Of a Petite Prima Donna (and her pretty little feet)

Judith Moore; or, Fashioning a Pipe
Joanna E. Wood
101 pages

A very slim paperback printed on demand at Amazon's Bolton, Ontario fulfillment centre, I'm to blame for this book's existence. It was ordered in the Covid spring of 2022, just after I'd finished Joanna E. Wood's debut The Untempered Wind (1894), a book I described on the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast as the only novel, ever, where I actually wept." You can hear me begin to go on about it at 36:45.

Had it not been for The Untempered Wind, I might never have read Judith Moore. Had I read Judith Moore first, its unlikely that I would've read The Untempered Wind or anything else by Joanna E. Wood.

Judith Moore is the author's second novel. It shares something with The Untempered Wind in being set in rural Ontario, yet features little of the small town cruelty, hypocrisy, dogmatism, and pious conceit that makes the earlier work so involving and affecting.

The titular character, a literal prima donna, has completed her first European tour to great success and requires rest before taking on the United States. She finds room and board with Mr and Mrs Morris, whose homestead is nestled in a hollow outside fictional Ovid, Ontario.

Why Ovid? Why the Morrises? How had Judith Moore so much as heard of Ovid? These are questions left unanswered. Mrs Morris is of no help in solving the mystery:

"She and a little black-a-vised chap came driving up the lane one day last week, and before I just rightly could make out what they were, he was driving off and she was there for keeps. Next day there came a whole waggon [sic] load of trunks."

The need of such a respite – an entire summer – is concerning in one so young and at the very start of an exciting and promising career. Might it be because Judith Moore, petite, pale, delicate, and fragile, lacks the physique of the diva commonly associated with what Mrs Morris calls "the opry?"

No, the cause of Judith's fatigue is something else entirely, and is worth quoting at length:

Blind fools who could not see it was the passion of an empty heart, the yearning of a solitary soul, the unutterable longing of a woman's nature for love, that rendered her marvellous voice so passionately and painfully sweet. She herself never suspected it; only she believed what the doctors had told her manager and teacher, the good man who wore such big diamonds and used such bad language, that she must have rest, quiet, complete and absolute change. So she and this man had come to Canada, and had driven on and on into the heart of the country till they came to this village in the valley, and there she had elected to stay – a caprice not nearly so extravagant, and certainly more sweet and wholesome than the freaks indulged in by some others of her ilk. So here she was, lying perdu, whilst her picture was in every paper in the country, with marvellous tales of her triumphs abroad and whispers of the wonderful treat in store for the music-lovers of America. And her little, good-hearted manager flashed out his biggest diamonds, swore his worst oaths, hoped the child was getting strong, and never dreamed he was killing her.

Enter handsome Andrew Cutler. Healthy, wealthy, young, and of Loyalist stock, his land borders the Morris homestead. Andrew is literally sowing seeds when "assailed by a succession of the sweetest sounds he had ever heard – note after note of purest melody, flung forth unsyllabled, full-throated to the air, inarticulate but eloquent. Again and again it came, liquid, rich, and with that pathos which perfection always touches."

Assailed again the following day, he follows the call:

"I have come," he said, half dreamily – stepping out from the shelter of the trees.

   The pale-faced singing siren changed to a startled, blushing girl, and in swift sequence Andrew's rapt gaze altered to one not altogether without daring. "Oh, so I see," she half gasped, then laughed outright, looking at him with shy eyes, but mutinously curving lips. The laugh robbed the scene of its last illusion of mystery.

This fin de siecle meet cute begins well, but is spoiled by Judith's habiliment. Not being "up in chatelaines," the farmer's "masculine horse sense and the instinct of protection" gets the better of him:

"Why in the world do you wear shoes like these?" he asked. "And such stockings! and standing on that damp moss! You had better go right into the house and get on decently heavy shoes."

   This was too much. Miss Judith Moore fancied her own feet, and fancied open-work silk hose, and high-heeled wisps of shoes. Most of all, she liked the combination. In fact, in a harmless little way, she rather liked people to have a chance to appreciate these beauties, and at the very moment Andrew spoke, she had noted his downward glance and felt a righteous peace settle upon her. To be well shod is such moral support, and, lo, this heathen, this wretch, this abominable, conceited, brazen young farmer, had actually dared to suggest a change; more than that, he had spoken of "stockings"—disgusting!

