Freedom to Read Week – Thursday

The Leader-Post, 7 January 1938

The Ottawa Citizen, 7 January 1938

Freedom to Read Week – Wednesday

The Gazette, 6 November 1959

Freedom to Read Week – Tuesday

The Globe & Mail, 23 October 1961

The Globe & Mail, 25 November 1961

Freedom to Read Week – Monday

Lt.-Col. John Merner (Ret'd)

1980

Some chilling words from "Censorship Canada" by Hawley Black, published in the December 1980 edition of Saturday Night:

Like the Vatican in the old days, Canada has an index of forbidden material. Ours is a filing cabinet of index cards, kept by Customs and Excise officials on the sixth floor of the Connaught Building just around the corner from the Château Laurier. The keeper of the index, in effect the chief of Censorship Canada, is Lt.-Col. John Merner, a sixty-two-year-old retired army officer who bears the official title Head, Prohibited Importation Section. Along with a departmental lawyer and a couple of clerks, Merner protects Canada from books, films, videotapes, and other materials that he believes (as Section 99201-1 of Schedule C of the Canada Customs Tariff puts it) "treasonable or seditious or of an immoral or indecent character."

...

If a customs decision goes against you, you can appeal. But you may find yourself catalogued among the 100,000 names contained in the Customs Intelligence File. If your appeal fails, the government can destroy the material and you lose your court costs. If your appeal succeeds, the government returns the material to you – and you lose your court costs anyway. Not many people appeal.

...

When I visited the office recently, the Head, Prohibited Importation Section, and his helpers were busily keeping Canada free of material that might subvert the civil order or endanger morals. They were doing so in something close to secrecy, protected by a bureaucratic wall that can be penetrated neither by parliament nor by the press, or even by the minister of revenue himself. Other censors – such as the Ontario film censors – find themselves regularly embroiled in headline-making conflicts, but all is quiet in the Connaught Building. So far as an outsider can determine, there are not even internal struggles over what to censor. Only once in ten years, Merner recalls, has the minister of revenue – it was Robert Stanbury – actually fought one of his decisions. And, says Merner, "He lost."

Funny he never married.

Freedom to Read Week – Sunday

The Cambridge Public Library's copy of Censorship Goes to School by David Booth (Markham, ON: Pembroke, 1992).

The Elusive Diane Bataille

I intend no pun in writing that "DIRT" just about covers this 2001 bind-up (again, no pun intended) of Marcus Huttning's Linda's Strange Vacation and The Whip Angels by our own Diane Bataille. The latter novel is without a doubt the filthiest piece of porn I've encountered in writing this blog.

For two years now I've been keeping an eye out for something – anything – relating to Mme Bataille. The return has been so slight that this amusing cover image, stumbled over yesterday, ranks as a major find.

And so I ask: The daughter of a Russian prince, the wife of Georges Bataille, a model for Alberto Giacometti, how is it that so little has been recorded about this dear lady?

Related post:

Canada's Olympians (Part I)

Hard Copy

Mention here is a bit late, but not so much that one can't pick up a copy as a last minute stocking stuffer. The new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries features the debut of The Dusty Bookcase on paper. Subject? Nothing less than John Glassco's most intricate piece of hoaxery: The Temple of Pederasty. Banned in Canada, pulped in the United States, its history is one involving deception, forgery, plagiarism, smuggling and a cold government bureaucrat.

I'll say no more except to point out that the very same issue features a very fine piece by Zachariah Wells' on The Mulgrave Road, Harry Bruce's 1951 collection of verse.

Neglected, not suppressed.

And These Were Her Magnificent Breasts

This was Joanna

Niel [sic] H. Perrin [pseud. Danny Halperin]

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Of all the novels read this past year, not one has left so great an impression as Neil H. Perrin's The Door Between. In the second of two posts about the book, I described it as "one of the most peculiar Canadian novels I've ever read". Here I reconsider: The Door Between might well be the most peculiar Canadian novel I've ever read. It's portrayal of 1948 Toronto as a dark, sexual sin city, populated by stricken, agonizing souls certainly runs counter to the staid and sober images that linger in popular culture.

These same sorry sods would find fit in This was Joanna, which was published twelve months earlier. We never actually meet Joanna – she's found dead on page one by an unnamed fisherman, as depicted on the cover of the publisher's American edition: "...for one witless moment he looked down on the haunting perfection that was Joanna, the closed eyes in a kind of rapture, the long, strained throat, twisted torso, magnificent breasts, profound hips, proud legs, crouched in death like a supple cat."

Profound hips...

