Showing posts with label Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Show all posts

11 June 2021

Love is a Long Shot on the Nose

The Calgary Herald, 29 September 1978

This weekend the 29th Toronto Jewish Film Festival presents Love on the Nose.

Do you know it?

I didn't before being contacted by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. A made-for-TV movie, Love on the Nose, aired on the CBC in September 1978... and then never again. The screenplay, credited to  "John Smith" (read: Ted Allan), tells the story of David (Saul Rubinek), a young Trotskyite who, thanks to his uncle (Paul Soles), lands a job at Keller's cigar store in Depression-era Montreal. The establishment is a front for a bookie joint, which allows David a good amount of time for on-the-job studies of Karl Marx.

Love on the Nose received glowing reviews; I've yet to find a critic who said a bad word. Much of the praise landed on Saul Rubinek. He played a character a decade younger than himself, though you'd never know it. Al Waxman was singled out for playing a crime boss, a character so very different than the Larry King we'd come to love on The King of Kensington. Reading the reviews, it's clear that to that point the critics hadn't recognized the actor's range.

Months later, the Windsor Star was still going on about it.

The Windsor Star, 9 January 1979

I was contacted by the Festival because of my writing on Allan this blog, in Canadian Notes & Queries, and in my most recent book. It was my pleasure to provide a short video postscript to the film in which I discuss Love on the Nose, its relationship to Allan's 1949 pulp Love is a Long Shot, and the lighter 1984 version published by McClelland & Stewart.

What I didn't mention – but should've – is that Love on the Nose is the best of the three.

Tickets for Love on the Nose can be purchased through this link.

You will not be disappointed.

Related posts:

01 January 2021

Gordon Pinsent's Gift



A Gift to Last
Gordon Pinsent and Grahame Woods
Toronto: Seal, 1978
215 pages

Gordon Pinsent celebrated his ninetieth birthday last summer. I recognized the day – July 12th – by raising a glass and downing its contents... and then I thought of this book.

A Gift to Last was a Salvation Army Thrift Store score. Did I pay fifty cents or a dollar? The sight of it brought back memories. A Gift to Last began in 1976 as a critically-acclaimed made-for-TV Christmas movie. Its popularity spawned a television series that ran for three seasons before Pinsent pulled the plug. 

In any other country, A Gift to Last would be aired annually as a Christmas classic. I saw it only once, in my adolescence, and so have to rely on this novelization. The early pages follow a familiar pattern. We begin with Harrison Sturgess – his very name suggests a stick-in-the-mud – the father of two children: sensible, strong-willed Jane, and "pale-skinned, fragile-looking" Clement. You might guess which child Harrison favours.


Clement is the novel's protagonist, though his Uncle Edgar is the hero. Portrayed by Pinsent, Edgar is larger than life and stronger than nature. He appears on Christmas Eve 1898, having made his way through a blinding snowstorm to his bother's expansive home in small town Ontario. Edgar is the black sheep of the family in that he joined the Royal Canadian Regiment, instead of following dour brothers Harrison and James into the Sturgess tannery business. A joker, a singer, a teller of tall tales, and heavy drinker, Edgar has an eye for the ladies. You might guess which brother this reader favours. 

I believe the novelization is faithful to its source material, but can't say to what degree because both movie and series haven't aired in over four decades. My memory is just not that good. I do remember that the movie was framed by Clement as an old man looking back on that Christmas of his youth. The novelization abandons all things 1976, instead presenting a linear story that begins in fin de siècle Tamarack (the series' fictitious small Ontario town) and ends just a few year later. Things happen, and as in the very best television, strength lies in the ways in which characters react and interact in the face of these events.


The first episode of the series – chapters four through six in the novelization – revolves around the illness and death of Harrison Sturgess (because Alan Scarfe, who'd played the character in the movie, was committed to the Stratford Festival). His unexpected demise changes the dynamic of the Sturgess family. In black silk weeds and weeping veil, the widowed Clara withdraws from her children, retreating into memories of her late husband. Cold and calculating James sees his chance to not only expand the tannery, which Harrison opposed, but control his later brother's finances. Eleven-year-old Clement, who is told he is now the man of the house, struggles with the distant relationship he had with his dead father. Edgar, who recognizes his surviving brother's conniving, is torn between duty to family and the Dominion.

Following the hot mess "shapeless jumble" that was The Whiteoaks of Jalna (1972), A Gift to Last is an all-too-rare example of Canadian television period drama. Like the programme, the novelization is rich in history. In her mourning, Clara recalls a trip to Montreal, where William Notman took her portrait, and she visited Savage, Lyman & Co on Notre-Dame Street.

