The Great War and Its Discontents

The Magpie
Douglas Durkin
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974
351 pages

Craig Forrester has received a telephone call from Mrs Gilbert Nason, wife of one of the wealthiest men in Winnipeg, inviting him to a dinner party at the family home: "no dinner party was complete nowadays without its war hero — she would promise that he would not be asked one question during the evening, about his experiences at the front — and Marion would be there to tease him — and, well, would he come?"

Craig accepts the invitation. Marion, the Nasons' daughter, does indeed tease, as when she ushers him toward another woman, whispering:

“She’s a war widow, but she’s young and — come on, you’ll see for yourself.” She took him by the hand and pulled him after her across the hall and through an open doorway into a small reception-room. Mrs. Nason got up from where she had been sitting and came forward to meet him. “So here you are!” she greeted him, extending her hand. “My, but you’re looking well! Here’s our hero, Jeannette."

The scene takes place in July 1919, eight months after the Armistice, and one month after the violent end of Winnipeg General Strike.

The promise of the post-war future is very much a topic of dinner conversation. Methodist minister Reverend George Bentley, who joins Craig and Jeanette at the Nason family table, has strong opinions about the demands of the working man:

“Unless we restore our institutions to their status of the days before the war,” Bentley declared, “there is no hope for civilization.”
   Jeannette Bawden broke through at last with a word of protest. “Why take the trouble to save it, Mr. Bentley?” she asked in her softest voice.
   Marion chuckled in spite of herself — or because she had been awaiting just such an opportunity — and was reprimanded by a look from her father.
   “Why take the trouble to save our Christian heritage?” the good gentleman asked, surprised.
   “I wasn’t aware that it was Christian,” Jeannette retorted.
   Craig caught a glance from Marion and the two exchanged furtive winks. He was beginning to like Jeannette Bawden and was pleased, for some reason or other, to find that Marion shared her views.

   “Jeannette, you heretic,” Mrs. Nason interrupted, “I’m not going to permit you to badger Mr. Bentley. Craig, can’t you talk her off the subject.”
   “On the contrary,” objected Bentley, recovering himself, “I think I rather enjoy being badgered by a woman when she is as charming as—”

Craig makes no attempt to take Jeannette Bawden off the subject, he'd much rather hear what she has to say. Craig is the Magpie of the title, so named by a colleague who'd noted his habit of listening to conversation without contributing. Invariably, another would make a point he was contemplating:

“Craigie has a nimble wit but a heavy tongue,” his father had said of him in the old days.

Craig's father died on the family farm while he was off fighting overseas. He blames himself for not having been present. The two had always been very close, and were no doubt brought closer by the early death of Craig's mother.

At twenty, Craig was sent off to university. At twenty-four, his father bought him a seat on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange as a graduation gift.

The Winnipeg Grain Exchange as it was c.1920.
Craig's office is described as being on the seventh floor.

While tense moments in the pit follow, I admit my eyes began to glaze over. Debate over barley futures wasn't for me. I was more interested in the promises that had been made working men who had brought victory. More than anything, what grabbed my interest was the reception of the returning soldier and the portrayal of women.

Mrs Nason's assurance that Craig would not be asked about his experiences at the front proved true. However, the very next month, during a second dinner, this one at the Nason summer home, he finds himself seated beside coquettish Vicky Howard:

“Don’t you think you can persuade Captain Forrester to tell us some of the heroic things he did when he was in France, Marion?” Miss Howard cooed, with her cheek touching Craig’s left shoulder.

   “I should think you could get him to do that, Vicky,” Marion suggested. “I’ve never known how to get a returned man to tell of his experiences.”

   “I’ve heard some — some perfectly wonderful stories from men who have come back — one boy in the bank —”

Vicky Howard is one of several female characters of Craig's generation in the story. Each interesting in her own way, together they reflect a jarring shift in societal expectations and social norms. The Magpie spans 1919 and 1920, a touch early for bound breasts and flapperism to have reached the Canadian prairie, though it should be noted that one of the characters has bobbed her hair. 

