Showing posts with label Davies (Robertson). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Davies (Robertson). Show all posts

07 August 2020

What's This?



I purchased Robertson Davies' What's Bred in the Bone upon publication, the exchange taking place in 1985 at the old Coles bookstore on the corner of St Catherine and Stanley in downtown Montreal. The second book in Davies' Cornish Trilogy, it is the earliest Canadian edition of a Davies book to feature a cover by Anna Bascove. Prior to this, she'd provided illustrations for the American editions of The Rebel Angels and High Spirits. Following What's Bred in the Bone, her work came to take over Davies' Penguin backlist. It also graced his final novels.

High Spirits (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1982)
and High Spirits (New York: Viking, 1983)
Whoever hired the artist deserves recognition; Bascove and Davies were a perfect match. In my mind, they're forever linked.

I've been thinking about Davies because this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. His star shone so brightly back then... but not so much now. Some Davies titles are still in print, though most are not.

I don't think of Davies as a neglected writer, which is why he hasn't featured much in this blog or in my books. Here and there, I've mentioned that Davies' What's Bred in the Bone shares its title with Grant Allen's 1891 Tit-Bits £1000 award-winning novel. How odd, then, that I happened upon this rip-off being sold by a print on demand vulture using CreateSpace.


Someone call a lawyer. Anna Bascove is owed recompense.

Related post:

07 June 2016

Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?



The Hohenzollerns in America; 
     With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and Other Impossibilities
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1919

Robertson Davies hated this book. "Leacock at his worst," he wrote in his ill-fated tribute to the man, adding: "Nevertheless, we may not dismiss it; he wrote it, and if we accept the sunshine, we must not shrink from a peep into the dank chill of his shade."

Centring on the lengthy title story, Davies' disgust is anything but unique. Biographers David M. Legate, Albert Moritz and Theresa Moritz express similar opinions, while Ralph L. Currie, the first to pen a life of Leacock, chooses to simply ignore it. In her Leacock book, Margaret MacMillan complains that the story is "too broad and too crude." Writes the author of Paris 1919:
The title piece of his 1919 book, The Hohenzollerns in America, starts from the amusing conceit that the German royal family takes refuge in the United States as penniless refugees after Germany's defeat in the First World War but goes downhill because Leacock cannot keep his light touch. "The proper punishment," says Leacock in his preface, "for the Hohenzollerns, and the Hapsburgs, and the Mecklenburgs, and the Muckendorfs, and all such puppets and princelings, is that they should be made to work."
I'm breaking in here with a couple of comments, the first being that the title piece does not begin with a "light touch," but is heavy from the start. Note that MacMillan contradicts herself by quoting the story's preface.* And while it's true that Leacock can be relied upon for a goodnatured, inoffensive chuckle, his touch was not always light. Teetotals will confirm.

MacMillan continues:
The resulting sketch is nasty and not at all funny. At its end, the former Kaiser, now a ragged street peddler in the Bowery, dies of his injuries after a traffic accident.
I myself found "The Hohenzollerns in America" nasty, funny and fun. Anticipating Sue Townsend's The Queen and I, it imagines the German
royal family stripped of wealth and trappings, and forced to work "as millions of poor emigrants out of Germany have worked for generations past." The piece is presented in the form of a diary – Townsend would approve – kept by Princess Frederica, niece to the deposed emperor, beginning with her first day in steerage on a ship bound for New York. Once in America, the Hohens, as they are now known, do their best to reinvent themselves. A couple become waiters. Uncle Henry, once a Grand Admiral, finds a job as a stevedore while studying to become a Barge Master. Meanwhile, untrustworthy Cousin Ferdinand makes a killing in the schmatta trade, as reflected in the vaguely anti-semitic dust jacket of the first British edition. One of their number, Cousin Willie, becomes an out and out thief.

The deposed Kaiser loses his mind and ends up hawking pins, ribbons and bobbles to amused folk who see him as a something of a character. In the princess's account, he doesn't die after a traffic accident, as MacMillan claims, but of injuries sustained by running into a line of cavalry horses at the unveiling of a monument "put up in memory of the people who were lost when one of our war boats fought the English cruiser Lusitania." Princess Frederica finds true love with Mr Peters, a very nice iceman.

