A Man Reaps What He Sows

The Homesteaders: A Novel of the Canadian West
Robert J.C. Stead
Toronto: Musson , 1916
347 pages

The first edition is bound in boards reading The Homesteader when it should be The Homesteaders. The distinction is important, particularly in the early chapters, though it becomes less so as the novel progresses.

The Homesteaders opens in Quebec's Eastern Townships as one-room schoolteacher John Harris watches students scatter at the end of the day. He's soon joined by his fiancée Mary. 

This being 1881, John is expected to support his betrothed, and so has made the decision to give up his paltry teacher's salary and try his hand at farming in Manitoba. The plan, which John has taken care to hide, involves traveling west the next spring, locating a homestead, constructing some sort of shelter, and breaking ground. If all goes well, he'll return for Mary. If not, well, there's aways the year after that.

There's something about Mary in these early pages. Lithe and beautiful, she is not "a daughter of the sturdy backwoods pioneers, bred to hard work in field and barnyard," rather "she was sprung from gentler stock." Mary is also the only character in this novel to demonstrate a sense of humour, as when she ribs John:

“Always at your studies,” she cried, as he sprang eagerly to his feet. “You must be seeking a professorship. But I suppose you have to be always brushing up,” she continued, banteringly. “Your oldest pupil must be—let me see—not less than eight?”

Clever and quick, Mary was onto her fiancé from the start. “I declare, if it isn’t Manitoba!" she says, snatching a map from his hands. "What next? Siberia or Patagonia? I thought you were still in the Eastern Townships.”

Mary insists on accompanying John west, moving up their wedding day in the process. What follows is not an account of their honeymoon, rather descriptions of lengthy train travel to Emerson and an oh-so-slow trek northward to tracts of land Ottawa is offering gratis to men who prove themselves able to establish working farms. The couple's first marital home is a windowless sod shack with a heavy blanket for a door.

These are the novel's most interesting pages, no doubt drawn from Stead's childhood memories and experiences. Born in Ontario's Lanark Highlands, as a toddler Robert, his father (Robert, Sr). and mother (tellingly, Mary) established a Manitoba homestead in the very same year as John and Mary Harris.

Robert J.C. Stead
Bookseller & Stationer, October 1916

The fictional couple's success in meeting the government's terms has to do with hard work, but not necessarily self-sufficiency. Friendships were formed as those cramped railcars made their way across Ontario. Though the homesteaders settle miles away from one another, their struggle is common. The men work together, loaning each other mowers, plows, and hayracks. As for the women:

Mrs. Grant was the proud possessor of a very modern labour- saver in the shape of a clothes-wringer, as a consequence of which wash-day was rotated throughout the community, and it was well known that Mrs. Riles and Mrs. Harris had to do their churning alternately.

Stead takes great care here. This is not drudgery, rather progress, with each couple striving for a better life. The most dramatic pages are set after the first harvest, reaching a climax in the fifth chapter when, during a winter storm, John abducts a drunken doctor to aid with the delivery of Allan, his first child.

cliquez pour agrandir

Moving between chapters five and six can be jarring. Twenty-five years have passed. The sod shack has been replaced by a brick house. Family and farm have expanded with the addition of a second child, Beulah, and many more acres of land. But all this is no way satisfies John:

He saw the light ahead, but it was now a phantom of the imagination. He said, “When I am worth ten thousand I will have reached it”; when he was worth ten thousand he found the faithless light had moved on to twenty-five thousand. He said, “When I am worth twenty-five thousand I will have reached it”; when he was worth twenty-five thousand he saw the glow still ahead, beckoning him on to fifty thousand. It never occurred to him to slacken his pace—to allow his mind a rest from its concentration; if he had paused and looked about he might, even yet, have recognized the distant lighthouse on the reef about the wreck of his ideals. But to stop now might mean losing sight of his goal, and John Harris held nothing in heaven or earth so great as its attainment.

The John of the early chapters has become crude; even his whole manner of speech has changed. Mary too is transformed, but only physically. The years have taken a toll, "the shoulders, in mute testimony to much hard labour of the hands, had drooped forward over the deepening chest; the hair was thinner, and farther back above the forehead, and streaked with grey at the temples; the mouth lacked the rosy sensuousness of youth, and sat now in a mould, half of resolution, half submission."

The community formed a quarter-century earlier in those railcars is already a thing of the past. Though one of the most prosperous homesteaders, John cannot help but compare himself to others. Wanting more, he teams up with neighbouring homesteader Hirim Riles. They plan to go out to Alberta, the new frontier, and procure four or five tracts of free land. John will set up a homestead on the first and Riles will establish another on the second. The third, four and possibly fifth would be worked by men who will be provided grub and a small wage during the three years required to secure titles which would subsequently be be transferred to Harris and Riles:

This was strictly against the law, but the two pioneers felt no sense of crime or shame for their plans, but rather congratulated themselves upon their cunning though by no means original scheme to evade the regulations.