Grahame Woods' novelization is unembellished, as one might expect from a former screenwriter. He understands pacing, story, and the use of dialogue, making for an entertaining adaptation of an entertaining show.


Novelizations of television programmes seem such quaint things today. Relics of a time before Betamax, next to the Fotonovel, they were the only way to revisit shows and movies on demand. Not that A Gift to Last made it to Betamax or VHS or Laserdisc or DVD. The series has never been offered by any streaming service. Hell, CBC Gem doesn't even offer The Beachcombers

How I wish I could see it again. Until then, I've got this.

A Christmas Miracle: I read A Gift to Last on Christmas Day, and wrote the above on Boxing Day.  The very next day, December 27, someone going by the name of Chance Wolf uploaded the movie to YouTube:


As it turns out, my memory wasn't so far off. The novelization pares down the script somewhat. Old man Clement appears more than I remember, and is much more sour. I didn't remember anything of the father's early morning drinking. Even more remarkable, my memory held nothing of actress Barbara Gordon's orange lounging attire.


Credits: The cover credits the novel to Gordon Pinsent and Graham Woods. The title page clarifies:


Trivia: Gordon Pinsent co-wrote and sang the theme song. It was released as a single by the CBC and on South Africa's Plum label.


His character is also given to singing. Lines several songs are found throughout the book, but for all my efforts I haven't been able to identify one. Could they be Pinsent's own?  Here's a example, from the family gathering to see Edgar off to the Second Boer War:
By eight o'clock, things had got quite serious and maudlin. Edgar decided that enough was enough, did a quick shuffle-step and started to sing. 
          In the middle of Auntie's petunias,
          Where I thought I'd rest for a spell,
          There along came a couple of lilies
          And their names were Virginia and Nell... 
"Not another word of that song, you old fool, Lizzy sniffed back a tear.
     "But you taught it to me."
     She slapped at him. "I did not. Have you ever heard anything quite so foolish.
Darn that Lizzy Sturgess for cutting him off.

More trivia: In 1978, the made-for-TV movie was adapted to the stage by Alden Nowlan and Walter Learning.

Object and Access: A mass market paperback. Eleven stills feature on the interior covers. Were this an American production they would've been interior plates. The novel itself is followed by the first two chapters of Charles Templeton's thriller An Act of God, "to be on sale August 23rd [1978], wherever paperbacks are sold."

As far as I've been able to tell, A Gift to Last enjoyed just one printing. I've not been able to find it in any library catalogue. A handful of used copies are listed for sale online, ranging in price from US$3.89 to US$34.97. Condition is a factor.

14 August 2020

They Fell in Love With the Actress



The Darling Illusion
Margerie Scott
London: Peter Davies, 1954
246 pages

Olivia Thompson's dead body lies in a slowly growing pool of blood, an apron belonging to her housekeeper, Mrs Baker, covering the head. Looking down, Inspector of Detectives John Sims believes the death a suicide, but Doctor Jordan Plant, the coroner, suggests otherwise: "I've been thinking—John, have you ever known a woman to shoot herself in the face?"

Olivia's final days favour the doctor's opinion. A young actress who had spent much of the Second World War in London, she'd returned to her Canadian hometown only four days earlier. In the short time between arrival and death, Olivia had purchased and moved into her childhood home. She'd hired Mrs Baker, ordered new furniture, and had started in on plans to renovate. No, nothing speaks to suicide, which made this reader question the inspector's rush to judgement. I didn't know what to think of the coroner, who has this to say about the murderer: "It's more likely to be a woman than a man to do a thing like that to another woman."

Is it? I honestly have no idea.

Save the housekeeper, Olivia had no contact with anyone except Louise Brand, Edith Temple, and Mary Anne Nesbit, each of whom had visited in the days leading to her death. Names from Olivia's past, they all have reasons to hate her. The novel's structure, coupled with Dr Plant's conviction, encourages the expectation that one of these women did the bloody deed. But which one?


Don't look to Doctor Jordan Plant or Inspector John Sims for the answer, they feature only in the first of the novel's five sections. "Louise," the second section, serves to introduce a living Olivia and her family. Mother Meg, was a music hall performer in the Old Country. Father Tom was a smitten medical student, disowned over his choice of mate. Together Meg and Tom emigrated to a small Canadian city (read: Windsor), where they raised their children, Olivia and Gerry, and earned a reputation as a couple of carefree oddballs.

