The Return of Hugh Garner's Neglected Novel

As promised, after a sixty-three year and nine month absence Hugh Garner's Waste No Tears returned to print last week. The fifth Vehicle Press Ricochet Book, it marks something of a departure in the series as the first reissue set in Toronto. It is also the first novel written by a

Governor General's Award-winning author, which begs the question: Where is David Montrose's award? Murder Over Dorval is a hell of a lot better than The Pillar.

Never mind.

Waste No Tears was Garner's third novel, and follows Storm Below in being the second published. As mentioned elsewhere, the original News Stand Library edition from July 1950 is uncommon – three of our university libraries have copies – but this only goes part way in explaining the neglect and indifference shown by those who have written on Garner and his work. The novel receives no mention in  The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Yet, the novel is ever-present in the bibliographies featured in the author's books. Here it is in Hugh Garner's Best Stories, for which he won that Governor General's Award:

Garner's early paperback originals have been too readily dismissed. It seems that only Cabbagetown has been deemed worthy of attention – in large part, I think, because the bowdlerized Collins White Circle first edition was restored and published by respectable Ryerson Press.

In his Canadian Literary Landmarks, John Robert Colombo writes of Waste No Tears as "hack work". Paul Stuewe, Garner's biographer, echoes in describing it as a "book noteworthy only as an example of how rapidly a professional writer can produce hackwork when necessary."

Hey, we non-academics have to make a living somehow. Besides, writing produced with an eye on manna can have value.

As with Brian Moore's pulp work – similarly neglected – there is much to explore in Waste No Tears. I recommend Michael P.J. Kennedy's "Garner's Forgotten Novel and Its Relationship to the Stories", which deals with the links between Waste No Tears, "Lucy", "Mama Says to Tell You She's Out" and "The Yellow Sweater". Amy Lavender Harris gives us not only "Hugh Garner's Forgotten Toronto Novel, Waste No Tears", but graciously accepted my invitation to write the Introduction to the new edition:

Although Morley Callaghan’s early Toronto novel Strange Fugitive – set in a long-vanished downtown slum district known as 'the Ward' – often receives literary credit for exposing the city’s seedy underside, it is Garner’s paperback novels – Waste No Tears and Present Reckoning chief among them – that reveal how narrow is the line that separates 'Toronto the Good' from its seamier shadow. It’s a line drawn precisely along Jarvis Street, a street that even now remains incompletely improved, the converted mansions and corporate towers at its north end still sliding irrevocably downhill toward the rooming houses and massage parlors where brutal necessities continue to be transacted in what remains of Toronto’s notorious skid row.

More Toronto novels to come. Promise.

More Montreal, too. Another promise.

But first, Niagara Falls.

That's a tease.

Related post:

Unsettling Garners

Brian Moore's Pulp Fiction

This blog began ten months ago with a modest piece on Sailor's Leave, the Brian Moore novel first published by Harlequin as Wreath for a Redhead. "It's a very small secret", I wrote at the time, "that between 1951 and 1957 Moore published seven pulp novels." Today, having spent much of the morning surrounded by Canadian reference books, I'm beginning to reconsider my words. The Canadian Encyclopedia doesn't mention them, nor does The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Reference works that do recognize Moore's pulps cock things up completely. Here, for example, is John Robert Colombo writing in his 1000 Questions About Canada:

The distinguished novelist Brian Moore did not write Harlequin Romances, but in 1951, while still a newspaperman, he wrote a number of suspense novels that were published by Harlequin Books. They are Wreath for a Redhead and The Executioners.

Information is not plentiful, but it seems Moore wrote other novels for Harlequin. Their titles are sometimes given as This Gun for Gloria, French for Murder (as Bernard Mara), Intention to Kill [sic] and Murder in Majorca (as Michael Bryan). It seems in 1952 Pyramid Books published yet another Moore pot-boiler, titled Sailor's Leave.

