The Dusty Bookcase: Beattie (Jeann)

Showing posts with label Beattie (Jeann). Show all posts

27 January 2023

Television Man is Crazy

The one hundred and twelfth issue of Canadian Notes & Queries arrived in our rural mailbox yesterday afternoon. A beautiful thing, wrapped in a cover by Seth, I've been dipping in and out. I read Michael Holmes' remembrance of Steven Heighton first.

It was followed by Ken Norris's interview with Bruce Whiteman.

This evening, I'll be reading 'My Year of Mycorrhizal Thinking' by Ariel Gordon, whose daughter shares something with my own as a fan of Hannibal. Ariel, her daughter, and mine, will appreciate this photo taken in our kitchen not eight days ago.

This issue's Dusty Bookcase column focuses on Jeann Beattie's Behold the Hour (1959), which in my opinion ranks with Ralph Allen's The Chartered Libertine (1954) as one of the two best novels set early days of Canadian television.

I'm not aware of a third.

Northrop Frye praised Allen's novel. Do I praise Beattie's?

Read and find out! Subscriptions can be purchased through this link.

Other contributors to this issue include:

Carolyn Bennett
James Cairns
Andreae Callana
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwai
Stephen Fowler
Susan Glickman
Alex Good
Brett Josef Griubisic
Graeme Hunter
Kate Kennedy
Rohan Maitzen
Darcy Mason
David Mason
Roderock Moody-Corbett
Shani Mootoo
Ian Clay Sewall
Rudrapiya Rathmore
Richard Sanger
Natalie Southworth
Kevin Sprout

Did I mention subscriptions can be purchased through this link?

19 December 2022

The Ten Best Book Buys of 2022 (plus gifts!)

This year will be forever remembered as the one in which Sexpo '69 was added to my collection. An elusive book, published in 1969 by Brandon House of North Hollywood, I spent at least two decades on its trail. My pursuit ended this past summer. The book set me back over one hundred dollars.

I'm betting it was worth every penny and that Lisa and considerate, gentle, sophisticated Bobbie will not disappoint.

"What?" I hear you say. "You mean you haven't read it!"

No, I have not. Too busy.... so busy that I didn't visit the Strand during last month's trip to New York. I did find time for Trump Tower, but only because it was so close to my hotel. I expected to be underwhelmed, and was more than underwhelmed. This was during the weekend of the New York City Marathon, and yet the place was nearly deserted.

The length of my tie is not a political statement.

Each of this year's ten best book buys was found online, which is a sad state of affairs given recent travels. These are the remaining nine:
Behold the Hour

Jeann Beattie
Toronto: Ryerson, 1959

Jeann Beattie won the Ryerson Fiction Award for Blaze of Noon (1950), her debut novel. Behold the Hour, her second and last, is set in the early days of CBC television. I didn't think much of the novel, but illustrator Ken Elliott's dust jacket is a favourite.

A Daughter of To-day

Mrs Everard Cotes (Sara

Jeannette Duncan)
New York: Appleton, 1894

Not at all what I expected.

What did I expect? At twenty-one, I read Duncan's classic, The Imperialist, but remember nothing.

Not only a beautiful volume, but one of the year's two best reads.

One-Way Street
Dan Keller [Louis Kaufman]
London: Hale, 1960

Flee the Night in Anger, Keller's first novel, is unique as the only post-war pulp to be set in both Montreal and Toronto. There's a fair amount of travel back and forth. This second and last novel, a very attractive hardcover, begins with a man arriving in Toronto from Montreal. Will he return? The title may provide a clue.

Murder by Accident

Leonie Mason [Joan Suter]

London: C & J Temple, 1947

Following East of Temple Bar (below), Murder By Accident was the second novel by Joan Suter. Both were published the year she divorced her first husband, left England for Canada, married again, and began writing as Joan Walker. The author hid her first two novels. Why she did is a mystery. This novel is another.