"What makes us cringe as we read it is that Leacock has plainly aimed it at minds inferior to his own to feed a nasty kind of patriotism and mean triumph," writes Davies. Come now, most readers of Leacock can't quite match the man's intellect. This dimwit detected not so much as a dash of nasty patriotism, but savoured the stewing of the aristocracy. Such is my taste. Any country's aristocracy will do. I'm also happy to eat the rich, though Davies doesn't share my appetite:
Even when we try to consider it ["The Hohenzollerns in America"] as a part of an hysterical post-war relief, it is still bad Leacock, and the other things in the book, including the satire on plutocrats who profited from the war but sent their chauffeurs to fight, is no better.
No better? The piece to which Davies refers, "The War Sacrifices of Mr. Spugg," is just about the best thing Leacock ever published. This is fine satire:
Although we had been members of the same club for years, I only knew Mr. Spugg by sight until one afternoon when I heard him saying that he intended to send his chauffeur to the war.
     It was said quite quietly, no bombast or boasting about it. Mr. Spugg was standing among a little group of listening members of the club and when he said that he had decided to send his chauffeur, he spoke with a kind of simple earnestness, a determination that marks the character of the man.
     "Yes," he said, "we need all the man power we can command. This thing has come to a showdown and we've got to recognise it. I told Henry that it's a showdown and that he's to get ready and start right away."
     "Well, Spugg," said one of the members, "you're certainly setting us a fine example."
You won't find "The War Sacrifices of Mr. Spugg" in any Leacock anthology, nor "War and Peace in the Galaxy Club" in which a series of
ill-conceived fundraising events meant to aid the Red Cross only bring increasing debt. By the Armistice, the Club faces insolvency:
Peace has ruined us. Not a single member, so far as I am aware, is prepared to protest against the peace, or is anything but delighted to think that the war is over. At the same time we do feel that if we could have had a longer notice, six months for instance, we could have braced ourselves better to stand up against it and meet the blow when it fell.
Both pieces come from the middle section of the book: "Echoes of the War". Given the title, should we really be expecting a light touch? It leads with "The Boy Who Came Back," an account of young nephew Tom's first dinner party as a returning war hero. The host is at concerned that Tom will disturb the other guests with gruesome accounts of the war, and is then disappointed when he doesn't.
Tom had nothing to say about the Hindenburg line. In fact, for the first half of the dinner he hardly spoke. I think he was worried about his left hand. There is a deep furrow across the back of it where a piece of shrapnel went through and there are two fingers that will hardly move at all. I could see that he was ashamed of its clumsiness and afraid that someone might notice it. So he kept silent. Professor Razzler did indeed ask him straight across the table what he thought about the final breaking of the Hindenburg line. But he asked it with that same fierce look from under his bushy eyebrows with which he used to ask Tom to define the path of a tangent, and Tom was rattled at once. He answered something about being afraid that he was not well posted, owing to there being so little chance over there to read the papers.
When Tom finally breaks his silence it is to talk about how his French comrades had really taken to baseball, his great passion in life.
It grieved me to note that as the men sat smoking their cigars and drinking liqueur whiskey (we have cut out port at our house till the final peace is signed) Tom seemed to have subsided into being only a boy again, a first-year college boy among his seniors. They spoke to him in quite a patronising way, and even asked him two or three direct questions about fighting in the trenches, and wounds and the dead men in No Man's Land and the other horrors that the civilian mind hankers to hear about. Perhaps they thought, from the boy's talk, that he had seen nothing. If so, they were mistaken. For about three minutes, not more, Tom gave them what was coming to them. He told them, for example, why he trained his 'fellows' to drive the bayonet through the stomach and not through the head, that the bayonet driven through the face or skull sticks and, but there is no need to recite it here. Any of the boys like Tom can tell it all to you, only they don't want to and don't care to.
Dismiss The Hozenhollers in America? Never. I've enjoyed the sunshine, but within the dank chill of his shade exists a depth that makes me appreciate the man all the more. It's Leacock at his best.


