A Nellie McClung Manitoba Mystery

The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories
Nellie L. McClung
Toronto: William Briggs, 1912
224 pages

We have here a collection of short stories by a writer best known as a novelist.

Scratch that.

Nellie McClung is remembered today as a campaigner for women's rights. I learned this in 1973 when my mum brought home a sheet of newly issued postage stamps bearing her portait.

My mother was born at a time when women in Canada were not considered persons under the law. Strange but true. She wasn't recognized as a person until the month after her second birthday. Nellie McClung worked to made that possible.

I don't remember my mum mentioning that Nellie McClung wrote fiction and am not certain that she knew, though McClung had once time one of the country's bestselling novelists. Her 1908 debut, Sowing Seeds for Danny, sold over 100,000 copies.

Toronto: William Briggs, 1908

The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories was the author's third book and the first of her two short story collections. It was published fifteen years before my mother's birth, sixty-one years before that stamp was issued, and one-hundred-and-thirteen years before today. 

There are eight stories in all. They are interesting enough, though much of that interest has less to do with prose or clever plot than as snapshots of the time in which they were penned. Nowhere is this more true than with 'The Elusive Vote,' which takes place on the final day of the 1911 Canadian federal election:

The story centres on John Thomas Green, "a gentle soul in ill-fitting armor," and attempts by local Conservative Association to secure his vote – or, failing that, preventing him from casting a ballot. It reminded me of Stephen Leacock, as did 'The Runaway Grandmother,' in which a bachelor farmer hires an tenacious elderly housekeeper, bends to her will, and finds his life much improved. Then I remind myself that Prof Leacock was fairly new on the scene as a humorist.

I'm more confident that 'A Short Story of a Rabbit' was influenced by by Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts. A young rabbit disregards the warnings of his mother and so learns a valuable lesson.

'The Return Ticket' is also timestamped. The narrator has a chance encounter with a woman who is accompanying her daughter's body back from Rochester, Minnesota to Manitoba's Rose Valley. The only the only truly dark story, it is also the very best.

But it is the title story that dominates:

'The Black Creek Stopping-House' begins with John Corbett strolling into a Salvation Army meeting at Winnipeg's Victoria Hall. He has for no other reason to be there other than the fact that "he would do anything once, and if he liked it he would do it again." Corbett is very taken with the music, the camaraderie, and more than anything Maggie Murphy, the pretty young thing seated by the door selling War Cry: "When he went in he bought one; when he came out he bought all she had left."

Corbett is a card shark. He loves the life, the challenge, the money, and may be the very best. But he gives it all up, ill-gotten gains included, for pretty Maggie Murphy. The two wed and with the aid of oxen move more than 200 kilometres west to what would become Brandon, Manitoba. There they set up a "stopping house," feeding hungry men traveling east and west. The railway comes the following year, thus securing their future.

 
Early in the story, John and Maggie Corbett cede their positions as protagonists to twin Brydon brothers Reginald and Randolph. Are they remittance men? They don't do much of anything apart from waiting for wealthy, appropriately-named Aunt Patience to die. As they mess about, making money tighter, Randolph comes up with an idea to tide them over. Why not encourage young half-brother Fred to come out West?

“Wot’s the matter with us gettin’ out Fred for our farm pupil? He’s got some money—they say he married a rich man’s daughter—and we’ve got the experience!”

Fred sends money, then follows with his elegant, delicate, doll-like wife Evelyn. The daughter of a wealthy lumber baron, she had defied her father to marry for love. Events after the couple's arrival are not happy, and involve deceit, betrayal, misunderstanding, and a wolf of a man named Rance Belmont. I was all in! But then came an unimaginative climax that for a short story, no matter how long, relies far too much on coincidence. The denouement, happy and breezy, sees the Brydon twins receiving their just desserts.

Those familiar with the story will appreciate the pun.

The first ten chapters of 'The Black Creek Stopping-House' were so engaging that I moved my copy of Sowing Seeds for Danny to my night table. The final two chapters were such a disappointment that I moved it back to the shelves.

I thought no more about it until glancing through Nellie McClung's 1935 biography Clearing in the West. In the nineteenth chapter, the author recounts a thirty-mile trip to Brandon with her mother and brother Jack on a sleigh heavily loaded with wheat. According to McClung she was twelve at the time, meaning that the journey was untaken in the December of 1885: 

Though the stay at this "Black Creek Stopping house" is brief, four pages provide a Clearing in the West provides a description of the stopping house, which is something lacking in McClung's long short story:

Mrs. Cobett's stopping house was one big room, with one end used as a kitchen, in which stood a great high-over black stove where Mrs. Corbett with quick movements filled plates with a cut of roast bef and helpings of turnips, potatoes and gravy. Each man, who was helped took a place at the long table coveref with oil-cloth, where he found everything else he needed.
   "Da," Corbett, traversed the length of the table with a blue enamel tea pot and filled the cups that were stationed at every place. Bread and butter, pickles, biscuits and cheese were set at close intervals, along the long table and it took but little time to serve thirty or forty men.