But what of Louise? Though this is her section, she features hardly at all. It's instead given over to Reg Barnes. The son of a rumrunner who made a fortune during American prohibition, he's expected to marry pretty, buxom blonde Louise Williams, a member of a prominent family that had achieved its riches in the very same manner. The Barneses and Williamses have money and pretense, but Reg is attracted to Meg and Tom's way of life... and their daughter. On the eve of the announcement of his engagement to Louise – invitations are back from the printer – he asks Olivia to marry him. She declines, Reg marries Louise, and in the section's climax, calls out Olivia's name on his wedding night.

"Edith," the novel's second section is named for Edith Temple. A frigid widow with a fetish for cleanliness, she'd once married a younger man, and had endured sex until pregnant. Her unfortunate husband was mercifully shot to death whilst running rum to thirsty Americans. Edith gave birth to a son, Jack, whom she raised with her cold, cold heart. It's no wonder that he's drawn to Meg and Tom's warm, loving home. Like Reg, he develops a thing for Olivia. Things take a turn when Jack learns of Olivia's plans to study theatre in London. He pleads with her to stay, is met with derision, and kills himself.

Though only sixty pages in length, "Mary Anne" may be worthy of a paper. Historians will find interest in its portrait of a family, Meg and Tom's, in wartime London, but the real value comes in its depiction of homosexuality and attitudes towards same. We begin in Canada. Mary Anne Nesbit and younger brother Bill are orphaned in their early teens. Against all odds, with the use of an otherwise useless aunt, they manage to maintain their independence. When comes the war, Bill is sent to fight overseas. Mary Anne joins the Canadian Red Cross so as to be closer to her brother. On leave, Bill visits Meg and Tom, now living in London, and surprises everyone by proposing to Olivia. She accepts, only to frustrate her betrothed by deferring the wedding for the stage. Bill goes on a bender, ending up in a King's Road pub. A man named Christopher Bentley sidles up to him at the bar and, when Bill gets too drunk to stand, takes him back to his flat. From this point on, despite initial "self disgust" on Bill's part, he and Christopher become a couple.

Mary Anne cannot accept her bother's new relationship, as evidenced in this exchange:
"It's your fault, " Mary Anne jumped up and stood facing Olivia, her face working, her hands balled into fists. "I didn't want him to marry you because I knew you'd never make him happy; I know as much about you as you know about me, and I know you'e selfish and cruel and always have been, but you did get engaged to Bill and you should have kept your promise instead of making him so miserable that he went off and got drunk and took up with... this..." she paused, thinking, and Olivia said with deadly sweetness:
     "Is 'pansy' the word you're looking for?"
Citing this passage out of context is deceiving; Olivia can be mean, but here she's defending Bill. His relationship with Christopher is not only accepted, but embraced by Meg, Tom, Olivia, their upstairs neighbour... really, everyone except his sister.

Olivia's defence of Bill is made more interesting in that it is so uncharacteristic. She's depicted as a dislikable, selfish, self-centred, uncaring woman whose only desire is stardom on the stage. In this she's supported by her parents. Meg and Ted's return to England has nearly everything to do with helping Olivia to achieve her dreams, though they'd be quick to point out that it also has something to do with the overseas wartime service of their son Gerry.

Remember Gerry?

The male characters in The Darling Illusion serve no purpose other than to propel the plot. Ted is nothing more than the most adoring of husbands, happily supporting his wife's whims, including her sudden decision to return to England. Gerry, at best the ghost of a character, provides additional reason for Meg and Tom's relocation. Once his parents are reestablished in London, he is – quite literally – killed off. Reg, Jack, and Bill exist only to provide Louise, Edith, and Mary Anne with reasons to hate Olivia.

It wasn't until I'd finished the novel that I read this in the jacket copy: "The Darling Illusion is not a thriller or detective story, but a penetrating novel of character."

A bold claim, it is both true and false.

It's true that The Darling Illusion is not a thriller or detective story; Inspector of Detectives John Sims and coroner Jordan Plant are nowhere to be found after the eighth page. It is not true that The Darling Illusion is a penetrating novel of character. Of its population, only Meg, Edith, and Mary Anne live. This is an unusual novel in that its protagonist, Olivia, exists as little more than a sketch; she's not nearly so realized as the secondary female characters. In this lies the novel's great flaw. Reg, Jack, and Bill all fall in love with Olivia, but the reader will be hard pressed to understand.

Midway through the novel, the omniscient narrator shares this about Bill's feelings for Olivia: "He loved her, but didn't like her."

