Ralph Connor's Canada Dry

Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police:
   A Tale of the MacLeod Trail
Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon]

Toronto: Westminster, 1912
454 pages

We begin on an Inverleith rugby pitch. Scotland is up against Wales in the International. It's a close contest, in part because Allan Cameron, fierce-fighting half-back of the Scottish line, hasn't been playing up to snuff. In the dying minutes, the Scots get a lucky break when the ball comes tumbling Cameron's way. He hesitates, and the promise of victory turns to defeat.

"Oh-h-h-h, Cam-er-on!" is the novel's first sentence. What has happened to Scotland's star player?

The answer is drink.

This is not to suggest that Cameron was under the influence during the game, rather that "he was out of condition; he had let himself run down last week, since the last match, indeed, got out of hand a bit."

The loss isn't the worst of it. Days later, Cameron faces arrest for passing a forged cheque. He doesn't remember doing so, but is unable to deny the charge because... well, you know, drink. 

The half-back is saved from arrest by Miss Brody, rugby-loving niece of the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Scotland, and Cameron's conscience is later cleared when a dishonourable drinking buddy owns up to the crime. However, the damage has been done; Cameron has decided to give up drink, give up his studies, and make a new life for himself in Canada, envisioning himself "a wealthy rancher, ranging over square miles of his estate upon a 'bucking broncho,' garbed in the picturesque cowboy dress."

Instead, he ends up a low-level clerk at a Montreal shipping company.

The job doesn't last long – something to do with losing his temper and throwing his superior against a wall – and so, newly unemployed, Cameron does what we've all done in the same situation by taking in a travelling circus. There he chances upon farmer Tom Haley and his son Timmy who've come to the city to take in the show and purchase provisions for the family farm. Sadly, young freckle-faced Timmy winds up outside one of the drinking tents dotting the circus grounds as inside his father – rather sloshed – begins dipping into the money meant for baking flour and such. Cameron comes to the rescue by dragging Tom out, beating back "circus toughs" in the process.

Grateful and somewhat sobered by the violence, Tom offers our hero a position on his farm, twelve miles outside of town. Cameron accepts. Before long, he's proven himself an expert milker of cows, hoer of beets, player of bagpipes, and temperate role model to young Timmy. Over the course of the growing season, unrefined Mandy, the farmer's daughter, falls for the new hired hand, which scares Cameron into setting out for the West.

Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police is divided fairly evenly into three books, each with very different settings: Inverleith, Montreal and surrounding countryside, and the Canadian West. As a reader I found the first the most entertaining. As a Montrealer, the second held some interest, but only because it depicted a unilingual city that never existed. The last third, in which our hero finds an enemy in a whiskey trader, held the most action, but there's only so much fisticuffs and gunplay I can take. Its depiction of "our Indians" and mythologizing of the NWMP was particularly hard to stomach:

To the whole country the advent of the police proved an incalculable blessing. But to the Indian tribes especially was this the case. The natives soon learned to regard the police officers as their friends. In them they found protection from the unscrupulous traders who had hitherto cheated them without mercy or conscience, as well as from the whiskey runners through whose devilish activities their people had suffered irreparable loss.
     The administration of the law by the officers of the police with firm and patient justice put an end also to the frequent and bloody wars that had prevailed previously between the various tribes, till, by these wild and savage people the red coat came to be regarded with mingled awe and confidence, a terror to evil-doers and a protection to those that did well.

In the introduction to his anthology Best Mounted Police Stories (Edmonton: U of Alberta Press, 1978), Dick Harrison writes that Connor "did more to create the literary image of the Mountie than any other writer." He doesn't say whether this is a good thing, but I'll suggest it is not.

At the end of it all, I was left wondering whether early readers of Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police were a touch disappointed. As Connor's title suggests, Cameron does indeed join the force, but this doesn't happen until the twenty-second of the novel's twenty-five chapters. By this point, I'd long since lost interest; the late introductions of Big Bear, Crowfoot, Louis Riel, and other historic figures to Cameron's story only irritated.  

Ultimately, Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police turned out to be another of those novels that gets off to a fairly good start, but quickly loses momentum, grows tired and begins to wander, much like Cameron on the pitch at Inverleith.

I've nothing more to add. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get a drink.

Bloomer: "When a fellow gets on the bum and gets into a hole he knows well that there'll be a lot of people tumbling over each other to get him out, hence he deliberately and cheerfully slides in."

Trivia: The novel was adapted to the silent screen in 1921 as Cameron of the Royal Mounted; an interesting title change given that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had replaced the North-West Mounted Police (note the hyphen) just the previous year.

Filmed in Banff, directed by son of Toronto Henry MacRae, unlike the vast majority of silent-era films Cameron of the Royal Mounted is not lost!

Well, not entirely.

The first three of its nine reels are preserved at Library and Archives Canada.

Object and Access: An embossed hardcover, typical of its time, mine is a first Canadian edition. The book was purchased eight years ago in London, Ontario. At most, it set me back two dollars.

Used copies are plentiful and cheap. Of those listed for sale online, Doran's first American edition in uncommon dust jacket is the one to buy. Price: US$40.00.

The Internet Archive offers several editions online, including the Westminster, which can be be read through this link. Sadly, there was no photoplay edition.

Related posts:

Dale's Dumb Luck; or, A Mountie Messes Up

The Atomic Dale; or, The Mounties Mess Up?