And the Town Talked

Martha Ostenso

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Ted Allan and Hugh Garner were published by News Stand Library under pseudonyms – not so Martha Ostenso! And the Town Talked first appeared in a 1938 edition of McCall's. Where it doesn't appear is in any Canadian reference book.

The Blowtop

Alvin Schwartz

New York: Dial, 1948

The author's first novel. Published twenty years before he gave up the United States for Canada, it is set in Greenwich Village and concerns fallout stemming from the murder of a local pusher. Did I read somewhere that one of the characters is based on Schwartz's friend Jackson Pollack?

East of Temple Bar

Joan Suter

London: C & J Temple, 1946

Another favourite cover, it graces the hidden debut novel of a woman who would one day win the 1954 Stephen Leacock Medal for Pardon My Parka and the 1957 Ryerson Fiction Award for Repent at Leisure. I liked the novel for its depiction of a time and place in which one could make a decent living as a writer.

Lost House

Frances Shelley Wees

Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1949

As Ricochet Books series editor, I've returned two Wees novels to print. Lost House, a gothic thriller involving drug runners in remote British Columbia looked to be a possible third. Sadly, it is not one of the author's best.

The second book ever published by Harlequin!

A Question of Judgement
Phyllis Brett Young

London: Allen, 1970

Phyllis Brett Young published six books between 1959 and 1969 — and then nothing in the remaining twenty-seven years of her life. One wonders what happened. A Question of Judgement, her last, was first published in 1969 by Macmillan of Canada. This British edition, which appeared the following year, has the better cover.

This year the Dusty Bookcase received several gifts and review copies.

I'd long been an admirer of Dick Bourgois-Doyle's exploration of Leacock Medal winners. After reaching out, the author not only sent a signed copy of What's So Funny? (Burnstown, ON: Burnstown Publishing, 2016), but invited me to speak on Joan Walker and Ted Allan.

Quebec history and literature enthusiast Helen Meredith gave me this copy of Kurt W. Stock's All Quiet on the Russian Front (Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket, 1973), which she spotted at a Montreal Salvation Army Thrift Store. Another in the Simon & Schuster's short-lived "series of original Canadian books." I'd never seen a copy.

Novelist Lee Goldberg, publisher of California's Cutting Edge Books, sent three newly-reissued novels – initially published between 1948 and 1961 – with Canadian settings: Muriel Elwood's Heritage of the River, Robert McCaig's The Burntwood Men, and The Tall Captains by Bart Spicer.

Karyn Huenemann of Canada's Early Women Writers gave me a copy of The Ninth Vibration and Other Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922) by Theosophist and mystic L. Adams Beck. Like Sexpo '69, The Ninth Vibration and Other Stories sits near the top of my TBR pile.

Here's looking forward to next year's book purchases.

Here's hoping some will be found in physical book stores.

The Ten Best Book Buys of a Very Bad Year (2016)

Ten of the Best; Spanking Good Book Buys of 2015

Done With Buying Books (2014)

An Egotist of Yesterday

Accidents Never Happen in a Perfect World

Martha Ostenso's Forgotten Masterpiece?
A Forgotten Novelist's Hidden Debut
On the High Heels of Pleasure
The Incomplete Repent at Leisure

Dope. Danger. One Doll
Talking Joan Walker with Dick Borgeois-Doyle

Talking Ted Allan with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle

13 June 2022

An Old Novel of Misspent Youth

Blaze of Noon
Jeann Beattie
Toronto: Ryserson, 1950
353 pages

The sixth winner of Ryerson's in-house All-Canada Fiction Award, the publisher made much of Jeann Beattie. As the first woman and youngest person to win the award, her victory was played up on the back jacket.

Good thing I didn't read it before the novel; it would've put me off.