I've never quite understood how that works.

I didn't love her, I didn't like her, and I didn't hate her; she never seemed real. It's no wonder then that Louise, Edith, and Mary Anne didn't kill Olivia.

I spoil little in revealing that her death can be blamed on a mouse.

I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

Epigraph:


The lines come from Roberts' "The Tantramar Revisited," first published in 1883.

Query: In the years after the war, would Olivia have been able to fly into Canada with a loaded revolver?

The novel's final page hinges on the answer.

About the author:


In fact, The Darling Illusion was the author's third novel, following Life Begins for Father (London: Hutchinson, 1939) and Mine Own Content (1952).

Object: A slim hardcover featuring mustard-coloured boards. The jacket illustration is uncredited. I think the artist captured something of Olivia, a woman whom Dr Plant describes as a woman who "could give the impression of beauty."

My copy was purchased for nine American dollars from an Australian bookseller in mid-March. It arrived two weeks ago. As you might imagine, I'd pretty much given up.

It features this book trade label:


Access: Davies' The Darling Illusion enjoyed only one printing. There was a McClelland & Stewart edition, but I've never seen it. Copies of the novel can be found at Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and nine of our university libraries. Serving the city in which the author lived, the Windsor Public Library holds none of Scott's novels, though it does have Beyond All Recompense: The Story of the Honourable Profession of Nursing in Windsor (1954), a booklet she wrote for the Windsor Centennial Festival.

Three copies of The Darling Illusion are currently listed for sale online, the least expensive – ten Australian dollars – being in "Good+" condition. Were I to revisit my March purchase, I'd be tempted by the American bookseller offering The Darling Illusion (M&S edition) and her subsequent novel, Return to Today (Peter Davies edition), for forty-four American dollars.
My thanks to Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow for bringing Margerie Scott to my attention. His writing on the author can be found in this post.
Related post:

24 July 2020

Canada Reads 2020: "Shouts Out to Tara!"



After much delay, Canada Reads 2020 has come and gone. Congrats to Samra Habib, whose memoir We Have Always Been Here won the game show and was crowned "The One Book to Bring Canada Into Focus."

I listened with as much interest as ever, and was surprised to hear from people asking my opinion. This may have had something to do with "No Country for Old Books," an article I wrote last year for Canadian Notes & Queries. If so, the head doth swell.

As in other years, my thoughts take the form of complaints, like the 2014 decision to focus on the new.

Canadian Notes & Queries #104, Spring 2019

For those keeping track, all but one of the titles in this year's competition was published in 2019, the outlier being Eden Robinson's Son of a Trickster, which appeared in bookstores in 2017. The average age of a Canada Reads 2020 title was 13.5 months.

Canada Reads' preference for the front list was something I discovered through a letter CBC Books sent to publishers. An eye-opener, you can read it in "No Country for Old Books." In researching the game show, I've found CBC Books to be less than forthcoming. Imagine my interest when host Ali Hassan revealed, just yesterday, that Canada Reads has a style consultant named Tara Williams.


I remind that Canada Reads is a radio show.

My main quibble with Canada Reads remains. In its early years, panellists chose the books they wished to promote. In 2002, Leon Rooke, argued on behalf of The Stone Angel, a novel he'd read many times. The same can be said for Denise Bombardier, who in 2007 championed an old favourite in Gabrielle Roy's Children of My Heart.

This year, each of the "defenders" revealed that they had not read their respective books before being asked to participate.

We Have Always Been Here was a national bestseller before it made Canada Reads. It had won a Lambda and had been longlisted of the RBC Charles Taylor Award. The memoir was the subject of a Globe & Mail feature and a subsequent review. It was a 2019 "Globe 100" title. Published internationally, We Have Always Been Here was featured on The Next Chapter, and in the pages of  the Toronto StarNOW, Stylist, and something so distant as the Tampa Bay Times. CBC Books had been pushing We Have Always Been Here for more than a year, beginning with its excited 3 June 2019 article "10 Canadian books coming out in June we can't wait to read."

And yet... and yet, in making her case, Amanda Brugel, its defender, stated: "I wouldn't have been aware of this book until it had been brought to my attention via this competition."

Isn't this a sad state of affairs?

One last thing:

Ali, "The One Book to Bring Canada Into Focus"?

In 2020.

You're a comedian.

Was it too obvious?

Full disclosure: I wanted Eden Robinson's Son of a Trickster to win.