Queen Remembers a Forgotten Book

An Obstinate Virgin Turns Old-Fashioned Girl

The Obstinate Virgin
Sinclair Murray [Alan Sullivan]
London: Sampson Low, Marston [1934]
314 pages

In Essentially Canadian, his 1982 biography of Alan Sullivan, Gordon D. McLeod dismisses The Obstinate Virgin in two sentences:

The most devastating word applied to some of Sullivan's fiction is "ephemeral." It accurately describes The Obstinate Virgin, the only novel published by Sullivan in 1934.

And so, of course, I turned to The Obstinate Virgin as the next title in my exploration of things Sullivan.

The titular virgin is Mary Hellmuth, twenty-one-year-old step-daughter to Mr Henry Bentick, late of Kent. Step-dad is dead. His demise, quite recent, quite unexpected, must surely came as a shock, though no tears are in evidence. Mary's mother – known only as "Mrs Bentick" – had remarried for money, which is not to suggest that Mr Bentick wasn't most kind and considerate. "I wanted the right sort of home for you," she tells her daughter. "I don't complain about the last four years in any way at all, and you shouldn't either." "I'm not," replies Mary, "but naturally just at the moment I can't pretend to be overcome with grief, and equally naturally, I'm looking ahead."

This exchange takes place on the train to London, where they meet with family solicitor Mr Spillsbury of Spillsbury, Burkonshaw and Clewes. Mrs Bentick's expectation is that has inherited an annuity of £5000, the same amount enjoyed by her late husband. It is the solicitor's sad duty to inform that with Mr Bentick's death the entitlement has been transferred to another; the widow can expect no more than an annual payment of £250 drawn from investments made on her late husband's life insurance. This unpleasant news is coupled with the revelation that the grand Bentick house and estate were leased. Of a sudden, mother and daughter are without a home.

Mary takes the news much better than Mrs Bentick; where the daughter is disappointed in having to give up her dreams of a carefree life in London, the mother suffers the horror of having married for money that never existed. Sullivan shows kindness in not passing judgment on either woman.

Mrs Bentick retreats to a modest rooms in Bayswater, demonstrating little concern regarding the daughter for whom (she claims) she had (in part) married Mr Bentick.

Mary's initial searches for steady employment are not at all successful. However, fortunes turn – or do they? – when she responds to an advert placed by Mrs Hathaway, a middle-aged American woman in need of a secretary. It soon becomes clear that the obstinate virgin is hired for looks alone.

But why?

The location shifts to Monte Carlo, where it becomes clear that Mrs Hathaway hopes Mary's beauty might lure Hugo, her mentally unstable son, away from femme fatale Tonia Moore. Looking on is plain American girl Ann Mason who, being incredibly rich, has followed him across the Atlantic.

Monte Carlo, 1934

Mrs Hathaway holds slim hope that Ann might capture her son, though it's hard to see that there's much of a chance when compared to Tonia, "a sinuous, graceful, provocative creature who, when she moved, seemed to have no bones." Mrs Hathaway encourages Mary to chase Hugo, all the while making it clear that that she'd prefer wealthy Ann as a daughter-in-law:

"I've always been fond of her, and she's a fine girl, but she doesn't make any effort to attract, just thinks that it's enough to be natural. She was always like that. Of course, if you're a born beauty" – here she shot a different kind of glance at Mary – "no special effort is necessary, but believe me in Ann's case it is." 

Ouch.

Hugo never gives Mary so much as a second glance, though she does attract considerable attention from lively Italian Conte Guino Rivaldo and a rather serious Englishman named James Brock. The former can really cut a rug, and is recognized by all as Mrs Hathaway's gigolo (though no one suggests that they are lovers). Brock, who appears out of nowhere, somehow manages to attach himself to the group, despite being a right killjoy. As Guino woos the young virgin, Brock pooh-poohs her gambling, criticizes her use of make-up, advises her against swimming in cold water, and discourages her budding friendship with a certain Mme Gagnon. Within two weeks of arriving in Monte Carlo – and with considerable excitement – Mary accepts a proposal of marriage from one of these two men.

No points for correctly guessing which.

As a young woman who had expected an inheritance, had received nothing, and is left to make her own way, Mary Hellmuth is a familiar character. Her predicament is mirrored in Grant Allen's Juliet

Appleton (The Typewriter Girl; 1897) and Lois Cayley (Miss Cayley's Adventures; 1900), but Mary lacks their smarts and enterprise. She's more like the orphaned Monica Madden in George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893): a not-so-bright girl whose beauty tempts disaster. In short, Mary is a Victorian heroine moving through a Depression era novel. Reading The Obstinate Virgin, I kept having to remind myself that it was published the same year as Tender is the Night and The Postman Always Rings Twice. It is so old-fashioned that the passing of an automobile seems incongruous. Mention of a commercial aeroplane flight in the final pages was positively jarring.

This being 1934, Mary being twenty-one, I'll accept that she is a virgin – but obstinate? Mary, a free-spirit, is open to anything, which explains how she gets along with everyone, save spoilsport James Brock.

The last chapter is rushed. Should anything be made of the fact that the page count of The Obstinate Virgin and is nearly identical to that of What Fools Men Are!, Sullivan's previous novel for Samson Low, Marston?