Mrs Corbett's first name is not shared in Clearing in the West. In 'The Black Creek Stopping-House,' Maggie cannot bring herself to address her husband, whom she first knew as "Mr Corbett," by his first name. "Da" is Da is short for "Dad" which is something I'd rather not address, particularly as  they have no offspring .

The Corbetts of 'The Black Creek Stopping-House,' have one employee, a young hireling blessed with the unforgettable name Peter Rocket. The Clearing in the West Corbetts have help in the form of an child  named Peter Rocket about whom twelve-year-old Nellie has a strong opinion:

I could see he was a lout of a boy, who could not even think of two things at once.

   There was an impatient rattling of spoons on cups.
   "Let me do it," I said, and took the smallest pot on the stove and went down the line.
   I could hear Mrs. Cobett's voice above the chatter.
   "Look at that now, there's a girl with a quick turn, and her not more than twelve years old. I'd be a proud woman, if I had a little girl like that comin' along."

Young Nellie's mother is not of similar mind: "When we were in the sleigh again, Mother told told me, I should nt be so forward. It did not look well for a little girl to jump up and pour tea for strange men."

Was there a Peter Rocket? No one by that name is recorded in 1881 and 1891 census records, though the latter does include an English immigrant named John Rocket living in Manitoba. In 1885, that Rocket would've been a fourteen-year-old.  

Similarly, the Corbetts don't match up. The 1881 census features a John Corbett (age 27) and Maggie Corbett (age 21) living in Manitoba, but not close to one another. The sole Margaret Corbett is fifty-nine.

Don't get me started on the Brydon bothers.

Neither the Corbetts nor their Black Creek stopping-house receive mention in 1880 editions of the Brandon Daily Sun. Curiously, the newspaper did not review The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories.

So, I ask, is 'The Black Creek Stopping House' a nouvelle à clef? Did such a place exist? Could it be that the Corbetts are modeled on a couple who had entirely different names? What of Peter Rocket? Is it that the author couldn't remember John Rocket's first name? Did she even know it?

And now, I can't stop thinking about 'The Black Creek Stopping House.'

Dedication:

Trivia (personal): Because I'm working on a book about the Maria Monk hoax, I'm leaving this paragraph from 'The Way of the West' by way of reminder.

Object and Access: A very attractive hardcover, my copy, was purchased eight years ago in Toronto as part of a lot. It once belonged to Florence Adams.

The 1911 census features twenty-six women named Florence Adams, three of whom lived in Toronto. I'm ruling out the three-month-old, but not the twenty-three and twenty-five-year-olds  Of course, it's entirely possible that the woman who once owned the copy never lived in Toronto at all. 

I find no evidence of an edition published after 1919.

First editions begin at $30.00. At $177, the prize is a copy inscribed to one Alice Jordan:

A perfect gift for Xmas 2026.

Looking Back on Lot's Wife

Lot's Wife [La Femme de Loth]
Monique Bosco [trans John Glassco]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1975
151 pages

De temps à autre, un mot, une phrase, entendus malgré moi, me frappent comme un autre soufflet immérité.

– La Femme de Loth, Monique Bosco, 1970

There was a time in this great land when translations of French-language books were published with near exclusivity in hardcover. There were no second printings and there were no paperback reissues. I'm thinking of titles like In Quest of Splendour (Pierre le magnifique), Orphan Street (Un Chaîne dans la parc), and The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel (L'épouvantail).

Lot's Wife met the very same fate.

I was a child when La Femme de Loth was published. I was an adolescent when it appeared in English translation. I was adult when I first read Lot's Wife. I was an older adult when I wrote Monique Bosco to ask about her working relationship with the translator. This was when I was working on A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of John Glassco. The letter I received in response was generous and gracious. She'd had very limited correspondence. Though they were both living in Montreal they'd never met.

I never met Monique Bosco, either. She died two years after posting that letter, just short of her eightieth birthday.

Author photo on the jacket of Lot's Wife.

I wish our correspondence hadn't ended there. She was a remarkable woman and this novel is one of the best to come out of 1970s Quebec. It was an extraordinary decade.