Related post:

26 February 2020

Reading Gérard Bessette on His Hundredth



Not for Every Eye [Le libraire]
Gérard Bessette [trans. Glen Shortliffe] 
Toronto: Macmillan, 1962
98 pages

Yesterday marked the centenary of Gérard Bessette's birth. I spent an hour or so reading this translation of his most celebrated work. A novella – not a novel, as Macmillan claims – it isn't very long.

Bessette's title, Le libraire (The Bookseller), refers to narrator and protagonist Hervé Jodoin. It takes the form of a journal written on Sundays, when the bars are closed. The first entry involves Jodoin's arrival in the fictional Quebec town of Saint Joachim, where he has accepted a job in a bookstore. In truth, it's as much a bookstore as, say, Indigo; the better part of the establishment has been given over to toys, stationary, and religious articles. The book department is in the rear, allowing Jodoin to pass a good portion of the day in a quiet snooze.

Killing time is Jodoin's main occupation. He quickly settles into a routine – "book shop, beer parlour, room; room, book shop, beer parlour." At the end of each workday, he heads for Chez Treffelé, a working class bar where he drinks alone at a table located conveniently near the lavatory. After that – meaning, after the bar closes – Jodoin makes for his rooming house bed.

A crack appears in what Jodoin describes as "the monotony of my life" when the store's proprietor, Léon Chicoine, determines that his new bookseller is a believer in liberty and is a proponent of free thought. Chicoine unlocks a door to what Jodoin had thought was a closet, revealing the "sanctum sanctorum," a small, windowless room lined with books found in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and listed by Abbé Bethléem and Père Georges Sagehomme.*


Chicoine demands Jodoin's discretion, and asks him to sell the volumes (at inflated prices) to "serious purchasers." Our hero agrees, and starts off for Chez Treffelé "caressing the innocent notion that perhaps after all I was not yet completely useless, that perhaps my life might have a meaning."

Sadly, Jodoin's new customers fail to give meaning to his life:
They sidle up to me with a conspiratorial air and murmur into my ear the name of some author or book, all this in the same tone of someone asking for a condom or a suppository in a drug store. Others are more evasive still; they shower me with meaningful glances and ask me to recommend "something a little out of the ordinary" or "something with a kick to it."
Jodoin quickly comes to resent the extra work involved in retrieving volumes from the sanctum sanctorum, recognizing most aren't at all interested in liberty and freedom of thought: "If these jokers are looking for an aphrodisiac, they can find more effective ones."

The crack widens and drama begins with a pimply-faced boy he recognizes as a student of the Saint Roch School, "located a couple of miles from the town in open country, in the middle of a vast domain belonging to  a community of clerics who combine the dairy industry with the rearing of young men." The student asks for a volume by Voltaire, and whether "through curiosity or a kind of fellow-feeling produced by nostalgia for my own school days," Jodoin retrieves a copy from the sanctum sanctorum.

Le libraire was first published in Paris because Bessette was unable to find a Quebec publisher. This was in 1960, mere months before the Quiet Revolution began. Within two years, the novel had found a Quebec publisher, and had been translated and published in English.


I received this copy of Not for Every Eye as a gift on my twenty-third birthday. I read it the very same summer. A university student at the time, I used its story, and the story of its publication, in writing papers on the Quiet Revolution.

Much of the revolution took place when I was asleep in a crib.

I have people like Gérard Bessette to thank that it did.
* Researching this piece, I was amused to discover that Georges Sagehomme's Répertoire alphabétique de plus de 7000 auteurs avec leurs ouvrages au nombre de 32000 (romans et pièces de théâtre) qualifiés quant à leur valeur morale (1931), was revised nine times; the last – published twenty-nine years after his death – is Répertoire alphabétique de 16700 auteurs 70000 romans et pièces de théâtre cotés au point de vue moral.
Trivia: There is an actual St-Joachim, Quebec, located roughly thirty kilometres downriver from Quebec City, but it bears no resemblance to the town depicted in Bessette's novel.

More trivia: Adapted by M. Charles Cohen for CBC Television (1963) and CBC Radio (1967). The former starred Jack Creley, Larry Mann, and Barbara Hamilton.

Object: A slim volume consisting of white boards with purple type, as an objet Not for Every Eye is my favourite Macmillan of Canada book. Credit goes to Leslie SmartArnaud Maggs designed the jacket.


Bibliophiles will appreciate the adverts for other Macmillan titles on the back cover. I own three, but have read only one.