Mary, loses all her money at the roulette table, and goes into debt to Mme Gagnon... who, it turns out, is a white slave trader. Just as she's about to whisk Mary off to Paris, using the promise of a position in a fashion house, the madame is arrested.

No points for naming the person who tipped off the police.

No points, either, for the naming the person who ends up saving Mary from drowning.

A half-point for naming the woman who is revealed as Guino's estranged wife.

As everything goes south, Mary flees north to London. Arriving at Victoria Station, she encounters Brock: "'Hallo!' said he, "'better come with me and have a cup of tea: you look a bit washed out.'"

In the nine remaining pages, Brock explains his motivation in being in Monte Carlo, justifies his actions in the principality, and insists they be married:

Already he was arranging everything for her and she had the complete conviction that he always would, and could see him standing on the hearth after dinner planning the day to come, but for some strange reason instead of vexing it now made her thankful. That practically, was all she knew about him; he would always arrange things, and she, just as regularly, would be glad he should.

As I've more than hinted, Mary is none too smart.

Bloomer: In speaking of Ann's devotion to her son Hugo, Mrs Hathaway has this to say:

"Why she still loves him – frankly, I don't know – but she does just the same. He's queer. Sometimes I think he's frightened of women."

Trivia I: The Bank of England informs that £5000 in 1934 is the equivalent of over £360,500 today. Mrs Bentick's more modest annuity of £250 amounts to something more than £18,000.

Don't know about you, but I'd be pleased as Punch with that kind of money.

Trivia II: Is it not interesting that Gordon D. McLeod describes The Obstinate Virgin as "the only novel published by Sullivan in 1934"?

The only novel? Should we have expected more?

Well, yes.

From 1925 to 1933, Sullivan published an average of nearly three novels a year:

1925

The Crucible

The Jade God

John Frensham, K.C. 

1926

Human Clay

The Days of Their Youth

In the Beginning 

1927

Brother Blackfoot

The Splendid Silence

The Verdict of the Sea

The Whispering Lodge 

1929

The Broken Marriage

Double Lives

The Story of One-Ear

The Training of Chiliqui 

1930

A Little Way Ahead

The Magic Makers

Mr. Absalom

Queer Partners 

1931

Golden Foundling

The Ironmaster

No Secrets Island 

1932

Antidote

Colonel Pluckett

Cornish Interlude 

1933

Man at Lane Tree

What Fools Men Are!

I wonder what happened in 1928. McLeod provides no explanation.

Between 1934 and his death in 1947, Sullivan appears to have relaxed, publishing seven novels, one collection of short stories, and a translation of Félix-Antoine Savard's Menaud maître-draveur.

Object: An unremarkable hardcover, identical in design to Sullivan's What Fools Men Are! (1933). The novel itself is followed by eight pages of advertising for the publisher's "POPULAR CHEAP EDITIONS," consisting chiefly of titles by Jeffrey Farnol, E.C.R. Lora, Leonard A. Knight, Moray Dalton, Silas K. Hocking, Richard Starr, Henry St John Cooper, Donn Byrne, and Faith Baldwin. My copy lacks the dust jacket, but within its pages, I found what may be the rear flap. It appears to have been used as a bookmark.

Anyway, I used it for that purpose.

Access: If WorldCat is an indication, no Canadian library has a copy; the only copies it lists are held in the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and Dublin's Trinity College Library.

As of this writing, just one copy, a later Sampson Low sixpenny paperback with paper cover (below), is being offered online. At £9.90, it's a steal. Heads up, Library and Archives Canada!

Related posts:

Grant Allen Dons a Woman's Blouse

The Adventures of a Globe-Trotting Girton Girl

A Queer Thing, Nationalism
Stranger in a Strange Land

Getting to Know the Woman Who Did

The Woman Who Did
Grant Allen
Boston: Roberts Bros, 1895
223 pages

The Woman Who Did was the first Grant Allen novel I ever bought. For nearly two decades, it sat on the shelf as I read later Allen purchases – more than a dozen – most of which I've come to consider the better Canadian novels of the nineteenth century. Some, like The British Barbarians and What's Bred in the Bone (winner of the £1000 Tit-Bits Prize!), garnered a fair amount of attention in their day, but none so much as The Woman Who Did. The novel's publication was countered by damning editorials, preaching from the pulpit, and calls for censorship (it was banned in Ireland), all of which helped make it the author's best selling work.

There's no risk in writing that The Woman Who Did continues to receive more attention than Allen's other books – and he published more than fifty. Anyone at all interested in the "New Woman" novel or nineteenth-century feminism will have encountered discussion of the work. References are hard to dodge. The accumulation of tit-bits encountered here and there over the years had me thinking that I knew a  thing or two about The Woman Who Did... and so, I put off reading it. I mean, why bother with this Grant Allen novel when there were dozens more of which I knew nothing at all?  When I finally pulled the book off the shelf last week, I expected no surprises.

The Woman Who Did begins much as I'd imagined. Its heroine, schoolteacher Herminia Barton, is holidaying in Surrey when she's introduced to London lawyer Alan Merrick by a mutual acquaintance:

"You'll like him, Herminia," Mrs. Dewsbury said, nodding. "He's one of your own kind, as dreadful as you are; very free and advanced; a perfect firebrand. In fact, my dear child, I don't know which of you makes my hair stand on end most."

