Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 5: 'Sad End of a Noted Politician' by James MacRae

For the month, the fifth of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

To think I once worked to celebrate this horrible man.

I first learned of John J. MacDonald – "James MacRae" – a few months after moving to St Marys, the small Ontario town he adopted as his home. That introduction came through The Four James, William Arthur Deacon's 1927 study of MacRae and fellow poets James McIntyre, James Gay and James D. Gillis.

The four are forever united by that book. Indeed, their very legacies are crafted by that book and its subsequent reissues, the last of which was published forty-eight years ago by Macmillan.

"Canada's Four Worst- And Funniest-Poets."

They're not the four worst, nor are they the four funniest.

It's all too easy to see the Four Jameses as being similar (Paper Lace), when in fact they were actually very different from one another (The Beatles). McIntyre, the most prolific, was the most grounded. Like so much of his verse, 'Ode on the Mammoth Cheese,' his greatest hit, was intended to raise a smile at country fairs. Deacon encourages us to laugh at it, when we should be laughing with it. Gay, a loving and loveable loon who thought himself Tennyson's rival, is the most fun to read. Gillis wasn't so much a poet as a prose writer. He's included for no other reason than to make for a great title.

The differences between these four men is most evident in their respective reactions to the 1880 murder of politician and Globe publisher George Brown.

Unsurprisingly, the tragedy inspired no verse from prose-writer James Gillis. James McIntyre writes of his sorrow in a poem titled 'Departed Statesman.' James Gay expresses great affection for the fallen man with 'The Honourable G. Brown.' James MacRae's 'Sad End of a Noted Politician' is something else entirely.

A different kind of loon than Gay, much of MacRae's poetry is taken up by hate thrown on women, strangers, Protestants, and Liberals. 

'Sad End of a Noted Politician' comes from The Poems and Essays of John J. MacDonald, (Ottawa: Ru-Mi-Lou, 1928), the poet's third and final book.

MacDonald's nom de plume is misspelled on the cover.

SAD END OF A NOTED POLITICIAN

On a cold winter night, cruel death in its might,
Deprives Mr. Brown of his senses;

Now the joys that attend all his honours must end,

And his long night of sorrow commences.

As he hears the decree, he determines to flee

To the gate of the dwelling of glory,

But that gate he finds closed, and his entrance opposed,

Although sad to his party the story.

Thus insultingly used, thus disowned and refused,

He goes on in another direction;

At that medium place, where the Papists have grace,

He asks humbly for rest and protection.

But in vain as before for thgat rest to implore—

He must follow his downward gradation;

With the devil despite he soon meets at the gate,

And there follows this sort of conversation:—

 

     G.B.—Disappointed and grieved, of mu comforts bereaved,

                 And my relatives all at a distance,

                 I have come to request of you leave her to rest,

                 And to ask your paternal assistance.

     DEV.—Oh! my corpulent friend, I your case apprehend,

                 And will grant you coveted pittance;

                 If you tell me the claim that you have on the same

                 You will gain to my dwelling admittance.

     G.B.—It is little you know in these regions below;

                You must think I'm a Papist or Paddy;

                As a Child if you prize the retailer of lies,

                I can certainly claim you for daddy.

     DEV.—You must still keep aloof till you give me some proof

                 On your noble and worthy exertions;

                 For I oft shall mistake if I venture to take

                 Every wandering stranger's assertions.

     G.B.—In my nethermost robes I have brought you some globes,

                You will find them a recommendation;

                     They will prove beyond doubt that I laboured throughout

                 In extending your own dominion.

     DEV.—By the stories they tell now I know you too well,

                 And to have one more prudent would rather,

                 For, exposing my plan by the course which you ran,

                 You have brought disgrace on your father.

                 For to win the applause some men for my cause

                 Some discretion and caution are needed;

                 But, regardless of this, you have acted amiss,

                 And my wise inspirations unheeded.

                 But your failings I feel have resulted from zeal

                 To encourage your partners in evil;

                 So forgetting your sin, you may quietly come in

                 But you must be exceedingly civil.

Related posts:

The Murder of George Brown: He Died With Grit

A Mildly Eccentric Man Turns Nasty
Poet Names Newspaper Editor as Lucifer's Heir

Mean Mister MacDonald Attacks a Prime Minister

Words of Hate for Maria Monk

A Prudish Poet's Struggle with Stays

The St Marys James

Local Poet!

