A McGill Student's Mild Summer of Love

Expo Summer
Eileen Fitzgerald
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1969

Eileen Fitzgerald's Expo Summer began forty-seven years ago – 28 April 1967 – with the opening of the World's Fair. Mine began the very same day. I was four years old, living with my parents and little sister in suburban Montreal; the author was a second-year McGill student who had just moved into a flat in the city's downtown. I'm fairly certain that our paths crossed.

Expo Summer? Fitzgerald's memoir begins with the solstice more than fifty-five days in the future, yet she manages fewer than 163 pages, a good deal of which have to do with events that occurred in March, during which time she lived in residence at the university's Royal Victoria College.

"Bubbly", says the Province. I wonder what other adjectives they used. The Gazette went with "good":

16 August 1969

Eileen Fitzgerald was not of Montreal, but Eastchester, New York. Her writing in Expo Summer suggests a sheltered life lacking in inquisitiveness. I quote from the pages in which the author and her two girlfriends hunt for off-campus accommodation:

We wandered out of the Guy Street station somewhat lost, since at that time our world in Montreal didn't stretch much further west than Mountain Street.

Now, I point out that Guy is only two stops from McGill. Guy Street itself is just eight blocks west of the university campus. The trio find a flat on Mackay, which is invariably referred to – thirty-two times – as "MacKay Street". The Décarie is "DeCarie" and Cedar Avenue is "Cedar Street". The author's flatmates, Lyn and Gate, are just as clueless:

No one knew the exact location of Place Bonaventure except that it was a Metro stop, so we took the Metro from McGill east to the Berri-de Montigny [sic] transfer, and then back west on the other line until we found ourselves in Bonaventure station. Clearly, it was going to be a lively night.

Expo 67 aficionados, of which I am one, will recognize Place Bonaventure as the venue in which François Dallegret held his pre-Expo Super Party, which featured Lothar and the Hand People, Suzanne Verdal, Tiny Tim, and the Blues Project.  Juan Rodriguez wrote a very good piece on the event here, but Eileen Fitzgerald's is much more succinct:

They finally did show up on the roped-off stage, which looked like a little boxing ring rising out of the crowds of teenyboppers, costumed hippies, young sophisticates and just passers-by. But by the time we had tuned in to their sound sufficiently to tune out the steady roar of the hall, they had already finished playing and had hurried toward the periphery of the Salle Bonaventure.

You really can't expect much by way of observation from a person who doesn't know the name of the street on which she lives.

It's always a mistake for a reviewer to criticize a book for not being what he wanted it to be, but  Doubleday did deceive:

A COLLEGE GIRL TELLS US HOW IT WAS AT THE GREATEST WORLD'S FAIR EVER

Expo Summer doesn't have a whole lot to do with Expo 67. Fitzgerald worked there for a bit selling postcards, and she did visit a few pavilions, but this book is more about getting that first apartment, hassles with Hydro Québec, friends crashing on couches and making meals on a budget. I have my own stories, each every bit as interesting as Fitzgerald's – some more! –  but none worth writing down.

She attaches herself to a band called the Service Entrance, I think because she has something going on with one of the guitarists. For a couple of dozen pages I thought this might lead to something interesting. The band shares the bill one night with Tim Buckley at the New Penelope, but it ends up as their only Montreal gig. Author and guitarist don't so much as kiss.

Still, it's a memorable summer:

A Swiss chocolate ice cream bar stood right across the way from a Brazilian counter where they sold flavors of sherbet which no one who wasn't a Brazilian had ever heard of before, and we couldn't decide what to get, or forget them all and have Dutch ice cream. Seymour had black raspberry, and I had banana, and Lyn had pineapple rum. Mat volunteered to try the Dutch chocolate across the way. And they all were great.

I too ate sherbet at Expo, and though four, had tasted pineapple rum.