Blaze of Noon begins in fictitious Weldon, Ontario, a community almost certainly based on St Catharines, the author's hometown. Young reporter Jan Fredericks, the narrator, meets even younger reporter Reed Alexander, and a friendship is struck. Both work for the Banner, Weldon's only newspaper. Snide copy boy Tommy suggests that the two gals wouldn't have their jobs if not for the war.

He's probably right. Both were hired to fill in for guys fighting overseas.

Reed tires of the constraints of a small Canadian city and looks to New York where a friend offers a job working for the British Government. Reed is certain that she can get Jan in too, and so the pair purchase train tickets for Grand Central Station.

Jan and Reed find a flat in Greenwich Village, adopt a stay cat, and attend parties populated by people who are considered good connections. They date and sometimes double-date Tim and Pete, two thirty-somethings who are both fifteen years their senior. Nothing is made of the age difference.

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Reed, the more attractive of the two girls (this according to Jan), begins the novel as something of an ice queen. In Weldon, she's followed about by many men, the most devoted puppy being Richard Campbell, RCAF:

We heard later he had been killed in his first bombing mission. When I told Reed she sat silently in the chair, her body rigid, her eyes deepened to black and her face white. "Poor baby," she said "poor baby."

An unanticipated thaw sets in when Reed meets tall RAF officer Lauri Conroy. She's smitten, even though he treats Reed much as she'd teated her admirers. Eventually, Lauri returns to Europe, leaving her very weepy. On the rebound, Reed lands on moody John Schaeffer. When he comes out as a communist, the slow-moving story shifts to a stuttering crawl as Jan, Reed, Tim, Pete, and John discuss political philosophy and theory. They do this in letters, at restaurants, at parties, at each other's flats, on the street, and atop 30 Rockefeller Center. Really, the dialogue isn't much different after John is introduced, there's just more of it. Consider this early example, from Jan and Reed's first double-date with Tim and Pete:

Is it any wonder that Tim and Pete are bachelors?

The most interesting and atmospheric passages in the novel involve Jan and Reed's early days in New York, but like everything else, descriptions of the city and its culture soon give way to conversations about communism. The worst of it comes when Jan, Reed, Tim, and Pete visit to a "celebrated live joint on Second Avenue where one might hear the pure jazz." Once seated, they offer a tired-looking elderly man a place at their table. No jazz "enthusiast," he'd entered the club only to warm up. He too has thoughts on communism, which is shared over the course of six pages.

Here are two. Feel free to skip. There will be no test.

cliquez pour agrandir

And the band played on.

It's all so exhausting. Dinner parties are ruined by page after page of back and forth bickering between John, the communist, and Jan, the champion of liberalism. Reed is too late in standing up to it all:

"Let's not talk about Communism or Democracy or any other political belief any more. You two argue, but you never convince each other. So... let's just stop talking about it."

Yes, stop. Please. Please, stop.

But it doesn't stop, dragging on long after John and Reed are through. After their break-up, Pete invites Jan, Reed, and Tim to yet another dinner at his apartment. "I take it," Reed says, "that we are to talk Communism."

"More intellectualizing?" Tim said with a yawn.
"Who's intellectualizing? Pete's eyebrows lifted. "Although I was thinking of the last conversation we had before this fireplace.
"That's right," Tim took out his pipe and began to fill it.
"We settled it all nicely as I recall. There were some high-flown phrases I still don't get, but we tied up things. Now what shall we discuss? Books? The theatre?
"Certainly not," Pete dug deeper into his chair. "As I recall we approached it from a psychological angle."
"Approached it, " Tim groaned, "All right Socrates, make with the words. Don't leave us hanging..."

And yet Socrates couldn't say whether Hades was real.

Blaze of Noon was Jeann Beattie's first novel. Published when she was twenty-eight, it reads like the work of an even younger writer, less seasoned writer. It captures something of the curiosity and earnestness of youth, but little of its passion. Books? The theatre? Do any of these people have no interests outside political philosophy?