   So, with a dignity that reduced Andrew to despair, even whilst it roused his ire (she was so slight to be such a "defiant little cat" he told himself), she drew herself up, in a manner to do the traditional Duchess credit, and left him, saying: "Since you don't approve of my feet I'll take them out of your way."
   "You mean they'll take you," said Andrew, wrathfully conscious that she was, to use a good old figure of speech, "turning up her nose at him."
   "You are extremely rude," she called back.
   "And you are a bad-tempered little thing," he answered.

Focus on footwear, flaunting of feet, and pride of pieds aside, Judith and Andrew's contentious early exchange is conventional, as recognized by Elvis Costello:

          Chapter One, we didn't really get along

          Chapter Two, I think I fell in love with you

Judith and Andrew's romance is a touch different in that their first encounter takes place in the second chapter. They have no contact in the third, but are very much in each other's thoughts. In Chapter Four, Andrew rescues Judith from an apple tree, setting their relationship on a firmer footing. 

Pacing aside, what makes Judith Moore an unconventional romance novel is also what makes it so tedious. From the moment Andrew returns Judith's high-heeled wisps to terra firma, they walk a path free of obstruction, falling further in love with each meeting. It isn't until the ninth of the novel's eleven chapters – the last taking the form of a very brief epilogue – that anything occurs to threaten Judith's happiness.

She has only herself to blame.

Judith writes a letter to her manager asking to be released so that she may marry Andrew.

Released from what exactly? There is no contract, but innocent Judith feels an obligation towards this "little black-a-vised man with big diamonds [and] profane tongue" for recognizing her talent and taking her under his wing after her widowed father died . She writes that she will understand if he wishes her to return to the stage.

The manager shows up at the Morris homestead the very next week, accompanied by a French maid "of the real Parisian stripe," and Judith is whisked away without Andrew knowing.

There is no spoiler in sharing the conclusion; it's pretty much as one would expect. Judith is sent out on out on the American tour singing her little heart out. In New York, she surprises with a song, unaccompanied by orchestra, seemingly of her own composition:

                    For the peace which you crave;

                    For the end of your quest;

                    For the love which can save;

                        Come! Come to me!"

Hundreds of kilometres away, "in the silent spaces of a virgin forest," a  heartbroken Andrew is thinking of Judith:

Where was she? It was not her wish that he should know. He hoped her little feet trod pleasant paths. Oh, Judith, Judith! Then, explain it as we may, or leave it still a mystery, there came to him, faint, aëry, bodilessly, the words of a song—a song that ended in a plea, "Come! Come to me," and when it died away, Andrew Cutler sprang to his feet with a cry that echoed far between the icy tree trunks of the forest, "I come, I come." And that same night, at the same hour, at the same pulse of the hour, Judith Moore, with a look of ineffable joy upon her face, fell fainting upon the stage.

Judith Moore has a remarkable, entirely avoidable flaw in that Andrew is portrayed as a reader. "He's got a crank on books–took that off his mother," Mrs Morris says to Judith after the meet cute gone bad. And yet Andrew has no idea what has become of his love, despite her tour being covered by the papers.

Andrew returns from the virgin forest to Ovid, where he learns, quite by chance, that the swarthy manager lives in New York. And so he purchases a train ticket:

As the Canadian trains reach New York, the morning papers come aboard. Andrew bought one of each, and sat down turning them over with tremulous hands to search for a sign. He had not far to seek—"JUDITH MOORE DYING, THE END APPROACHING." That was what he read in big "scare head" type; that, and its narrations in the other papers, with the usual platitudes telling of the "short but bright career," and so on. With the calm of despair he searched for definite information as to where she was. It seemed every one knew so well that definite detail was superfluous. But at last, in a different part of the paper, he found: "In the corridors of the Brittany Hotel last night, Miss Moore's manager, who had just left her bedside, said all hope was gone." The train was in New York, slowing up in the Grand Central station by the time he found this.

Andrew reaches Judith with hours to spare. 

Marriage follows.

FIN

I laid down my cheap print on demand paperback with a sigh. The Untempered Wind, the author's first novel, is so very good, as is her third, A Daughter of Witches (1899). Judith Moore lands between the two with a dull thud. The disappointment is made all the worse with the knowledge that Wood produced just one more novel, Farden Ha' (1902). Apparently, it takes place in the Scottish mining town in which the author was born.

Types of Canadian Women
Henry Morgan, ed
Toronto: William Briggs, 1903

"Meteor-like, her career plunged into obscurity after 1902," writes Barbara Goddard in Wood's Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry.