The critics rave:

Young Miss Fitzgerald is a student at McGill University and golly, didn't she just practically drool to be in Montreal at Expo time. With her friends Lindsay (the moneyed one) and Gate (no one ever called her Mary) Eileen shares an apartment, works off and on at an Expo postcard palace, and pals with Mat, Josh, Eric, etc., students who were hoping to make a go with their electric rock group, the Service Entrance. Discouragement, and Mat cuts out, but there's a zoomy offer at the close and Mat returns. An occasional cut-up and jolly jape — sneaking into Labyrinth; copping a swim in an alien pool by hopping a rooftop; and the gosh-awful day when Lindsay's mother visits and discovers a boy or two in the bedroom (all innocent as a cub den). Eileen, bless her busy little pen, is undoubtedly the only member of her generation who admits to putting on a "gay summer frock." Dull as dishwater and pure as the drivelling snow.

— Kirkus, 3 July 1969

About the author:

A bonus: Not by Suzanne Verdal, but about her.

Object and Access: A slim hardcover in black and brown boards, my Fine first edition copy was bought in January from a bookseller in Woodbury, New York. At US$20, I did well. As of this writing, just one first edition – price-clipped, Near Fine – is listed for sale online (C$25). After that, you're left with a lone book club edition (US$15), and two less than pristine copies of the uncommon Curtis paperback (C$4 and US$4 – take your pick).

Toronto has the only public library to carry a copy. Eleven of our university libraries come through. Expo Summer is not to be found at  the author's alma mater.

Related post:

The Little People of Expo 67

Related plea:

All these years later, I'm still looking for a copy of Winston Smith's Sexpo '69 (North Hollywood: Brandon House, 1969).

C'mon, someone's gotta have a copy.

Leonard Cohen Stands Out as a One Woman Man

Death of a Lady's Man
Leonard Cohen
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978

Death of a Ladies' Man
Lee Roberts
New York: Gold Medal, 1960

Death of a Ladies' Man
James McQueen
Melbourne: Penguin Australia, 1989

Death of a Ladies' Man
Alan Bissett
Edinburgh: Hachette Scotland, 2010

The Foster Poetry Conference at Fifty

Irving Layton, Milton Wilson, Leonard Cohen, Eli Mandel and Aviva Layton,
Foster Poetry Conference,, October 1963

Off to the Eastern Townships this morning to celebrate the publication of The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco:

Brome Lake Books

265 E Knowlton Rd

Knowlton, QC 

12 October 2013, 2:00 pm

And what better day than today? 'Twas fifty years ago – 12 October 1963 – that Glassco's Foster Poetry Conference opened at the Glen Mountain Ski Chalet. With Glassco, F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, Eldon Grier, D. G. Jones, Leonard Cohen, Leonard Angel, Kenneth Hetrz, Henry Moscowitz and Seymour Mayne, it remains the greatest gathering of Quebec's English-language poets.

Three days of poetry, comradeship and drink, even the most subdued reports paint it as a great success. Scott was so fired by the experience that he pressured Glassco to edit the proceedings for McGill University Press.  

Glassco agreed to take on the project, but soon came to recognize that the contents failed to capture anything of the exuberant nature of the conference. The late night conversations, the raw exchanges, the drinking – almost all that had been informal, spontaneous, and dynamic had been left unrecorded. What's more he found work on the book a "horrible bore." On 4 May 1964, he wrote Jean Le Moyne: "I shall never be an editor again: this is the work for professionals who have secretaries, electric typewriters, photocopy machines, the co-ordinative faculty and endless patience: but the book is now ready for press."

When the galleys arrived Glassco found the quality so poor that the November 1964 publication date had to be scratched. For months the anthology hung over his head as he awaited, with dread, the reset galleys. What arrived was much improved and he moved quickly to clear the sheets from his desk. Then, just when his work appeared to be finished, Glassco discovered that he'd been saddled with the task of distributing payments to the twenty contributors. The irritation was only compounded by the small sums. Leonard Cohen received three dollars, barely enough to purchase a copy of the book.