This is not the dead woman's story, rather it concerns an ex-lover, a nameless newspaperman who attempts to solve the mystery that was Joanna. His quest brings him into contact with her other past paramours. As with The Door Between, sexual disfunction and perversity pervade. We see this on Joanna's wedding night, as described by her husband Charles:

At last she stood nude before me. When I looked at her I was shocked to see the most brazen smile on her face.

Then, without hesitation, her fingers sure, carefully, slowly, she began to undress me. I went slightly hysterical then. I began to shudder to laugh, to giggle, to squirm. I simply went berserk. In the grip of nameless emotions that shook my whole body and dazed my mind I began to fight with her, to hit her, to drag her toward the bed.

What Joanna thought of this I don't know. We have never discussed it. I only know that later, all passion spent, as I lay beside her in the muttering gloom, I realized that on our wedding night I had gone mad, had beaten my wife and had virtually raped her.

Joanna never forgives Charles, whose desperate attempts to win her back render him a cuckold. The tryst with the newspaperman is just the first in a series of extramarital flings. It's with penultimate lover Ted Wrisley that Joanna's amorous adventures come to a climax. A sensualist who owes much to J.-K. Huysmans' Jean Des Esseintes, Wrisley introduces Joanna to "the arts of which immortal Ovid and the Marquis de Sade have written." He takes delight in showing his "chamber of horrors" to the newspaperman:

On the walls of the room were hung all sorts of gadgets of torture; long needles, small, hairy whips, knouts, knives sharp as razors, silken threads of unbelievable length. Over the mantlepiece were afixed two large peacock feathers; the end of one was a rubber stopper, the end of the other a handgrip. I dared not ask the significance of these feathers for fear of being told.

Suspended from the ceiling were two long cords, obviously used to hold a person up from the floor by his (or her) thumbs. On the floor, as if alive, lay the stuffed corpse of a sinuous cobra. The most unspeakably evil paintings adorned the walls and, in one corner of the room under a blue light, sat the grinning statue of Priapus, the phallic symbol of the ages.

This was Joanna was banned in Ireland.

Wrisley's playroom – which, incidentally, is soundproof – stands as Priapus in what is otherwise a remarkably flat environment. Like an American soap opera, This was Joanna is set in a neutral everyplace that is populated by the pampered and privileged. How bland compared to the torrid Toronto of The Door Between! I can't help but compare – had it not been for one I would not have read the other – and yet... and yet I still recommend the novel. This was Joanna might not be the most peculiar Canadian novel I've ever read, but it's up there.

Trivia: News Stand Library's American edition of This was Joanna, published in November 1949, two months after the Canadian, marks the last time the book saw print. Why Halperin's pseudonym was changed from Neil H. Perrin to Grant R. Brooks remains a mystery.

Object: A mass market paperback that is typical of News Stand Library's shoddy production values. Streaks of black ink run along the edges of a dozen or so pages, making for challenging reading. The author's name is misspelled on the cover and title page (but is correct on the spine and back cover). "I before E, except after C", I suppose.

Fly-by-night provides a thorough account of the publisher's many failed attempts at getting Halperin's pseudonym right.

Access: Only the University of Calgary has copies (both the Perrin and Brooks editions). This was Joanna might be all but absent from libraries, but that doesn't mean it's expensive. Ten copies – all fairly decent – are currently listed online at between US$7.50 and US$30. One bookseller describes his offering as "a bit misscut [sic]". Par for the course, really.

Heed Ye the Church Ladies!

Fifty-five years ago today, 14 November 1955, the Catholic Women's League launched its "Decency Crusade", descending on Ontario newsstands, drug stores and bookshops in order to end the sale of "corrupted and salacious" material. Theirs was an imported campaign, one that originated with Chicago's Msgr Thomas J. Fitzgerald, Executive Director of the National Organization of Decent Literature, who provided the ladies with a list of 300 objectionable publications.

What titles did they target? To Have and Have Not was one; John O'Hara's Ten North Frederick was another. Works by William Faulkner, John Dos Passos and George Orwell were also deemed indecent. Which ones? Who knows – the League clutched the list to its collective bosom, making certain that the titles remained secret.

Must say, I find the number of publications on their list – an even 300 – to be a bit suspicious. Why not 317? Where some titles bumped to make room for others?

Chair of the League's Education Committee, Mrs George Davis, revealed what she'd been told about the list in a 29 October 1955 Gazette article:

By this thinking, of course, Lady Chatterley's Lover would have been given a pass – likewise Fanny Hill, which in 1964 so offended the delicate flowers of the Toronto Police Department.

What I find particularly delightful is the image of the robed monsignor – who was also Director of the Council for Catholic Women – watching over a group of ladies ("each of whom must be a mother") as they scanned books in a hunt for salacious material.