Indeed, by no means an original scheme. There is no way the two men would've succeeded, though the scheme does serve to bring further notice to John's descent from the decent, dedicated Eastern Townships schoolteacher with whom Marys fell in love.

The last fifteen chapters are far less interesting than the first five, in part because there isn't nearly so much about the pioneer experience, and in part because too many of its pages focus on a crime that takes too long to unfold. I suppose there is a lesson to be learned about working with another when committing a crime, but only if one has never heard of the time-worn observation on honour amongst thieves.

What I liked most was Mary leaving John.

Beulah running away was second.

She is in every way her mother's daughter.

Censorship?: Riles reaches Alberta before partner-in-crime Harris. Though a miser, he enters a bar in order to get the lay of the land (no pun intended). What follows is a scene somewhat reminiscent of this 2016 Heritage Minute:

The American in Stead's novel threatens a lumberjack – yes, a lumberjack – for what he perceives as a personal slight.

By far the most superfluous scene in the novel, it is nevertheless interesting for these two instances of... what exactly? Is it censorship? An author well aware of the impermissible?  Or just Stead having some fun?

I leave it for you to judge.

Object: My first edition is printed on paper so acidic that it's a wonder I didn't burn my fingers. It was acquired in 2018 as part of a lot. A few years earlier, I'd purchased a copy of the 1973 University of Toronto Press reissue with introduction by Susan Wood Glicksohn.

Access: A Canadian bestseller, The Homesteaders went through five printings. It was also published in the UK by Unwin (1916) and Hodder & Stoughton (1923). Used copies aren't at all difficult to find online. 

 

The Dodo Press print on demand edition uses a detail of Abraham Louis Buvelot's 1873 painting Tubbutt Homestead in the Bombala district, in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. Two different countries, two different continents, the distance between the Tubbutt and Harris homesteads amounts to roughly 15,000 kilometres. 

The novel is available online here thanks to the Internet Archive.

Related post:

A Man of Peculiar Notions

Three Weeks a Lady

Three Weeks
Elinor Glyn
New York: Macaulay, [c. 1924]
245 pages

I misread "IMMORTAL ROMANCE" as "IMMORAL ROMANCE," which I expect was the publisher's intent. The very definition of a succès de scandale, when first published in 1907 Three Weeks was denounced, banned, seized, and destroyed. This went on for years. Consider this Toronto Globe. story from 11 April 1911: 

Three Weeks shares something with Fifty Shades of Grey in being a novel read primarily by women. Nurse Sneed reads it to Baby Peggy in The Family Secret. A switchboard operator is shown reading it in Buster Keaton's Seven Chances.

My favourite appearance is in an oft-censored scene from the 1930 Mickey Mouse short The Shindig. 

Horace Horsecaller, Clarabelle Cow's date, pulls on her tail to announce his arrival. The bell around her neck rings, naked Clarabelle hides the book beneath straw and then gets dressed. I will not comment on the scene in which Mickey pulls on Minnie's bloomers because this post is about Three Weeks, which is far more family friendly.

The premise of Three Weeks is simple. Handsome, blonde, twenty-two-year-old son of privilege Paul Verdayne, "young and fresh and foolish," has fallen for Isabella Waring, secretary to his mother, Lady Henrietta.

And why not!

Isabella shares his passion for sport and the sporting papers, happily washes his terrier Pike, and is in every way an equal partner in the hunt. All is good until "one terrible day Paul unfortunately kissed the large pink lips of Isabella as his mother entered the room."

Lady Henrietta, is horrified; not so Paul's father:

"Let the boy have his fling," said Sir Charles Verdayne, who was a coarse person. "Damn it all! a man is not obliged to marry every woman he kisses!"

Lady Henrietta begs to differ – to her a kiss seals a betrothal – and so she is quite horrified at the prospect of a "daughter of the middle-classes" being brought into the family. Son Paul is is soon sent on a three week tour of the continent "for his health."

The first of three memorable scenes centres on Paul's final meeting with Isabella:

Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little distance, but for the lady's scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to distinguish her sex.
   "Good-bye, old chap," she said "We have been real pals, and I'll not forget you"
   But Paul, who was feeling sentimental, put it differently. "Good-bye, darling," he whispered with a suspicion of tremble in his charming voice. "I shall never love any woman but you — never, never in my life."
   Cuckoo! screamed the bird in the tree.