Lot's Wife opens with the narrator addressing a physician. These aren't the very first lines, but they are my favourite:

You're used to passing terrible sentences on people. Your technique is remarkable. First deliver the blow: the illness may be fatal. Then announce the remedy: amputation. The solution is hailed with positive joy. Those condemned to an imminent death are equally "reasonable." As a reward, the pretty joys of the invalid world are danced before them.

Though not obvious at first, the physician was her married lover. He's ended their decade-long affair and has sent her off for two weeks in Venice to recover, as if from surgery. What we're reading is the narrator's writing. She's writing because she cannot sleep. She cannot do anything but write. The text, disjointed and at times confusing, consists of 240 numbered segments that skip back and forth in time. The shortest, not more than two or three sentences, tend to be self-revelatory. The longer touch here and there on past events in her life. The total is addressed to her former lover.

She was the unwanted child of a Jewish mother and Catholic father, both blessed with good looks she did not inherit. Her earliest memories are of Paris. As clouds of the Second World War begin drifting westward, the small family relocates to New York. This proves a disaster for two reasons, the least of which has to do with her parents' broken English and inability to find employment. The second has to do with a dark episode she had always kept hidden.

Fortunes change with a chance encounter with a family friend. This results in relocation to Montreal where the narrator's parents thrive while striving to avoid any and all news of the country they left behind.

As the narrator grows into womanhood and the Nazis occupy Paris, her parents show the first signs of middle-age. Self-absorbed, they cling to what remains of youth with such desperation that they attempt to recast their daughter as more of a friend than a child. Their campaign is cut short when both die in an automobile accident on the way back from a ski trip in the Laurentians. Their adolescent daughter survived because she'd been left alone in their Montreal apartment.

Much of what the narrator writes she's told no one, not even the physician. She shares it now through her writing – the humiliations and horrors of a short-lived marriage included – though she knows it won't make a difference. The only person she has ever loved, the person she still loves, has cast her aside. She goes over her past because she cannot imagine a future. She doesn't want a future:

God was right. Those must be saved who value life enough to flee, following their noses, letting flames devour the wreckage behind them. Lot and his family. His daughters are young, their life is all before them. But for the old wife, it is her whole past that is being swallowed up. So she turns her head, trying to see what is happening – and what has happened. She looks back, breaking the commandment. Poor old woman. In the Bible you have no name. Lot's wife, that was enough.

It's not until the second half of the novel that the narrator reveals that her name is Hélène. The physician's name is Pierre. She was not his wife, though she very much wanted to be.

Monique Bosco published seventeen volumes in her seventy-nine years, consisting of novels, short story collections, and verse. La Femme de Loth is the best known, having received the 1970 Governor General's Award for French-language Fiction. A half-century after publication, Lot's Wife remains the lone translation of her work.

More, please.

Dedication:

Trivia: Curiously, McClelland & Stewart rejected Lot's Wife as the title of the translation and kept pushing the nonsensical The Woman of Lot. The pressure was such that in desperation Glassco offered an alternative: You Found Me Beautiful.

The critic's rave: Glassco's translation was well received. The only negative review I've found came from Pat Barclay. In the 19 July 1975 edition of the Victoria's Times-Columnist, Barclay writes that it "brings with it the whiff of the original French in its clipped yet dramatically effective phrasing. I found it dreary, depressing, almost maudlin – yet at the same time impressively well planned and presented."

The critic concludes:

Two things:

It's Hélène, not Helene.

No committee "one mad spring day in 1970, decided to select Lot's Wife [here I assume the critic means La Femme de Loth] as the winner of a Governor General's award [sic]" for the simple reason that La Femme de Loth was released in the autumn of that year.

Object and Access: A slim hardcover with black boards and a jacket by David Shaw. Does the woman depicted not resemble Margaret Atwood?

As I write, five copies are listed online with prices beginning at $9.95. Mine was purchased in 1999 from The Word in Montreal. Price: $60.

La Femme de Loth was first published in 1970 by Robert Laffont. I was surprised to learn that the novel is no longer in print. It was last published in 2003 by Bibliothèque québécoise.

Related posts:

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Langevin's Masterpiece; McClelland's Disappointment

Lost in Translation

Of Problem Children and Adolescent Angst

Sunburst
Phyllis Gotlieb
New York: Fawcett, 1964
160 pages

Sorrel Park is no place to live, but this wasn't always so. A smallish city not far from Chicago, it was once a place of industry and well-paying jobs. During the "Open-The Door-In-Eighty-Four" policy, immigrants from Western Europe flooded in until it all went horribly wrong. First came the 1994 nuclear reactor explosion and resulting deaths. The federal government was quick to impose a press ban, the city was sealed off, martial law was imposed, the old coal plant was fired up, and the rest of the country continued on as before.