It would seem that the Catholic Women's League's efforts weren't appreciated particularly. Their "Decency Crusade" was dubbed "Censorship Crusade" by the press, and it was pointed out that many of the books targeted had not only been "widely read", but were readily available in the local public library. In reaction perhaps, the League revealed the Crusade's new, true purpose. The Canadian Press reported that on the third day women heading out to scour book racks "were told that Communism has a hand in the need for their mission."

The Windsor Daily Star, 17 November 1955

Mrs Davis, who had made no previous mention of the Red Menace, spoke out: "We feel strongly that part of the Communist program is to undermine the thinking of our youth with this low-type literature so that they will become more susceptible to Communist material." The Education Committee Chair added that "exposing a generation of children to this printed smut does not broaden the freedom of our land. It only brings the citizens a step closer to Communism."

It's easy to laugh at the Decency Crusade today – and I do – but it should be pointed out that the League's sway was once significant. This was particularly true in Quebec, where they dictated what sort of bathing suits women could wear.

The Catholic Women's League's Decency Crusade lasted eight days. I imagine they rested on the Sunday.

No Belly Band Brings Bare Bum Book Ban

First it was the seals, then all those stories about the tar sands, now we have to deal with the disgrace that is British Columbia Ferry Services Inc., laid out for the world to see in the pages of The Guardian and The New Yorker. Goodness, could they not have seen it coming?

Or am I being too harsh? Perhaps the real blame lies with the prissy, prudish people running the corporation's Passages Gift Shops. You know, that area of the ferry devoted to those who'd rather shop for an Orca figurine than take advantage of the opportunity to see the real thing.

"Passages Gift Shops are uniquely West Coast in feel and theme", their website tells us. "The aim is to provide a unique West Coast shopping experience." How do they do it? Just how are they able to offer a unique West Coast shopping experience? Well, one way is by refusing to sell The Golden Mean, the acclaimed first novel by BC native Annabel Lyon. Seems such a curious decision; after all the book hit the bestseller lists, was nominated for both the GG and the Giller, won the Rogers Writers' Trust, and is now garnering rave reviews in the UK. What gives?

As BC Ferries spokeswoman Deborah Marshall explains, it's all about that bum on the cover: "Because we're obviously a 'family show' and we've got children in our gift shops, we had suggested we could carry the book if there's what's called a 'belly band,' wrap around the photo."

Can't say I've ever thought of those trips to Vancouver Island as a "show", family or otherwise. Never once felt tempted to walk out half-way through.

Update: No news to report – international ridicule has not encouraged Passages to revisit its boneheaded decision. In place of their mea culpa, I present the British and American editions of The Golden Mean.

That's the American one on the right. Apparently, being a #1 Canadian bestseller doesn't carry quite the same cachet it does across the pond.

Anything for a Buck (or Thereabouts)

Well, will you look at what I found at the local Salvation Army Thrift Store. You don't see much erotica in charity shops; I'm pretty sure this is the first I've come across. Do they weed out these things? Or is it that no one thinks it appropriate to donate grandpa's porn collection? Maybe they just haven't found his stash.

Whatever the case, this particular Fanny is a good example of the rush to cash in on The Queen v. C. Coles Co. Ltd. It was a bit expensive for its day, but was priced identically to the seized Putnam edition that had caused all the fuss.

Thrown together at the end of 1964, Swan's Fanny went through four printings, helping to launch a peculiar publishing program that lasted at least six years. There were few titles; sixteen, if one includes Canadian Indians Colouring Book and Stag Party Humor, their one-off digest. Looking at the list, it's evident that Fanny Hill was no anomaly; Swan seems to have always been on the prowl for something to exploit.

Just look at this quickie memorial from 1965.

Forty-four pages of photographs, eight "suitable for framing", along with a chronology of his life. Hard to argue that 1874 to 1965, the years the man was alive, weren't his greatest.

And Bond... Bond's hot, right?

Fleming wasn't two years dead when this appeared, but Swan had already been beaten to the bookstores by Henry A. Zelger's Ian Fleming: The Spy Who Came in with the Gold (1965). Such a tortured, needlessly confusing title – Fleming, LeCarré, Leamas, Bond – Ian Fleming: Man with the Golden Pen (1966) is an obvious improvement... so obvious that another Fleming biography was published the very same year with the title Ian Fleming: The Man with the Golden Pen. First time in paperback, claims the cover. True enough, though there never was a hardcover edition. While the Pelrines didn't collaborate on another book, Eleanor went on to write a second biography: Morgentaler: The Doctor Who Couldn't Turn Away. Just as timely as it was when first published by Gage in 1975.

