ladder. Coffee up my nose.

Related links:

Double Fantasy

Getting to the Fenian Raids

A Conceited, Entirely Likeable Private Detective

The Unexpected Robert Barr
Through the Unchanging East with Robert Barr
Women of the Unchanging East

He and His Arrow

Quest for Pajaro
Edward Maxwell [pseud Ted Allan]
London: Heinemann, 1957
116 pages

Before the title page, the reader encounters this:

It has the appearance of a publisher's note, but I suspect it was written by Allan. Either way, the fiction has already begun.

Quest for Pajaro is told in the first person. It's narrator, Edward Maxwell, is a son of great wealth and privilege. As a very young man, he designed and flew experimental aircraft. When came the Second World War, he joined the Royal Air Force, eventually becoming Chief of Staff to Air Vice Marshal Sir Matthew Brown Frew (right).

The war now over, Maxwell has settled into early middle age, living on the Buckinghamshire estate left by his parents. Of his personal life, he has only this to say: "I was married at the age of twenty-four, divorced a year later, and the less said about that unfortunate incident the better. At the age of thirty-seven I had still not found any woman I cared to share my life with."

Maxwell may be a bit off women , but his youthful enthusiasm for experimental aircraft has continued unabated, manifesting itself in an sleek jet he calls the "Arrow." The name will cause the Canadian reader to pause and brush away a tear. 

The Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow

Ted Allan was living in the UK when Quest for Pajaro was written, but I don't imagine for a minute that he wasn't following news from home about the real life Arrow, the most advanced jet aircraft of its day.

If anything, Maxwell's Arrow is even more remarkable in that it is both jet and rocket propelled. On the evening before the first test flight, which he himself is to pilot, our hero invites mathematician friend Alan Ryerman to discuss the project over dinner. A good amount of gobbledygook follows, much of it speculation as to what might happen if the Arrow cracks the "thermal barrier." Ryerman raises the intriguing possibility that his host might simply disappear. This speculation has to do with the speed Maxwell expects to achieve, combined with the speed of the Earth's rotation, the speed of our planet as it circles the sun, the speed of our solar system in the Milky Way, the speed of the galaxy itself, and... well, you get the idea.

As I say, gobbledygook. It's to Allan's credit that he keeps it brief.

The next morning's test flight begins just as hoped. Maxwell passes Mach I, then fires up the rockets. He sees a full circle rainbow, and immediately becomes confused as to whether the cloud ceiling is up or down. Then the clouds disappear, as does colour and all sense of motion. And then he blacks out. 

Maxwell regains consciousness in a one-room hut belonging to a Basque goat-herd and his wife. Their only child, an exquisitely beautiful daughter named Angelita, nurses our hero back to health. Just shy of twenty-one, at birth she suffered a brain injury which has rendered her mute.

There's a something of the fairy tale about Angelita. Though incapable of speech, she's able to communicate with birds through cooing and whistling. Her only friends, they fly in and out of the hut as in a Disney movie, and are talkative companions on walks.

Maxwell tells Pedro, the goat-herd, that he needs to send a telegram, only to be told that this remote corner of the Pyrenees has no such service. He offers to take a letter to Pajaro, the closest village, from which it will eventually make its way to San Bettino, then San Sebastian, and then to whichever destination it is addressed.

Maxwell accepts, sending a letter to Ryerman detailing his location. Days pass, during which our bedridden hero and Angelika become increasingly close. Eventually, Maxwell's letter is returned marked with "the careless script of officialdom" that the recipient is deceased. The cancellation date reads "19 Mayo, 1977."

It's only then that our hero realizes he's somehow flown into the future. The Arrow took off on the morning of 15 May 1956, months before the exquisite Angelika was even born! 

Bruce Petty's jacket illustration, itself exquisite, is more appropriate to a romance novel than a work of science fiction. But then, Quest for Pajaro is more a love story than a tale about a man and his plane. It's Maxwell love for Angelita – come now, you can't pretend you didn't see that coming – that drives the second half of the book. There's really something for everyone, fans of travel adventure included.

Much as I liked Quest for Pajaro, by the end I couldn't help but think it was better suited to the screen than the page. And so, it came as no surprise to discover that it had once been optioned. Thirteen days after the launch of "satellite moon" Sputnik, Queen of Hollywood gossip Louella Parsons reported: 

The Calgary Herald, 17 October 1957

The film has yet to be made, of course, but I'd love to see it done today as a period piece that moves between 1956 and 1977.