My work in editing Glassco's letters was much more pleasurable.

H is for Hoffer

List 75: Canadian Literature
Vancouver: William Hoffer, Bookseller, [1989?]

In spite of his obvious weirdness I found myself liking him. When he launched into a diatribe, which he  did often, he would become intoxicated by his own rhetoric, then leap up bellowing and, like an actor, pace the store as though it were the stage of a theatre. He was, perhaps, the first person I ever met whose voice merited the word stentorian. 

– David Mason, The Pope's Bookbinder

How did I come to have this? A response to an advert in Books in Canada, perhaps. When it landed at my Montreal flat, sometime around the death of Doug Harvey, this catalogue was like nothing I'd ever seen. The bookseller seemed to be daring customers to purchase.

From the introduction:

There isn't very much Canadian literature, and most of it is garbage. It is the junk literature of a junk age. It is beneath those who care about anything.

The attacks begin with item #6, Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Anansi, 1982):

Having spent considerable time wandering 2nd hand bookshops, it recently occurred to me that the only people ever overheard congratulating or recommending this author are teen-aged girls of the least promising variety. Our animosity is, in this case, genuine. The more quickly this author is forgotten the better it will be for Canada. In the meantime we are optimistic in regard to selling our stock of copies to unpromising customers, Any regular customer who orders it may expect to be dropped from the mailing list.

I was not a regular customer; in fact, I never bought a book from William Hoffer. Spoiled terribly by Montreal's low book prices and the indifference paid things Canadian in New York, I found his prices high. Here Hoffer asks $75 for the Canadian first of Brian Moore's The Emperor of Ice-Cream (McClelland & Stewart, 1965), a book I'd bought for $2 in a Sherbrooke Street bookstore not three years earlier. I was lucky; another store had it for six.

He titled one of his catalogues Cheap Sons of Bitches.

My plea was poverty, but I still feel bad for having given nothing in return for this catalogue. Twenty-four or so years later, it continues to inform and entertain.

Cold eye or not, Hoffer knew Canadian literature far better than most other booksellers. Today, when my queries concerning Bertrand W. Sinclair are met with a blank stare, I consider this entry:

By 1994, the year I moved to Vancouver, William Hoffer was gone. He'd closed up shop, sold his stock, and was living in Moscow with a wife, two teenaged stepsons, and a growing collection of handmade toys. When he returned to BC, it was to be treated for the cancer that killed him. It's probably just as well that we never met. In his very fine memoir, The Pope's Bookbinder (Biblioasis, 2013), David Mason portrays Hoffer as a man of contradictions, about whom people held conflicting opinions. It only follows.

To Mason, Hoffer delighted in sowing the seeds of strife; he decimated the conviviality that had once existed within the bookselling community, very nearly destroying the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Canada in the process. Hoffer comes off as being as brilliant as he was demented. Yet, like me, Mason returns to Hoffer's catalogues.

 "You would be the only bookseller I ever met who purported to despise the only area you know anything about," he once wrote Hoffer.

I think "purported" is the key word.

Related post:

A is for Amtmann

The Year L.M. Montgomery Became Lucy Maud

The Canadian Bookman, January 1909

I have Erica Brown of the wonderful Reading 1900-1950 to blame for time wasted this past weekend. It was she who demonstrated just how much fun can be had with the Google Ngram Viewer, a tool used in charting words, names and phrases found in the 5.2-million books that the corporation has digitized.

Prof Brown, whose work focusses on the history of popular fiction, used the GNV to trace the rise of the term "middlebrow". I began with "Ontario Gothic" (as with all, click the graph to enlarge):

An interesting result, though one that should be viewed with a cautious eye. As Prof Brown points out, "5.2 million books digitized sounds great – and it is – but it isn’t everything, and it is skewed towards US publications." I'll add that the tool doesn't capture anything published after 2008, and that any ngram that occurs in fewer than 40 books will deliver a rather deceptive 0% flatline. Still, while not entirely accurate, I think it goes far in reflecting trends.

