A Very Canadian Succès de scandale

The Parliamentary Librarian chased after "Gilbert Knox". Conservative MP Alfred Fripp joined in the hunt, intent on having the author deported to who knows where. The clergy condemned, Ottawa echoed with talk of lawsuits, an election was fought. and a government fell. In the midst of it all, the woman behind the pseudonym suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent away to a Toronto nursing home…

So begins my latest Canadian Notes & Queries Dusty Bookcase column. The rest is found in the new issue, number 92, sharing pages with writing by Michel Basilières, Laura Bast, Darryl Joel Berger, Kerry Clare, Michael Darling, Marc di Saverio, Jennifer A. Franssen, Kaper Hartman, Melanie Janisse, Lydia Kwa, Nick Maandag, David Mason, John McFetridge, Shane Neilson, Patricia Robertson, Rebecca Rosenblum, Mark Sampson, Russell Smith, JC Sutcliffe, Nicholas Zacharewicz and, of course, Seth.

Fellow contributors will understand my singling out Alex Good's "Shackled to a Corpse: The Long, Long Shadow" and Stephen Henighan's "Jimmy the Crossdresser, Mother of Mavis Gallant" as being particularly worthy of attention.

My own contribution, much more modest, concerns The Land of Afternoon, a very good, yet forgotten roman à clef published in 1925 under the name "Gilbert Knox". Madge Macbeth (right) was its true author, which is something not even her publisher knew. The author took the secret to her grave, leaving behind a bright white paper trail for all to follow.

Few have.

Go back ninety years and we'd all be talking about The Land of Afternoon. The first book to come out of Ottawa's Graphic Publishers, it landed in the midst of the federal election fought between Arthur Meighen's Conservatives and the Liberals of William Lyon Mackenzie King. The latter doesn't figure, but Meighen served as a model for protagonist Raymond Dillings, Member of Parliament for Pinto Plains. Wife Isabel inspired Marjorie Dillings… and on it goes.

Again, you'll find more in the new CNQ.

For now, a couple of pieces of trivia that didn't make it into the piece:

1. In February 1936, a scene from the novel was dramatized by Toronto's Canadian Literature Club.
2. Macbeth's good friend Lawrence Burpee once appeared in disguise at a Canadian Authors Association event as "Gilbert Knox".

Burpee, not Knox, May 1926

Subscriptions to CNQ are available through this link.

Bilious, Bitchy and Bedevilled by Spite? Not at All.

Just in time for Christmas, the new Canadian Notes & Queries is here. Seth provides the cover, along with a short tribute to the Maclean's illustrated cover. The magazine switched to photographs before I came along, but old issues lingered in our home. The 10 January 1952 cover by Oscar Cahén was a favourite. I think of it each dying year as winter moves in.

Here I am getting all nostalgic.

John Metcalf, not Maclean's, is the focus of this CNQ. Contributors include Caroline Adderson, Mike Barnes, Clarke Blaise, Michael Darling, Alex Good, Jeet Heer, Kim Jernigan, David Mason and Dan Wells. Cartoonist David Collier gives us a two-page adaptation of Going Down Slow. Roy MacSkimming, Christopher Moore and Nick Mount have interviews with the man, while I praise Metcalf's invigorating, irreverent Bumper Books.

But wait, there's more: a new short story from Kathy Page, four poems by Jim Johnston, along with reviews from Steven W. Beattie, Kerry Clare, Emily Donaldson and Bruce Whiteman.

I think all contributors will forgive and understand that my favourite thing about the issue is the collectable. A numbered, limited edition chapbook containing a new John Metcalf story, it's available only to subscribers.

And subscriptions are only $20.

And they make a great Christmas gift.

Here's how to order.

A bonus:

(cliquez pour agrandir)

The back cover of Carry On Bumping (Toronto: ECW, 1988).

Now, that's how you sell a book.

Mordecai's Mom's Memoirs

The new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries has arrived, bringing a rich mixture of essays on collecting, bookselling and Mordecai Richler. With ninety-six pages of goodness, there's too much to list here, but I will point CanLit collectors to essays by Nigel Beale, Michael Darling and Jim Fitzpatrick. I add that admirers of Charles Foran's Mordecai are treated to the biography's original preface, penned just as work was beginning.

My own piece deals with The Errand Runner: Reflections of a Rabbi's Daughter, the 1981 book by Leah Rosenberg, Richler's mother. A product of John Wiley & Sons' Toronto branch plant, it ranks as the most awkward and badly edited memoir I've yet come across – and here I'm including self-published stuff. Blame belongs entirely with the publisher, which reveals its reason for signing the memoir on the book's dust jacket.

As I write in CNQ: "Discard the dust jacket, however, and Mordecai Richler's name disappears. His is not to be found in the text..."

More in print.

Subscriptions are available here.

The Mysterious Question Mystery

The Canadian Century: English Canadian Writing Since Confederation

A. J. M. Smith, editor

Toronto: Gage, 1973

The Canadian Century is the tardy companion to The Colonial Century, a textbook that began life in 1965 as The Book of Canadian Prose: Volume 1. Worth the wait? I think so. Smith wastes more than a few of the 652 pages on things like Hugh Garner's 'One- Two- Three Little Indians', but this is more than offset by the inspired, accomplished and all too often overlooked. The reader is presented with writing by Edward Blake, Wilfrid Laurier, Northrop Frye, Leonard Cohen and Alice Munro. Louis Riel's eloquent, if confused, final statement in The Queen v Louis Riel is included; as is John Glassco's comic memoir 'A Season in Limbo', otherwise only available in an old number of The Tamarack Review. Preceding all is a piece titled 'The Mysterious Question', which Smith chose to include in his Preface.

'Perhaps I take a risk of including here a remarkable short story', the anthologist writes

Perhaps.

The short work of fiction, first published in a 1951 issue of Northern Review, is a hoax. Attributed to 'John Goodwin of West Vancouver, B.C.', age 12, it was actually the work of editor John Sutherland (plagiarized from a story by Washington Irving). The prank fooled a great many people, including Ethel Wilson, who had been so impressed by the story that, thirteen years later, she wondered about its author in her essay 'Series of Combination of Events and Where Is John Goodwin?'

Smith knew the true identity of the author; in 1969, he and Glassco had exchanged correspondence about Sutherland's prank. Yet, the anthologist appears to have had no qualms in furthering the ruse... for a while. The Canadian Century was reprinted at some point. Hard to tell when. The title and copyright pages are identical, the design is unchanged, yet 'The Mysterious Question' has disappeared.

Object: Well, it's a textbook: bland layout and paper of a shade that induces symptoms not dissimilar to snowblindness. Simultaneous cloth and paper editions.

Access: Not as common as one might expect. A handful of copies are currently listed, the most expensive coming in at US$15. Seems everyone thinks that they're offering the first printing. Maybe they are. The second printing is scarce — in his A. J. M. Smith, An Annotated Bibliography (Montreal: Véhicule, 1981) Michael Darling writes that he'd been unable to locate a copy.