I wonder whether Ted Allan's papers, held at Simon Fraser University and Library and Archives Canada, contain a script. If so, I wouldn't be surprised if it pre-dates the novel.

Quest for Pajaro enjoyed just one printing. I purchased my copy earlier this year from a Wallingford, Oxfordshire bookseller. Price: £4. Until a few weeks ago, when I began encouraging friends to add the book to their collections, copies could be purchased on the cheap. As of this writing, the least expensive with jacket is being offered by an Australian bookseller at A$40.00. Not one of the listings identifies Ted Allan as Edward Maxwell.

The fiction that Maxwell is a real person is given a bit of a twist on the dust jacket's front flap:

Ted Allan wasn't a well-known writer when Quest for Pajaro appeared in bookshops. His previous books were This Time a Better Earth (London: Heinemann, 1939), a pseudonymously-published pulp titled Love is a Long Shot (Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949), and The Scalpel, The Sword (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), a biography of Norman Bethune, co-authored by Sydney Gordon. He was, however, managing to support his family through work for the BBC and CBC.

The Gazette (Montreal)
27 September 1975

Looking back on his career, I'm not sure Ted Allan was ever a "well-known writer," though my thirteen-year-old self knew his name through Lies My Father Told Me (1975), which I first saw in first run at Cinema Place Ville Marie. I liked the film so much that my mother presented me with son Norman Allan's novelization as an Easter gift.

Was Lies My Father Told Me the high-point of Ted Allan's career? He was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, while the film itself received a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. I have no argument with those who instead point to Allan's script for the John Cassevetes film Love Streams, winner of the 1984 Golden Bear.

How is it Love Streams is so forgotten?

Ten Allan was an interesting man and an accomplished writer. One correspondent suggests that Allan's life would make for a riveting biography. Sadly, the days in which the flush publishers would be interested in such a project are long past.

Still, I hold out hope that Ted Allan will better recognized by people twenty-one years in the future than he is today.

Coincidence: The Arrow was rolled out to the public on 4 October 1957 (below), the very same day Sputnik was launched.

What exciting times!

Object and Access: A bland black hardcover in dust jacket by Bruce Petty. My Lord, his work is wonderful. Here's another example:

Pray for a Brave Heart
Helen MacInnes
London: Collins, 1955

Library and Archives Canada and three Canadian universities hold copies of Quest for Pajaro.

Related posts:

Remembering Ted Allan on His Hundredth

Pulp Noir à Montréal

The Author as Thespian

Best Books of 1920: Beware the Bolshevik Poets

The Globe, 4 December 1920

The 1920 Globe round-up of the year's best books was published on the first Saturday of that December. Twenty-four months had passed since the Armistice, and the introduction takes pains to position the conflict in the past:

This bold pronouncement follows:

The war has passed into history and even the "aftermath" is over.

   

Sure, but a good many titles concerning the Great War feature, and a new category makes its debut:

No, the conflict is still very much felt. Loss and sacrifice continue to inspire poetry, such as Our Absent Hero by Mrs Durie, the widow of Capt William Arthur Peel Durie.

Captain Durie died at Passchendaele on 29 December 1917 in an effort rescue wounded comrades in No Man's Land. 

Capt William Arthur Peel Durie
1881 - 1917
RIP

Another of the newspaper's poetry selections, J. Lewis Mulligan's The Beckoning Skyline and Other Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1920), includes fifteen pieces of verse inspired by the war.

The 1920 Globe list recognizes a total of seven Canadian books of poetry, the others being:

               Acanthus and Wild Grape - F.O. Call

               Leaves on the Wind - Rev D.A. Casey

               Apple Blossoms - Carrie Wetmore McColl

               Lady Latour - Rev W.I. Morse

               Rhymes of a Northland - Hugh L. Warren

This is something of a return to form. Where in 1918, the paper gave notice to eight Canadian volumes of verse, the 1919 list featured all of two (one of which, Pauline Johnson's Flint and Feather, had been published seven years earlier).

As is so often the case in the paper's annual book list, the "Poetry" section brings columns of comment, much if it designed to distance we Canadians from our American cousins:

We usually write in metre and dislike poetical as well as other kinds of Bolshevism. It is merely the affectation of free verse that makes American 'poetry' more distinctive – or notorious – than Canadian. It is a cheap substitute for originality.