Mrs Dewsbury is spot on in her prediction; not only does Herminia like Alan, the feeling is mutual. The two prove to be kindred spirits, sharing identical opinions on all topics, the foremost of which are the education and emancipation of women.

"They're trying hard enough to develop us intellectually; but morally and socially they want to mew us up just as close as ever. And they won't succeed. The zenana must go. Sooner or later, I'm sure, if you begin by educating women, you must end by emancipating them."
     "So I think too," Alan answered, growing every moment more interested. "And for my part, it's the emancipation, not the mere education, that most appeals to me."
     "Yes, I've always felt that," Herminia went on, letting herself out more freely, for she felt she was face to face with a sympathetic listener. "And for that reason, it's the question of social and moral emancipation that interests me far more than the mere political one, – woman's rights as they call it. Of course I'm a member of all the woman's franchise leagues and everything of that sort, – they can't afford to do without a single friend's name on their lists at present; but the vote is a matter that troubles me little in itself, what I want is to see women made fit to use it. After all, political life fills but a small and unimportant part in our total existence. It's the perpetual pressure of social and ethical restrictions that most weighs down women."

These exchanges test the reader's patience, but not that of the couple caught up in the bloom of new love. The challenge to their relationship comes when, three weeks after Mrs Dewsbury's introduction, Alan proposes marriage. Here, at last, is something on which they don't see eye to eye. Replies Herminia:

"My conscience won't let me. I know what marriage is, from what vile slavery it has sprung; on what unseen horrors for my sister women it is reared and buttressed; by what unholy sacrifices it is sustained, and made possible. I know it has a history. I know its past, I know its present, and I can't embrace it; I can't be untrue to my most sacred beliefs."

Alan tries to convince Herminia that their marriage wouldn't be like others. The ceremony would be a mere formality, and would save them both – her particularly – from scorn, hardship, and martyrdom.

The Woman Who Did is a suggestive title, particularly in the context of the time. But what did Herminia do exactly? From the tit-bits, I knew hers to be the story of a woman who has a child out of wedlock and then dares raise it on her own. And so, I anticipated Alan abandoning our heroine. Early on, the narrator appears to confirm expectations, sharing: "...it adds, to my mind, to the tragedy of Herminia Barton's life that the man for whom she risked and lost everything was never quite worthy of her; and that Herminia to the end not once suspected it." But the man Herminia loves proves loyal to the end.

Short months after what is described as her "bridal evening," Herminia becomes pregnant. Alan convinces her that it would be best to have the child abroad. They travel to Perugia, Italy, where he dies of typhoid. After giving birth to a girl she names Delores, Herminia returns to London intent on raising the child as the first "born into this world as the deliberate result of a free union, contracted on philosophical and ethical principles."

Oh-so-earnest in intent, The Woman Who Did barely skirts silliness, and has some of the worst dialogue I've read in an Allen novel. Still, I found myself caught up in the drama of it all, and grew to admire Alan and Herminia. The tit-bits led me to expect a tragic ending, but it wasn't anything like I anticipated.  The concluding pages were as moving as they were depressing, putting me in a funk that lasted well into this past holiday weekend.

Never have I been affected by so flawed a novel.

Dedication:

Bloomer:

Alan observed almost without observing it that she was gone but for a second. She asked none of that long interval that most women require for the simplest matter of toilet.

Trivia I: Remarkably, The Woman Who Did novel inspired no less than three responses that took the form of novels: Victoria Crosse's The Woman Who Didn't, Mrs Lovett Cameron's The Man Who Didn't, and Lucas Cleeve's The Woman Who Wouldn't, all published in 1895.

As might be expected, Punch weighed in with a parody, "The Woman Who Wouldn't Do," which can be read here courtesy of Allen biographer Peter Morton.

This Punch cartoon is a favourite:

Trivia II: Twice adapted to the silver screen – The Woman Who Did (1915) and Die Frau mit dem schlechten Ruf (1925) – both, sadly, lost. The latter featured Lionel Barrymore as Alan.

Object: A small hardcover. The decorations on the cover and title page are by Aubrey Beardsley. Ten pages of adverts for other "Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications" feature at the end. A first American edition, I purchased by copy in 2000 for US$9.99 from a Pennsylvania bookseller. The receipt records that I paid a further three dollars in shipping. Have rates really increased so dramatically?

Access: Common in university libraries, but not in those serving the public. The most recent editions are the 1995 Oxford University Press (above; now out-of-print) and a fine Broadview Press book with critical introduction and a generous gathering of appendices. Edited by Nicholas Ruddick, the latter is recommended.

The novel has been translated into French (Le Roman d'une féministe), German (Die es tat), Yiddish (Di froy velkhe hot es gethon), and twice into Swedish (Hon vågade det and Hennes livs historia).

The first edition is available for download here through the Internet Archive.

Related posts:

Grant Allen Tells It Like It Was
A Nineteenth-century What's  Bred in the  Bone

Starting in on Grant Allen: A Top Ten

A Curious Romance about a Closeted, Corseted, Petticoated Poet and His Masculine Twin Sister

Maid-At-Arms
Enid Cushing [and Andre Norton]
New York: Fawcett, 1981
221 pages

Twins Lady Jennifer and Lord Jonathan Welland are alike in body, but not in mind. Jenny's chief interests are guns, horses, and war. As a little girl she would sneak out of bed to eavesdrop on her grumpy guardian, the Duke of Burghley, as he regaled dinner guests about his fight against Napoleon in the Peninsular War. Jonnie never joined her; his interests lay in poetry, the pianoforte, and petticoats. Throughout their young lives, the twins would secretly trade identities. Jenny, as Jonnie, joined the men on a fox chase, while "a skirted and beruffled Jonathan toyed with tea and cakes and exchanged titters with delicately nurtured maidens at the Manor."

