Showing posts with label Buell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buell. Show all posts

20 December 2018

Best Books of 2018 (none of which are from 2018)



I'm right now reading Thomas Jerome Seabrook's Bowie in Berlin, a book that has nothing at all to do with Canadian literature. The next up on deck is The Great Gatsby, which I'm in the habit of rereading every three, four or five years. Given this busy season, it's doubtful that I'll read another Canadian book before year's end. And so, the time has come for my annual reading obit, beginning with the three out-of-print books most deserving of reissue:



The Thread of Flame
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1920

The first novel the reverend wrote after the Armistice, this is the story of a man who, suffering from shell shock, loses his identity and memory. Essential reading for anyone studying the depiction of PTSD in literature.

The Empty Sack
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1921

A tale of two families, both trying to make sense of the post-Great War world. Murder features, rather unexpectedly. I dare not spoil, but I have reason to think that it influenced Ben Hecht's The Front Page.


Blencarrow
Isabel Mackay
Toronto: Allen, 1926

The last of five novels penned by a woman known more commonly as Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, its depiction of failed promise and domestic abuse had me wondering how it is that she is so forgotten.



Between this blog and my Canadian Notes & Queries column, I read and reviewed twenty-five forgotten and/or neglected Canadian books this year, five of which are actually in print:


It's rare that I let a year go by without tacking a Grant Allen novel. Miss Cayley's Adventures is one of the most popular, but not with me. Oh, I liked it well enough... but there are much better. In the midst of reading the novel I posted a list of my ten favourite Grant Allen novels. Revising that list, I would place Miss Cayley's Adventures at number eight, between The British Barbarians and Recalled to Life.


What fun! Last year, Robert Barr's Revenge! made my list of three books most deserving of a reprint. The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont would've been a shoe-in for this year had it not been available from the good folks at Gaslight Crime of Harpenden, Herts. Their edition features "The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs" and "The Adventure of the Second Swag," two Sherlock Holmes parodies not included in the original. The most entertaining read this year.


The Invisible Worm, Margaret Millar's 1941 debut had been long beyond both my financial reach and that of Ontario's interlibrary loan system. At long last, I was able to read it thanks to Syndicate Books' Collected Millar. Or is it called The Complete Margaret Millar? Either way, I'm appreciative. Collectors should take note that a copy of the first UK edition (above left), published in 1943 by John Long, is still available from Dacobra Books, Belleville, NSW, Australia. Price: US$520.


The Lively Corpse is Rose's Last Summer under another name. Margaret Millar's tenth novel, it closes The Dawn of Domestic Suspense, the second volume in the Collected Millar. The third volume is titled The Master at Her Zenith. This is Millar ascending.


The author's second novel, The Box Garden was published fifteen years before The Stone Diaries made her a household name. I'm embarrassed to admit – yet I must admit – that it is the only Carol Shields novel I've ever read. On the other hand, does her work really have a place in a blog devoted to forgotten, neglected, and suppressed writing?

This year I was involved in returning John Buell's Four Days to print. The author's second novel, it isn't so well known as his debut, The Pyx, but I think it is his best (and here I acknowledge that I haven't yet read his 1976 novel Playground). A Ricochet Book from Véhicule Press, the new edition features an introduction by Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow).


I didn't publish a book this year, but did contribute a few photos, ticket stubs, and a handbill to my friend Jim Dooley's Red Set: A History of Gang of Four. This is what comes from being a pack rat.


Praise this year goes to American Frank L. Packard scholar Michael Howard, who has begun reissuing the Jimmie Dale/Grey Seal novels in annotated editions.


The next, featuring The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale and Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue, will be released in the New Year. True labours of love, they can be purchased through American online booksellers.

Resolutions, I have a few:
  • I resolved last year to read more books by women. And I did! Eleven of the twenty-five I reviewed were by women writers. Let's see if I can't improve on that number.
  • I resolved last year to read more books by French language writers... and failed miserably. What I'd thought was an all-time low in 2017 – one! – was surpassed with a zero count in 2018. I hang my head in shame.
  • I resolve to finish one of the two books I'm currently writing.
  • Finally, as always, I resolve to continue kicking against the pricks.
How 'bout you?

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24 September 2018

The Return of John Buell's Four Days



John Buell is Montreal's most unjustly neglected novelist, and this is his most unjustly neglected novel. Four Days is so strong a work that it alone caused Edmund Wilson to declare Buell one of Canada's foremost writers. Beginning with the 1962 Farrar, Straus & Culahy, the novel enjoyed several editions and translations, then slipped out of print in the early 'nineties.

No more.


This week sees its return, following The Pyx, John Buell's debut novel, as the thirteenth Ricochet Book published by Véhicule Press. Montreal writer Trevor Ferguson, also known by his "John Farrow" pen name, provides a new foreword. As Ricochet series editor, I'm proud to have worked with publishers Simon Dardick and Nancy Marrelli in returning Four Days to print.