Perfectly put, I remembered those words from when I first read them. What I did not recall is Goddard's discovery of two Wood novellas published in the New York pulp magazine Tales from Town Topics. The earlier, A Martyr to Love (1897) "recounts the adventures of a femme fatale ironically wounded in her heartless conquests." The later, Where Waters Beckon (1902) "draws symbolically on Niagara’s whirlpools and local Indian legends as the setting for a dark tale of a woman married off to a madman by her father and later destroyed with her lover, an engineer developing hydroelectricity."

I'd purchase print on demand editions of either in a flash.

Farden Ha', too.

About the epigraph:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning never wrote a poem titled 'Fashioning a Pipe,' the words are taken from her poem 'A Musical Instrument' (1860) beginning with the first two lines of the second stanza. From there, we skip to the second word of third line of the third stanza, ignoring the opening "And."

The epigraph includes twenty of the poems forty-two lines (in whole or in part), ignoring structure, adding and deleting punctuation, touching down here and there. It reminded me of nothing so much as a K-tel album track.

Object and Access: A floppy paperback, so poorly designed that the spine is blank. 

Judith Moore was first published in 1898 by the Ontario Publishing Company. It has been out of print ever since. The novel entered public domain in 1978. It is available for download here courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

I've never come upon a copy of the Ontario Publishing Company edition in the wild. As I write, two are listed for sale online at $160 and $250 respectively. Judging by the sellers' descriptions, the least expensive is the superior copy.

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Of Poets, Poetry, Politicians, and Parliament Hill

Yet another gloriously sunny September weekend, I spent most of it stacking firewood in preparation for winter. The high point came early Saturday morning when I found myself in Ottawa's ByWard Market with an hour to kill. It was so early, that Patrick McGahern Books hadn't yet opened, and so I made for Parliament Hill to see how the restoration of the Centre Block is progressing.

Quite well, it seems.

Despite the early hour, there were swarms of tourists from the United Kingdom and China... but then it was noon in London and early evening in Shanghai.

It had been nearly twenty-four years since I'd walked around the building. The last time was on Sunday, October 1, 2000, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau's body lay in state in the Centre Block's Hall of Honour. I was there with my birth parents, both staunch Liberals. Here I am waiting in the eight-hour line with my birth mother; I have no idea as to the identity of the man in the turquoise cap:

The pins we are wearing were distributed on the evening PET made his farewell speech. I'm no Grit, but the conclusion of that speech has always inspired.

Enough nostalgia.

What I most wanted to see was the Library of Parliament. Its restoration took four years, beginning in  2002. From the outside, the library looks better than I remember. Money well spent, I say!

Several statues have had to be relocated during the restoration, but not the one honouring D'Arcy McGee. His still stands in place, though you really have to look.

See it?

It's not a good photo, but I remind that Saturday was gloriously sunny. I took a better snap of this plaque, which I'd never seen before:

cliquez pour agandir

As you can see, it lies just outside the construction zone. I really like the design and text. Sadly, "the female figure, representing Memory" is currently hidden by the fence. McGee, something of a hero to me,  made his greatest impact as a politician and journalist, of course, but I like that his work as a poet and historian is also recognized. The reference to McGee's verse sent me off walking toward what I think is the most interesting statue on Parliament Hill.

I knew just where to find it.

'A Canadian Galahad' memorializes the heroism of Henry Albert Harper, who on 6 December 1901 died attempting to save Bessie Blair, a young woman who had fallen though the ice while skating on the Ottawa River. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography features a brief entry on Harper by H. Blair Neatby. William Lyon Mackenzie King provides a more thorough biography in The Secret of Heroism: A Memoir of Henry Albert Harper (New York: Revell, 1906). The future prime minister's book, his first, was published the year after 'A Canadian Galahad' was unveiled by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. Three thousand people were in attendance.

The deaths of Henry Harper and Bessie Blair shook the national's capital, in part because the young lady's father, Andrew George Blair, was the Minister of Railways and Canals. The statue was funded by public donations. Inspiration was drawn from a reproduction of George Frederic Watts' 'Sir Galahad,' which Harper had placed above his desk.

To this Canadian, 'A Canadian Galahad,' a statue inspired by a painting, is forever linked with verse. Within days of the tragedy, William Wilfred Campbell, who had a mutual friend in King, wrote a tribute to the doomed hero. This version comes from The Collected Poems of Wilfred Campbell (Toronto: Briggs, 1905):

HENRY A. HARPER

(Drowned in the Ottawa River while trying to save Miss Blair)

               We crown the splendours of immortal peace,

               And laud the heroes of ensanguined war.

               Rearing in granite memory of men

               Who build the future, recreate the past.

               Or animate the present dull world's pulse

               With loftier riches of the human mind.