Here, for example, is a search that charts the shift away from "L.M. Montgomery" to "Lucy Maud Montgomery". Interesting to note that the two lines converge in the mid-nineties, when most of her work entered the public domain.

The real fun comes in drawing comparisons between writers. Here, for example, are Canada's Booker Prize winners:

How about this graph featuring mentor Irving Layton and pupil Leonard Cohen:

Better yet, Irving Layton versus Louis Dudek:

Here we see the careers of rivals Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts:

The declining interest in Seton and Sir Charles made me curious about Sir Gilbert Parker, our biggest fin de siecle author.

Sobering. Wonder how I'm doing. 

Oh.

When Poets Ruled; Or, Never Mind the Novelists

For my poet friends, these observations from Canada 1962:

A striking feature of Canadian letters in recent years has been the consistently high level of Canadian poetry. Although the poet's audience was often not large, he was at least assured of publication in one of the many literary magazines of the country where his work would receive discriminating critical attention. Too often, however, such limited circulation was the most that could be expected. More recently a growing interest among a wider reading public has made possible the publication of a number of volumes of poetry, some of which have achieved minor commercial successes.

A comprehensive picture of Canadian poetry was made available to readers during 1961 by the appearance of the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. Several other important collections also appeared during the year, including Leonard Cohen's The Spice Box of Earth, River Among Rocks by Ralph Gustafson, The Devil's Picture Book by Daryl Hine and Irving Layton's collection of stories and poems, The Swinging Flesh. The Governor General's Award for poetry in English for 1960 went to Margaret Avison for Winter Sun and Other Poems, her first published collection. Poetry in French Canada is no less important and vital as was amply illustrated in the Oxford Book. Among the most widely known of the younger poets are Alan Grandbois, Rina Lasnier and Anne Hébert. The latter received the Governor General's Award for French Poetry for her book Poèmes. 

Canadian fiction is perhaps somewhat less vigorous.

A Song for the Irving Layton Centenary

 
Irving Peter Layton
(né Israel Pincu Lazarovitch)
12 March 1912 – 4 January 2006

He is the light of our generation and after his 130 or 140 years are over and the man's removed from his work so that nothing lies between the reader and the work, the universe Irving created will shine forever.

– Leonard Cohen, 1997

Amazon Customer Review: 'I couldn't throw it away or burn it as I would have liked to do'

Related posts:

Homophobes and Book Burners Weigh In

Amazon Customer Review: Michel Tremblay's 'possible potential'
Amazon Customer Review: 'My review has more intelect'

Ex Libris: The Leitchs

Another fine example of the New Canadian Library's incredibly ugly second series design. Thirty-two years ago, this book belonged to neighbours of the Cohen family on Westmount's Belmont Avenue. I bought it in 1991, just as prices for things LC were on the runway about to take off.

Frank Newfeld's Masterpiece (and Leonard Cohen's Unseen Face for Tits)

The Spice-Box of Earth

Leonard Cohen

Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1961

Let's get this out of the way. Leonard Cohen doesn't really have much of a place in a blog devoted to the suppressed, ignored and forgotten in our literature. Anyone doubting his stature in this country need only look at the media's treatment of this weekend's news out of Valencia. Not to say that there aren't Cohen works that are forgotten and ignored – the short story 'Lovers and Barbers' comes to mind – but this isn't one of them. Most of the poems in The Spice-Box of Earth have reappeared at some point or other – twenty-eight are currently in print as part of Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs – and yet, Frank Newfeld's accomplished, award-winning design has never been reprinted.

Of the many books the designer created for McClelland and Stewart, The Spice-Box of Earth ranks as is one of the more elaborate. Issued in simultaneous cloth and paper editions, the book has a cut-out jacket through which the poet's portrait is displayed, while nearly every page features pen and ink illustrations and other design elements printed in red, black and gold.