A favourite light passage to cleanse the palate:
Mr. Peters came over to my chair and took hold of the arm of it and told me not to cry. Somehow his touch on the arm of the chair thrilled all through me and though I knew that it was wrong I let him keep it there and even let him stroke the upholstery and I don't know just what would have happened but at that very minute Uncle William came in.
Object: A dull-looking 222-page book with olive green boards, lacking dust jacket. I bought my first Canadian edition twenty-six years ago in Montreal. Price: $6.00. I probably could've got it cheaper.

Access: The Hohenzollerns in America is one of the few early Leacocks to have been excluded from the New Canadian Library. The collection has been out of print over nine decades, which isn't to say that it is at all difficult to find. Dozens of copies are being offered online at prices ranging from one American dollar to US$521. At the low and high end are jacketless copies of the John Lane British first, the difference being that the latter is being sold by crooks. The one to own comes courtesy of bookseller Ian Thompson, who offers an inscribed and dated copy of the John Lane first in uncommon dust jacket. Price: US$400.

Leacock being Leacock, the book is available at our big city libraries and nearly every university in the land.

A German translation, Die Hohenzollern in Amerika und andere Satiren, was published in 1989 by Fackelträger-Verlag!

* MacMillan limits herself to the beginning of what just might be Leacock's longest published sentence. It is worth quoted in full:
The proper punishment for the Hohenzollerns, and the Hapsburgs, and the Mecklenburgs, and the Muckendorfs, and all such puppets and princelings, is that they should be made to work; and not made to work in the glittering and glorious sense, as generals and chiefs of staff and legislators, and land-barons, but in the plain and humble part of laborers looking for a job; that they should carry a hod and wield a trowel and swing a pick and, at the day's end, be glad of a humble supper and a night's rest; that they should work, in short, as millions of poor emigrants out of Germany have worked for generations past; that there should be about them none of the prestige of fallen grandeur; that, if it were possible, by some trick of magic, or change of circumstance, the world should know them only as laboring men, with the dignity and divinity of kingship departed out of them; that, as such, they should stand or fall, live or starve, as best they might by the work of their own hands and brains.
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08 April 2015

Collard's Cock-up (and a curious coincidence)



Edgar Andrew Collard seems to have been a pretty interesting fellow. A Montrealer armed with a M.A. in history from McGill, in 1942 he found to work in the Gazette library – eleven years later he was editor-in-chief. Robertson Davies, once a newspaperman himself, wrote of his tenure: "I follow about 25 Canadian editorial pages day by day, and I see nothing to compare with this work, either in subject or in treatment."

In 1971, Collard stepped down. Youngsters like myself remember him only as a columnist. From August 1944 to August 2000 – the month before his death – Collard's "All Our Yesterdays" appeared each and every weekend. With titles like "When Dominion Square Was a Cemetery", "Was Dr. James Barry a Woman?", "Strange Experiences of Colonel Ham" and "College as the Ruination of Girls", they focussed on the more colourful aspects of Montreal's past. Several hundred were collected in books like Montreal Yesterdays, Montreal: The Days That Are No More, All Our Yesterdays and 100 More Tales from All Our Yesterdays, but this column on the country's first political assassination isn't one of them :

Saturday, 16 November 1963
(cliques pour grander)
Writes Collard:
Did D'Arcy McGee foresee his sudden death at the age of 42? He did. And he wrote about his fate in a poem entitled "Forewarned."
"Forewarned" meant nothing to me; it doesn't figure in the 612-page Poems of Thomas D'Arcy McGee. A quick search reveals that the verse isn't by McGee at all, rather it belongs to Irish novelist, poet and playwright Gerald Griffin (1803-1840). You can find all 64 lines beginning on page 395 of The Life of Gerald Griffin (Dublin: James Duffy, 1872), written by brother Daniel.

I wonder if Collard ever realized his mistake. As far as I can tell, he never issued a correction. Published the following weekend, Collard's next column dealt with the sculptures gracing the Bank of Montreal Head Office.

