À rebours

It's been some time since I've written much about John Glassco, whose life consumed seven or so years of mine. A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of the man, was published by McGill-Queen's in 2011. Last year saw The Heart Accepts It All, a selection of his letters I edited for Véhicule Press. I've since been working on other projects, but Glassco is forever in the background. The last few months have brought reviews of the biography from Robert Edison Sandiford (The Antigonish Review) and the letters from Bruce Whiteman (Canadian Notes & Queries). The former is available online. Here's an excerpt:

Busby’s biography is as much forensic exercise as literary reclamation. He is only interested in the facts of Glassco’s life and work that can be corroborated. The level of cross-checking he had to do must have been drink-inducing. But it pays off with a book that gives a lively and accurate account of a Canadian writer who was at one point one of the country’s most significant translators and who remains iconic because of his famous fictionalized memoir.

Speaking of fiction, this past Hallowe'en morn my eyes were drawn to this Margaret Cannon review on the Globe & Mail website:

Glassco died young? As I creep up in age, seventy-one no longer seems so ancient. But still.

I've always meant to read Murder in Montparnasse, if only to see whether Glassco, Taylor, Callaghan, McAlmon and other fixtures of that time and place feature in its pages. I had no idea that the protagonist of the 1992 mystery is based on Glassco; no one else has ever made the connection.  To be honest, nothing in Ms Cannon's writing convinces me that this is so. You'll forgive me, I hope, for pointing out that she botches the title of Glassco's memoirs.

Still, I'll make a point of reading Engel's mystery.

A decade or so ago, when I began work on what would become A Gentleman of Pleasure, a fellow writer cautioned. "Do this and Glassco will always be with you," he said. "The biographer's subject haunts."

He himself had written the biography of a man whom he'd come to despise.

His experience is not mine.

I leave the second to last words to Sandiford:

Busby may be overly sympathetic at times, which is understandable given his subject, but there is something all of us – artist and not – can understand of Glassco’s very human doubts that he may be merely a “trifler, dilettante, petit-maître.”

Indeed, in all of us.

Cross-posted, with minor variations, at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

Eleven Earth and High Heavens

It's been a week since the celebration of Gwethalyn Graham at the Writers' Chapel, which isn't to say that she is no longer on my mind. Looking through my collection, I'm beginning to think that nearly all Anglo Montreal families once had a copy of Earth and High Heaven. That pictured above, published in 1948 by Bantam, was ours. I picked up my own, the Lippincott first American edition (below) from the "FREE" box at Cheap Thrills. Like Lionel Shapiro's The Sixth of June, there was a time when it was pretty thick on the ground.

Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944

I like the Lippincott cover because it reminds me of Charles Addams; those trees are most certainly his. The English Jonathan Cape edition, which I understand to be the true first, doesn't have nearly as much going for it:   

London: Jonathan Cape, 1944

The edition I've always wanted was given away to Americans serving in the Second World War. Cheap, so cheap, it was not designed to survive – Lippincott didn't want thousands of used copies flooding the market in peacetime – but they are out there.

New Delhi: Editions for the Armed Services, 1944

Much more rare is Entre ciel et terre, the French translation. I've never seen a copy. The image below was found in my online wanderings.

Entre ciel et terre
Paris: Tallandier, 1946

Odd to think that this novel of Montreal – one that dominated bestseller lists, one that is still studied university – should have enjoyed just one printing in French translation... from a Parisian press.

Welcome to the depressing world of Canadian literature.

Outside the English-speaking world, it's the Germans – yes, the Germans – who have paid the most attention to Graham's novel.

Im Himmel und auf Erden
Nürnberg: Nest Verlag, 1948

The novel has also found a home with the Dutch, the Danes and the Finns.

Maa ja korkea taivas
Helsinki: Otava, 1947

In the nearly seven decades since Earth and High Heaven first appeared, it's pretty much retreated behind Canadian borders. The novel that once topped the New York Times Bestseller List was last published down south during the Johnson administration:  

New York: Paperback Library, 1965

While Earth and High Heaven has had more legs in Canada, this didn't mean much for its author. Graham received a $100 advance on royalties in 1960 when the novel joined the New Canadian Library. Four years later, the author received a further three dollars when it earned out.