A Local Poet is Recognized

Unpleasant Verse for New Year's Day

McIntyre's Mammoth Ode

CNQ: Spring? Spring Ish

“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”

The same might be said of a magazine's Spring Issue landing in July. Something is seriously wrong, though I dare say we're getting used to it. Yesterday, I donned a mask, looked about, and felt good that others waiting to buy beer had done the same.

What a long, strange year this has been... and it's barely half-way done. I like to think the arrival of this new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries signals a return to better times. There's a whole lot to look at, like this issue's What's Old, which features:

Here I remind readers that my birthday is next month.

The Dusty Bookcase column in this issue concerns Robert W. Service's thriller The Master of the Microbe. Published in 1926, its hero, an American expat living in Montparnasse, stumbles over a plot to unleash a deadly virus that attacks the respiratory system. Its earliest pages are as interesting and entertaining as anything I've read this year.

You'll also find Bruce Whiteman on George Fetherling, whose The Writing Life (Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2013) I edited:

I'm all in with Nigel Beale, who sounds off on the disregard this country demonstrates toward its literary heritage:

David Mason is spot on: There's no such thing as book hoarding.

The embarrassment of riches continues with Colette Maitland's contribution:

And then there's Cynthia Holz's memoir, 'Out of the Bronx':

Other contributors include:

Jeff Bursey

Page Cooper

Elaine Dewar

Meags Fitzgerald

Stephen Fowler

Ulrikka S. Gernes

Basia Gilas

Douglas Glover

Alex Good

Brett Josef Grubisic

Alex Pugsley

Seth

Kelly S. Thompson

Shelley Wood

and

editor Emily Donaldson

An unexpected treat, the copy I received included this insert:

Again, my birthday is next month.

Hugh Garner: Article Lost, Article Found

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1962

Toronto: Ryerson, 1968

Markhan, ON: PaperJacks, 1983

Toronto: Dundurn, 2011

A Bonus:

Regarding the sales of "The Silence On The Shore" [sic] I think it has done remarkably well, considering that its publisher didn't want to sell any copies of it at all. I think, however, that had I not wanted to sell it I would have kept its sales down below 1,400, even if I would have to burn the books. 

     My personal feelings to you are friendly, but from a business and professional point of view I think it better that we do not involve each other with the other any more. 

– Hugh Garner, letter to Jack McClelland, 28 August 1963

The Man Who Hated Toronto

Present Reckoning
Hugh Garner
Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1951

Tom Neelton has arrived too late for the party, but he doesn't care. It's the morning after V-J Day and he has just stepped off a train at Union Station. Outside, steamers hang limply from lampposts and confetti clogs the gutters.

What is he doing here?

Tom hates Toronto. Though born and raised in the city, "it had been something he had had to fight, an enemy of brick and stone and smug condescension." Tom's mother and father are dead. His nearest kin is a dishonest aunt with whom he made the mistake of storing his civilian clothes before shipping out. She'll claim that the moths got to them.

Again, what is he doing here?

At first, I thought the answer lay in Carol Berkett. Seven years ago, when he was twenty-five and she was seventeen, they'd gone out for a bit. She'd even brought him home to meet her mom. Roast was served. Tom and Carol did some necking on the chesterfield. He never called on her again.

He's now thinking he made a mistake. Tom imagines a better life, one in which Carol would have been waiting at the train station. He returns to familiar digs, a cheap room in the Pentland Hotel (read: Warwick Hotel), determined to track her down. But it turns out that she's not in the phone book. Her mom's not in the phone book either. Then, "like a soft slap against his consciousness", it occurs to him that Carol might be married.

So he gives up and is soon snogging Margaret, the buxom blonde who works the front desk.

Tom guessed right about Carol. We know because Garner devotes several chapters to her marriage.

Happy?

Not unhappy. Husband George, a punch press operator, has come to accept that his passion for amateur radio is not shared. He sometimes gets a good chuckle out of Blondie, which is his wife's favourite comic strip. Carol, who often thinks of her brief romance with Tom, becomes much more contented after the birth of baby Harold.

Clearly, Tom and Carol are destined to meet, but this doesn't occur before the second half of the novel. Until then, the returning veteran kills time drinking with friends in the local beer parlour. Margaret decamps for Kamloops, Tom takes up with bohemian art school student Louise Kramer and Garner runs up the word count.