Paris bores Paul because he can think of nothing but Isabella. The same is true of Lucerne, until one fateful evening, whilst dining alone, he is seated at a table in view of another lone diner. This is the novel's greatest scene. In its eleven pages there is but one word of dialogue –"Bon" – the rest consists entirely of descriptions of the two people dining at separate tables. One, a woman, is seemingly oblivious as to Paul's presence, while Paul is all too aware aware of her. He is at first judgemental ("Who could want roses eating alone?"), then irritated ("The woman had to pass him — even so close that the heavily silk touched his foot.), and then unsettled:

Her face was white, he saw that plainly enough, startlingly white, like a magnolia bloom, and contained no marked features. No features at all! he said to himself. Yes — he was wrong, she had certainly a mouth worth looking at again. It was so red. Not large and pink and laughingly open like Isabella's, but straight and chiselled, and red, red, red.

    Paul was young, but he knew paint when he saw it, and this red was real, and vivid, and disconcerted him.

Try as he may, Paul cannot help but compare Isabella to this woman. Whether Paul falls in love with the woman then and there is up for debate; that he does fall in love with her is not.

But who is she?

The "lady" – by my count the descriptor is used nearly two hundred times – is never named. An older woman, perhaps ten years older, the lady is very much the dominant in their relationship. She initiates Paul into the ways of love and Paul responds in the manner of most twenty-two-year-old heterosexual males. Three evenings pass between five-star hotel dining and sin on a tiger skin:

This is the scene that made Elinor Glyn famous. It is the scene that inspired these lines of verse (sometimes attributed to George Bernard Shaw):

                                   Would you like to sin

                                   With Elinor Glyn

                                   On a tiger skin? 

                                   Or would you prefer

                                   To err with her

                                   On some other fur?

It's the scene for which she is best remembered today – and it is not at all what I expected. 

Look carefully  and you will see that

is followed by this:

There is no sex in Three Weeks.

How disappointing!

The best scenes now past, Three Weeks shifts its focus to the lady's teachings on the nature of love and, well, nature. These lectures, coupled with extensive travel itinerary, consume much of the middle-third. It all seems a bit slow and repetitive, but the pace picks up in the third period.

What impressed most wasn't the plot, rather the author's ability to mine the male mind. This is best demonstrated in Paul, but extends to Sir Charles and his friend Captain Grigsby, both of whom display unhealthy interest in Paul's relationship with the lady. 

Three Weeks is an immortal romance. It lives on in that it is read, though perhaps not as a work of literature. What I know for sure is that it is in no way immoral. 

Object and Access: A bulky red hardcover with four plates of scenes used in promoting the 1924 Hollywood adaptation. I do like the jacket; not only does California girl Aileen Pringle as the lady feature, the rear flap and cover have advertisements for other Glyn titles.

Three Weeks enjoyed sales in the hundreds of thousands. It is not at all hard to find, which is not to say that I've ever come across a one in a Canadian bookstore. I blame Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney.

My copy was purchased earlier this year from a Northampton, Massachusetts bookseller. Price: US$45.00 (w/ a further US$ 30.00 for shipping).

Related posts:

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn
Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's
Guelph: City of Galt, Gay, Glyn, Graves, and Girdles

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images

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 Smart. Arnaud 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.

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 former 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

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.

Related posts:

A Penthouse Killing in Montreal

Six Pyxides for Sunday

The Return of The Pyx

Four Days in Darkest Quebec

Where is Catherine Deneuve?

Six Exits to Shrewsdale

Remembering John Buell: A Lot to Make Up For

Freedom to Read Week: Selected Salacious Filth Found in a Toronto Controller's Dresser Drawer

David A. Balfour
1889 - 1956
RIP

The joke that is Rob Ford isn't funny anymore, right? We all know where he's heading, the only real question is whether he'll be taking anyone with him. Torontonians, take extra care as you cross at the intersection, a black Cadillac Escalade may be just around the corner. 

No, not that funny at all. That's where Ford breaks with the buffoons of the city's past, my favourite being Controller David Balfour. If the name seems familiar, it may be that you've once strolled through Toronto's David A. Balfour Park.*

Balfour was no friend of parks, once calling for the removal of all flower beds, but his real foe was reds. He saw them everywhere, pressuring both Queen's Park and Ottawa to round up anyone he considered a communist leader. This included aldermen and Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, who once dared speak in his city. Reds taught children to spit on the cross, claimed Balfour, adding that Bathurst United Church was a centre of communism. A Catholic, the controller fought Ontario Attorney-General Leslie Blackwell's move to  regulate bingo operators.

When not protecting children from those who would teach them to spit, he was working to shield their eyes and those of their parents from "salacious books" being circulated by lending libraries. Balfour's obsessive focus on "immoral literature" provided many column inches for Globe & Mail City Hall reporter Frank Tumpane. The six on the right come from the 22 March 1947 edition.

Balfour was a great collector of the material he sought to ban, encouraging others in the battle to send filth his way. "I stick them in the top drawer of my dresser," he told council. "I'm ashamed of them."