Marion Nason delights in her friend Jeannette's needling Reverend Bentley, whose ministry has been supported by her father and other wealthy businessmen. This, combined with her beauty, leads Craig to make her his wife. However, once she has left her father's house she becomes a different person, one who is more concerned with maintaining the lifestyle into which she was born rather than the plight of others less fortunate.

Jeannette Bawden's life has been very much changed by the war. It killed her husband. Jeanette's desire for social upheaval is fuelled in part by revenge. Jeanette will end up living in sin with an outspoken veteran who shares her newfound politics.

Vicky Howard flirts openly with Craig during that second Nason dinner and in the evening that follows. When he does not respond, she opts for a one-nighter with Claude Charnley, Craig's rival for Marion's affection. The following summer, by which time Craig has married Marion, Vicky makes an overt pass: "People don’t wonder about such things nowadays. They used to.... before the war.... but not now. They take some things for granted.....” 

Then there's Martha Lane, Craig's friend since childhood. The girl from the neighbouring farm, they'd lost touch when she went off to study sculpture in Europe. Martha's father doesn't understand her art, but takes pride in her achievement. Once she and Craig reconnect, they spend hours alone together working on an exhibition of her works. 

These young women  are so unlike those depicted in pre-Great War Canadian novels and live in a much different world. To have a man, in this case Craig Forrester, spend time alone with, say, Jeannette Bawden or Martha Lane, would've destroyed reputations.

Hodder & Stoughton ad in The Victoria Daily Times, 15 December 1923

For other characters, the post-war world is all too familiar. Craig is driving late one afternoon when he encounters Jimmy Dyer as he walks home from work. They''d served alongside each in Europe and are now, to paraphrase Neil Young, back in their Canadian prairie homes. Jimmy's is the same little green and white shack he left to fight, leaving behind his wife and children. He's a cheerful sort, until talk turns to the war: 

"They’re all doing their damnedest to forget about it. They’re sticking a few hundred of the broken ones in hospitals here and there and they’re putting in a cenotaph and a bronze tablet here and there for the fellows who won’t be back. For the rest of us they’re putting green seats in the parks where we can sit down and go over our troubles if we want to without being asked to move on. In a year’s time they’ll send us a medal with a couple of inches of coloured ribbon and a form letter and the thing will be all over. Instead of shouting ‘On to Berlin’ they’ll change it to ‘Back to Normalcy’. We’ve spent four years of the best part of our lives fighting for the big fellows, and we’ll spend the rest of our days working for them just the same as we did before the war. The only real difference is that we had a band or two and a banner or two and a chaplain or two to remind us that we were fighting for the glory of God and the brotherhood of mankind, and now we have the squalls of hungry kids and the insults of a few God damned slackers to cheer us on our way. That sums it up for me, just about.”

Contemporary reviewers really struggled with this one. Some papers merely acknowledged the novel without reviewing it. In this case, the political elements are downplayed: 

The Border Cities Star, 22 March 1924

The Magpie was first published in 1923 by Hodder & Stoughton Canada. My 1974 edition was published as number 23 in the University of Toronto Press's Social History of Canada. It was given to me by a generous reader of this blog.

I'd assumed that the novel had been in and out of print over those five decades, but I was wrong. The Magpie had been out-of-print. What's more, after the University of Toronto Press reissue, The Magpie again slipped out of print for decades, until brought back in 2018 by Invisible Press.

It can be purchased through this link.

I'd been meaning to read the novel since my days as a Canadian Studies student in the 'eighties. Its depictions of the Winnipeg General Strike made it important, or so I thought. In fact, there are no depictions of the Winnipeg General Strike in The Magpie, just as there are no depictions of the Great War. The novel is a reaction to both events. It is a novel about the aftermath of conflict, as experienced by those who were harmed and those who benefited. 