   There has been a great deal more verse published this year than appears in the publishers' lists. Nearly all of it has been printed at the authors' expense, and it has been circulated largely 'among friends.' This practice is not to be despised or discouraged, unless it raises false hopes in authors who have merely the faculty of rhyming without possessing poetical talent or literary judgement.

There are 264 titles in the 1920 Globe list, fifty-three of which are Canadian. Just six of the fifty-three – all novels, no poetry – feature in my library:

Going by the Globe, 1920 was as good year for the country's novelists and short story writers; twenty of the 114 fiction titles are Canadian:

          Aleta Dey - Francis M Beynon

          The La Chance Mine Mystery - S. Carleton

          Glen of the High North - H.A. Cody
          Sheila and Others - Winifred Cotter

          The Conquering Hero - Murray Gibbon

          Eyes of the Law - Ethel Penman Hope

          Daisy Herself - Will E. Ingersoll

          The Luck of the Mounted - Sgt Ralph Kendall

          The Thread of Flame - Basil King

          A Son of Courage - Archie P. McKishale

          Graydon of the Windermere - Evan McKowan

          Every Man for Himself - Hopkins Moorhouse

          The Forging of the Pikes - Anson North
          No Defence - Gilbert Parker

          Poor Man's Rock - Bertrand W. Sinclair

          Dennison Grant - Robert Stead

          The Prairie Mother - Arthur Stringer

          The Rapids - Alan Sullivan

          The Viking Blood - Frederick William Wallace

          Stronger Than His Sea - Robert Watson

For the first time, the newspaper lumps together Canadian fiction, though it errs in failing to recognize Basil King, Prince Edward Island's second bestselling author, as a fellow countryman. The Thread of Flame, Rev King's sixteenth novel, is listed with This Side of Paradise under the heading "By Other Authors."

I've read all of two of the twenty. The Thread of Flame ranks as my favourite King novel after The Empty Sack. The other, Hopkins Moorhouse's Every Man for Himself didn't make so much of an impression. I found it even less interesting than described: 

Of the remaining novels, The Prairie Mother was reprinted for a decade or so. In 1972, Alan Sullivan's The Rapids enjoyed a brief second life with the University of Toronto Press. It can' be argued that the most enduring Canadian novel of 1920 is Aleta Dey, which was revived in 1988 as a Virago Modern Classic. It remains in print to this day in a Broadview Press edition.

This country fares much worse in other categories. Where in 1919, Canadian authors took six of the coveted "Economics" titles, the 1920 showing amounts to A Study of Canadian Immigration by Prof W.G. Smith and Occupations for Trained Women in Canada by Mrs Vincent Massey. If forced to choose, I guess I'd read the latter. It might be interesting to see what advice Mrs Massey, daughter of Sir George Robert Parkin, wife of one of Canada's most privileged men — a future Governor General, no less — might have for the working woman.

The Canadian titles in the "Historical" category are a touch more tempting:

Hydro-Electric Development in Ontario - E.B. Biggar
The Cross-Bearers of the Sanguenay - Very Rev W.R. Harris

The Evolution of the Oil Industry - Victor Ross
The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt - O. D. Skelton
The Life and Work of Sir William Van Horne - W. Vaughan

A new edition of Katherine Hale's biography of Father Lacombe and a revised edition of George H. Locke's When Canada was New France. also feature, but the real standout is George T. Denison's Recollections of a Police Magistrate, which is deemed "our outstanding Canadian book of the year."

This is something new; the Globe had never before made such a pronouncement. Here's its description:

I haven't yet cracked open Recollections of a Police Magistrate — copies begin at $245 — but it can be read for free here thanks to the Internet Archive,

I prefer paper, myself.

Consider me old fashioned.

Tempted as I am to leave it there, this being 2020, I can't help but note that the 1920 Globe list — like those of 1918 and 1919 — features not so much a passing reference to the Spanish Flu.

Not one mention,

Not one book.