The controller was short on titles, amassing a lengthy list that he was never  willing to share. However, over the years he did mention five titles, one of which was Jan Peel's The Bed and the Blonde (Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949). I don't have a copy in the top drawer of my dresser, so can't provide a cover image. Here are the rest:

Forever Amber
Kathleen Winsor
New York: Macmillan, 1944

Kitty
Rosamond Marshall
Toronto: Collins White Circle,  1944

Duchess Hotspur
Rosamond Marshall
Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1947

The Flesh is Willing
James Clayford
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

A fin de la semaine bonus:

The Globe & Mail, 30 September 1949

* David Balfour is, of course, also the name of the central character in Robert Lewis Stevenson's Kidnapped, which was published just three years before the controller's birth. I'm not certain that this wasn't just a coincidence.

Freedom to Read Week: Condemned by Coren

How Do You Spell Abducted?
Cherylyn Stacey
Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press, 1996

Newspaper columnists don't always write their headlines, but I think Michael Coren had something to do with this one:

TAXES FUND OFFENSIVE CHILDREN'S BOOK ABOUT ABUSIVE FATHER:
Suddenly your dad is no longer a man to be loved or trusted

Published in the 31 July 1996 edition of the Financial Post, the column that followed lit amassing gas beneath the seat of Alberta backbencher Julius Yankowsky, who called for the book to be banned and its publisher's funding to be pulled. The MLA aped the columnist, repeating Coren's assertion that it was "hate literature", all the while acknowledging that he hadn't actually read the thing. After all, How Do You Spell Abducted? is 135 pages long, and some of the words have eight letters. Just look at that title!

A few months later in Books in Canada, Coren reported that the controversy he'd started over Do You Spell Abducted? had been "so much fun" – his words, not mine… as are these:

It begins with bad old Dad, divorced from good old Mum, forcing his way into his ex-wife's bedroom and screaming at her until she weeps. He then kidnaps the kids and they are so terrified they think he might kill them all and then commit suicide.

Well, no.

Dad never forces his way into any room, least of all his ex-wife's bedroom. Mum does indeed weep, which has been known to happen in divorces. Dad leaves with the kids on what is meant to be a vacation, but it soon becomes clear that he has no intention of returning. That stuff about the kids being "so terrified they think he might kill them all and then commit suicide" was fabricated by Coren; it isn't in the book.

Michael Coren is currently employed by the Sun News Network.

Not to be outdone or ignored, in the 19 August 1996 Western Report an anonymous reporter bravely worked to fan dying embers with the claim that "the fictional father threatened to kill or prostitute his progeny". It's a lie, plain and simple, but then the late magazine was never tied to the truth. More crap follows:

Her book features three other men: a crabby oldster, a fat and stupid state trooper and a good Samaritan who has been unjustly denied legal access to his own children.

There is no "crabby oldster" in the novel. The state trooper, girth never mentioned, is pretty sharp. The good Samaritan, named Dusty Andover, is a very fine and generous gentleman. He has never been denied access, legal or otherwise, to his children, though there is estrangement. Dusty's adult offspring – no sexes mentioned – begrudge his having spent their inheritances in fighting their mother's cancer.

How Do You Spell Abducted? is a rotten title, but the book isn't half bad. The characters, particularly the father, are well drawn. The plot is believable, disturbingly so, though the resolution is forced and fantastical.

I can say these things because, you see, I've read the book. I have Michael Coren to thank for bringing it to my attention.

Object: An unattractive trade-size paperback. The cover illustration by Jeff Hitch depicts a scene that does not feature in the novel.

Access:

It will be forgotten before we can say 'bleeding-heart neurotic'.

— Michael Coren, Books in Canada, Oct 1996

Found in most of our larger public libraries. Used copies are cheap, but I encourage anyone considering purchase to buy it new. Yep, How Do You Spell Abducted? is still available. Setting It Right, Michael Coren's book from the same year is long out of print.

Freedom to Read Week: Ben Hecht on Front Page …of The Ottawa Citizen

The Ottawa Citizen, 31 October 1947

Freedom to Read Week: Eight Men Speak

Freedom to Read Week Hump Day. Have you bought your banned book yet? If not, may I suggest Eight Men Speak? Written in 1933, reissued just last year by University of Ottawa Press, it's not so much a banned book as a banned play once – only once – staged as part of an effort to free Communist Party of Canada leader Tim Buck from Kingston Penitentiary. The Toronto Police didn't approve, nor did their Winnipeg brothers.

The Globe & Mail, May Day, 1934

The Ottawa Citizen, 2 May 1934

Where mail carriers once worked to prevent its spread, today's will happily deliver Eight Men Speak to your door… er, post box.