Shandy Johnson was born in Sorrel Park on June 3rd, 2011 to second generation Americans. Her father's family came from Denmark, changing their surname from Jensen along the way. Shandy's mother was named Mary O'Brian; as might be supposed, her family immigrated from Ireland. Until the explosion, Mary cleaned the offices at the nuclear facility, after which she was transferred to the coal plant. Shandy's father worked in both, even after being being struck on the back of the head with hot material. The wound would never close.

Shandy's birth, seventeen years after "the Blowup," came as a surprise. Her parents had assumed they'd been rendered sterile, but here they were in their forties with a baby girl. The joy they experienced as parents was short lived: "I was three and a half when they died, and since I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old, that means I can't have really known them for more than two years..."

The novel begins on Shandy's thirteenth birthday. A strong-willed, savvy girl, she spends much of it evading capture. It didn't begin this way. Shandy had been celebrating the day with a vanilla cone and licorice stick when spotted. Shandy is a target because she is unusual. "I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old," suggests something, don't you think?

New York: Berkley, 1983

Years earlier, not long after Shandy was born, dozens of Sorrel Park teens, offspring of the men and women exposed to radiation from the explosion, went on a violent rampage. It lasted no more than a few hours, but was devastating just the same. Much of the downtown lay in ruins, thanks entirely to newly awakened telepathic and telekinetic powers. It was only through dumb luck in the form of a freak accident that authorities were able to round them up. They've lived ever since in "the Dump," a prison compound equipped with a device that shields the outside world from their abilities. What sets young Shandy apart is that her mind cannot be read by those imprisoned in the Dump. She is a mutant amongst mutants, and thus of great interest to the government. 

I've never been one for stories in which radiation exposure brings the superhuman – something to so with having seen film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at an early age, I suspect. It's probably the reason why the Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four never really appealed. 

The Hulk #1, May 1962

Yet Sunburst did appeal. It would be enough to say this all comes down to Shandy, but all the characters are brilliantly drawn. There's Jason Hemmer, who first spots the girl. He is the one mutant who cooperates with the authorities, and so is tasked with finding others. Colonel Prothelo was assigned to Sorrel Park in the aftermath of the Blowup. The son he fathered in Sorrel Park instigated that night of destruction. Cigar store owner Ma Slippec is a fleeting character, but just as fully formed. It was she who took in the orphaned Shandy, provided a modicum of stability, and introduced her to bootlegging in what is a dry city.

Of course, at the centre of it all is Shandy, a tall, awkward looking girl who is bothered by her flat chest. She longs for adolescence to really kick in, all the while worrying that she'll also develop abilities that will lead her to incarceration the Dump.

Sixty-two years ago, Fawcett positioned Sunburn as "A Science Fiction Classic of Tomorrow," and here we are in that past's tomorrow. While we don't have superhuman mutants, we do have government and corporate surveillance, suppression, manipulation and brutality. Sunburn is a classic of today.

About the author: 

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom)

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom) was born in Toronto one hundred years ago today. She attended the University of Toronto (BA, 1948; MA, 1950) where, I'm guessing, she met her husband (see: Dedication).

As far as writing goes, she was known first a poet. In 1961, John Robert Colombo's Hawkshead Press published her a pamphlet of verse. Sunburst landed in 1964, the very same year as Within the Zodiac, her first book of poems.

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964

Phyllis Gotlieb is remembered more as a writer of science fiction than as a poet. Her bibliography features twelve books in the genre, including A Judgement of Dragons for which she received the inaugural Aurora Award. 

New York: Berkley, 1980

Phyllis Gotlieb died in Toronto on 14 July 2009 at the age of eighty-three.

Dedication:

Kelly is the author's  husband, Calvin Carl Gotlieb, CM FRSC (27 March 1921 - 16 October 2016), considered the father of Canadian computing.

Of Phyllis Gotlieb's twenty other books, the one I'm most interested in reading is Phyllis Loves Kelly, (Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries, 2014), a posthumous collection of poems written to her husband over the course of their sixty year marriage.

Object and Access: A typical Fawcett Gold Medal mass market paperback original in excellent condition, it showed no sign of having been read before I got to it. I took good care.

The novel first appeared, abridged, in Amazing Stories (March - May 1964). 

Two years after the Fawcett, Coronet published the first British edition. 