I don't think Colombo really meant that Moore wrote all his pulps in 1951 – they were produced over a six-year stretch that began in 1950 – and so, put this morsel of misinformation down to sloppiness. But what of the rest? None of the "other novels" were published by Harlequin, and Sailor's Leave, published in 1953 (not 1952), was nothing but an American reissue of Wreath for a Redhead. Contrary to Colombo's claim, information is plentiful and the titles are well-documented – as they were in 2001, when 1000 Questions About Canada was first published. As with any research, the trick is knowing where to look. Let's start with Denis Sampson's fine biography Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist, which includes this handy page:

The very same information can be found elsewhere, which makes Colombo's writing all the more disconcerting. This is, after all, a man whose career was built in large measure as Canada's go-to guy for reference works. I don't think I'm making too much of a fuss; this is the second time I've consulted Colombo in writing this blog, and it is the second time his information has shown itself to be incorrect.

Enough. I promised myself that October would be dedicated to writing that brings in money. The next week or so will feature nothing but images of Moore's pulp novels. Enjoy!

Related posts:

Brian Moore's True First

Murderer's Move in on Montreal

Parisian French, not Québécois French
No Lady Before Judith Hearne
No Gun for Gloria

Gustafson's Good or Bad Novel

Ralph Barker Gustafson

16 August 1909 - 29 May 1995

In recent months, I've come to realize the importance of nineteen-aught-nine to the poetry of Anglo-Quebec. A.M. Klein was born that year, as were Ralph Gustafson and John Glassco. Three very different poets and, I dare say, three very different men.

Today belongs to Gustafson. I'm sometimes hesitant when acknowledging anniversaries here – it may be argued that the poet didn't always receive the recognition he deserved, but his writing wasn't exactly suppressed or ignored. That said, there is one work, No Music in the Nightingale, that could be considered forgotten. Much of what I know of this unpublished novel comes from Jack, A Life in Letters, James King's 1999 biography of Jack McClelland. Its history is curious, one where publication, which at first seems certain, becomes less likely with each new draft. We're told that in 1953 the publisher approached Gustafson, then under contract with Viking in New York, hoping to win Canadian rights. Three years later, the manuscript arrived at McClelland and Stewart's offices, generating an 'enthusiastic letter' with detailed comments from fiction editor Conway Turton.

Then... silence.

Three more years passed, during which M&S published Gustafson's well-received collection of verse, Rivers Among Rocks. The poet wrote McClelland asking him to reconsider the novel. This time, however, the reception was muted. 'We have read it here and are reserving judgement', he wrote. 'It's either very, very good or very, very bad. I'm damned if I know which.' These words, to Little, Brown editor Alan D. Williams, were part of an ill-fated effort to find an American co-publisher. What happened to the early contract with Viking, King doesn't say.

Gustafson tried again in 1965, sending a McClelland a revised version of the novel. This time, John Robert Colombo weighed in with a reader's report that featured a fatal line: 'As a poet he is a consummate craftsman – but as a novelist: ugh!' In response, Gustafson wrote McClelland: 'I was deflated by the readers' reports and haven't got up enough courage to read through the novel again – I know I should, in fairness to you, and I know it needs one revision. I suppose, on the whole, after the reader's "ugh," you better ship the thing home to me, alas.'

The unpublished novel is held at the Queen's University Archives.

Gay and Withdrawn

Gay Canadian Rogues: Swindlers, Gold-diggers and

Spies

Frank Rasky

Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1958

Bought for a buck twenty years ago, Gay Canadian Rogues has stayed with me from Montreal to Vancouver to Toronto, then back to Vancouver and, finally, the picturesque town of St Marys. Cover and title have ensured its survival during those nasty culls that invariably accompany moves.