More Swan anon.

Related posts:

Gay Swans

Serving Up Louis Riel

Climax!: A Happy Ending

The second part of my review of Neil Perrin's The Door Between, this 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

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related post:

Toronto's Tortured Sexual Souls

A Prudish Policewoman's Porn

The Globe and Mail, 31 December 1964

Oh, Policewoman Davies, you tried your best, but you were no match for Mistress Hill and Lady Chatterley.

A note to collectors: Lust for Two is an early pseudonymous work by science fiction writer Robert Silverberg.

Related post: Freedom for Fanny

Freedom for Fanny

Yesterday marked the beginning of Freedom to Read Week; I spent much of it stripping wallpaper. Truth be told, I don't much feel like joining the charge led by the Book and Periodical Council and their Freedom of Expression Committee. Their slapdash "Challenged Books and Magazines List" hasn't changed in over a year – still nothing about Rodolphe Girard, Jean-Charles Harvey, the 1961 RCMP raid on the Vancouver Public Library or the temporary embargo placed on The Satanic Verses. Not even the committee's error-ridden work on Lady Chatterley's Lover has been added. A bit of a surprise, really, since the organization saw fit to spread this misinformation by email last August. An "important legal victory", their researcher noted at the time, adding that it is "poorly documented by the historians of literary freedom in Canada".

Not only poorly documented, but entirely ignored in material being distributed by the council and its committee.

It goes without saying that F.R. Scott's defence of Lady Chatte in Brody, Dansky, Rubin v. The Queen is one most important cases in the fight against censorship in this country... and nearly 48 years after the man emerged triumphant from the Supreme Court we're still waiting for the story to be told. When it is written, I think a chapter should be devoted to the coup de grâce delivered two years later by Fanny Hill.

The Globe and Mail, 2 March 1964

John Cleland's "woman of pleasure" received something of a delayed reception in Canada. She was ignored for two centuries, until November 1963 when local police moved in on a Richmond Hill Coles seizing eight copies. Not to be outdone, two months later Toronto police raided two Yonge Street branches, rounding up a couple of thousand more. It was all laughable; even the staid Globe and Mail thought the raids ridiculous, dismissing the police in a 28 January 1964 editorial as a group of "merry men".

During subsequent court proceedings Robertson Davies testified that Fanny Hill was "a Jolly sort of book". Saturday Night editor Arnold Edinborough joined in, praising Cleland's work as "funny, gay and light-hearted." Oh, but then there was the morality squad's Detective-Sergeant William Quennell, who declared that he'd read the book and had found it to be obscene. On 17 February, Judge Everett L. Weaver sided with critic Quennell: "Jollity in its presentation does not purge it of its pornographic taint." Ontarians who have a copy of Cleland's classic need not worry, that December the decision was overturned by the province's Court of Appeal, securing Fanny Hill a place on the bestseller lists.

Chief Justice Dana Porter, father of Julian, father-in-law of Anna.

So, during a week in which the Book and Periodical Council would have me fret over the anonymous Toronto Public Library patron who in 2003 complained about violence in a Richard North Patterson novel, I'll be watching for real threats... and thinking about the words of Chief Justice Dana Porter in rendering the ultimate decision over Fanny Hill:

The freedom to write books, and thus to disseminate ideas, opinions and concepts of the imagination – the freedom to treat with complete candor an aspect of human life and the activities, aspirations and failings of human beings – these are fundamental to progress in a free society.

Hard Lessons in Publishing

Why keep flogging? Well, for one thing, I'm not so sure this horse is dead; the scandal surrounding Harlequin's Vintage Collection continues to spread. Scandal... not too strong a word, is it? After all, here we have a publisher that took six novels, tinkered with grammar and spelling, substituted phrases, removed any and all scenes it thought offensive, and then sold the results as being identical to the originals.

So, yes... scandal. And like any scandal, information trickles forth like the drool collected by Miles Copperthwaite. Today, an interview with associate editor Adrienne Macintosh: "The Inside Scoop on the Harlequin Vintage Collection".

There are no tricky questions here – the interviewer is a fellow employee – but taken with executive editor Marsha Zinberg's Harlequin blog post, it does provide a revealing glimpse into Harlequin's culture. We learn, for example, that only eight books were considered for the series, each chosen on the basis of cover alone. Something called Nine to Five by some guy named Harvey Smith was dropped because it was too long and boring, while Anneke de Lange's Anna... I'll let Ms Macintosh explain:

From the cover you might think the story was about... er, well, rolling in the hay. But that couldn't be further from the truth. Let's just say that the plot involves jealousy, hatred, physical abuse, rape, suicide, murder, racism, adultery, a couple of unwanted pregnancies and a mother so unlikeable that you are actually glad when she’s stabbed by her son. In any case, that one was nixed.