The one person not taken in by their masquerade was Lord Rufus Randall; Jonnie aside, he knows Jenny better than anyone alive. Randall first met Jenny when she was a newly orphaned girl of eight – he was eighteen – and they've been jolly good friends ever since. Twelve years have passed, and the first of this novel's twenty-four chapters finds Lady Jennifer in a nostalgic mood:

"Rufus, do you remember the time Sir Peter Davies over at the Lodge had that party three years ago? They all played those forfeit for a kiss games – or maybe you don't remember, because you stayed off in the trophy room with Sir Peter – anyway, Jonathan was the belle of the party and was always being caught on purpose. You must have heard about it"
     "I also recollect that the Jonathan of the evening also made quite a name for himself as well," Lord Rufus said dryly. "Fine pair up to no good – that was the two of you."
     "We used to have fun," Jennifer nodded at the memories of mischief successfully carried through. "Nobody could ever tell the difference."
     "The only noticeable difference was that fair Jonathan displayed a fine sense of more maidenly conduct than his sister appears interested in showing," Lord Rufus pointed out.
     "I should have been a boy," Jennifer sighed, not for the first time.

Jenny gives expression to her desire in midnight rides through the English countryside dressed in male drag: riding boots, black breeches, dark shirt and black jacket. She never forgets to carry a gun.

Does Jenny's twin think he should have been a girl? Jonnie doesn't say, but the Duke of Burghley has long been concerned about interests he associates with women. Fearing his ward is getting to be a "damned sissy," he hunts him down in London. "Gad, do you know where I found this brother of yours, my dear?" the Duke says to Jennie. "At Lady Ashbury's salon, listening to a fop reading poetry. Poetry! And he was ready to spout off verses, too. Imagine that for your brother! I tell you, at that point I had enough. I told him to come with me. I'm not going to have my ward behaving like a pampered pimp, reeling around in ladies' salons and boudoirs, listening to poetry."

The Duke decides to make a man of Jonnie through military service. He purchases a commission in the Rifle Brigade, and makes certain that the newly-minted Captain Jonathan Welland will be posted far from Lady Ashbury's London salon.

Where exactly?

Jonnie tells Jenny:

"Halifax," he said gloomily.
     "Halifax? Where's Halifax? she repeated blankly. "What on earth are you going to do there?"
     He made a sweeping, oddly feminine gesture. "Place's in Canada – I'm for garrison duty."

Jenny manages to convince their guardian – she calls him "Guardie" – to let her accompany her brother; it helps that Lord Bradbury, the Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia, happens to be one of the Duke's old war pals. The very next week, the twins board the Cambria, bound from Liverpool to Halifax. Sadly, predictably, they're not two days out when delicate Jonnie collapses in Jennie's bunk from mal de mer. There he remains for the remainder of the voyage "rolled in one of her dressing gowns." Meanwhile, hardy Jennie dons Jonnie's military uniform – "fortunate, she considered, that padded fronts to an officer's uniform had become a recent military style" – so as to pass as her brother and be allowed on deck in rough weather.

View of Dartmouth and Halifax (c 1850)
L. Crepy

The twins' arrival in Halifax poses a problem in that Jonnie, under guise of Lady Jennifer, remains deathly ill. So as not to arouse suspicion amongst the other passengers, he disembarks in whalebone corset, petticoats, bell-skirted dress, and bonnet, and is whisked away to the Colonial Hotel. Once there, however, he declines to take up his commission. Jennie is annoyed, but at the same time all too willing to take his place as a captain in the Rifle Brigade:

"I'll make a deal with you, Jonathan, and you'll abide by it. Your place for my place; my skirts for your trousers."
     Jonathan fiddled with the arm of his chair. "Jennifer, I don't think..." he began hesitantly, but his sister cut in.
     "You're quite right, Jonnie, you don't think. You make a choice, now. Either you promise to stay in my skirts, most of the time anyway, or you get into this uniform right away. Which will it be? One or the other Jonnie. There's no other choice. You're a Welland, and I don't propose to have to blush for the name."
     "Oh, all right," Jonathan was goaded by beyond his endurance. "I'll be Lady Jennifer and you can go on playing soldier."

What could go wrong? I expected plenty, particularly after Lady Bradbury, wife of the Lieutenant-Governor, insists "Lady Jennifer" reside at Government House.

Government House from the S.W. (1819)
John Elliott Woolford

Surprisingly, things go quite well for the twins. Jenny proves to be an excellent soldier, and is quite popular with the men under her command, and Jonnie has no difficulty in passing as a woman while staying with Lord and Lady Bradbury and their two daughters. This is not to suggest Jonnie is altogether happy; he complains about corsets, but his chief source of frustration lies in not being able to live the life he'd enjoyed in England. "You've always liked the female's role better than the man's," observes Jenny. "Oh yes, I've heard stories of your London exploits – don't worry."