Biographer Paul Stewe is dismissive of Present Reckoning, focussing in on what he considers a melodramatic climax. In the monograph he penned for the Canadian Writers & their [sic]Works series, George Fetherling describes it as "a little novel which depends far too much on chance meetings, coincidence and on the double-whammy at the end and is nowhere near the level of Garmer's best prose."

I agree with that last bit. That said, I count only two coincidences or chance meetings:

• Louise sees Tom in a museum one week, then spots him a library the next.
• Twelve months after returning to town, Tom encounters old flame Carol on the street.

These things happen.

I won't spoil the ending, other that to say that I found it believable, strong enough, more than a little upsetting and not the least bit melodramatic. But what I really took away from Present Reckoning – what is really of value – is its depiction of Toronto in the months after the war.

Carol lives in a new development, ever aware of the prying eyes of neighbouring housewives. George's company prepares for the new peacetime economy. Tom looks over glasses of beer, gauging the progress of a disfigured drinking buddy's reconstructed face. He'll also make the mistake of returning to an old haunt where he's confronted by "young punks in zoot-suit pants and girls in Eisenhower jackets." Tom later describes the scene to Carol:

"They danced differently than we did, wore their hair in brush cuts and feathered bobs, and stared at me standing on the sidelines as though I was a bouncer. I moved over near the orchestra and spent an hour or so listening to the music trying to recapture the feeling I had in the old days, but it was no use. I didn't belong there."

There's something not to like about Present Reckoning. It meanders in a way that had me wondering whether Garner wasn't drawing from unpublished stories and other jottings. After all, he'd done just that the year before with the pseudonymous Waste No Tears.

Again, I agree with my friend George that this is not Garmer's best prose. And yet passages like this, in which newly arrived Tom is confronted by his first sight of the Royal York Hotel, are just about the greatest things he ever wrote:

The hotel – Largest in the British Empire – squatted sullenly against the opposite sidewalk, daring those leaving the station to pass it by without a glance. He forced his eyes along its self-satisfied exterior and thought back to the days of its opening fifteen years before. There had been much fanfare then, with big-wigs by the score. Ben Bernie's orchestra, a porter for every bag and doormen garbed in coachman's habit. During the depression the coachmen had disappeared along with many of the other opulent ostentations, and for years the edifice had gone on like a bankrupt dowager, bravely pretending that things had not changed and that its hundreds of empty rooms were full of guests. To him it symbolized the city: smug, part good taste and bad, a brave thing formed of a maladmixture of decency and sham.

What was Tom Neelton doing back in Toronto?

Better the hell you know.

He'll come to wish he'd never returned.

A Bonus: Over at Canadian Fly-By-Night, Bowdler identifies the corner depicted on the cover as Bay and Richmond. The scene does not feature in the novel.

Object and Access:: A 158-page novel with a further two pages advertising Peter Cheyney's Lady Behave and One of Those Things. Present Reckoning was Garner's third paperback original, and was printed but once. My copy, a Reading Copy in every sense, was purchased last month at London's Attic Books. Price: $7.50.

Sixty-four years after publication, the novel has become scarce. I've found just three copies listed for sale online – all Fine, they range in price from US$75 to US$100.

All of six university libraries and the Toronto Public Library have the book in their holdings. As might be expected, Library and Archives Canada fails.

Related post:

The Return of Hugh Garner's Neglected Novel

Unsettling Garners

Hugh Garner's pseudonymous second novel, Waste No Tears, goes to press next week, returning after a sixty-four year absence as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series. I'm proud to have played a part in its resurrection, and am particularly pleased with myself for having asked Amy Lavender Harris to pen the Introduction. Anyone at all familiar with her work will understand.

Waste No Tears is not a feel-good novel, but then one would never expect such a thing from a book pitched as "The Novel about the Abortion Racket". The cover, by unappreciated Winnipeg boy Syd Dyke, has haunted me from the day I first set eyes on it.

Published in 1950 by Toronto's New Stand Library, it's a rare book – so rare that two decades later George (then Doug) Fetherling had to give it a pass when writing on Garner for Forum House's Canadian Writers & Their Works series:

It is a novel so scarce that it cannot be found in Canada's largest public library, it's largest university library or even the National Library's copyright deposit.

Odd thing about Garner: his books were graced with some of the most disturbing images. He was, of course, a Governor General's Award-winner, once considered one of our greatest short story writers, but you'd never know it to look at these.