When cropped, the image looks like a 'sixties LP I'd buy in a second.

Other editions followed in Australia from Eclipse (1969) and the United States from Berkley (1978). In 2002, Insomniac Press published the only Canadian edition to date as part of its Bakka Books series. 

The novel is currently available from Wildside Press of Cabin John, Maryland.

The six-decade-old Fawcett first edition is cheap in more than one way. Prices listed online range from US$6.00 to US$19.00. Condition is not a factor. At under twenty-one dollars, two signed copies of the Insomniac edition tempt, but the one you really want is a copy of the Fawcett the author inscribed to Miriam Waddington (and was subsequently owned by Maurice Forget, OC). It is being sold for $36.00 by a Gatineau bookseller.

Sunburst has been translated into French (Psycataclysme) and German (Die Geißel des Lichts).

Related post:

The Dustiest Bookcase: G is for Gotlieb

A Gypsy in the Jazz Age; Or, Reader Meet Author

Eyes of a Gypsy
John Murray Gibbon
Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1926
255 pages

This past Saturday marked the sesquicentennial of John Murray Gibbon's birth. That this aging Canadian Studies and English Literature graduate first learned of him only ten years ago seems absurd. For goodness sake, the man coined the term "Canadian Mosaic."

Two years have passed since I first read Gibbon's third novel, Pagan Love, which I've described as the most remarkable, unconventional, and challenging Canadian novel of the 'twenties. Eyes of a Gypsy was Gibbon's fourth novel. Could it possibly live up to expectation?

I was won over in the early pages set on the good ship Alaric. Twenty-two-year-old Maurice Arden is our hero. An artist, he comes from a long line of commercial printers who have for generations scraped by in supplying cards, pamphlets, posters, and packaging for other businesses in and around Manhattan. As his father's only son, Maurice is set to inherit the struggle, and could not be more unhappy at the prospect. 

The recent discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb having made Egypt all the rage, Maurice had left Manhattan – and fiancée Gladys in boozy Greenwich Village jazz clubs – for the ancient, dry Valley of the King. There he'd been inspired to create works that should prove profitable. Who knows, one might be used on the cover of a chocolate box. 

And now Maurice is on his way home.

The Alaric isn't a grand liner, but it's what the family firm can afford. All glamour and elegance is supplied by fellow passenger Jacqueline Stuart, an uncommonly beautiful woman of Scots/Romani heritage, always "two steps ahead of Vogue," who appears each evening at the Captain's Table. Maurice learns the captain is a cousin, which explains her passage on so modest a vessel.

Last year's twenty-four Dusty Bookcase reads included one, two, three, four novels in which maritime accidents feature, so it came as no surprise that the Alaric strikes the hull of an overturned ship and begins to take on water.

Of the five maritime disasters, the sinking of the Alaric is the least catastrophic. No one dies. No one is hurt. No one gets wet. More anxious for his paintings than he is his soul, Maurice sets foot in the last lifeboat. At the moment it is about to be is lowered, he is joined by Jacqueline:

"What the hell! thundered the officer. "How wasn't she sent off with the first boats?"

   "My fault entirely," explained the lady with dazzling teeth and an accent surprisingly Scotch. "I do hate to be hurried. This 'women and children first' business can be overdone. Doesn't give us a chance to ready for this world or the next."

Their bob on the ocean is not long – they are soon rescued by the passing Belladonna – but it is long enough for Maurice to become smitten. And who can blame him. The banter they exchange reveals Jacqueline to be witty, confident, clever, and full of life. Her reasons for visiting the Old World had nothing to do with Egyptomania, rather a scandal involving a United States senator. What happened exactly is uncertain – the novel offers three differing accounts – though all rely on the glamazon's talent as a fortune teller to New York's high society.

Two ships that might otherwise have passed in the night, the Alaric and Belladonna have passengers who know one another. It's a small world after all. In Jacqueline's case, it's the senator. For Maurice, it's his friend Kenneth MacLean, an architect from the Canadian west who is traveling with his sister Peggie, herself a painter.

Eyes of a Gypsy seems a simple novel, but isn't. The introduction of Peggie (page 28) suggests formula. Blonde, pretty, wholesome, innocent, she stands in stark contrast with the dark, beautiful, sophisticated, worldly-wise Jacqueline. Skipping ahead seventy-two pages, we get this: 

The Scots-Canadian girl brought nature, the beloved mother. Jacqueline filled his dreams with more tempestuous emotions. 

And so, a love triangle.