This depiction of Jonnie as someone who has never "flirted with the girls" changes abruptly with the arrival of Lord and Lady Bradbury's English niece, Miss Matilda Markham, at Government House. Jonnie is immediately smitten by her feminine, yet dominant ways, and longs to end his masquerade so that he may court her.

Why the change in Jonnie? I suggest this note appended to the novel's page at Andre-Norton-Books.com may provide an explanation "Andre Norton's name is Not On This Book – however she did complete the story for Enid Cushing when Enid became ill."

Of course, being a romance novel, Maid-At-Arms is more Jenny's story than Jonnie's. She may be the less interesting character, but this is not to suggest that she isn't loved. Remember Rufus Randall? You know, the English Lord who befriended Jenny when she was a girl of eight? Well, Rufus isn't fooled by stories of Lord Jonathan's success in soldiering coming across the pond, and so he sets out for Halifax. I'm sure I spoil nothing in reporting that Rufus rescues Jennie from a situation that she can't handle. In fact, he saves her life.

And then church bells ring.

Jonnie does not serve as maid-of-honour.

About the author(s): Maid-At-Arms marks the beginning of what I've described as Enid Cushing's second act. Her first consisted of five mystery novels, stretching from Murder's No Picnic (1953) to The Girl Who Bought a Dream (1957). What accounts from the twenty-eight-year silence that followed is a real life mystery, as is how she came to collaborate with Andre Norton.

The contract signed by Cushing and Norton can be found here, courtesy of Andre-Norton-Books.com.

In 1983, the year of Cushing's death, she published one last novel. This time, Norton's co-authorship was acknowledged on the cover:

Bloomer: You knew there'd be one. Coming in the very first chapter, it provides a good example of the novel's poor writing and editing:

"Tell me, Jenny, did your guardian ever become aware of the numerous occasions on which you, er, diddled him. I believe such was the term you used – in the past?"

Object: A typical 'eighties mass market paperback, complete with five pages of adverts for other Fawcett titles. Bil Keane's Daddy's Little Helpers – "More laughs from the Family Circus Crew" – appears under the header "GREAT ADVENTURES IN READING."

As far as I've been able to determine, there was no second printing.

Access: WorldCat suggests that not one Canadian library holds Maid-At-Arms. The good news is that used copies are plentiful and cheap. Do not be taken in by the Massachusetts bookseller who describes the book as "Very rare," and claims it is by Norton "Writing As Enid Cushing." He's out to make an easy fifty bucks, but is not so bad as the New Hampshire bookseller who asks US$85.97, adding a further US$24.99 for shipping.

I purchased my copy for one American penny.

Well worth it, I think.

Related posts:

Montreal's Murderous Murder Mystery Writer
(and the transvestite brother he passed off as his wife)

Bewitched, Bothered, but not Bewildered

Soldiering On with Edith Percival

No Picnic

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.

Related posts:

Romance Amongst the Racists

The Hell That is Retail

Ontario, Opium and Cocaine

An 'Other Novel' from Margaret Millar

Wives and Lovers
Collected Millar: The Master at Her Zenith
Margaret Millar
New York: Syndicate, 2016

The thirteenth of Margaret Millar's twenty-five novels, Wives and Lovers is often relegated to a spot near the end of the author's bibliographies. The one included in this third volume of the Collected Millar does just that, placing it after the "Paul Pyre Novels", the "Inspector Sands Novels", the "Tom Aragon Novels", and the "Novels of Suspense" as one of her "Other Novels". The category is a small one, shared with only Experiment in Springtime, which I've not read. Until last week, I hadn't read Wives and Lovers either, though I'd long been curious about it. Why the distinction? What makes it so different?

The novel is set in California's Channel City (read: Santa Barbara), fairly familiar territory for Millar. As with so many of her novels, focus shifts between characters, first landing on Hazel Philip, assistant to dentist Gordon Foster. It is a brutally hot day, made somewhat bearable by the absence of patients. Only two people enter the practice, the first being Ruby MacCormick, "a friend of one of his nieces from up north." Just last week, Hazel had helped Ruby get a job at her ex-husband's restaurant out on the pier. Now, the girl needs help again.

Gordon dried his hands on a linen towel. "Who was at the door?"
"The girl, the one who was here last week."
"Girl?"
"Ruby MacCormick."
"Well," he said carefully. "What did she want?"
"She's still here."
"Oh."
"She wants a room. She's moving. I was just trying to find a place for her to go."

Did you catch that... "he said carefully"?

Gordon's wife, Elaine, is the second person to walk through the door. She reminds him of her plans to take the children to the beach.

Elaine believed that Gordon could have been a real doctor if he had more initiative, or if he'd met her earlier in life, so that she could have supplied the initiative. As it was, when they met, Gordon was already a dentist, and even Elaine's considerable powers couldn't make him into anything else. Their marriage had been coloured by Elaine's bile-green feeling that she had been cheated, that Gordon should have been a real doctor because she herself had all the attributes of a perfect doctor's wife.

At the end of the day, Hazel returns to the house she shares with her unemployed cousin, her simple-minded brother, and his petite pregnant wife. Ruth, the cousin, goes on about household finances and the suit she'll wear when presenting herself before the School Board. Ruth wants to teach again.

But why isn't Ruth teaching now? Santa Barbara has a shortage of teachers. And did you notice that Ruby showed up at Gordon's office with all her belongings? Why is she suddenly out on the street?