Hugh Garner's Best Stories
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971

A Nice PLace to Visit
Toronto: Ryerson, 1970

A Nice Place to Visit
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971

Violation of the Virgins
Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1970

Violation of the Virgins
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket, 1975

Out of print, each and every one. Well, next month Waste No Tears will be available again, in original cover tweaked to give Garner his due. Pre-orders are being taken by the usual sources.

Can't wait? There's a decent copy of the original New Stand Library edition listed online. But it'll cost you US$249, and it won't have Amy's Introduction.

Related post:

The Return of Hugh Garner's Neglected Novel

Pulp Noir à Montréal

The new edition of Canadian Notes & Queries lands, and with it comes another Dusty Bookcase sur papier. This time the spotlight plays upon Ted Allan's Love is a Long Shot. Not the Love is a Long Shot for which he was awarded the 1984 Stephen Leacock Medal, but a cheap, pseudonymous pulp novel from a quarter-century earlier.

Published by News Stand Library in September 1949, two months before newspaperman Al Palmer’s Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, this Love is a Long Shot holds the distinction of being the first pulp noir novel set in Montreal. As I write in CNQ, it ain't that pretty at all. The cover depicts, but doesn't quite capture, one of the darkest, most horrific scenes in any Canadian novel.

There's more to the issue, of course, including new fiction by Nathan Whitlock, new poetry by Nyla Matuck and – ahem – praise for A Gentleman of Pleasure from George Fetherling.

Wildly Wayward Walt Whitman

To Toronto this evening for the launch of my friend George Fetherling's third novel, Walt Whitman's Secret, at Ben McNally Books.

So... in anticipation of this joyous event, James McIntyre's verse about the Good Gray Poet:

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

Richardson's End

So big, so close, so powerful, and yet New York doesn't really feature much in Canadian literature. The city rarely serves as a setting, and not all that many of our notable writers have called it home – Arthur Stringer and Thomas B. Costain just aren't names we pay much attention to these days. Still, Ralph Gustafson spent much of the Second World War in Manhattan working for British Information Services. Brian Moore lived in the city for a few years – two of his finest novels, An Answer from Limbo and I Am Mary Dunne, feature New York as a setting. In Travels by Night, George Fetherling writes that the city served as something of a way-station between West Virginia and Ontario.

I'd argue that our greatest canonical connection properly belongs to Major John Richardson, he of Wacousta fame, who took up residence in New York in the autumn of 1849. On the surface it seems such a smart move; he produced several bestsellers. However, this did not translate into coin. After two years in the city, on 12 May 1852, Richardson died in his lodgings at 113 West 29th Street. Cause of death: erysipelas. John Dryden died of the disease, as did John Stuart Mill. Charles Lamb fell, cut on his face and succumbed to the malady. Richardson's erysipelas was brought on by malnutrition – in short, 'the first Canadian novelist' wasn't earning enough to feed himself. Richardson's funeral took place two days later at the Church of the Holy Communion, corner of 6th Avenue and West 20th Street. His body was then transported outside the city, presumably to be buried.

Richardson's lodgings are long gone, but the Church of the Holy Communion still stands. A beautiful Gothic Revival building, the vision of Anglo-American architect Richard Upjohn, it once counted John Jacob Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt amongst its parishioners. Richardson was a steadfast follower of its rector, evangelical Episcopalian Reverend William Augustus Muhlenberg.

As a young man, I knew the Church of the Holy Communion as the Limelight, a dance club I would pass on what were then frequent visits to New York. The hedonistic playground of Michael Alig's coked-out Club Kids, a building Reverend Muhlenberg intended as 'an oasis of Christian activity in the city', it ended up at the centre of the Angel Melendez murder.*

The structure once known as the Church of the Holy Communion now serves as a clearing house for clothing samples. The days of debauchery and indulgence are past, but the sacrilege continues.

* Those possessing a morbid curiosity and strong stomach may have an appetite for James St James' Disco Bloodbath (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), an account of his time in the Limelight, and the Melendez murder and dismemberment. St James, a transplanted Indianan and former Club Kid writes, 'if its superficial that my response to murder is to stop wearing false eyelashes – then goddamnit – SO BE IT.' Goddamnit, indeed.

Local Poet!