Access: The translation may be neglected, but it is not rare. Very Good copies are offered online for as little as ten dollars. I've seen some evidence of a softcover edition that may have been a rebind. It would seem that in 1977 the novella was absorbed into Macmillan's moribund Laurentian Library, though I've yet to encounter a copy. I have, however, seen the 1984 edition, issued by Exile (right). It is still available for purchase.

A second English translation, which I've not read, was published in 1999 by Guernica Editions. Its translator, Steven Urquhart has written a very interesting essay about the need and process:
Retranslating a Quebec Classic
The Urquhart translation is also still in print.

Remarkably, there is a Czech translation, Skandal V Knihkpectvi (Scandal in the Bookstore; Prague: Odeon, 1974). Collectors may be interested in a copy inscribed to Bessette by translator Ea Masnerova on offer from an Oregon bookseller.


Copies of Le libraire are plentiful. The cheapest copy I've seen offered online is going for one Yankee dollar. Few copies of the first edition, published in Paris by Jilliard, are in evidence.

22 July 2017

CBC Books' French Problem



The time has come to ask why CBC Books demonstrates so little regard for this country's French language writing. Published yesterday, its 150-title "Great Canadian Reading List" features just six books in translation from French into English. That's one fewer than the number written by women named Margaret.

Coincidentally, CBC Books' abysmal "100 Novels that make you feel proud to be Canadian" from three years ago also featured six. The number in its 2015 "100 young adult books that make you proud to be Canadian" list was one.

I'm not the first to note that the maple leaf featured in its photo is Japanese, though I do believe I am the first to point out that the pages are blank.

Related posts:


25 August 2015

Toronto, Life, the Subliminal Seduction of the Innocent and a Morley Callaghan Mystery



Toronto Life, vol. 4, no. 7 (7 June 1970)

There are jokes to be made about Toronto Life having to travel two hours outside the city for a cover story, but this Montrealer is above all that. What's more, this Montrealer deserves credit for saving this magazine from the pulper.

Just look at that cover!

It would've been displayed at United Cigar Stores four years before I made the leap from Allancroft Elementary to Beaconsfield High. A to B, it was at the latter that I encountered Wilson Bryan Key's Subliminal Seduction, the closest thing the school library had to a dirty book.

Key, who taught briefly at the University of Western Ontario, saw sex everywhere. In fact, he claimed the very word – SEX – was written in caps on images of ice cubes used in ads for hard liquor.

SEX on ice? I couldn't see it – and as a twelve year-old I was really looking. That said, my fifty-two year-old self did notice something about the cover of this old Toronto Life.

Do you?

Different times, right? This is the issue's subscription card:


Forty-five years have passed. "Stratford As You'll Like It", the promised "Fun guide to Stratford the turned-on town", is now as dated as author David Smith's wardrobe.


Smith's hook, dull and lacking a lure, is all about how much the town has changed since the Stratford Festival's 1953 beginning:
Boutiques now line Ontario Street where the dry goods shops used to be. The "hippies" on the street are probably townspeople. Stratford even has its own topless dancer, at 56" more for your money than anywhere else I know.
It doesn't say much that Smith failed to interest the local historian in me, though I did enjoy the photos, like this one of nearby St Marys, where I now live.


Like something from another century… which, of course, it is. And look, here's the author in Olin Brown's, "where confectionary is still made by hand – and tastes delicious."


Toronto Life informs that David Smith is a "Toronto couturier".

Odd how few recognizable names feature in the bylines. This Toronto Life is no Montrealer: no short stories, no poetry, no book reviews; though you will find an automotive column, a cooking column and a column concerning interior decoration.

Not to say that literary types didn't contribute. Our very own E.L. James, Marika Robert, whose lone novel A Stranger and Afraid I read last year, has a travel piece on Rome. Eric LeBourdais, nephew of Gwethalyn Graham, provides a very long article: "Why We Need the Spadina and How It Can Lead Toronto into the 21st Century", in which he draws on a study by automotive industry front General Research Corporation of Burbank, California.


Heather Cooper's illustrations did not convince, though I did marvel at those demonstrating how the proposed expressway "would skirt Casa Loma and provide a partial interchange at Davenport":


"READ ON FOR FACTS ABOUT THE SPADINA AND THE FUTURE" encourages the magazine, between ads for General Motors, Shell, Chrysler, Chevrolet, Maserati and a Lincoln Mercury dealership.

To be perfectly fair, the same  issue features a snap of novelist David Lewis Stein making the rounds in his fight against the very same project.