It's a fast read, not much more than a collection of disjointed chapters, each dealing, more or less, with the sorts of folk described in the subtitle. They're not particularly gay, in any sense of the word, nor are they necessarily Canadian. A few fail to meet any definition of the word 'rogue' – and it is here that the author may have dug himself into a bit of a hole. In 1000 Questions About Canada, John Robert Colombo writes that Gay Canadian Rogues was withdrawn by Thomas Nelson & Sons 'within weeks of publication':

The publishers were responding to the threat of legal action. The author of the book, journalist Frank Rasky, had devoted one chapter to Igor Gouzenko, the Soviet defector. Gouzenko did not object to the innocent use of the word 'gay' in the title – it had yet to take on other connotations – but he did object to being lumped in with rogues, swindlers, and gold-diggers. Once withdrawn from publication, the book was never reprinted.

Hmm... Not to quibble, but Rasky devoted two chapters to Gouzenko, and the book was reprinted... by Harlequin... that very same year... with a cover that owed everything to the original.

Assuming Colombo is correct about the withdrawal of the first edition, I'll add that it really is a shame; particularly since the Gouzenko chapters – 'Gouzenko, and Whisky, and Wild, Wild Spys' and 'Gouzenko's Escape from the Red Atom Spies' – rank with 'Dog Detectives of the R.C.M.P.' as the weakest. There's much better payoff in reading about Cassie Chadwick or the author's account of the time he infiltrated a farcical gang of Vancouver juvenile delinquents. Readers of Canadian literature are directed to Rasky's writing on Red Ryan, the criminal cause célèbrewho inspired Morley Callaghan's More Joy in Heaven. The author tells us that Ryan had been signed to write Crime Does Not Pay, a biography that was left unfinished when he was gunned down by members of the Sarnia Police Department. I wonder where that manuscript is today.

Object and Access: Well-bound, printed on heavy stock, it's saddled with a dust jacket this is thin and fragile. The book isn't common, but it's not expensive either. Four of the eleven copies currently listed online include letters from the author to various members of the media and can be had for under C$40. At the high end we find one Toronto bookseller offering the book – sans letter – for C$75. Condition is not a factor. A Calgary merchant goes even farther in attempting to flog a copy – again, sans letter, and with 'heavy wear on dust jacket' – for C$100. But then, this same bookstore is asking C$2,500 for a 1995 bargain book about cats. No joke.

The Poet Mayor of Toronto

The Mackenzie Poems

William Lyon Mackenzie & John Robert Colombo

Toronto: Swan, 1966

A great deal is being made today over Toronto's 175th anniversary. This all goes back to the city's incorporation, of course, ignoring the founding of York by the heroic John Graves Simcoe some four decades earlier. Never mind, the day gives cause to look more closely at this interesting collaboration between Toronto's first mayor and John Robert Colombo. 'Is this prose or poetry?' asks the cover copy. The answer is clearly the latter - found poetry, to be precise. To quote further: 'Here are the actual words of William Lyon Mackenzie, the man who led armed citizens through the streets of Toronto in 1837.'

FRANCE AND FREEDOM

Let the readers

of the Colonial Advocate

keep a watchful eye

upon the march of events

in Europe;

the tide rises.

Predating F.R. Scott's Trouvailles: poems from prose by one year, this is poetry of the Centennial, written - or, to be more accurate, cut - at a time of healthy, heightened interest in the past. Fun stuff, it's easy to see why names like Scott, Earle Birney, Raymond Souster and James Reaney wrote blurbs for the book.

Object: A slim title, just 94 pages in length, The Mackenzie Poems appears to have been issued in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions. Both are published on cheap newsprint and state 'First Edition, 1966'. My paperback copy was purchased nine years ago for 69¢, a full 6¢ off the original price, at a Toronto Value Village. A pretty good find, it's inscribed by Colombo to Philip Givens, who was then the city's mayor. 'Your cultural crusade is as needed today as Mayor Mackenzie's political crusade was in his', wrote the poet - a reference, perhaps, to Givens' lengthy campaign to bring Henry Moore's Three-Way Piece No. 2 to Nathan Phillips Square.

Access: A fairly fragile item, I imagine most library copies have long since fallen apart and been discarded - the Toronto Public Library holds only three. That said, it is readily available and inexpensive. Very Good copies of the paperback can be had for as little as C$3. Expect to pay roughly C$10 for the hardcover.