The once-silent Magpie begins to speak out.

Favourite pasage (w/ spoiler): After his chance encounter with Craig, we never see Jimmy Dyer again. Craig keeps meaning to call, but many months pass before he returns to the Dyer family's extremely modest home. On a whim, he's decided to bring along Gilbert Nason, his liberal-minded businessman father-in-law. Over tea, they learn that Jimmy is dead; he never quite recovered from his encounter with mustard gas. Gilbert Nason reacts by offering help, but is soundly rejected:

"There’s a lot of women left alone in the world — lots of them right here in this city — and some of them might take help if you offered it to them. Some of them can’t help themselves. But I can. Jimmy Dyer never took charity from anyone and he wouldn’t want his wife to take it from anyone, either. No, Mr. Nason, there are some of us who are strong enough in body to go out and work for our children and strong enough in mind, too, to do a little thinking for ourselves. Somewhere I read of what one woman made her mind up to do when she got word that her husband had been killed. She was going out to take the life of some warmaker — take it with her own hands. And that’s what the men who make war are driving us to do. They will force the women to make war on those who made war for us. We’ll go out and find the men who sit in upholstered chairs and play the game of politics and business and move the Jimmy Dyers of the world about on the checker board like so many bits of wood. We’ll find them. They killed our men. We’ll kill them. What else have we to do? We’ll dog their steps. We’ll make them afraid to go out unattended. They’ll be afraid to touch food or water for fear of being poisoned. There’ll be ways, and ways—and ways! But we’ll stop it — we’ll stop it! We’ll bring no more sons into the world for them to feed to cannons. We’ll send no more husbands out behind brass bands to spill their blood in the field. We kept the homes — the gardens — the flowers.... the poppy beds....” 

Trivia (w/ spoiler): In the final pages, Craig is forced to come to terms with the fact that from the early days of his marriage Marion has been having an affair with Claude Charnley. The last page suggests a future with Martha Lane.

Canadian Singers and Their Songs
Edward S. Caswell, ed.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1919

In his own life, Durkin was the unfaithful spouse. His lover was also named Martha – Martha Ostenso – with whom he collaborated on over a dozen novels, including her 1925 bestselling debut Wild Geese. Their affair lasted over two decades, ending in marriage only after the death of his wife. 

Object and Access: My U of T Press edition is bound in black boards. The jacket design is not credited. 

Used copies of the first edition aren't nearly as dear as one might expect. Very Good and better copies of the first edition (all sans jacket) begin at $36.00. The copy to have is an inscribed and signed, offered by a Gatineau bookseller for $155.00.

The novel is available here – gratis – thanks to Faded Page.

Related posts:

Dead Man Sitting
Wild, Wild Geese

In Search of Margerie Scott

The Windsor Daily Star, 10 April 1951

Following last week's review of Margerie Scott's The Darling Illusion.

Until this year, I'd never heard of Margerie Scott. Her name doesn't appear in The Canadian Encyclopedia, The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, or the Enyclopedia of Canadian Literature. Three of her five novels were published by McClelland & Stewart – once "The Canadian Publisher" – but I'd never come across copies. My introduction came by way of an American, Scott Thompson of Furrowed Middlebrow, who mentioned her in this February post. "It's possible that Margerie Scott belongs on a Canadian women writers list," writes Mr Thompson.

Margerie Scott was born in 1897 at Leeds. If her publishers' author bios are correct, she received some part of her education in Belgium. Edith Margery Waite was her name at birth; "Scott" was added when she married Canadian Hubert Scott. According to the author, she lived in Canada ten years between the World Wars. During the second conflict, she served as chief billeting officer for the London borough of Chelsea. When the fighting stopped, she worked briefly for the Entertainments National Service Association before returning to Canada for another decade.