There are many little mysteries in Wives and Lovers; what sets it apart from nearly every other Millar novel is that the most serious crime is the stealing of a pair of hedge clippers. There are no bodies. I spoil nothing in writing this. Consider cover copy. Here is Syndicate's description of Vanish in an Instant, the novel that preceded Wives and Lovers:

In this classic noir tale of blurred guilt and flawed innocence, a cynical lawyer uncovers the desperate lives of a group connected only by a gruesome murder.

And here's the description of Beast in View, the novel that followed Wives and Lovers:

Hailed as one of the greatest psychological mysteries ever written, Beast in View remains as freshly sinister today as the day it was first published.

Now, compare with that for Wives and Lovers:

A sincere compassionate novel about the complications of married life, and the love, loathing, pain, loyalty, disappointments and friendship that grow out of marriage.

What makes Wives and Lovers like other Millar novels is that characters are key. What makes it so interesting is that criminal acts are always a possibility. Lives become unstable, desperation takes hold, jealousy and pettiness rear their ugly heads, and the reader braces for violence that never comes.

In other words, Wives and Lovers is a novel about the lives most of us live.

Bloomer:

He said he'd like to take a little trip.
     "To San Francisco again?" Elaine said with sweet irony.
     "What do you mean, again?"
     "I only mean that you seem to have had such a gay time there a couple of months ago."

Object: A 553 page trade-size paperback, comprised of Vanish in an Instant, Wives and Lovers, Beast in View, An Air That Kills and The Listening Walls, along with a brief Introduction by Tom Nolan. The Master at Her Zenith is the first third volume – though first to be released – in Syndicate's Collected Millar. I purchased my copy last September. Price: C$19.99.

Access: Published just six months ago, The Master at Her Zenith is easily found in good bookstores. Wives and Lovers itself was first published in 1954 by Random House (above). It appears there was no second printing. Twenty years later, Avon published a mass-market paperback edition. There has been only one translation: Erwecket die Liebe nicht (Düsseldorf: Dörner, 1964).

Nearly all our libraries let us down. Whether separate or as part of the Master at Her Zenith, Wives and Lovers is held only by Library and Archives Canada, the Kitchener Public Library, the Toronto Public Library, and six of our universities.

Related posts:

Margaret Millar's Michigan Murder Mystery

The Telephone Always Rings

Margaret Millar and the Air Up North

Millar's Experiment in Springtime in Springtime

A Quiet, Mildly Depressing Depression-Era Debut

John
Irene Baird
Philadelphia/Toronto: Lippincott, 1937

A first novel, the discovery that this copy is a fourth impression surprised me no end. I knew Irene Baird for Waste Heritage – once part of the Laurentian Library – but John meant nothing to me. And yet, in the excellent Introduction to the current University of Ottawa Press edition of the former Colin Hill informs that John was an international bestseller. The Lippincott was followed by other editions in the UK and Australia, leading me to think that – eight decades later – John continues to hold title as Baird's best selling book.

The Globe & Mail
5 November 1937

No pun intended.

I don't quite understand its popularity because this sort of novel has never appealed to me. John takes place in rural British Columbia, but this city boy has never been much interested in stories with country settings. I also don't care much for novels in which nothing really happens. Huysmans' À Rebours is not for me. Even Baird's title – my middle name – is a bit of a bore.

John is John Dorey, a perfectly nice Englishman who passes up partnership in the family woollen mills for a simple life on the BC coast. He purchases ten acres, clears same, and farms; for a time, he delivers the rural mail. John has a horse that is killed by a nasty neighbour, though nothing of significance results from the crime. A developer makes an offer  for his land, but this is rejected. The most significant event in John's life is a fleeting encounter with a younger married woman. John falls for her, though not so much as a kiss is exchanged.

John is a character study. The man under examination is, as I say, perfectly nice; I'd want him is a neighbour, but would never think to invite him over. John is given to philosophizing. At the urging of his closest friend, the local doctor, he tries his hand at putting his thoughts down on paper:

Book-writing didn't come like the knack of judging a good horse, or training a fine dog till she all but spoke her thoughts. Ideas were not tangible like soil, to pick up and weigh between the fingers. It was a will-o'-the-wispbusiness, writing – though it was strange, too, from the look of their pictures, what unlikely people excelled at it!

It's a fine book – Baird's, not John's – but it isn't for me. That said, I do recommend it to anyone who might enjoy this passage:

An eagle, far up, planed serenely by, bent on its eyrie. From the cedar close to the house, an owl awakened – tuk–tuk–tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk— Who knew how many were its notes? Another owl fro the bush on the opposite side of the road answered: the first of ghostly night messages. The frogs would join in before long.
     He yawned deeply. There was nothing like the sublime afterglow of bodily fatigue. Even the mind refused to disturb a body so perfectly spent.

Again, this is not for me, though I can almost sense the attraction.

Singing frogs might have helped.

Bloomer:

"It's a wonder to me you never married. You're a queer chap."
     John flushed.

Dedication:

Lord Tweedsmuir, of course, being Buchan. John Buchan.

Object: A well-constructed 235-page hardcover bound in brown cloth. My copy, which once belonged to a woman named Anne Marshall, was rescued four years ago from books left unsold at the end of our local public library book sale. It lacks the rather busy, uninteresting dust jacket.