Gwethalyn Graham died in 1965, so was spared witness to the ugly New Canadian Library editions credited to "Gwenthalyn Graham".

  

Two bucks will buy a copy from a Yankee bookseller. That said, he has "McClulland and Stewart" as the publisher, so I can't be sure it's the same.

Never mind. The one you want is the 2003 Cormorant edition:

By far the most attractive edition ever published in this country, it has an Introduction by Norman Ravvin.

Buy it!

With Norman Ravvin, Claire Holden Rothman and the Venerable Linda Borden Taylor
The Writers' Chapel, Montreal, 11 October 2013 

Credit: The image of the NCL "Gwenthalyn Graham" edition was lifted from the very fine Chumley and Pepys on Books blog. 

Related post:

The Paralyzing Success of Gwethalyn Graham

The Paralyzing Success of Gwethalyn Graham

Gwethalyn Graham
18 January 1913 – 26 November 1965

Expect no media recognition today of the Gwethalyn Graham centenary – such things just aren't done in this country. Oh, there was a good deal of fuss last year over Irving Layton at 100, but the silence surrounding the similar anniversaries of Gabrielle Roy and Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau are more in keeping with cool Canadian tradition.

In Graham's case, the neglect is a bit easier to understand. She produced only three books in her short life. The first, Swiss Sonata (1938), was published in England and the United States, earned reviews of the "respectable first novel" variety, won a Governor General's Award, then quickly slipped out of print and out of mind. The third, Dear Enemies (1963), "a dialogue on French and English Canada" with unhappy journalist Solange Chaput-Rolland, might be of interest to those studying the Quiet Revolution.

It's for that middle book, the novel Earth and High Heaven, that we remember Graham. Or do we? Before Cormorant Books resurrected Swiss Sonata and Earth and High Heaven last decade, Graham had been long out-of-print. But in 1944 and 1945, she was a publishing sensation.

Arriving in bookstores during the final months of the Second World War, Earth and High Heaven and its romantic story of the forbidden love between a Gentile and a Jew appealed.

"Deserves the widest possible audience," decreed the New York Times. Earth and High Heaven received just that. The week of publication, a portrait of the unknown author graced the cover of The Saturday Review. Two weeks later, the magazine featured an advert boasting that the book was in its third printing.

Life, 19 February 1945

There was a Lippincott edition, a Jonathan Cape edition, an Armed Services edition and a cheap hardcover from Sun Dial Press. Earth and High Heaven became the first Canadian novel to hold number one spot on the New York Times Best Seller list. Throughout the following year, it worked steadily beside Elizabeth Goudge's Green Dolphin Street in luring readers to join the Literary Guild and the Doubleday One Dollar Book Club. Fifteen translations were to come.

Ottawa Citizen
12 October 1946

Earth and High Heaven received the 1944 Governor General's Award for Fiction and the 1945 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book on race relations. Not everyone was on board. Writing in First Statement, John Glassco dismissed the novel as "cinematic and strictly spurious." Samuel Goldwyn half-agreed, paying $100,000 for the screen rights. Screenwriter Howard Koch was dispatched to Montreal, where he visited the author and strolled about Windsor Station, Dominion Square, Mount Royal and Westmount.

Graham estimated that her novel sold 1,250,000 copies in its first thirteen months. Sure seems like it. When I was a student back in the 'eighties, Montreal's used bookstores were giving away copies gratis.

There would be no movie – film historians are of the mind that it was somehow killed by the success of Gentleman's Agreement. There was no third novel, either. One might blame the riches – they did get in the way for a time – but I think the true reason for the silence was fear. Accepting her second Governor General's Award at Montreal's Ritz-Carleton Graham admitted that she was "worried to death" about her next book:

At the risk of sounding ungrateful – which Heaven knows I am not – being so strongly identified with one book and one title gives one an awful feeling at times, and I should like to forget all about Earth and High Heaven and get on to something else if I can, and, with luck do a better job next time.

Gwethalyn Graham never could forget Earth and High Heaven... and yet we did.