I first wrote about Four Days in this 2011 Dusty Bookcase review:
Four Days in Darkest Quebec
It is one of Canada's greatest novels.

Edmund Wilson would agree.

John Buell
1927 - 2013
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05 March 2018

The Pyx Censored!



I spent a couple of hours this past weekend researching John Buell's second novel, Four Days, first published fifty-five years ago by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. And why not? Buell is one of our finest novelists – Edmund Wilson thought so – but he is also one of our most unjustly neglected. I was honoured to help usher his debut, The Pyx, back into print last year as part of the Ricochet Books series.

The Pyx was roundly praised, enjoyed numerous translations, and was adapted to the screen in a not so bad film starring Christopher Plummer and Karen Black. Four Days too was praised. It has always been in the shadow of Buell's debut, and yet it is the better novel. In fact, Four Days is the author's best novel and is one of the greatest novels set, as least partly, in Montreal.

Why was I researching?

I'll leave you to guess.

An unexpected discovery came from an unlikely source, Anne Montagnes' review of Four Days in the 24 February 1962 edition of the Globe & Mail:
This, Mr. Buell's second novel, is of a texture with his first, The Pyx. Both reveal his careful study of Graham Greene – the concern with outlaw characters, the struggle between good and evil, the ever-narrowing pursuit both spiritual and physical, the compassionate Catholicism that appears before even those who spurn it, the violence, the pity. Unlike Mr. Greene, Mr. Buell writes with an economy of viewpoint and action, a simple unfolding of his story. Furthermore, Mr. Buell is never off-colour, as Mr. Greene sometimes is, making it even stranger that at least one branch of the Toronto Public Library has, because of vociferous complaints, removed The Pyx from its open shelves.
This is the first I'd learned of The Pyx being attacked by the censors... and in Protestant Toronto, no less. Further research uncovered this Letter to the Editor (6 March 1962):


The Toronto Public Library website informs that six copies of the Ricochet Books edition are in circulation. Only one copy of the Farrar, Straus & Cudahy edition survives.

It's reference only.

A coincidence, I'm sure.

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11 December 2017

The Year's Best Books in Review – A.D. 2017; Featuring Three Books Deserving Resurrection



I finished reading my last book of the year yesterday afternoon; there is no way the I'll reach the end of the next before January. And so, the time has come for the annual recap of the best dusty books reviewed here and in Canadian Notes & Queries.

Twenty-seventeen was an unusual year for the Dusty Bookcase. Roughly twice as many books were covered in the first half as in the second. Promotion of the Dusty Bookcase book, The Dusty Bookcase: A Journey Through Canada's Forgotten, Neglected and Suppressed Writing, had something to do with it, but so too did other projects. The sad result is that just nineteen books were reviewed in 2017... and here I include that for the book I finished yesterday, which has yet to be written and posted. Either way, it is an all-time low.

Happily, despite the relatively small number – nineteen! – it was very easy to come up with this year's list of three books deserving a return to print:


Revenge!
Robert Barr

Barr stands with May Agnes Fleming and Grant Allen as one of our three most interesting Victorian novelists, and yet we ignore them all. This 1896 collection of twenty short stories delves into the darkest, deadliest areas of the soul.



Behind the Beyond
Stephen Leacock

First published in 1913, this is one of titles dropped in the New Canadian Library's bloody post-Ross purge. It stands amongst Professor Leacock's best collections. Interested publishers should consider the sixteen A.H. Fish illustrations featured in the first edition.


In Quest of Splendour
[Pierre le magnifique]
Roger Lemelin
[trans. Harry Lorin Binsse]

Lemelin's third novel, and very nearly his last, this pales beside the sales of the other three, but I think it is his best. Harry Binsse's 1955 translation enjoyed a single printing. Time has come for a new edition.



Three works reviewed this year are in print:


First published in 1902, the oldest is Ralph Connor's somewhat nostalgic, somewhat autobiographical novel Glengarry School Days. Last I looked, the 2009 New Canadian Library edition with introduction by John Lennox was still available from Penguin Random House. For how much longer, I wonder.


Shadow on the Hearth (1950) by Judith Merril is far from the best novel I read this year, but is recommended just the same. A Cold War nightmare, it has as much to do with the H-bomb as state secrecy and control. It features as one of three novels collected in Spaced Out: Three Novels of Tomorrow, published by the New England Science Fiction Society Press.


Wives and Lovers (1954) is generally considered the last Margaret Millar non-Mystery... which isn't to say that there isn't mystery or that its characters don't do some very bad things. The very best novel I read this year, it can be found in The Master at Her Zenith, the third volume in Syndicate Books' Collected Millar.