Yes, a triangle, because Gladys is no longer in the picture. After the Belladonna docks, Maurice is told that his father has just died, and is handed what may be the greatest "Dear John" letter in all of Canadian literature:

This reader began settling in. I've read enough novels with love triangles to know that resolution typically occurs in the penultimate chapter.

I should have known better.

Eyes of a Gypsy does not follow a conventional path because these are not conventional characters. Moreover, Gibbon is not a conventional writer.

Time, events, relationships, and scenes move quickly in this novel.

In short weeks, Maurice manages to turn the family firm around. Peggie and Kenneth make a brief visit to friends in Montreal, return to New York, rent a studio, but are soon off to their parents' home in the Kootenays. Jacqueline follows, because her Romani blood is drawn to great expanses, but also to because the senator threatens. This leaves Maurice all alone, until Peggie invites him to visit.

Montreal, 1926

Once in Canada, the novel slows considerably. Plot and personages give way to loving descriptions of settings, the first being Montreal, the city in which the author spent most of his working life. The descriptions of the Kootenays, more lengthy, are accompanied by digressions on folk music, folk tales, trail riding, and First Nations culture.

It is a book the can be divided neatly in two. The first fourteen chapters have something in common with Pagan Love in that they deal with art, commerce, advertising, influence, and polished sophistication, but breaks in the last twelve which focus on the relatively simple lives and lore of those who rely on the land. That I prefer the first part says something about me. Both say much about Gibbon life – read Daniel R. Meister's Canadian Encyclopedia entry and see!

Two months ago, I won a copy of the author's first book Hearts and Faces (New York: Lane, 1916) at auction. It's set in the Bohemian Paris in which he'd studied art. I look forward to reading it and perhaps getting to know a bit more about the man, but am I wrong in wanting more about Gladys?

Favourite line: Early in the novel, a catty passenger on the Alaric says this of Jacqueline.

"If she can show us as much of the future as she does of her back, she is a wonder all right."

Dedication:

By great coincidence, my wife owns a copy of Ethel Watts Mumford's Hand-Reading Today: A New Angle of an Ancient Science (New York: Stokes, 1925), which she bought after reading Diana Souhami's The Trials of Radcliffe Hall (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997). The latter is one of the best literary biographies I have ever read.

New Broadway Magazine (June 1908)

Object and Access: An orange hardcover, typical of its time, I purchased my copy in 2023 from an Ontario bookseller. Price: $21.00. Sadly, it lacks the dust jacket (which I've never seen).

As I write this, just one copy, also jacket-less, is listed for sale online. Price: $66.00. 

Get it while you can.

Related post:

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Self-Improvement

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s

Too Soon?

Son of a Meech: The Best Brian Mulroney Jokes
Mark Breslin, ed.
Toronto: Ballantine, 1991
113 pages

News of Brian Mulroney's death last Thursday did not hit hard. I was no admirer. As a young man, I dismissed Mulroney as Ronald Reagan Lite. Simplistic, but not wrong. In 1984, the year he led his party to the second greatest electoral victory in this country's history, I was distrustful and skeptical. It came as no surprise when his government began selling off Crown assets at Fire Sale prices.

The Mulroney government spanned the better part of my twenties. He hung onto power, forcing the game into overtime, only to leave the political arena when it became clear he could not score a third victory. Mulroney all but destroyed the Progressive Conservative Party, leaving Kim Campbell and Peter Mackay to ensure its end. 

Nostalgia.

As I say, I was no admirer, though I've come to recognize the man's achievements. He somehow managed to convince Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that Apartheid was wrong, which was no small feat. He wasn't quite as successful in pushing Reagan on acid rain, but he did get a treaty through with the first President Bush. Mulroney really was our "greenest prime minister," a title included in most of the obituaries.

That he holds it still, three decades after he stepped down as PM, is a sad commentary on his successors.

Son of a Meech
Andy Donato
Toronto: Key Porter, 1990

Son of a Meech is so obvious a pun that Breslin's book is the second to use it as a title. The Meech Lake Accord was Mulroney's greatest gambit, and his greatest defeat. I was against it at the time but have since changed my position. I won't go into my reasoning as it would add five thousand words to this post. I'd much rather focus on this collection of "The Best Brian Mulroney Jokes" because it anticipates the hate, homophobia, and misogyny spread by Ezra Levant, Jeff Ballingall's Proud pages, and the Conservative Party itself.

And so, a warning to the reader, I will be quoting from this book.

Let's begin with stand-up comedian Mark Breslin's brief introduction, in which he describes how Son of a Meech was born:

After each show, members of the audience would approach me with jokes about [Mulroney] – vicious, mean, brutal – my kind of jokes. They weren't, as my literary sensei Jack Kapiica observed, the usual anti-government barbs, but personal ad hominem attacks on the man's most private self. These jokes stepped over the line of good taste, and I got interested.

