O Lucky Man!

You Never Know Your Luck: Being the Story of a

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

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

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

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

Munsey's Magazine, April 1914

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

Munsey's Magazine, April 1914

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

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

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

The Daily Sketch, 7 June 1913 

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is in Shiel that the fault lies.

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

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

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

Bloomer:

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

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

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

Munsey provides nineteen illustrations, the first depicting Kitty Tynan:

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

Related post:

Born Again Infidel

The Beautiful, Very Desirable Stephen Leacock (and the bloody severed head of Orpheus)

A few words as following Monday's post on Stephen Leacock's Behind the Beyond.

Behind the Beyond was dropped by New Canadian Library during the post-Ross purge. Anyone familiar with the series today knows better than to expect its return. Fortunately, used copies are both inexpensive and plentiful.

The ugliest NCL edition can be bought online for as little as two Yankee bucks, but at nine dollars and up what you really want is the 1913 Bell & Cockburn.

I won't pretend to have seen every edition of every Leacock, but feel confident in holding high this particular one as the most beautiful Leacock of all time. Credit goes to English illustrator A.H. Fish (1890-1964), whose century-old Vogue and Vanity Fair cover illustrations have become a bit of a cash cow for Condé Nast. Premium gilsee prints begin at US$125.

Miss Fish provided decorations, dust jacket and no less than seventeen plates for Behind the Beyond. Here are three favourites:

Those afflicted with an aversion to old books – I once knew such a person – will take heart that Behind the Beyond is available from a volt of print on demand vultures. The discriminating buyer might what to consider that "published" by Dodo Press, if only because it soars above the rest as the most competent. The cover of its "Illustrated Edition" – they have no other – features an illustration I've not been able to identify. It is not by Miss Fish, though her other illustrations feature.

Print on demand publisher PAP offers this strange looking thing...

... but I recommend the one offered by Library of Alexandria (of California).

Gustave Moreau's Orpheus seems a curious choice, does it not?

I'd like to say it's a nod to "Homer and Humbug", but that would be giving Library of Alexandria too much credit. Besides, Orpheus is never mentioned in Homer.

Related posts:

Professor Leacock Sets the Stage

About Those Ugly NCL Covers

Professor Leacock Sets the Stage

Behind the Beyond
     and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1913

Early Leacock is the best Leacock, and this one is very early indeed. His fourth book of humour in as many years, it falls between his finest, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich, and establishes a format repeated in many of the collections that followed: a relatively long opening piece, followed by gatherings of shorter writings.

The long piece here, "Behind the Beyond", takes the form of a running commentary on an evening at the theatre. The drama performed – untitled – is of Leacock's own imagination: Sir John Trevor, MP, is a man with much responsibility, troubled by serious matters in the House of Commons. A quarter-century his junior, his wife is never so concerned and, as soon becomes apparent, has found escape in the arms of Sir John's ineffectual secretary, young Jack Harding:

"Do you remember, Jack, when first you came, in Italy, that night, at Amalfi, when we sat on the piazza of the palazzo?"
     She is looking rapturously into his face.
     Mr. Harding says that he does.
     "And that day at Fiesole among the orange trees, and at Pisa and the Capello de Terisa and the Mona Lisa. Oh, Jack, take me away from all this; take me to the Riviera among the contadini, where we can stand together with my head on your shoulder just as we did in the Duomo at Milano, or on the piaggia at Verona. Take me to Corfu, to the Cappo Santo, to Civita Vecchia, to Para Noia, anywhere —"
     Mr. Harding, smothered with her kisses, says, "My dearest, I will, I will."
     Any man in the audience would do as much. They'd take her to Honolulu.

Leacock's is a "problem play". The term is no longer used, but the situation at the heart of it all will be familiar to today's reader. These eyes have seen something of it in Edith Wharton, Henry James and select episodes of The Edge of Night from my childhood.

The Edge of Night is no more, and humour ages poorly. Not everything in Behind the Beyond works today. "With the Photographer", is not so much funny as it is an interesting glimpse at a time gone by:

The photographer rolled a machine into the middle of the room and crawled into it from behind.
     He was only in a second – just time enough for one look at me – and then he was out again, tearing at the cotton sheet and the window panes with a hooked stick, apparently frantic for light and air.
     Then he crawled back into the machine again and drew a little black cloth over himself. This time he was very quiet in there. I knew that he was praying and I kept still.
     When the photographer came out at last, he looked very grave and shook his head.
     "The face is quite wrong," he said.
     "I know," I answered quietly, "I have always known it."