I was involved in resurrecting only one book this year:


The Pyx
John Buell

The twelfth title in the Ricochet Books series, I consider this the best. A debut novel, first published in 1959 by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, it has drawn considerable praise through the decades. This new edition has an introduction by Sean Kelly.



Praise this year goes to Biblioasis' ReSet series. Now, I do recognize the optics – Biblioasis being the publisher of The Dusty Bookcase – but, really, is it not overdue? For six years now, roughly half the life of the press, it has been bringing back some of our most unjustly neglected titles. Early in the New Year, I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, the collected stories of Norman Levine, will be added to the series.


Speaking of the New Year, I don't think it's too early for resolutions. Here are mine:
  • I resolve to read more books by women (two-thirds of my 2017 reading were books by men);
  • I resolve to read more books by French language writers (In Quest of Splendour was the only one read in 2017);
  • I resolve to read and review more forgotten, neglected and suppressed books than I did this past year;
  • I resolve to continue kicking against the pricks. 
You?

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26 June 2017

News from a Messy Desk in a Dusty Room



The publication of The Dusty Bookcase – the book – approaches. I spent several hours last week going over copy edits, which is one reason there hasn't been much activity here. The second reason is that changes are afoot.

More anon.


Today, I wanted to announce the return to print of John Buell's The Pyx, the twelfth title in the Ricochet Books series. As series editor, I couldn't be more proud. To be honest, after Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly, I never thought I'd be involved in the republication of so important a novel. First published in 1959 by no less a house than Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, The Pyx has been roundly praised. It enjoyed numerous editions and translations, remaining in print for over three decades. It was last published in 1991 by HarperCollins Canada – curiously, I've yet to encounter this edition.

The new Ricochet Books reissue features "A Reminiscence By Way of Introduction" by the author's former student Sean Kelly.

If you're knew to Ricochet, The Pyx is a great place to start. If you've been buying the series, thank you!


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08 May 2017

The Return of The Pyx



It's no great secret – and certainly no deadly secret – that this spring's Ricochet Books title will be John Buell's masterful debut novel, The Pyx. The reissue was announced a few months ago, though I haven't mentioned it here.

I should have. I've never felt so proud in working to return a title to print.

No Canadian novelist has been so unjustly neglected as John Buell. He was published by Farrar, Straus, he was praised by Edmund Wilson, and he has been out of print for more than a quarter century. I never once heard John Buell's name in the years I studied at Concordia University... the very same university at which he was teaching.

Wish I'd known.

Sean Kelly was one of Buell's students. This was years earlier, when The Pyx was first published. Sean was good enough to write the introduction to the new Ricochet edition. It begins:
In 1959, when his novel The Pyx was published, John Buell was a 32-year old professor at Loyola College, where I was a first-year student and he saved my life.
The first half of Sean's introduction has just been published in Concordia University Magazine. You can read it and the rest of the issue online – gratis – through this link. Sean's piece features on the third to last page.


The Ricochet edition of The Pyx will hit bookstores later this month. It can be pre-ordered through the publisher and online booksellers.

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13 July 2015

John Buell Meets Ross Macdonald


The Pyx
John Buell
New York: Crest, 1960
De zaak Ferguson [The Ferguson Affair]
John Ross Macdonald [pseud. Kenneth Millar]
Rotterdam: Combinatie, 1963
Artist: Barye Phillips.

A Bonus:

Una lunga striscia d'asfalto [The Shrewsdale Exit]
John Buell
Milan: Mondadori, 1975
John Buell meets Easyriders magazine.

Artist: unknown.

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12 December 2014

The Christmas Offering of Books – 1914 and 2014



The image is small, but the selection is huge. This full page advert from the 2 December 1914 Globe & Mail gives good idea of the books Canadians received during the first Christmas of "the Great European War". Mixed in with the expected - de luxe editions of Dickens, new fiction from popular novelist Alice Hegan Rice, cookbooks, Boy Scouts' books and hymn books (Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist) – we find poetry by W.H. Drummond, Robert W. Service, Pauline Johnson, and Katherine Hale. There are also these "New Books by Distinguished Canadian Authors":
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich - Stephen Leacock
His Royal Happiness - Mrs. Everard Coates
The Patrol of the Sundance Trail - Ralph Connor
You Never Know Your Luck - Sir Gilbert Parker
The Miracle Man - Frank L. Packard
Hoof and Claw - Charles G.D. Roberts
Seeds of Pine - Janey Canuck
Recollections and Records of Toronto of Old - W.H. Pearson
The Leacock and Packard are recommended. I've not read the rest.