               But his was greatness not of common mould,

               And yet so human in its simple worth,

               That any spirit plodding its slow round

               Of social commonplace and daily moil.

               Might blunder on such greatness, did he hold

               In him the kernel sap from which it sprung.

               Men in rare hours great actions may perform,

               Heroic, lofty, whereof earth will ring,

               A world onlooking, and the spirit strung

               To high achievement, at the cannon's mouth.

               Or where fierce ranks of maddened men go down.

               But this was godlier. In the common round

               Of life's slow action, stumbling on the brink

               Of sudden opportunity, he chose

               The only noble, godlike, splendid way.

               And made his exit, as earth's great have gone,

               By that vast doorway looking out on death.

               No poet this of winged, immortal pen;

               No hero of an hundred victories;

               Nor iron moulder of unwieldy states.

               Grave counsellor of parliaments, gold-tongued.

               Standing in shadow of a centuried fame.

               Drinking the splendid plaudits of a world.

               But simple, unrecorded in his days,

               Unostentatious, like the average man

               Of average duty, walked the common earth.

               And when fate flung her challenge in his face.

               Took all his spirit in his blinded eyes.

               And showed in action why God made the world.

               He passes as all pass, both small and great,

               Oblivion-clouded, to the common goal; —

               And all unmindful moves the dull world round.

               With baser dreams of this material day.

               And all that makes man petty, the slow pace

               Of small accomplishment that mocks the soul.

               But he hath taught us by this splendid deed,

               That under all the brutish mask of life
               And dulled intention of ignoble ends,
               Man's soul is not all sordid; that behind

               This tragedy of ills and hates that seem,

               There lurks a godlike impulse in the world,

               And men are greater than they idly dream.

Henry Albert Harper
1873-1901

Elizabeth "Bessie" Blair
1879-1901

RIP

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Remembrance Day

Daniel Issac Vernon Eaton was the father of novelist Evelyn Eaton, whose 1940 international bestseller Quietly My Captain Waits was reviewed here this past April. Known as Vernon, he was born on 19 September 1869 at Salmon River, Nova Scotia. Eaton was a civil engineer, surveyor, typographer, and geologist, but believed military service to be his true calling. At twenty-six, he left a good position at the Geological Survey of Canada for a career as a soldier. Eaton served in the South African War and the Great War, during which he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel.

Records indicate that during the latter conflict his wife, Myra Eaton (née Fitz Randolph), relocated from Kingston to London. It's possible, but not certain, that daughter Evelyn was living in the Big Smoke when news was received that her father had been killed whilst preparing to take Vimy Ridge.

Eaton's entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is recommended. Written by Glenn Wright, it concludes:

Vernon Eaton was tall and handsome with steely grey eyes and a dark complexion. He was keenly aware of his Eaton family heritage and proudly wore a tattoo of the family crest on his right arm. Twice he was mentioned in dispatches for gallant and distinguished service in the field. In many ways he epitomizes the professional soldier in Canada in the period from the 1890s to World War I. With opportunities for training and for active service, Eaton carved out a promising career for himself as an experienced artillery officer of the first rank, only to lose his life on the eve of Canada’s greatest military achievement of the Great War.

Daniel Issac Vernon Eaton

19 September 1869, Salmon River, Nova Scotia, Canada

11 April 1917, Vimy Ridge, France

RIP

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A Very Acadian Scandal

Quietly My Captain Waits
Evelyn Eaton
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, [c. 1943]
355 pages

I first learned of Louise de Freneuse last autumn during a visit to Nova Scotia. A historic plaque outlining her life served as my introduction. Something I came upon during an early evening stroll through Annapolis Royal, the story it told beggared belief. Her entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography will explain my reaction.

There is little wonder that Louise de Freneuse inspired a historical novel. This description of the lady comes from original publisher Harper & Bros:

As courageous as she was captivating, she defied every convention and all the wilderness in a gallant fight for love and happiness.

New York Times, 8 September 1940

Quietly My Captain Waits was a critical and commercial success; comparisons were drawn to Gone With the Wind and Hollywood came calling:

Boxoffice Barometer, 22 February 1941 

Here I note that Evelyn Eaton's novel is set well before the "French and Indian Wars [sic]" and the capture of Quebec. It's likely that Louise de Freneuse's death pre-dates the Battle of the Plains of Abraham by more than four decades.