Here's that day's front page:

Saturday, 23 November 1963
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25 February 2014

Freedom to Read Week: Robertson Davies' Dad Against Censorship (and Misleading Cover Art)


Senator William Rupert Davies
12 September 1879 - 11 March 1967
RIP
For my part, I do not believe this senate has any business at all legislating what I or anyone else should read. This is a free country, and we are not the keepers of our brothers' consciences to that extent. It would be going to far to try to tell adult Canadians what they should read… I think we should have confidence in the rising generation and try not to protect them too much. After all, character is formed by overcoming obstacles and resisting temptation.
— William Rupert Davies, 5 May 1953  

The Globe & Mail, 6 May 1953

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15 March 2013

Alpha, Beta and Other Crap Sold by Amazon



Corporate greed knows no bounds beyond those imposed by prostate government ministers. Anyone seeking evidence should look no further than the feculence being spewed upon us all by VDM Publishing. Located in the publishing hotbed of Saarbrücken, Germany (pop. 176,000), VDM publishes no original material; for the most part, its writers (unwitting) are the selfless souls who contribute to Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia's entry on Malaysia's South Klang Valley Expressway can be yours through VDM and Amazon for US$146.39. 

If this all seems somehow familiar, its because I've written about VDM, Alphascript, Betascript and its 76 other imprints before... back in 2011 and 2012. I thought then that I was taking shots at a sinking ship. Amazon, through which the company sells nearly all its stuff, seemed ready to "retire" their titles. At least that's what they'd told a disgruntled customer back in 2010 – but you know how slowly things move on the internet.
Consider this my 2013 post. The proliferation of titles aside – the Betascript imprint alone now offers more than 319,000 – there's really nothing new to report. That said, I must acknowledge the debate raging over something in Moscow called "Bookvika". Are they part of VDM or are they an imitator? Because, really, who wouldn't want to follow VDM's business model. 

Recognizing that Bookvika is a 2500-kilometre drive from Saarbrücken, I feel pretty confident in my belief that it falls under the proud VDM corporate umbrella. I cite as evidence the tag found on the cover of Mordecai Richler – "High Quality  Content by [sic] WIKIPEDIA articles" – which is identical to that found on VDM titles. And should we not recognize Jesse Russell and Ronald Cohn, whose names grace tens of thousands of titles?

That Isaac Asimov, what a piker.

Russell and Cohn's Mordecai Richler is worthy of special attention, if only for its odd cover. I must admit, I've never associated the man's name or his writing with China or the Chinese. On the other hand, VDM uses the very same image in hoovering up, bagging and selling entries relating to Pierre Elliott Trudeau... and in 1970 the late Prime Minister did open relations with China. So there you go.

Forget politics, never mind history, being a bookish fellow I'm most interested in VDM's CanLit titles.    

"Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress," opined Dorothy Parker. Here we have former thespian Robertson Davies, the man who gave us the Deptford Trilogyas attractive sorority girl:


There's more gender-bending with Marie-Claire Blais... 


but, oddly, not with Michel Tremblay, whose work is populated by transvestites and drag queens. Instead, VDM's Bookvika imprint presents the celebrated separatist as a staunch federalist.


More weirdness comes with their book on Gabrielle Roy – thirty years dead  which features the laptop she used when writing Bonheur d'occassion and La Petite Poule d'Eau.


Having devoted six or so years of my life – my wife insists the number is ten – to writing a biography of poet John Glassco, it was this title that interested me more than any other:


Amazon sells Alphascript's 18-page John Glassco for $53.00. Buy it and you'll find not only the man's Wikipedia entry, but others on McGill University (which he attended), James Joyce (whom he likely never met), Ernest Hemingway (ditto), Gertrude Stein (ditto) and Alice B. Toklas (ditto). You'll  also find my name because some kind Wikipedian saw fit to cite A Gentleman of Pleasure, my 398-page biography. A McGill-Queen's University Press publication, Amazon is selling the hardcover first edition for $25.17.

Order four and I'll have earned enough in royalties to buy you a beer.

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30 August 2012

Thirty Years After Thirty Years at Stratford



Thirty Years at Stratford
Robertson Davies
Stratford, ON: Stratford Festival, 1982

Christopher Plummer left town a few days ago, signalling the coming end of Stratford's sixtieth season. Oh, the shows will go on – some for two more months – but the crowds will thin, temperatures will fall, and the ladies will begin wearing shawls and wraps. It's my favourite part of the season.