Ms Macintosh and Ms Zinberg each express ignorance of their company's origins, surprise at the grittiness of pulp fiction, make a big deal over having had texts retyped, and see considerable changes in our language:

Ms Zinberg: "Also, grammar and spelling standards have changed quite a bit in sixty years."

Ms Macintosh: "Grammar and spelling has [sic] also changed quite a bit in the past sixty years..."

We're informed, for example, that "loogan" is no longer in use.

Loogan?

Here's Philip Marlowe with a definition:

"What's a loogan?"

"A guy with a gun."

"Are you a loogan?"

"Sure," I laughed. "But strictly speaking a loogan is a guy on the wrong side of the fence."

These words come from The Big Sleep. I found them in Stories and Early Novels, the first in the Library of America's two-volume Raymond Chandler collection. Now, as a nonprofit publisher "dedicated to preserving the works of America's greatest writers in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative editions", Library of America is pretty well everything Harlequin is not. Recognition of this fact raises the question: Are we being too hard on this multi-national?

I don't think so. After all, each title in the Harlequin collection bears a message from its president and CEO stating: "it is such fun to be able to present these works with their original text and cover art".

It appears the Vintage Collection, which both editors thought would be such a simple project, became a burden because they encountered challenges only too familiar to those who work at other houses; little things like trying to track down copyright (at which they failed). In short, these editors were out of their depths; and still know not of what they speak. How else to explain Ms Macintosh's absurd assumption: "These are fifty-, sixty-year-old books. The authors have passed away".

RIP Mavis Gallant. RIP Farley Mowat.

Related posts:

Harlequin's Change of Heart

Covering Up the Past

Covering Up the Past

Harlequin? Really? Again?

Look, I'm more surprised than anyone at the number of times the publisher has appeared in this blog. Sure, it spews forth more books per annum than any other, but nothing in the last four decades has been even remotely interesting. And yet, Harlequin features in so many posts: those dealing with Brian Moore, Arthur Stringer, Gay Canadian Rogues, drug paperbacks, News Stand Library and, of course, its own 60th anniversary celebrations. I've had few kind words – and was, perhaps, a touch harsh about their SoHo gallery show – so, I felt pretty good about drawing attention to their series of vintage reissues a couple of months ago. "Whoever is overseeing this thing has done a very nice job", I wrote at the time.

Well, that person turns out to be Executive Editor Marsha Zinberg, who a few weeks later wrote about the collection on Harlequin's blog. Interesting stuff, it goes some way to explaining their strange choice of titles. "We wanted books whose cover art appealed to us," writes the editor, "and we had to be in physical possession of the book, but in some cases, once we started reading the text, we simply couldn’t see publishing the story, for a host of reasons….content, language, political correctness, etc. Several were eliminated, no matter how striking the cover!"

Then, Ms Zinberg casually drops a bomb:

Remember, our intention was to publish the stories in their original form. But once we immersed ourselves in the text, our eyes grew wide. Our jaws dropped. Social behavior — such as hitting a woman — that would be considered totally unacceptable now was quite common sixty years ago. Scenes of near rape would not sit well with a contemporary audience, we were quite convinced. We therefore decided to make small adjustments to the text, only in cases where we felt scenes or phrases would be offensive to a 2009 readership. Also, grammar and spelling standards have changed quite a bit in sixty years.

So, there you have it: not reissues, but bowdlerized editions designed for we sensitive, semi-literate souls of the 21st century. How strange, then, that Ms Zinberg should end her post:

Everyone in house has taken such interest and pride in this project, and we're delighted that the collection is now out in the marketplace. We hope they will also accomplish what the cover art exhibition attempted to do: "offer a unique insight into the profound changes that have occurred in women’s lives over the past six decades — from shifts in private desires to shifts in the politics of gender"!

Yes, profound changes that appear much less so thanks to the censor's blood red pen.

The comments section of Ms Zinberg's post indicates that initial reaction was quite positive. "Marsha, what a great story!" writes Harlequin author Jean Brashear. "What a fascinating journey!" chimes in unbiased stablemate Jeannie Watt. With one exception, all were quite friendly and congratulatory until late last week when it seems the post was discovered by pulp collectors. I can add nothing to their comments.

The truth out, I take back my complimentary words about the series and its editor. The kindest observation I'm able to offer at this point is that Harlequin has not seen fit to remove the post or comments from its blog.

Not yet, away.

Related posts:

Harlequin's Change of Heart

Hard Lessons in Publishing