Throughout both Canadian stints, Windsor served as her home. She threw herself into society, volunteerism, and amateur theatre. Margerie Scott's name appears in nearly two hundred editions of the Border Cities Star and Windsor Daily Star, this from the 18 September 1956 edition of the latter being an example:

Scott also wrote theatre, film, and book reviews for the Star. My critique of Andre Langévin's Dust Over the City is at odds with hers.

The Windsor Daily Star
24 Sept 1955

I'm not sure we would have much agreed on things literary. In her lecture "The Short Story and Its Place in Modern Letters," covered in the Border Cities Star (22 September 1931), Margerie Scott described O. Henry and Rudyard Kipling as the greatest short story writers of the day. An Anderson, Fitzgerald, and Mansfield man, I take issue.

And then there's this:

Until recent years, the short story has been somewhat despised [emphasis mine]. The novel was the real work. But today, people are giving most of their time to perfecting the technique of the short story, which includes concise presentation of an idea, with an introduction, climax and completion.

More often than not, the Border City Star and Windsor Daily Star refer to Margery Scott as a short story writer. I've managed to track down twenty, most of which were published in long-dead magazines like Breezy Stories, Young Realistic Stories, Britannia and Eve, and The Canadian. One source records that she is the same E.M. Scott who  contributed "The Voyage to Kleptonia" to the October 1928 edition of Amazing Stories.

I don't quite doubt it.

Because her stories were never collected, I think of Margery Scott as a novelist. Life Begins for Father (1939), her debut, appears to have been written off; it received no mention in her subsequent books. In his surprisingly long 22 April 1939 Windsor Daily Star review, "Windsorite Resembles Dad in Novel," critic Angus Munro praises the novel as a "first class story of life in modern London."

My own first book dealt with people who inspired characters in Canadian literature, so you can understand my interest in this paragraph:

A Yorkshireman himself, Tom Waite emigrated to Canada in 1927, settling in Windsor. His profile in the January 1928 edition of Canadian Golfer is quite impressive.

There's more to be learned about Margery Scott. I've only started digging.

For now, the question remains: Does Margerie Scott belong on a Canadian women writers list?

I would say so. How about you?

Related posts:

They Fell in Love With the Actress

Another Handful of Dust
Love During Wartime

A Fine Cure for Brain Fag: Earlier Opinions of Hopkins Moorhouse's Every Man for Himself

Further thoughts on Every Man for Himself, the subject of last week's post.

I first learned of Every Man for Himself through "Canadian Crime Writing in English" by David Skene-Melvin, one of thirteen essays on Canadian crime fiction, television, and film included in the anthology Detecting Canada (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014), edited by Jeannette Sloniowski and Marilyn Rose. Skene-Melvin says little about Every Man for Himself other than it is "set along the North Shore of Lake Superior." In fact, the better part (and best part) of the novel takes place in Toronto.*

Bookseller & Stationer, April 1920

Never mind, it's mere existence as a 1920 mystery with a Canadian setting was enough to get me interested. Was there even another?

Further investigation found that Every Man for Himself had received heaps of praise in its day, much of it having to do with the author having set the novel in his home and native land:

Many Canadian writers like to tell a story of any country but Canada. They seem to forget that nothing better can be offered than a background of our own country. Not so Hopkins Moorhouse, author of "Every Man for Himself." It is a yarn punctuated with some rapid-fire detective work and a real romance — the whole thing is put together with a skill of a Victor Hugo.

—Bookseller & Stationer, August 1920 

This book is not intended for the school library but is a wonderfully good story, full of action — a fine cure for teacher's "brain fag."

—The School, September 1920 

A bully of a Canadian novel of mystery, romance and political intrigue, with a smashing climax ... The local color of this novel, so thoroughly Canadian in its setting and tone is one of the most fascinating features.

—The Grain Growers' Guide, 8 December 1920 

The book is a sit-up-till-you-get-to-the-last-word work, fresh as a new pin with a characterization wholly Canadian. 