Delivered thirty years ago yesterday, the day after the great man's 69th birthday, this lecture is a souvenir of a familiar time – one in which the festival was fighting for funds, and against declining ticket sales. Be not deceived by its title, this not a history – "Shakespeare has reminded us in many passages of the tediousness of the oft-told tale", Davies tells us – rather it's an attempt to properly place the festival within the history of Canadian theatre.

Dry stuff?

Not at all.

I ramble a bit, but then so does Davies. The Festival Theatre crowd that night was treated to the raising of the ghost of Sarah Bernhardt, a tender tickling and ribbing of puritans, and the drawing of parallels between Beautiful Joe, Little Lord Fauntleroy and E.T. I'd have fallen off my seat.

At its heart Davies' lecture is a celebration of Stratford, a lively schooling of those who attack the festival as being something somehow not Canadian. But at the end I found my mind returning to Davies' opening remarks about the "oft-told tale":
Of course, the story of the very long chance that at last romps home with the prize is one of the best stories in the world, but insofar as it applies to Stratford, you have heard it.
Yes. Yes, I have. As those ladies in shawls age, and I find my middle-aged self counted amongst the youngest patrons, I wonder if it isn't time to let the younger generation in on it.

A personal note: "Canada has had a theatre ever since it had good-sized towns," writes Davies, "and it says something about our ancestors – something we often forget – that they regarded a theatre as a necessary part of a good-sized town."

Sure enough, at the centre of my adopted town of St Marys, seventeen kilometres south of Stratford, rests this magnificent opera house:


It's a mere fine-minute stroll from the inn at which Plummer stays when he plays Stratford.

Object: Sixteen glossy staple-bound pages with card covers. I purchased my sun-bleached copy for $1.50 last year in Montreal. A festival price sticker indicates that it originally sold for $2.50.

Access: A rare item, only three copies are currently listed by online booksellers. The cheapest, in Fine condition, is going for US$25. At US$30, the most expensive is offered by a confused bookseller who pitches "signed at back", then adds "hard to tell if it is printed or signed." Hard to tell? How absurd. Here's my "signed" copy:


Believe me, you can tell.

02 August 2012

The LSD CanLit



Regrets? I've had a few. Just last week I passed on a fine Macmillan first edition of Bernard Epps' Pilgarlic the Death that was priced at two dollars. Why? Well, I already had the 1980 Quadrant Edition... and I wasn't thinking straight. Don't get me wrong, I pretty happy to have this:


But I could've also had this:


I don't know that Victor Moscoso or Stanley Mouse had anything to do with that early cover, but they certainly deserve some credit. From the Summer of Love through the first dozen seasons that followed, Macmillan and rival McClelland & Stewart look to have been caught up in a psychedelic grove that embraced the most unlikely of authors.
I'm thinking here of old folks like Stephen Leacock, social conservative and staunch Conservative, who died thirteen years before the word "psychedelic" was even coined. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the David John Shaw cover above looks like it might've graced Joe Rosenblatt's The LSD Leacock (Toronto: Coach House, 1966).

Even writings about Leacock bring the Merry Pranksters to mind.


I don't mean to suggest that our two big publishers were unique, rather that they were more hip than their American and British counterparts. Just cast your glazed gaze upon the McClelland and Stewart edition of Farley Mowat's 1969 The Boat Who Wouldn't Float


...and compare it to the first American edition from Little, Brown


...and the staid first British edition, published by Heinemann in swinging London.


Next to Pilgarlic the Death, my favourite cover of those heady times was drawn by an anonymous hand for Gérard Bessette's Incubation (Macmillan, 1967).


But I don't think there's a greater example of this short-lived trend than McClelland & Stewart's 1969 cover for Never Sleep Three in a Bed, Max Braithwaite's boyhood memoir. Here we see the author's father, George Braithwaite, driving the family car into Pepperland.


That sun on the cover is setting. The new day and new decade would be less colourful. Macmillan was still capable creativity, while M&S decended into what I refer to as "The Letraset Years"

1973


1974

1979
... about which, the less said the better.

29 May 2012

Canada's Most Popular Writers (25 Years Ago)?



Unearthed this past weekend, this little list from the May 1987 issue of Books in Canada. It is as described, a "studiously unscientific survey", consisting only of those readers who cared to respond and sacrifice what was then a 34¢ stamp. Still, I think it interesting enough to comment, thereby risking ridicule and ruffled feathers.