The front flap of the Ryerson edition – there was no other – promoted Blaze at Noon as "the most gripping story of 1950." The publisher's newspaper adverts describe it as the most timely:

Regina Leader-Post, 21 October 1950

Strangers on a Train is the most gripping story of 1950.

Given last month's leak in the republic to the south, the most timely novel of 1950 may be Margaret Millar's Do Evil in Return.

How I wish it was otherwise.

Object: A bulky hardcover. The dust jacket design is uncredited. Its rear flap, listing past winners of the Ryerson All-Canada Fiction Award, is nothing less than depressing.

Access: Held by Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Kingston-Frontenac Public Library, and six of our academic libraries. As of this writing, one copy – one – is listed for sale online. A Very Good copy lacking dust jacket, at US$15.00 it seems a deal.

Desperately Seeking Violet
Mr. Child's Simple Story of Dramatic Suspense

07 January 2013

Anyone Care about the Ryerson Fiction Award?

It's not found in The Canadian Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature or W.H. New's Companion to Canadian Literature; the three-volume History of the Book in Canada limits mention to a single sentence; misnamed the "Ryerson Fiction Prize", fleeting reference is made in The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature – yet in mid-20th-century Canada the Ryerson Fiction Award was second only to the Governor General's Award. Authors were encouraged to submit manuscripts to Ryerson, which in turn would publish the winning work.

The Cambridge error is understandable. The award-winning titles I've seen invariably feature a page listing past recipients, similar to the one above from Evelyn M. Richardson's Desired Haven. Each repeats this bit of awkwardness:

THE RYERSON FICTION AWARD

The All-Canada Prize Novels

Most dust jackets add to the confusion in trumpeting "The All-Canada Fiction Award".

The Ryerson Fiction Award... The All-Canada Prize... The All-Canada Fiction Award... Whatever the name, it seems clear that by "fiction" Ryerson meant "novel." As for "All-Canada"? Well, our French-language novelists need not submit.

First presented in 1942, the award moved in fits and starts. There was no recipient in its second year... or its third... no award in 1946, 1948, 1951, 1952 or 1955 either. Some years saw the honour go to two titles. It was last presented in 1960.

Does anyone care about the Ryerson Fiction Award? Did anyone care about the Ryerson Fiction Award? I imagine the winners were delighted, but I see no evidence that it made much of an impression on the public. Only one title, Will R. Bird's Here Lies Good Yorkshire, enjoyed a second printing, and only five have ever appeared in paperback. The academics don't appear to have been much impressed. Writing in Queen's Quarterly, Desmond W. Cole concluded his review of 1958 winner Gladys Taylor's The King Tree:

If this is the "All-Canada Fiction Award" as the dust cover asserts, it has been a slim year for the novel, or at least for the publisher who has the presumption to imply that this is the best work of fiction published in Canada in the past year.

Edward McCourt's Music at the Close is the only title to have been included in the New Canadian Library. Tellingly, I think, the author used the opportunity to revise the text. NCL has since dropped the novel.

All I've seen of the first winner, G. Herbert Sallans' Little Man, is the little jpeg above. A shame. Going by bookseller Stephen Temple's description, Little Man is the Ryerson Fiction Award-winner I'd most like to read:

A novel covering four decades of Canadian life, set in Canada, France and Britain. "The author is merciless in his handling of shoddy Top Hats, fake Utopia Builders, spurious Abundant Lifers and Crack Pots of all sorts." – jacket.

"I remember when this was a very common book that no one wanted," continues Mr Temple. "It is surprisingly scarce, and saleable, in the market today. But it ain't no four figure book, not even close."

That last sentence appears to be a dig at an Oregon bookseller who demands an even US$1000 for a jacket-less copy in Fair condition. Mr Temple's, a Very Good copy in Good dust jacket, is being offered for US$85. My birthday is in August.

The thirteen other Ryerson Fiction Award-winners follow.

I've read one.

You?