Quietly My Captain Waits begins on an early evening in 1691 with young Raoul de Perrichet's return to his family home in the French commune of Draguigan. Not twenty-four hours earlier, he'd caught serial adulterer Vanina in the arms of the Compte de Callian, "old enough to be her father and Raoul's grandfather, Bigre!" Sixteen-year-old Raoul had wanted her for himself – he'd enjoyed Vanina's delights in the past – and in anger and frustration molests petite Marie "who had always loved him."

Raoul now finds himself under threat of imprisonment; not for the molestation, you understand, rather for what he witnessed in Vanina’s bedchamber. The Comte, who has the King’s ear, cannot entrust his reputation to a boy’s discretion. Raoul finds a saviour in his dashing uncle, Pierre de Bonaventure, captain of the Soleil d’Afrique – “the fastest vessel in the world!” – who enlists his nephew in the navy and sets sail for New France.

Armed Services Edition, 1945

Raoul doesn’t prove much of a seaman, but de Bonaventure is happy to have him aboard for games of bezique and to share the occasional bottle. One drunken evening, l’Oncle Pierre tells a tale about a raven-haired beauty. All occurred seven years earlier in New France; she was the sixteen-year-old daughter of an important man while de Bonaventure was then a twenty-six-year-old nothing. When the important man learned of the relationship, he sent the girl to a convent. She escaped, cut her hair, dressed as a boy, and made for her lover’s ship as it was about to set sail for France. Her idea was that they could marry in the Old World, but de Bonaventure turned her away.

In Quebec City, Raoul meets the raven-haired beauty, and falls in love with her himself. This is, of course, Louise de Freneuse, the girl his uncle loved – and still loves – who is now a twice-married woman with children. De Bonaventure does all he can not to avoid her, but fails. When the Soleil d’Afrique is tasked with transporting the Madam de Freneuse to her second husband’s Acadian home, the two old flames come together and things become very hot.

De Bonaventure is so ignorant of his Raoul’s love for Louise that he hands over the nephew who is so ill-suited to life at sea. Raoul arrives at the settlement built by Louise’s husband, Mathieu de Freneuse, and is tasked with tutoring her children. 

Mathieu de Freneuse is a force to be reckoned with, matrimonial bedroom excepted. His passion for Louise is equal to de Bonaventure’s, but the poor man has long recognised that her own passion lies in the memory of an old love (see: Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure). A Frenchman who has come to be accepted as a member of the local “Micmacs,” Mathieu finds sexual outlet amongst the tribe’s women. He encourages the teenaged tutor to undergo the same initiation he endured, and then enjoy the same benefits.

This Raoul does, but only to prove his love for Louise.

It’s complicated.

Remarkably – improbably – Raoul grows to become a great Micmac leader, but not before Mathieu de Freneuse and his settlement are destroyed by Iroquois warriors. Mathieu expires in the arms of the miller’s daughter, with whom, it turns out, he’d been having an affair.

New York: Permabooks, 1951

Quietly, the reader turns eighty pages, awaiting Captain de Bonaventure's return.

In her Author’s Note, Evelyn Eaton writes of the research she put into writing Quietly My Captain Waits.

Let us consider the nameless miller's daughter, who enters and exits the novel during Mathieu de Freneuse's final minutes. Gervais Tibault's existence spans no more pages. In the author's fiction, he is a favoured child, the first-born of her first marriage. A sensitive soul, better suited for the salons of Paris than the backwoods of Acadia,  Gervais Tibault is killed by Iroquois arrows. Eaton places characters she created – those not based on historical figures – as if they are all of equal weight, and yet the actions of the fictitious Raoul de Perrichet are far more consequential than those of Louise and Pierre.

Eaton uses the “fragments” from which she wove her novel to good effect, but she does not tie them to fact. It is true that, Louise did in fact cross the Bay of Fundy in open canoe in winter, but it was not to meet de Bonaventure in a remote inlet, as in the novel. In reality – sans conjecture – Louise made for English-occupied Annapolis Royal. At the time, de Bonaventure was dead and buried in France.

At its heart, Quietly My Captain Waits is a love story inspired by scandale. Louise's very public relationship with the married de Bonaventure produced a son. We have avocat Mathieu de Goutins to thank for documenting their relationship. A pathetic figure in Eaton’s novel, he sent several letters to Paris complaining of the lovers’ conduct. De Goutins' puritanical outrage was shared twenty-three decades later by an anonymous reviewer in St Petersburg Times (30 June 1940):

You will soon be hearing a great deal about this book but take this reviewer’s advice if you are thinking of buying or renting it – save your money. Wait until you can see the movie version of it that will have to be censored.
     It is said that Hollywood paid $40,000 for it before it appeared in print – only a paltry $10,000 less than was paid for “Gone With the Wind.” It is a type of book that is this reviewers particular bete noir.
     We review few novels for the present trend is toward a particularly disgusting realism that seems to be increasing.