I'll begin by stating the obvious (to me at any rate): The number of respondents was likely quite small, as indicated by the number of ties. And yet I think that the top five authors is an accurate reflection of the time.

Here they are again with what would have been their most recent books:
1. Alice Munro – The Progress of Love (1986)
2. Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
3. Timothy Findley – The Telling of Lies (1986)
4. Robertson Davies – What's Bred in the Bone (1985)
     Margaret Laurence – A Christmas Birthday Story (1982)

The unexpected comes with the five names that follow. The presence of Mavis Gallant, whom I maintain has never been accorded proper respect and recognition, is a pleasant surprise, while Janette Turner Hospital, Marian Engel and Audrey Thomas are... well, simply surprises. I don't mean to belittle, but I dare say that they wouldn't figure in a top ten "People's Choice" today.

But then, who would? Carol Shields, whose The Stone Diaries was six years in the future, seems a sure bet. Timothy Findley would be down, if not out. Richler would be up, bucking a trendy decent of the deceased. And here I return to the late Mrs Shields in stating boldly that she would have ranked higher in 2003, when she was still amongst us, than she does today.


How forgetful we are. All but two of the writers on the 1987 Books in Canada list were living. The exceptions, Margaret Laurence and Marian Engel, would have been safely described as "recently deceased".

No authors of another century feature on this "People Choice" – the first half of the twentieth century is unrecognized. Are we Canadians not unique? Imagine an English list without Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontës and Dickens; a French list lacking Balzac, Flaubert and de Maupassant; or an American top ten without Whitman, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

The most important and sad observation one might make about the Books in Canada list is this: francophones do not figure. Gabrielle Roy, perhaps the best hope, is absent, as are Michel Tremblay, Anne Hébert and Antonine Maillet.

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau?

Don't give him a second thought.

Books in Canada, vol. 16, no. 4 (May 1987)
RIP

04 October 2011

A Ninteenth-Century What's Bred in the Bone



What's Bred in the Bone
Grant Allen
London: Tit-Bits, 1891

Two Canadian writers, both with strong ties to Kingston, Grant Allen and Robertson Davies each wrote novels entitled What's Bred in the Bone. I remarked on this in Character Parts, but don't see that anyone else has thought it worth the ink. Not even Judith Skelton Grant's massive biography, the 787-page Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, mentions the curious connection.

Perhaps I make too much of this. Davies was attracted by the neglected past, and had an appreciation of the peculiar, but he never exactly dwelled on Allen in his own writing. In fact, the Kingstonian's name appears only once in Davies' published work. The mention – fleeting – is found in "Canadian Literature: 1964", an essay that was written when Fifth Business was no more than a gleam in author's eye: "...if a Canadian novel is not a novel written in Canada by a resident of the country, what is it? There were a few, like Sara Jeannette Duncan, who wrote of the land they knew, and achieved reputation; others, like Grant Allen and Gilbert Parker, were Canadians by birth but Englishmen by choice."

Allen's What's Bred in the Bone is very much an English novel. At its core are Cyril and Guy Waring, identical twins of uncertain parentage and independent, if modest means. Cyril, a landscape painter, is our hero; he shows his stuff very early in the novel by saving the life of beautiful Elma Clifford after a railway tunnel collapse. Guy, much the weaker figure, is under the influence of Montague Nevitt, a London bank clerk. Nevitt uses his position to bet on sure things in the stock market, pressuring his friend to likewise. When one investment goes sour, the clerk exercises a near hypnotic influence over Guy, getting him to commit forgery in "borrowing" £6000 from his brother's account.

How handsome Cyril came to have such a large sum, though believable, is very complicated. The same might be said for much of What's Bred in the Bone; hidden marriages, mistaken identities and multiple misunderstandings carry the plot. It says much about Allen's talent that no matter how tangled the web, the reader is never confused. This particular reader was caught up in it all, curious as to how everything would unfold, racing toward what was ultimately an overly melodramatic conclusion.