Related post:

The Globe 100 One Hundred Years Ago: Poets are Struck Dumb

and Capitalism Proves Embarrassing (1919)

The Globe 100 178 of 2018

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

A Man Forgets His Identity
(but not his manners)

A Foggy Night in Hogtown

Rhyming Leads to Ruin (and a correction)

Ballads of a Bohemian
Robert W. Service
New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1921
220 pages

It would be interesting to see sales figures for Robert W. Service's books of poetry; my feeling is that each sold fewer copies than the last. Ballads of a Bohemian, his fifth, followed Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916), which followed Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912), which followed Ballads of a Cheechako (1909), which followed Songs of the Sourdough (1907). It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Songs of the Sourdough – The Spell of the Yukon to you Yankee readers – accrued more sales than all the others put together.

This is not to suggest that Ballads of a Bohemian was a commercial failure. Far from it! Ninety-nine years after publication, ninety-nine-year-old copies are thick on the ground. I bought mine two years ago for two dollars. It was read last month, along with Service's forgotten 1926 thriller, The Master of the Microbe (the subject of next month's Canadian Notes & Queries column). Both reminded me that when Service left Dawson City for the City of Light, he arrived on the eve of the Great War.

Ballads of a Bohemian is presented as the diary of someone named Stephen Poore, a young American expatriate who, very much like Service, quits secure employment for the life of a versifier. Each entry serves to introduce a Poore poem or two or three. The date of the first – "April 1914" – establishes an ever-hanging, ever-darkening cloud. Poole moves through Montparnasse with the excitement, enthusiasm and optimism of youth, but we people know what's coming.

A few pages in, I began to question whether Stephen Poole can be considered a bohemian. Some cred comes in his claim that he "kicked over an office stool and came to Paris thinking to make a living by my pen," but there's otherwise nothing at all unconventional about the man. Poole demonstrates remarkable discipline and industry. He lives modestly, has no vices, and knows no women. Poole's acquaintances are limited to "short story man" MacBean and a poet named Saxon Dane. The former is appreciated as a mentor, while the latter is described as dislikable and pretentious: "Originality is his sin," writes Poole:

He strains after it in every line. I must confess I think much of the free verse he writes is really prose, and a good deal of it blank verse chopped up into odd lengths. He talks of assonance and color, of stress and pause and accent, and bewilders me with his theories.

Poole's verse push no boundaries. After presenting "On the Boulevard," the tenth of the sixty-six poems bound between these boards, he brags:

I wrote this so quickly that I might almost say I had reached the end before I had come to the beginning. In such a mood I wonder why everybody does not write poetry. Get a Roget's Thesaurus, a rhyming dictionary: sit before your typewriter with a strong glass of coffee at your elbow, and just click the stuff off.

Poole's verse is conventional, sentimental, romantic, melodramatic, and he knows it:

I have no illusions about myself. I am not fool enough to think I am a poet, but I have a knack of rhyme and I love to make verses. Mine is a tootling, tin-whistle music. Humbly and afar I follow in the footsteps of Praed and Lampson, of Field and Riley, hoping that in time my Muse may bring me bread and butter. So far, however, it has been all kicks and no coppers. And to-night I am at the end of my tether. I wish I knew where to-morrow’s breakfast was coming from. Well, since rhyming’s been my ruin, let me rhyme to the bitter end.

Praed? Lampson? Field? Riley? None of those names meant a thing to me. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica informs that Winthrop Mackworth Praed was the author of "brilliant rhythmic trifles." The same edition describes Frederick Locker-Lampson as a poet belonging "to the choir who deal with the gay rather than the grave in verse—with the polished and witty rather than the lofty or emotional."

Field is "Michael Field," the pseudonym of Edith Cooper and her aunt, guardian, and lover Katharine Bradley (above), writers of more than two dozen verse dramas.* James Whitcomb Riley, the lone American, was a "poet remembered for nostalgic dialect verse and often called 'the poet of the common people.'" Encyclopædia Britannica tells me so.

I thank Service for providing an introduction to each. I may just read them one day.

(Am I wrong in being disturbed by the relationship between Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley?)

Ballads of a Bohemian sold well, reaching #1 Bookseller & Stationer's "Non-Fiction" list. According to Publishers Weekly, it reached #6 south of the border. Reviews tended toward the positive, if not the laudatory. I've not come across one that addresses the volume's greatest flaw: Service's inability to write as anyone but himself. I can't imagine that readers Service's previous books would detect any difference between the poetry of the Bard of the Yukon and that of his character.

Might I be too hash in suggesting Service incapable? Evidence suggests that he made no effort at all.