René Baudry, who wrote Louise de Freneuse's entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, had other issues. He makes no mention of Quietly My Captain Waits by title,  rather concludes with a veiled reference:

An American novelist has written a questionable novel about Mme de Freneuse. What need is there of adding imaginary episodes to the ardent and courageous life of this woman, the heroine of a true romance filled with adventure and passion?

The late M Baudry is mistaken. Evelyn Eaton was not an American novelist, although she did apply for citizenship in her forties. Eaton was born in 1902 to Canadian parents in Montreux, Switzerland, and lived much of her early life in New Brunswick. After the death of her father at Vimy Ridge, the family moved to England. She studied at Heathfield School and the Sorbonne. While at the latter, Eaton became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Therese, whom she raised. Eaton married a Polish count, fled the Nazis, made her way to the United States, and wrote for the New Yorker. She published more than thirty books, encompassing novels, poetry, non-fiction, and biography. Her name doesn’t feature the Canadian Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, or the Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature, but she does have a highly informative entry at the Canada’s Early Women Writers.

Returning to René Baudry's comment, I remind that Quietly My Captain Waits is a historical novel.

Historical novels are works of fiction.

Works of fiction feature imaginary episodes.

Quietly My Captain Waits is a hell of a story.

Hollywood could not have done better.

Bloomer:

At first he thought the ship was sinking, and that the two snoring men with whom he had gone to bed had left him there to die.

Trivia:  Hollywood has yet to adapt of the novel. Consensus is that another war intruded. Eaton used money from the sale to build a summer home on the Bay of Fundy.

Object: For the life of me, I cannot remember when and where I bought this book. What I can say for certain is that I paid no more than a dollar. I may have paid nothing. It once belonged to Cicely and Scottie Mitchell, a couple who lived at 12 Elmwood Avenue, Senneville, Quebec. If the notation on the frontispiece is accurate, it was added to their library on 18 March 1943. I found this postcard within its pages.

I'm happy to report that the Mitchells' house still stands. It's quite beautiful.

Access: The novel was first published in 1940 by Harper (New York) and Cassell (London). The Grosset & Dunlop followed a Literary Guild of America edition. In 1945, American GIs were treated to an Armed Services edition. In 1951, Permabooks' published the second paperback edition. Fifteen years later, Pyramid published a the first of its two mass market paperback editions.

The novel is currently in print from Formac as one of its Fiction Treasures titles. First editions, Armed Services copies, and vintage paperbacks are always tempting, but I recommend the Formac for its introduction by Barry M. Moody. It can be purchased through this link.

Surprisingly, there is no French translation, though there is a Portuguese: Até um dia, meu capitão!

Quietly My Captain Waits was read for the 1940 Club.

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Blue Plaque Special: Maritime Edition

No Weddings and Three Funerals

Quebec in Revolt
Herman Buller
Toronto: Swan, 1966
352 pages

The cover has all the look of a 1960s polemic, but Quebec in Revolt is in fact a historical novel. Its key characters are depicted on the title pages:

At far left is Joseph Guibord, he of the Guibord Affair.

The Guibord Affair?

Like Gordon Sinclair, one of twelve columnists and critics quoted on the back cover, the Guibord Affair meant nothing to me.

It most certainly didn't feature in the textbooks I was assigned in school. This is a shame because the Guibord Affair would've challenged classmates who complained that Canadian history was boring.

Here's what happened:

In 1844, Montreal typographer Joseph Guibord helped found the Institut canadien. An association dedicated to the principles of liberalism, its library included titles prohibited by the Roman Catholic Index – the Index Librorum Prohibitoru. These volumes, combined with the Institut's cultural and political activities, drew the condemnation of Ignace Bourget, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Montreal. In July 1869, Bourget issued a decree depriving members of the sacraments. Guibord died four months later.

Here's what happened next: 

Guibord's body was transported to a plot he'd purchased at Montreal's Catholic Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery, only to be refused burial by the Church. The remains found a temporary resting place at the Protestant Mount Royal Cemetery, while friend and lawyer Joseph Doutre brought a lawsuit on behalf of the widow Guibord. In 1874, after the initial court case and a series of appeals, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ordered the burial. In response, Bourget deconsecrated Guibord's plot.

The second attempt at interment, on 2 September 1875, began at Mount Royal Cemetery:

At Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a violent mob attacked, forcing a retreat to Mount Royal.