That said, the five pieces collected under the title "Parisian Pastimes" seem barely to have aged at all. Here's Leacock on the French child:

The child, I was saying, wears about two hundred dollars worth of visible clothing upon it; and I believe that if you were to take it up by its ten-dollar slipper and hold it upside down, you would see about fifty dollars more. The French child has been converted into an elaborately dressed doll. It is altogether a thing of show, an appendage of its fashionably dressed mother, with frock and parasol to match. It is no longer a child, but a living toy or plaything.
     Even on these terms the child is not a success. It has a rival who is rapidly beating it off the ground. This is the Parisian dog. As an implement of fashion, as a set-off to the fair sex, as the recipient of ecstatic kisses and ravishing hugs, the Parisian dog can give the child forty points in a hundred and win out. It can dress better, look more intelligent, behave better, bark better – in fact, the child is simply not in it.

The final piece, "Homer and Humbug – An Academic Suggestion", should be considered one of Leacock's greatest hits. I don't often laugh when reading – Fran Leibowitz, who I think is funnier than just about anyone, leaves me silent – but I did at this:

An ancient friend of mine, a clergyman, tells me that in Hesiod he finds a peculiar grace that he doesn't find elsewhere. He's a liar. That's all. Another man, in politics and in the legislature, tells me that every night before going to bed he reads over a page or two of Thucydides to keep his mind fresh. Either he never goes to bed or he's a liar. Doubly so: no one could read Greek at that frantic rate: and anyway his mind isn't fresh. How could it be? he's in the legislature. I don't object to this man talking freely of the classics, but he ought to keep it for the voters. My own opinion is that before he goes to bed he takes whisky: why call it Thucydides?

Why indeed?

I first read Behind the Beyond on the plane that carried me from my Montreal home to a new one in Vancouver. This was in the mid-nineties. I didn't read Leacock again until late last spring, when I picked up The Hohenzollerns in America. I resolved then and there to never let another year go by without Leacock. I'm sure I'll read him again before the year is up. These dark, dark days I appreciate him more than ever.

Fran Leibowitz, too.

Preferred over Hesiod and Thucydides.

Note: After writing this piece, I read Silver Donald Cameron's Introduction to my old New Canadian Library edition only to find that he'd made a couple of the very same observations.

What can I say?

Great minds think alike.

Fools seldom differ.

Trivia: In 1932, Gowans and Gray published a stage adaptation of "Behind the Beyond" by V.C. Clinton-Braddeley. I include an image of same, along this link to the booksellers, in the hope that some librarian somewhere will consider purchase. As it stands, just three Canadian libraries hold copies; Library and Archives Canada does not.

Leacock biographer Ralph L. Currie informs that the BBC broadcast a televised performance in 1937!

Object: A very attractive hardcover with crimson boards and gold embossing. The print is large. Though the text doesn't amount to 200 pages, thick paper provides bulk, as do the decorations and sixteen plates featuring illustrations by A.H. Fish. My jacketless copy, a first Canadian edition, was purchased in 1989 at the annual McGill Book Fair, a hop, skip and a jump away from the university's Leacock Building. Price: $2.00.

It looks to have once been a gift purchased from Quebec City bookseller H.F. Kimball.

Access: Our public libraries fail entirely. How can that be? As might be expected, the academic libraries come through... but not that of McGill University. How can that be?

Behind the Beyond did well in its day with editions in England and the United States enjoying several printings. In Canada, S.B. Gundy took over after Bell & Cockburn went bankrupt. The book joined the New Canadian Library in 1969, only to fall in the post-Ross purge of the 'eighties. It has been out of print ever since. Happily, it can be read here - gratis - courtesy of the Internet archive.

People preferring paper – I'm one – will be happy to learn that the used copies listed online are cheap.  Prices range from US$2.00 (a fourth printing of the NCL edition) to US$350 (a 1917 American reprint inscribed by the author). The latter is preferred, of course, but who has that kind of money?

Related post:

Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?