Like the Service books that came before, Ballads of a Bohemian is a haphazard gathering of verse written and published over a period of several years. "The Blood-Red Fourragère" (Maclean's, April 1918). "The Twa Jocks" (Maclean's, May 1918), "Kelly of the Legion" (Maclean's, June 1918), and "The Wife" (Maclean's, December,  1918) weren't presented as anything other than Robert W. Service poems. Similarly, verse from the book published after Ballads of a Bohemian arrived in stores – "Julot the Apache" (Cosmopolitan, March 1921), "The Absinthe Drinkers" (Cosmopolitan, April 1921), "The Death of Marie Toro" (Cosmopolitan, May 1921) – have no accompanying notes about the Poole character.

Service makes one small effort to separate himself from his character, having Poole write about a poem titled "Lucille":

Well, here’s the thing that has turned the tide for me. It is somewhat in the vein of “Sourdough” Service, the Yukon bard. I don’t think much of his stuff, but they say he makes heaps of money. I can well believe it, for he drives a Hispano-Suiza in the Bois every afternoon. The other night he was with a crowd at the Dome Cafe, a chubby chap who sits in a corner and seldom speaks. I was disappointed. I thought he was a big, hairy man who swore like a trooper and mixed brandy with his beer. He only drank Vichy, poor fellow!

Tellingly, this verse "somewhat in the vein of 'Sourdough' Service," is Poole's easiest and most lucrative sale. It begins:

Of course you’ve heard of the Nancy Lee and how she sailed away
On her famous quest of the Arctic flea, to the wilds of Hudson’s Bay
For it was a foreign Prince's whim to collect this tiny cuss,
And a golden quid was no more to him than a copper to coves like us.

Young children may enjoy.

Ah, I'm being too harsh. Something of a sentimentalist and romantic myself, I was moved by "The Wee Shop," "The Pencil Seller," "The Death of Marie Toro" and, more than any other, "The Auction Sale." "The Coco-Fiend" chilled, but not so much as "It's Later Than You Think." I'd never encountered it in print, but I had heard it... and more than once. But where? These are the best of its seven stanzas:

Look again: yon dainty blonde,
All allure and golden grace,
Oh so willing to respond
Should you turn a smiling face.
Play your part, poor pretty doll;
Feast and frolic, pose and prink;
There’s the Morgue to end it all,
And it’s later than you think. 

Yon’s a playwright—mark his face,
Puffed and purple, tense and tired;
Pasha-like, he holds his place,
Hated, envied and admired.
How you gobble life, my friend;
Wine, and woman soft and pink!
Well, each tether has its end:
Sir, it’s later than you think. 

See yon living scarecrow pass
With a wild and wolfish stare
At each empty absinthe glass,
As if he saw Heaven there.
Poor damned wretch, to end your pain
There is still the Greater Drink.
Yonder waits the sanguine Seine...
It is later than you think.

Clicking the stuff off is not enough. Ballads of a Bohemian is a failure for lack of trying, which is not to say that it doesn't have things that may be salvaged. If you read it, you'll find them. The question is whether it's worth your time.

It's later than I think.

Bookseller & Stationer, November 1921

*Correction: Shortly after the above was posted, Daniel H. Grader was kind enough to write, suggesting: "Service's 'Field' can't possibly have been 'Michael Field', whose refined productions have nothing in common with the work of James Whitcomb Riley. Instead, he must have been referring to Eugene Field, the prolific American versifier best remembered as the creator of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod."

I have no doubt that he's correct.

A similar observation was left by reese in the comments.

My thanks to both.
 
Trivia: In 1921, the year Ballads of a Bohemian was published, Joseph Delmont and Hertha von Walther directed a film titled Julot der Apache. I've yet to find a link between it and "Julot the Apache." On the other hand, I've yet to find so much as a synopsis or still.

Julot seems to reappear in The Master of the Microbe... and then turns out to be someone else entirely. I hope this doesn't serve as a spoiler.

Object and Access: Slim, bound in dark green boards. The frontispiece features a portrait of the poet, looking not the least bit chubby.

Copies are common, but not in our public libraries. The book can be read here – gratis – thanks to the Internet Archive. Those preferring paper will find an inexpensive (£3.00) copy of T. Fisher Unwin's first British edition for sale online. At US$139.95, the most expensive copy currently on offer is Barse & Hopkins American first in dust jacket.

Related post:

Robert W. Service's Revised Christmas Miracle

(with the poet's forgotten reading instructions)