Are these amongst the jokes he collected? 

Canadians no longer believe in the theory of trickle-down economics.

   Mulroney's trickled down on them long enough.

Not that the prime minister is crooked...

   But last week he swallowed a nail and it came out a corkscrew.

Perhaps not. They don't step over the line.

Variations of the trickle-down economics joke can be traced back to Reagan's first term. The corkscrew joke has iits origins in an insult General Sir Gerald Templer delivered to Lord Mountbatten.

The most interesting part of Breslin's introduction suggests that the jokes provided by his fans weren't quite so numerous as he claims:

The collection got bigger, so I turned to Martin Waxman for help. He researched volumes of comedy material of all eras for jokes about despots and cruel or incompetent leaders. Sad to say, they fit.

And so, we get these:

Did you hear the new Mulroney stamp has had to be recalled?

   People kept spitting on the wrong side.

What's the difference between the prime minister and yogurt?
   Yogurt has culture.

Why would Mulroney never be eaten by cannibals?
   Because he's too hard to swallow.

What do you call an Irish Canadian with half a brain?

   Mr. Prime Minister.

Take a tired old joke, insert a reference to Mulroney, and you're pretty much done, but not always. This one was made contemporary with a reference to yuppies:

What's the only mediocre product yuppies will buy?

   Brian Mulroney.

This one proved too difficult to update:

What's the difference between Howdy Doody and Prime Minister Mulroney?

   You can't see Mulroney's strings.

There are even a couple of blonde jokes:

How do you make Brian Mulroney laugh on Monday?

   Tell him a joke on Friday.

Looking to bolster his stodgy image, the P.M. spent the night at a rock club. And not wanting to be perceived as a square, he even snorted Sweet and Low. 

   He thought it was Diet Coke.

Tame stuff, lame stuff, these can't be the "vicious, mean, brutal jokes" Breslin says he likes.

I've given an imprecise depiction of this book's content, choosing to not share jokes involving bestiality or golden showers. There's also a fair amount of racist and homophobic writing, the most extreme being a joke that combines the two and involves the PM receiving a black coffee enema. I won't be sharing it either, but because I feel there should be at least one example of Breslin's vicious, mean, brutal jokes, I present this:

What's the difference between Rock Hudson and Brian Mulroney?

   Brian's aides have not killed him yet.

Mark Breslin's book is unlike earlier Canadian political humour books. It has little in common with Sex and the Single Prime Minister, The Naked Prime Minister, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, P.E.T., or even Andrew Donato's Son of a Meech, which seem gentle ribbing in comparison. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its treatment of the prime minister's wife, Mila Mulroney, to whom Breslin dedicates the book.

Of the dozens of jokes in which she figures, this is the most tame:

Over dessert at 24 Sussex, Mulroney whispered to Mila, "Drinking makes you absolutely gorgeous."

   "I don't drink," Mila replied.

   "Yes, but I do."

The others feature fellatio, anal sex, adultery, and descriptions of a variety of sexual positions. Plumbers feature in four of them. 'The Unity Issue,' eighth of the book's ten sections, focusses exclusively on Brian and Mila Mulroney's sex life.

Mark Breslin was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2017.

Was Brian Mulroney Canada's worst prime minister as Breslin claims? Of course not. The most recent Maclean's ranking had him in eighth spot, just below Jean Chrétien, which seemed about right. But then I remembered that Mulroney accepted bribes and was a tax cheat. How about we place him in the very middle, just below eleventh place John Diefenbaker, but above Alexander Mackenzie.

Seems more than fair.

Is Breslin's Canada's worst joke book?

Beyond a doubt.

Martin Brian Mulroney
20 March 1939, Baie Comeau, Quebec
29 February 2024, Palm Beech, Florida

RIP

Object and Access: A slim mass market paperback, I found my copy two years ago in a Kemptville, Ontario thrift store. Price: $1.00.

Son of a Meech is held by seven Canadian libraries, the most surprising being the Legislative Library of British Columbia. St Francis-Xavier University, Brian Mulroney's alma mater, does not have a copy. 