What's Bred in the Bone was written was an eye on a prize; that being £1000 offered by the English weekly Tit-Bits for the best serial story. If the magazine's hype is to be believed, the novel won out over 20,000 entries. However, the strive for the commercial was not nearly enough to hold Allen's quirkiness in check. No surprise here – we are, after all, considering the work of a man who would one day write a novel about an elderly civil servant who believes himself to be the archangel Michael. I focussed at first on the twin brothers; they were so much alike, had both experienced a toothache "in the self-same tooth on the self-same night" and each had dealt with the problem in the very same way. But Guy put an end to this early on: "There's nothing of the Corsican Brothers sort of hocus-pocus about us in any way. The whole thing is a simple caste of natural causation."

The freaky comes out of left field when prim, proper and virginal Elma retires to her bedroom after her escape from the tunnel. Her bosom heaves, her heart beats violently and she feels "a new sense aroused within her." She begins dancing wildly, rhythmically, and yet this release does not satisfy. "She hadn't everything she required for this solitary orgy", Grant tells us. "Her hands were empty. She must have something to fill them. Something alive, lithe, curling, sensuous... Cyril Waring! Cyril Waring! It was all Cyril Waring. And what on earth would Cyril Waring think of her?"

The cause of Elma's behaviour is not so obvious; the reader soon learns that a "Roumanian ancestress" has passed on an attraction to snakes, and Cyril has a pet snake, and... well, maybe it is obvious.

Trivia: In 1916, the novel was adapted for the silent screen as What's Bred in the Bone Comes Out in the Flesh.

More Trivia: What's Bred in the Bone was published in England, the United States and Denmark (Hvad i Kodet er baaret, 1893), but only once in Canada, when in 1911 Winnipeg publisher Heimskringlu issued Ættareinkennið, an Icelandic translation. A century later, it remains the only Canadian edition.

Object: An odd-looking, yet attractive hardcover, the slightly fragile first edition disappoints only in that it, like all subsequent editions, features no illustrations.

Access: Print-on-demand monstrosities all but overwhelm online listings. Seek and ye shall find a few copies of the first edition going for about $100. The Toronto Public Library and just four of our universities have copies – of any edition – in their collections. Three copies of Ættareinkennið, all offered by the same Winnipeg bookseller, are currently listed online at an even US$300 each. No Canadian libraries hold copies.

07 December 2010

Many Happy Returns



The Ottawa Citizen, 3 December 1960

McClelland and Stewart's Christmas offerings from half-a-century ago. Only This Side Jordan is in print today. Pity that, Robertson Davies' A Voice from the Attic is a particularly good match for a snowy winter's day. "A witty, robust and wonderfully opinionated book on the joys of reading and the author's own offbeat likes and dislikes." There is truth in advertising.

Which of this fall's McClelland and Stewart titles will be in print in 2060, I wonder. I'm betting against Ezra Levant's Ethical Oil (and even 2009's Shakedown, which I was once told "belongs in the category of Uncle Tom's Cabin".)

My recommendations for this season's gift-giving favours presses that are hard at work mining the neglected riches of our past.

First up, Véhicule, which this fall launched its Ricochet Books series of pulp fiction reprints. (Full disclosure: I'm consulting editor for the series.)

The Crime on Cote des Neiges
David Montrose
The series debut, returning Montrose (Charles Ross Graham) to print after after an absence of more than four decades. Originally published in 1951, this edition includes a foreword by yours truly.

Two blondes, one brunette, a roadster and a whole lotta Dow. It doesn't get much better.


Murder Over Dorval
David Montrose
Foreword by Michael Blair
"In one hand she held a plane ticket to Montreal, in the other a wad of greenbacks. She was a gorgeous looking redhead. For the sake of her lovely green eyes, Russell Teed took the plane and the money. But it wasn't long before h realized that whatever she had offered, it wasn't worth it."


Recognition of Dundurn's Voyageur Classics series is long overdue. For four years now it's been "bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties." This year's titles:

Hugh Garner
Introduction by Paul Stuewe








Scott Symons
Introduction by Christopher Elson







Wyndham Lewis
Introduction by Allan Pero








Grey Owl
Edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski








Note the handy links to the publishers' websites. Of course, all are also available from booksellers, whether online or not, but I'm not playing favourites.

Related post: Books are Best