I'm afraid that the only other sign of Toronto's literary scene comes through a recycled press release:


Thumbs Down on Julien Jones – note correct title – "his first book in seven years", was never published; I've been keeping an eye out for decades. Callaghan began the novel in 1942 as his follow-up to More Joy in Heaven. Twenty-one years later, he told the New York Times that it was a month from completion. And here it is again in 1970, presented as something on the cusp of publication.

Callaghan read four excerpts on CBL. Some of it was adapted and published in 1973 as a short story, "The Meterman, Caliban, and Then Mr. Jones", in son Barry's Exile. The following year, the same was dramatized in an episode of the CBC's The Play's the Thing.

I keep expecting Thumbs Down on Julien Jones to be published; Library and Archives Canada holds several drafts. Of And Then It All Came Together, described in Toronto Life as a novel in progress, there is no trace; nothing with that title is found amongst his papers. Throughout the latter half of 1970, Callaghan talked about the work as something he wouldn't talk about.

Maybe not talking about it was enough.

Could be I've said too much.

I'll shut up.



RIP

I would be remiss not to recognize that Morley Callaghan died twenty-five years ago today. His was the last death of which I learned by way of a newspaper. I was walking across Square St-Henri when I read the news on the front page of the Gazette.

Different times, right?


Related posts:

19 May 2015

CBC's Awful List, Radio-Canada's Disheartening List and Perhaps the Best Book List I've Ever Seen



It's been nearly a year since CBC Books unveiled its crummy 100 NOVELS THAT MAKE YOU PROUD TO BE CANADIAN. Don't know about you, but I feel pretty much the same about my citizenship.

CBC Books' 100 Novels list was as poorly conceived as it was presented. Writing here last July, I dismissed it as a grab bag of recent novels peppered with a few CanLit course mainstays. Given the claim that "everything from cultural impact and critical reception to reader response" was considered, I wondered how it could be that Anne of Green Gables and The Tin Flute were not included. There were other omissions, of course, but none nearly so glaring.

A week later, CBC Books issued a patch – CBC Books 100: Bonus 10* – featuring Anne of Green GablesThe Tin Flute and eight other recommendations "from passionate readers all over the world":


Also included was this short note: "one of the most popular suggestions was the great Nobel Prize-winning Alice Munro. We think Alice is one of the greatest Canadian writers to ever hold a pen, but this list is reserved for novels only."

And so a decades-old debate comes to an end. You lose Mary Rubio. You too, Coral Ann Howels. Lives of Girls and Women isn't a novel, it's a collection of short stories. Yes, this list is reserved for novels only… except that they then added Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf.

CBC Books hasn't fixed that gaffe – not yet anyway. Nothing but silence has followed the end of that note on Munro:
Celebrate Alice by checking out all our coverage of her life and legacy and stay tuned – we may have more 100 lists up our sleeves.
God, I hope not.


Now Radio-Canada, has weighed in with Les incontournables, 100 Canadian books to read once in your lifetime. (I suggest that at least once is what's meant). The best that can be said is that it's not as bad a list. Les incontournables shares all the faults of CBC Books' 100 Novels, but to lesser degrees. Where the former includes fourteen English-language titles, the latter has six in French. Those figures alone signal that neither list is to be taken seriously. Both share an even greater flaw in that they rely so heavily on recent works. Most of the titles found on the 2014 CBC Books list were published between 2000 and 2013. Yes, most

Take a moment to let that sink in.

The new Radio-Canada list includes 41 titles published between 2000 and 2014 – including Jean-François Lépine's Sur la ligne de feu, which was released all of seven months ago. To borrow from Jean-Louis Lessard's comments on Les incontournables, il faut laisser le temps faire son oeuvre.


Has it all been worth it? Yes and no. CBC Books' 100 Novels was meant to "start a dialogue", but the only comments I heard were from friends who expressed surprise at how few they'd read. Les incontournables, on the other hand, seems to have inspired M Lessard to produce Liste des œuvres québécoises importants. His criteria: the quality of the work, cultural or social impact, the representativeness of the time and influence. It's about as perfect and well-considered as any book list I've ever seen; anyone looking to read the essential works of French-speaking Quebec will find no better.

An observation and query to close this rant: Where Les incontournables includes titles that are out of print, all of CBC Books' 100 Novels – including the Bonus 10 – are in print. Surely this isn't a coincidence. And what are we to make of the fact that nearly every one is currently published by a foreign-owned house?

McClelland & Stewart is owned by Bertelsmann. The CBC is in decline. Suddenly, I'm not feeling so proud.

* Curiously, the list itself was rebranded as "CBC Books 100: Novels that make you proud to be Canadian".