Related posts:

Wishing the Prime Minster Dead
Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Ladies Man
Sex and the Trudeaus: The Bachelor Canada
Margaret's Marriage in Mass Market
The Ugliest Canadian Book Cover of All Time
E.T. Cash In

A Woman Cheated

The Cannibal Heart
Collected Millar: Dawn of Domestic Suspense
Margaret Millar
New York: Syndicate, 2017

In Margaret Millar's bibliography, The Cannibal Heart falls between It's All in the Family and Do Evil in Return. As a light and lively novel for children, the former is her most unusual; the latter, which deals with the tragic consequences of a refused abortion, is both her most controversial and most timely. The Cannibal Heart isn't so noteworthy. Of the fourteen Millars I've read to date, it ranks below the average, which is to say that it is merely very, very good.

The novel takes place almost entirely on the grounds of a large California oceanfront estate rented by the Banners: Richard, Evelyn, and their active eight-year-old daughter Jessie. The property belongs to a Mrs Wakefield, whose efforts to sell have been thwarted by a draught. Her employees, cook Carmelita and caretaker husband Carl, live with their adolescent daughter Luisa in a three-room apartment above the garage.

Someone spoken of, but not seen, Mrs Wakefield grows as a figure of mystery in the initial chapters. She at last appears as an attractive thirty-something widow worthy of sympathy. In the space of the previous two years, Mrs Wakefield has lost her husband John, as well as Billy, their only child. John was a naval engineer, a wealthy man whom Mrs Wakefield met as a schoolteacher from a small Nebraska town. Their child, Billy, was... well, let's say Billy is revealed gradually. 

But then things in Millar novels are always revealed gradually.

It's suggested that the Banners have come from the East Coast to recover from some sort of domestic disturbance. Might Evelyn's issues with jealousy be related? Even when alone, Evelyn and Richard maintain the pretence that the move has to do with expanding Jessie's horizons.

We come to know Mrs Wakefield intimately. The life she shared with her husband is something of a blur, but her experience giving birth to Billy and the days that followed are too clear for comfortable reading.

As always, Millar delves deeply into the inner lives of its characters, children included. Fifteen-year-old Luisa, a minor character (no pun intended), is a good example. Like most teenagers, she dreams of life far from her parents. In her fantasies, she's a singer with beautiful blonde hair, fawned over by handsome men with lots of money. But this can never happen in the way she imagines. Reality intrudes, reflected in the words of her father, who recognizes that she has been born "half-mulatto, half Mexican."

Syndicate Books, Millar's current publisher, lists The Cannibal Heart as a novel of suspense. It isn't. The Cannibal Heart belongs with Experiment in Springtime and Wives and Lovers, the two (and only two) novels the publisher categorizes as "OTHER NOVELS." As I wrote in a previous review, in these people do bad things; as do we all. While the reader might anticipate murder – after all, Millar was a mystery writer – nothing of the kind occurs. No character commits a criminal act, though one comes close. That that same character is the most sympathetic, most wronged, and most cheated, leads me to wonder whether I'm not right to thinking The Cannibal Heart below average Millar.

Dedication:

"For an old friend, a fine critic, and an ever-imaginative angler, Harry E. Maule."

An editor at Random House, Harry Edward Maule (1886-1971) accepted Millar's 1956 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Beast in View.

Object and Access: A bulky trade-size paperback, Dawn of Domestic Suspense is the second in the attractive (if cramped) seven-volume Collected Millar. The Cannibal Heart was the last to be read; the others have been reviewed in previous blog posts:

Fire Will Freeze

Experiment in Springtime

Do Evil in Return

Rose's Last Summer

The Cannibal Heart is the ninth of Margaret Millar's twenty-six novels. It was first published in 1949 by Random House; Hamish Hamilton issued a British edition the following year. The Random House jacket (above right) better reflects the novel.

The Cannibal Heart was not a commercial success. It had spent over three decades out-of-print when, in 1985, International Polygonics issued the first paperback edition. A Thorndike large print edition followed fifteen years later.

As might be expected, The Cannibal Heart is uncommon in our public libraries. That serving Kitchener, the city in which Margaret Millar was born, the city in which she was raised, the city in which her father served as mayor, does not have a copy.

The Collected Millar remains in print. Used copies of The Cannibal Heart listed online begin at €6 (a first edition lacking jacket). At US$225, the most expensive is the same edition in "fine, bright dust jacket." Do not read the bookseller's description as there is a spoiler. 

The Cannibal Heart has enjoyed two translations: French (Le coeur cannibale) and German (Kannibalen-Herz).

Related posts:

Telephone Always Rings
Margaret Millar's Great Toronto Murder Mystery

Kitchener's Grand Dame

Millar's Experiment in Springtime in Springtime

Desperately Seeking Violet

A Margaret Millar Mystery Spoiled

Where to Begin With Margaret Millar: A Top Ten