The Four Jameses

William Arthur Deacon

Toronto: Macmillan, 1974

A bit of a risk acknowledging National Poetry Month on a day when people are looking-out for hoaxes and practical jokes. I double the hazard by focusing on this book, with its lousy cover and cheap sales pitch. The whole thing looks a bit fake - but, as George Fetherling (then Doug) notes, Deacon's book is 'that rare thing in Canadian literature: an underground classic.' As is often the fate of titles that fall into this category, The Four Jameses has had an unusual history. First issued as a hardcover in 1927, its publisher, Graphic, was felled by the Depression. After a period in limbo, unbound sheets were bought and issued in paper wraps. In 1953, Ryerson published a revised edition, which was followed, a little over two decades later, by this Macmillan paperback. With one publisher done in by hard times, and the others victims of manifest destiny, you'd almost think that The Four Jameses was cursed. Still, I keep it on my shelves.

Deacon's book centres on James Gay, James McIntyre, James D. Gillis and James MacRae, four poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are, as Fetherling points out, united by Christian name, nationality and sheer lack of talent. That said, I'm quick to express my doubts that they are 'Canada's Four Worst - And Funniest - Poets', as claimed on the cover. True, their work can raise a smile or two, but I've read much worse.

Of the four, I prefer James MacRae (né John James MacDonald), who published his first book of verse, Poems written by J. J. MacDonald, a Native of Glengarry, in or about 1877. Deacon is good enough to provide several lines from this extremely rare book, including:

How oft thus lay the secret way

In which the game is played:-

A shapely mass, by name a lass,

Is artfully arrayed.

Is neatly bound with metal round

And trimmings wisely made,

And padded o'er with worthless store

To cover unbetrayed

The sad defects, which one detects

When nature is displayed.

Forty-six years elapsed between the poet's debut and his second book, An Ideal Courtship. Published in 1923 under the nom de plume James MacRae, it is described by Deacon as the poet's magnum opus. An Ideal Courtship is a long narrative poem telling of the company kept between Mary Campbell, formed by her parents as a chaste 'model for the public to admire', and William Chisholm, a stick-in-the-mud farmer from the Maritimes. There doesn't appear to be much amour or ardor in this poem. In MacRae's world, an ideal courtship ends not at the altar, but the grave:

Mary suddenly took sick, and human skill could find no relief

Render her in her distress, which made the tragic struggle brief.

But, wait, a few days later the grief-stricken William is found dead, lying on his fiancée's grave:

Though so often disappointed by events beyond their power.

They were finally reunited at their own appointed hour.

But so well their lives were ended, and so holy was their love,

We may hope that they were married at the altar steps above.

MacRae didn't let another 46 years pass before publishing his next book. A septuagenarian, how could he? His Poems and Essays was published in 1930.

Sadly, The Four Jameses provides little biographical information about MacRae. Deacon tells us that the poet was born in 1849 in what was then Alexandria, roughly 40 kilometres north of Cornwall, Ontario. In 1875 he arrived in St Marys, Ontario, and was living in the town when his first volume was published. It seems MacRae stayed in St Marys for about a decade, before settling out to farm in parts unknown. According to Deacon, in 1918 the poet returned to St Marys, 'where he spent a pleasant old age, and where the Public Library was an unfailing source of enjoyment... Among the townspeople he was reported to be mildly eccentric, which probably means nothing more than a strongly marked personality intensified by a touch of the artistic temperament, without which no poet is properly equipped.'

Here I admit that my preference for MacRae is influenced by my move to this pretty little town last year. I, too, have found the library to be an 'unfailing source of enjoyment' - though, I regret to report, it contains not a single volume of MacRae's verse. Nor does it have a copy of The Four Jameses.

St Marys Public Library

Object: We all live on a yellow hunk of cheese... I can't imagine how many people were turned away by the cover. Fairly typical of Macmillan's paperbacks, at 35 it's holding up quite well.

Access: The Four Jameses is readily available in our larger public libraries, most often in the Macmillan edition. The Graphic Publishers first is by far the most attractive, and includes illustrations and photos not found in the others. Nice copies of the cloth and paper editions can be found for under C$30. The Ryerson edition, the least desirable, can be had for C$20. Macmillan's 1974 edition benefits from Fetherling's informative Introduction. Curiously, it's the least common of the three - only two copies are currently listed online: one going for US$11, the other at US$59.85 (on offer from an optimistic bookseller in Little Elm, Texas).