(cliquez pour agrandir)
With just twelve days left until this Christmas, time has come for some suggestions, beginning with this year's favourite reads. Before I do, it needs be pointed out that 2014 proved the least rewarding in my casual exploration of Canada'a suppressed, ignored and forgotten. Of the thirty-two titles reviewed here and in Canadian Notes & Queries, I can count on one hand the number that deserve to be returned to print. Tradition dictates I pick three. These are they:

Intent to Kill 
Michael Bryan [pseud. Brian Moore]
New York: Dell, 1956

Brian Moore's sixth pulp, the third to be set in Montreal, proved riveting. It's a shame that these early titles have been kept out of print, but you have to admire the writer's estate for honouring his wishes.
The Iron Gates
Margaret Millar
New York: Dell, 1960

That The Iron Gates ranks as one of the year's best should come as no surprise – two years ago Millar took all three spots. "Arguably the most talented English-Canadian woman writer of her generation," I wrote in the Canadian Encyclopedia.

Fasting Friar
Edward McCourt
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963

Before finding Fasting Friar, I'd never thought much about McCourt – he once won Ryerson's All-Canada Prize, right? – but its subject, censorship, did attract. A flawed yet interesting novel featuring what may be the most reluctant protagonist I've ever met.  


Given this year's slim pickings, I may as well mention the also rans: Grant Allen's The Devil's Die. and A Lot to Make Up For by the late John Buell. Used copies of the five are easily found for sale online.

Two books reviewed these past twelve are currently in print:

The first, Douglas Sanderson's Pure Sweet Hell (1957), is paired with Catch a Fallen Starlet (1960) in an edition available from Stark House Press. Both favourites, I rank them just beneath Hot Freeze and The Darker Traffic, the first two Mike Garfin novels, as the best things the man ever wrote. Stark House has no Canadian distributor, but books can be bought through the Stark House Press website.

I'm not so enthusiastic about Cherylyn Stacey's How Do You Spell Abducted? (1996), a slight, slim YA novel about an estranged father who runs off to the States with his three children. Michael Coren had a field day with this one, misrepresenting the book in the Financial Post and Books in Canada. Politician Julius Yankowsky (MLA, Edmonton Beverly-Belmont) got so riled up that he called for the thing to be banned. Buy it, if only to stick it to both men.

The year saw two books reviewed in previous years return to print; I was involved with both:

All Else is Folly
Peregrine Acland
Toronto: Dundurn, 2013

This 1929 novel of the Great War – by a veteran of the Great War – was praised by Ford Madox Ford, Bertrand Russell, Frank Harris and Robert Borden. This new edition, the first in over eight decades, features an Introduction by myself and James Calhoun.


The Long November
James Benson Nablo
Montreal: Véhicule, 2013

Featured on my 2010 list of books deserving a return to print, this 1946 novel received a good amount of attention in its day. Subsequent neglect can be explained – but only in part – by the author's early death. The new edition includes an Introduction by yours truly.


Go get 'em!

The Globe & Mail, 12 December 1914

29 January 2014

Remembering John Buell: A Lot to Make Up For



A Lot to Make Up For
John Buell
Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 1990

John Buell died last month. I know because a friend forwarded the obituary his family placed in The Gazette. The newspaper itself did nothing. The fourth estate, which in life never properly recognized the novelist, has been silent on Buell's passing.

Edmund Wilson, the great American critic, praised John Buell's novels. Forget him. Wilson knew nothing about Canadian literature. O Canada, the book he crafted for the centennial, is an embarrassing late career cash-in. And yet, for all his flailing, Bunny landed truth with Buell.


John Buell's novels came onto us in fits and starts. The first, The Pyx (1959) and Four Days (1962), were followed by a decade of silence; then came The Shrewsdale Exit (1972) and Playground (1976). A Lot to Make Up For, his fifth and final novel, broke an even longer silence. Short, yet complex, it centres on three damaged characters: Adele Symons, Stan Hagan, and Martin Lacey. Things come together. A single mother, Adele is cleaning houses in Quebec's Eastern Townships. Stan is searching for her, intent on righting past wrongs. Martin offers Stan room and board in exchange for help with his crops. Addiction plays a role in all three lives. Past addiction. A Lot to Make Up For is a story of recovery, redemption and restoration. Positive, it gives hope, yet there is no happy ending.

The words end, but not the story.

The Globe & Mail, 4 August 1990
Object: A 202-page hardcover in tan boards. The HarperCollins Canada edition is so similar to the American Farrar, Straus & Giroux that the author bio reads:


Access: Concordia University, the institution at which the author taught for thirty-seven years, does not have a copy.

More than decent copies of the Canadian first edition are available online for as little as eight dollars. The American first edition can be had for a buck. Neither HarperCollins Canada nor Farrar, Straus & Giroux went back for second printings.

In the autumn of 1991, HarperCollins Canada reissued the novel as a trade paperback. I've never seen a copy. A Lot to Make Up For is the alone amongst Buell's five novels in having not been translated.

"In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in John's name to the charity you support."

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