The third attempt, on 16 November, was accompanied by a military escort of over 1200 men. Guibord's coffin was encased in concrete so as to protect his body from vandals.

The sorry "Guibord Affair" spans the second half of the novel. The focus of the first half is the man himself. Young Guibord woos and weds Henriette Brown, the smallpox-scared orphaned daughter of a poor shoemaker. He moves up the ranks within Louis Perrault & Co, the printing firm in which he'd worked since a boy, eventually becoming manager of the entire operation.

Louis Perrault & Co, c.1869

Henriette and husband come to be joined by Della, the daughter of one of her distant Irish cousins. Poor girl, Della was part of the exodus brought on by the Potato Famine. Her father and lone sibling having died whilst crossing the Atlantic – mother soon to follow – she clings to life in one of the "pestilential sheds" built for accommodate diseased immigrants. The most dramatic scene in the novel has Joseph defying authority by lifting he girl from her sickbed and carrying her home. 

"Skin and bone had given way to flesh and curves," Della recovers and grows to become a headstrong young woman. Buller makes much of her breasts. Ever one to buck convention and authority, Della spurns marriage, has a lengthy sexual and intellectual relationship with journalist Arthur Buies, and ends up living openly with Joseph Doutre ("Josef" in the novel). Truly, a liberated woman; remarkable for her time.

I've yet to find evidence that Della existed.

Joseph Guibord's entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography informs that he and Henriette, a couple Buller twice describes as childless, had at least ten children. The entry for Joseph Doutre, whom the author portrays as a lifelong bachelor, records two marriages.

Were it not for the novel's Author's Note, pointing out that Guibord began his career working for John Lovell (not Louis Perrault), or that he was born on 31 March 1809 (not 1 April 1809), or that women didn't wear bustles in 1820s Montreal, might seem nit-picky.

The Swan paperback quotes Al Palmer, author of Montreal Confidential and Sugar Puss on Dorchester Street):

In fact, what Palmer wrote is this:

The Gazette, 19 November 1965

I expect there many more fabrications and errors in this novel and its packaging, but can't say for sure. Again, we didn't learn about the Guibord Affair in school.

About the author: Herman Buller joins Kenneth Orvis and Ernie Hollands as Dusty Bookcase jailbird authors. A lawyer, he rose to fame in the 'fifties as part of a baby-selling ring.

The Gazette, 13 February 1954

Buller was arrested at Dorval Airport on 12 February 1954 whilst attempting to board a flight to Israel with his wife and in-laws. The worst of it all – according to the French-language press – was that the lawyer had placed babies born to unwed Catholic women with Jewish couples.

La Patrie, 11 February 1954

Remarkably, Buller served just one day in prison. He paid a $20,000 fine, was disbarred, and was good to go.

Though Quebec in Revolt was published just eleven years after all this, not a single review mentioned of Buller's criminal past.

I hadn't heard of the Buller Affair (as I call it) until researching this novel, despite it having been  dramatized in Le berceau des anges (2015) a five-part Series+ series. Buller (played by Lorne Bass) is mentioned twenty-two seconds into the trailer. 

Fun fact: I read Quebec in Revolt during a recent stay at the Monastère des Augustines in Quebec City. 

Object and Access: A bulky, well-read mass-market paperback, my copy was purchased for one dollar this past summer at an antiques/book store in Spencerville, Ontario.

Quebec in Revolt was first published in 1965 by Centennial Press. If the back cover is to be believed, McKenzie Porter of the Toronto Telegram describes that edition as a "Canadian best seller." I've yet to come across a copy.

As of this morning, seven copies of Quebec in Revolt are listed for sale online. At US$6.00, the least expensive is offered by Thiftbooks: "Unknown Binding. Condition: Fair. No Jacket. Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting," Take a chance! Who knows what will arrive!

There are two Swan copies at US$8.00 and US$12.45. Prices for the Centennial edition range from US$10.00 (sans jacket) to US$24.00. 

Surprisingly, Quebec in Revolt enjoyed an Estonian translation: Ja mullaks ei pea sa saama... Google translates this as And you don't have to become soil... 

There hasn't been a French translation.

Is it any wonder?

Margaret Murray Robertson Matrimonial Mystery (& Canadian literature's most tear-stained novel)

Summertime, and the livin' is busy. Many irons in the fire add to the heat, the pressure is on, and I'm enjoying each and every day. This week I finished a Dusty Bookcase review of Margaret Murray Robertson's 1866 novel Christie Redfern's Troubles for Canadian Notes & Queries.