This was not at all what Cohen had first envisioned. Two years before publication, he'd rejected editor Claire Pratt's proposal that the collection be included as part of M&S's hardcover Indian File poetry series (where it would have followed John Glassco's The Deficit Made Flesh), arguing for a cheaper paperback edition. However, biographer Ira Nadel tells us that the poet underwent a change of heart; when asked to choose between a basic edition and one with a Newfeld design, Cohen opted for the latter. The result is, I think, the designer's finest work.

Access: Canadians, look to your university libraries. There are copies out there for sale, the cheapest being the 1968 Bantam mass market edition (expect to pay at least C$20), but only the 3000 copy first edition features the Newfeld design in its full glory. Cohen being Cohen, Near Fine copies in cloth fetch a very high price – usually somewhere in the area of C$750. One problem is that cut-out jacket, which is easily damaged and, it seems, all too readily discarded. I bought my paperbound copy – signed – as a university student for all of four dollars. The vendor, a long-gone used bookshop on Montreal's Monkland Avenue, was just around the corner from Irving Layton's house. Coincidence? I have my doubts. During that same visit I noticed new copies of Layton's For My Neighbours in Hell (1980) and The Gucci Bag (1983) piled a dozen deep. All were signed.

Beware: the first American edition, published by Viking that same year, incorporates select elements of Newfeld's work, but is considerably less ambitious. It's also not nearly as beautiful or desirable. Lacking the cut-out jacket, it replaces Newfeld's elegant black and gold design with brown and butter.

Let us compare covers: In retrospect, The Spice-Box of Earth seems to have enjoyed a fairly easy birth. Not so, Flowers for Hitler, Cohen's next book of verse. Jack McClelland thought the quality of the poems uneven, while Cohen considered the collection 'a masterpiece'. Then, there was the matter of the proposed title, Opium and Hitler, on which publisher and poet could not agree. The two were still arguing in September 1964, mere months before the pub date, when a new battle flared up. At issue was Newfeld's cover image. I've not seen the design, so rely on imagination coupled with Cohen's own description in a letter to McClelland:

Nobody is going to buy a book the cover of which is a female body with my face for tits. You couldn't give that picture away. It doesn't matter what the title is now because the picture is simply offensive. It is dirty in the worst sense. It hasn't the sincerity of a stag movie or the imagination of a filthy postcard or the energy of real surrealist humour. It is dirty to the brain.

Adding that he refused to 'preside over the distribution of a crude hermaphrodotic distortion of the image of my person', Cohen suggested canceling the book altogether. With the book in production, McClelland could only back down.

What became the cover is, according to Nadel, an amalgamation of six designs Cohen himself provided.

As the biographer suggests, the result appears as 'a Valentine's Day card of sorts.' After The Spice-Box of Earth, it's difficult to see the design as anything but a disappointment. (And it is hard to get past the boyish Hitler in the bottom right... George Gobel's square.) Understandable, then, that it wasn't used when Jonathan Cape issued the first foreign edition in 1973.

But is this really any better?

Queen Victoria and He

A song for Victoria Day.

Leonard Cohen's words to our celebrated monarch, "mean governess of the huge pink maps", first surfaced as "Queen Victoria and Me" in Flowers for Hitler, his 1964 collection of poems. The song differs only sightly; title aside, the most noticeable change occurs a few lines in.

I love you too in all your forms

the slim unlovely virgin anyone would lay

the white figure floating among German beards 

becomes

I love you too in all your forms

the slim unlovely virgin floating among German beards

I've twice seen 'German beards' misquoted as 'German beers'. Make mine a Beck's.

No 'Hallelujah' this, 'Queen Victoria' certainly ranks amongst Cohen's least noticed songs. It has never featured in his public performances, yet is tacked on the end of 1973's Live Songs.

Related posts:

A Civil Servant's Awful Victoria Day Poem

Victoria Day Poetry Disaster

Verse for Victoria Day by the Master of All Poets

Cheery Victoria Day Verse from the Cheese Poet

'Away to Canada' – A Song for Victoria Day