Access: The Lippincott was followed by British (Collins, 1937) and Australian (Angus & Robertson, 1938) editions. A Swedish translation, also titled John, was published in 1938 by Medén.

Held by most Canadian university libraries. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec stands alone amongst those serving the public.

A dozen copies are listed for sale online. At eight dollars, the cheapest, a "Good" Lippincott copy, is described thusly: "May not look good on your bookcase after reading and probably not suitable as a present unless hard to find elsewhere." Hmm...

The best of the lot is an inscribed Lippincott first. Price: C$55. Suitable as a present, I suggest.

Behind Every Successful Man from Glengarry

The Man from Glengarry: A Tale of the Ottawa
Ralph Connor [pseud. Rev. Charles W. Gordon]
Toronto: Westminster, 1901

I think it likely that my paternal grandfather had a complete collection of Ralph Connor's novels. Uniform in size, but not in design, they took up the bottom shelf of the largest bookcase in the family home. My father inherited the books, but a decade or so after his death my mother donated the lot to our church's annual rummage sale. She offered them to me beforehand, but I was a teenager; family history and Canadian literature were nowhere near so interesting as Low or the tall Icelandic girl who was in the grade below mine.

Four decades later, family history and Canadian literature obsess. Sixteen Connors sit on my shelves, including two editions of Glengarry School Days and signed copies of The Major and The Prospector.

I have rule when it comes to collecting Connor: I pay no more than two dollars. The Man from Glengarry didn't cost me a thing. I rescued it from a pile of books that were to be stripped of their covers and pulped. The thing is in rotten shape. At some point in its past, an anonymous bookseller identified it as a first edition and hoped to sell it for twenty dollars. I'm betting he didn't.

The Man from Glengarry may be Connor's longest book – at 473 pages it's certainly the longest of those I own – but then the author has a lot to say.  This is a novel with a message. It was to Presbyterian aspirations what Antoine Gérin-Lajoie's Jean Rivard novels were to the Catholic. The Preface is essential reading:

There are many men from Glengarry, but the one who takes centre stage is Ranald Macdonald, lone son of ill-tempered lumberman Black Hugh. A boy in the opening pages, young Ranald bears witness to his father's bloody, ultimately fatal, beating by Louis LeNoir of the Murphy gang. The mid-nineteenth-century timber trade is dangerous place, but its gloomy forests are brightened by the Word of the Lord, as brought by Mrs Murray, wife of the local Presbyterian preacher. There is no more accurate word than "saintly" to describe this woman. Mrs Murray

is flawless, which means she is also two-dimensional. What makes her interesting is that she is modelled on Connor's dear mother, a highly-educated, sophisticated woman who devoted herself to her husband and his ministry.

It is through Mrs Murray's guidance – and not, tellingly, that of the flawed Rev Murray – that Ranald grows to become the most intelligent and virtuous of young men. Ultimately, his principles cost him both a partnership in a lumber company and the hand of Maimie St Clair, the woman he has loved since boyhood. However, we know our Father, who seeing what is done in secret, will reward him (see: Matthew 6:4).

This tale of the Ottawa is a good one. I found myself caught up in the struggles between rival gangs and the final days of the romance between Ranald and Maimie. The only eye-rolling moments come at the last chapter, which sees Ranald meeting with Sir John A. Macdonald (no relation, one presumes) to press the importance of the national railway in keeping British Columbia in the federation. The scene brought to mind René LaFlamme, the young hero of Connor's War of 1812 novel The Runner, who kills the man who killed Brock, rescues Laura Secord, etc, etc. "I have heard a great deal about you," Lady Mary Rivers says to Ranald. "Let me see, you opposed separation; saved the Dominion, in short."

So many novels are weakened by their final chapters.

"It is part of the purpose of this book to so picture these men and their times that they may not drop quite out of mind," Connor writes in his Preface. In this, he succeeds. The Man from Glengarry gives a good sense of what Glengarry was like in the day. While it doesn't have anything like the readership it once had, but it remains in print, continues to be studied. More than this, through Mrs Murphy, it has kept the memory of his mother alive.

Family, you understand.

I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has Ralph Connor books bearing the signatures of Edward Busby or Maurice John Busby.

Bloomer:

"What a wonderful boy he must be, Hughie," said Maimie, teasing him. "But isn't he just a little queer?"
     "He's not a bit queer," said Hughie, stoutly. "He is the best, best, best boy in all the world."

Dedication:

Trivia: As an adolescent, the author attended Ontario's St Marys Collegiate Institute, which sat on the property that borders ours. Until this summer, when the 141-year-old structure was torn down, I could see it from my desk.

Object and Access: First edition? I'll take the unknown bookseller's word for it, though I've seen variants in colour of cloth. The American first edition was published by Revell. The first British edition came from Hodder & Stoughton.

I'm pleased to report that pretty much every academic library in the Dominion and more than a few public libraries have it in their collections.

The Man from Glengarry is currently in print as part of the moribund New Canadian Library, but you'd be better off buying a used copy. Connor claimed that the novel sold five million copies (and here I remind you that he was a clergyman). Hundreds are listed online, starting as low as one Yankee dollar.

Pay no more than two Canadian dollars.

Related post:

Ralph Connor's Beautiful War of 1812
Small Town Boy Makes Good, Founds Small Town