A forgotten bestseller published by the Religious Tract Society, I expect a fair percentage of sales came through purchase as gifts and prizes. My own copy, which I bought last year from a London bookseller, was presented in 1893 to Katie Seymour, winner of Miss Moore's Prize at the Mall Board School, Brading.

The author herself taught at the Sherbrooke Academy in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Lorraine McMullin, who wrote the the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry for Margaret Murray Robertson, records that "as a teacher, she was devoted to her pupils, she never called a student by a pet name; instead, she looked to the intellect. Correspondingly, her students revered rather than loved her."

I think of Margaret Murray Robertson as "Miss Robertson." That she never married renders this undated edition curious.

That the scene depicted on its cover does not feature in the novel adds to the mystery.

My thoughts on Christie Redfern's Troubles will appear in the next issue of CNQ. What did I think? Well, I found the  following passages worthy of note. Préparez vos mouchoirs.

Night after night did her weary little head slumber on a pillow which her tears had wet. (15)

Amid a rush of angry tears, there fell a few very bitter drops to the memory of her mother. (22)

Christie did not speak; but the touch of her sister's lips unsealed the fountain of her tears, and clinging to her and hiding her face, she cried and sobbed in a way that, at last, really frightened her sister. (26)

If Christie could have found words with which to answer him, she could not have uttered them through the tears and sobs that had not been far from her all the evening. (39)

The disappointment was a very bitter one; and she turned her face away, that her sister might not see the tears that were gushing from her eyes. (41)

The tears that wet her pillow were very different from the drops that had fallen on it a little while before. (45)

Christie sank down, struggling with her tears. (64)

She was not a demonstrative child, usually; but now she dropped her face upon her father's hand, and he felt the fall of her warm tears. (80).

But she enjoyed the kind greetings and looks of sympathy that awaited them in the kirk-yard, though they brought many tears to Effie's eyes, and sent them gushing over her own pale cheeks. (90)

Her cheeks were crimson, and there was a light in her eyes that bade fair to be very soon quenched in tears. (121)

Her tears fell fast for a moment; but her heart was lightened, and it was with a comparatively cheerful face that she presented herself in the little back parlour, where she found Mrs, Mclntyre taking tea with a friend. (123)

There were tears in Christie's eyes as she raised them to look in Mrs. Lee's face, called forth quite as much by the gentle tones of her voice as by the thought of 'the bairns' at home. (130)

She was very much afraid that if Mrs. Lee were to speak so gently again her tears must flow; and this must not be if she could possibly help it. (137)

It was a troubled, tearful face that Christie laid down on her hands as she said this. (147)

It was only by a great effort that she restrained a flood of tears till her sister had gone. (156)

She went early, as usual, and had time for the shedding of some very sorrowful tears before the congregation gathered. (157)

Turning her aching eyes from the light, she did not, for a moment or two, try to restrain her tears. (166)

In a little while she grew unconscious of the tears she had tried to hide, and her hands fell down on her lap, and her wet cheeks and smiling lips were turned towards the face that her dim eyes failed to see. (169)

It was almost like seeing Effie herself, she told him, amid a great burst of tears that startled the grave John considerably. For a moment her sobs came fast. (191)

His words were light, but there was a meaning in his grave smile that made Christie's heart leap; and her answer was at first a startled look, and then a sudden gush of happy tears. (200)

Christie ceased to struggle with her tears now, but they fell very quietly. (214)

Remembering all they had passed through together, Christie could hardly restrain her tears. (221)

A few tears fell on the leaves of her little Bible; but by and by the former peace came back again, as she felt herself half resting indeed on the only sure foundation. (253)

The letter fell from her hands, and her face, as she burst into happy tears, was hidden by them. (260) Her face was flushed, and the tears filled her eyes, but she spoke very modestly and humbly too. (275)

To say that the surprise was a joyful one would be saying little, yet after the first tearful embrace, the joy of both sisters was manifested very quietly. (315)

Of Mrs. Lee's kindness she could not speak without tears. (317)

She was weak and worn out, and she could not manage to say what she had to say without a flood of tears, which greatly surprised her mistress. (323)

Her first night in the hospital was very dreary. No one can be surprised to hear that she shed some sorrowful tears. (327)
Was it any wonder that many a time her pillow was wet with tears? (332)

It was of no use to try to check her tears. They must flow for a minute or two. (333)

Christie's countenance lighted up with pleasure as he read, and the tears that had been close at hand flowed freely. (339)

Christie's face brightened as she turned her bright, tearful eyes upon him. (342)

Too many teardrops for one heart to be crying, wouldn't you say?

Related post:

The Mysterious Judith Hearne