—The Canadian Railroader, 5 February 1921

The most greatest praise is found in the 10 August 1920 edition of Windsor's Border Cities Star. A remarkable review, it's worth quoting in full:

"Every Man for Himself." It might mean something serious. You might open the cover. The story starts in Toronto. It is 4 a.m. with the wee sma' hours dying around you but you have read the last word not noticing the time pass. How does an author manage to accomplish this with a reader? Hopkins Moorhouse, who wrote "Every Man for Himself," accomplish it with overwhelming plot with a dash of style as keen as a rapier in action, It is a plot as distinctive as any written by Conan Doyle. It is entertainment fashioned for all people. The college girl, the farm hand, the business man, the sport enthusiast, and Sir George Foster or Premier Drury would find in it equal pleasure. It is so unusual that a big motion picture company in Los Angeles, Cal., has offered Mr. Moorhouse five thousand dollars for the motion picture rights. He is holding out for just two thousand five hundred more than that, and will get it. This Canadian author knows what he is worth.
     This novel, his second, is a scenario of action worthy of Dumas, with a French nearness to life, a Gallic skill of intrigue. As a matter of fact Mr. Moorhouse has French blood in his veins, and he rivals in his writing the cleverest of the race. But while the skill displayed in the book is worthy of the masters of entertainment, its setting is entirely Canadian and its types. Tom Edison would leave aside his next invention, to read it. It is this quality that will make Hopkins Moorhouse with his next two or three books Canada's most popular novelist. "Every Man for Himself" is not "ought-to read" stuff; it's the kind you cannot help reading whether you ought to or not. It carries the charm of the outdoors, the intimacy of Canadian politics and extraordinary type of Canadian heroine, the matched wits of big business men, the young man learning the game of life – a constant interweaving of different elements, situations and flashing change.
     Jot down the name Hopkins Moorhouse in your notebook. It will be the most prominent name among Canadian novelists within five years. To get read evidence of this and enjoy the most enthralling book of the season, read "Every Man for Himself," which has just been published and is Mr. Moorhouse's second book to date.
     "Deep Furrows," was his first, a story of facts picturing the struggles of the Western farmer – a wonderful book and serious reading. "Every Man for Himself," is entertainment, a story for story's sake. a book you cannot put down, a tale of plot, action and speed, a keenness and piquant knowledge as distinct as is found in the works of Arnold Bennett. One taste of the first chapter and you consume to the end. It's as irresistable [sic] as possum to a darky; a concoction inspiringly pleasureable [sic] for the multitude.
     There is no story you have read that is like it. In his descent Mr. Moorhouse carries a liberal dash of courtly French blood. French authors have combined plot and unusual writings as those of no other race in the world, and this is exactly what Mr. Moorhouse has done in "Every Man for Himself," – staging it in Canada with Canadian types.

Rambling, repetitive, drunken... but ignoring the bit about the book being "as irresistable as possum to a darky," who wouldn't like to receive such a review? As a sufferer of brain fag myself, can you blame me for splurging on an old copy of Every Man for Himself?

Can you imagine my disappointment?

I'm banking on Every Man for Himself ending up as my most disappointing novel of the year.

Here's hoping.

* Curiously, Skene-Melvin makes similar mistakes with other novels I've covered: "In 1946, Margery Bonner (Mrs. Malcolm Lowry) set her The Shapes That Creep in Vancouver, and Jane Layhew chose Montreal as the scene for her Rx for Murder." In fact, The Shapes That Creep takes place entirely in Deep Cove, BC ("Deep Water" in the novel). Jane Layhew's Rx for Murder is set in Vancouver and its surroundings. Skene-Melvin goes on to write that E. Louise Cushing's 1953 mystery Murder's No Picnic features "Inspector MacKay of the Toronto Police Department." It does not. What's more, the novel takes place in Montreal and the Laurentians.

Related posts:

A Foggy Night in Hogtown

Sugar Pills and a Nurse Named Molly

Mrs Lowry's West Coast Murder Mystery

No Picnic