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11 May 2015

What's Going on with The Plouffe Family?



The Plouffe Family [Les Plouffe]
Roger Lemelin [trans. Mary Finch]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1950
373 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through


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09 July 2014

Why You Shouldn't Feel Bad about the 100 Novels That Make You Proud to Be Canadian List (and why the CBC should)



"Depressing how few of these I've read," writes a friend. Minutes later, others begin chiming in with similar sentiment… and the list is shared. Such is the power of Facebook. The grey gloom generator is CBC Books' "100 NOVELS THAT MAKE YOU PROUD TO BE A CANADIAN".

Novels that make me proud to be Canadian? Do I really need help? After eight years of Harper Government™ rule, perhaps I do. But this isn't going to do it:

(cliquez pour agrandir)
(cliquez pour agrandir)
A remarkably democratic list, is it not?  No author is represented more than once except Margaret Atwood because… oh, I don't know… because she's Margaret Atwood? That fifty titles are by women and fifty are by men is, I am certain, no happy accident. Modest effort has been made toward regional balance, and the Canadian mosaic appears well in evidence – that is, until one realizes that there are only six French-language titles.

Six? And not one is The Tin Flute. What gives? The list's all too brief introduction may provide an explanation:


I see. Canada has a wealth of writers, and they're telling today's tales, and they're revisiting our past.

So, it's contemporary writers only then. Got it.

But wait, what's Hugh MacLennan doing on the list? And Robertson Davies? And Mordecai Richler? And Carol Shields? They're not "telling today's tales." Hell, Stephen Leacock is so long dead that his books have been in the public domain for nearly two decades.

(About the "novels are all in print" bit: Was that a criteria? Could this explain Margaret Millar's absence?)

Eaton's, Montreal, 1947
For anyone considering "everything from cultural impact and critical reception to reader response", The Tin Flute is an inescapable add. Such was the acclaim that the Toronto Eaton's – the Toronto Eaton's –advertised and sold the book in French. It won a Governor General's Award and the Prix Femina. It has been published in fourteen languages, adapted to film, is taught across the country and has never gone out of print. Go ahead, name another novel that has had greater cultural impact, name one that had greater reader response.

How about Anne of Green Gables?

Anne of Green Gables isn't on the list.

The muddled became muddied when guest host Suhana Meharchand opened discussion about the list on Cross Country Checkup. Forget all that stuff about  novels to make you feel proud, this was now "100 must-read Canadian novels", a list of "great Canadian novels" through which one would "become an expert in Canadian fiction [emphasis mine]". Ms Meharchand was then joined by CBC Books producer Erin Balser who revealed it to be nothing more than a list of 100 Canadian novels some CBC producers think everyone should read. She went on to say that the goal was to present "a balance of classic and contemporary books because we wanted to represent the whole history of Canadian literature."

If we're to consider novels written by those who "call or once called Canada home", the first up is Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague. It was published in 1769, one hundred and forty-three years before Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, the oldest book on the list. A further thirty-three years pass before we encounter another.


Ms Balser's words to the contrary, there is no "balance of classic and contemporary". Over half the books on the list were published between 2000 and 2013 (there are no titles from 2014). Seventy-nine of the books were published in the last twenty years. Eight of the books were published in 2009 alone, more than the 'sixties and 'seventies combined.

"We all know that readers love lists," enthused Suhana Meharchand. True enough. Here's mine:

SIX NOVELISTS WHO "CALL OR ONCE CALLED CANADA HOME" NOT FOUND ON THE 100 NOVELS LIST
Saul Bellow
Mavis Gallant
Malcolm Lowry
Antonine Maillet
Brian Moore 
Gabrielle Roy
It was hoped that "100 NOVELS THAT MAKE YOU PROUD TO BE A CANADIAN" would "start a dialogue in this country", but this list is another opportunity wasted. Messy and poorly presented, it is nothing more than a grab bag of recent novels peppered with a few CanLit course mainstays. Predictably, for this is today's CBC, most of the Giller and Canada Reads winners are included.

For the record, I've read nineteen of the hundred.

That number doesn't depress me in the least.

An explanation (of sorts):
There's actually two Margaret Atwood novels. The second one is Handmaid's Tale [sic]. So there are only two because we felt there should only be two – even though we all love Margaret Atwood deeply.
– Erin Balser, Cross Country Checkup, 29 June 2014
Errata: A sharp-eyed reader points out that Joseph Boyden also has two titles on the list. Thank you, Edith!

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