Mishandled by Hollywood?

An addendum to last week's post on "Woman-handled" by Arthur Stringer. 

Much of yesterday was spent reading 'The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912-1929,' a 2013 study by historian and archivist David Pierce. It was a disturbing yet pleasant distraction from the mess that is the republic to the south.

I could hear it from my Canadian home. 

David Pierce's findings brought focus to the awful truth that the vast majority of silent films are likely gone forever. Seeing it all laid out with such accuracy chilled the bones. 

This year alone, I've written about lost silent film adaptations of Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks, Frank L. Packard's The White Moll, and no less than three Gilbert Parker novels (The Money Master, The Translation of a Savage, and You Never Know Your Luck), all the while struggling to get some sense of what they were like through century-old trade magazines, reviews, stills, and adverts.

Happily, the adaptation of Arthur Stringer's Womanhandled (1925), subject of last week's post, is readily available on YouTube. The same can be said – for now, at least – of Stringer's Manhandled (1924), which was reviewed here eleven years ago. By great coincidence, Manhandled is singled out in Pierce's study as an example of a film that has survived, but in a lesser format.

Manhandled began as a longish short story spread out over two issues of the Saturday Evening Post. Russell Holman expanded it to novel-length in a movie tie-in published by Readers Library (UK) and Grosset & Dunlap (USA).

Womanhandled had no movie tie-in, which is just as well as there are only the faintest traces of Stringer's story in Luther Reed's screenplay.

Stringer's story begins in New York's Waldorf Astoria, at which novelist Baran Bowerman has just given a talk. He is approached by young Glenna van Gelder, who warns that he's being made soft by fawning female fans. Baran tries to toughen himself at a ranch outside Calgary only to find that the cowboys he seeks to emulate have decamped for more lucrative jobs in Hollywood westerns. Coincidentally, Hollywood comes to Alberta to shoot a western. Baran is injured whilst saving the film's leading lady from certain death when a stunt goes wrong. Glenna, who just happens to have been vacationing with her father in Banff, visits our hero as he recovers. It's implied that their story doesn't end there. 

Like "Women-handled," Womanhandled opens in New York, but in Central Park, where well-dressed man of leisure Bill Dana is feeding squirrels. He rescues a small boy who has fallen into the lake. Molly Martin, the boy's, um... she can't be his sister, can she?

Anyway, Bill notices that Molly's carrying a copy of Emerson Hough's North of 36, and so pretends to be a Westerner in order to impress. This works to his advantage as Molly, herself a Westerner, came east as a child after daddy died. She has a thing against Easterners, especially the men:

Bill, like Baran, goes west to make a man of himself in order to win over the girl; and, like Baran, discovers that the true cowboys have decamped for Hollywood. He finds himself working with Bowery bums who round up cattle in flivvers.

Bill ends up spending more time on the links than the range, and is about to board a train east when he receives a letter from Molly saying she is on her way west.

I'll write no more because I don't want to spoil things entirely, except to say that a scene in which the African-American housemaid's family is pushed to pass themselves off as Native Americans has become the subject of some debate amongst those who've seen the film.

Is it racist or a comment on racism?

Wherever you land, keep in mind that it has nothing to do with Arthur Stringer.

Related posts:

Handled by the Saturday Evening Post
Gilbert Parker's Hollywood Ending

Behold the Translation of a Savage on Film!

Oh, Lucky Man!

Three Weeks a Lady

Pearl White is the White Moll!

Handled by the Saturday Evening Post

'Woman-handled'
Arthur Stringer
The Saturday Evening Post, volume  197, issue 44

May 2, 1925

A critic writes: "In your New Year's Day post you urged readers to start off 2024 with Arthur Stringer. It's now fall and you haven't reviewed any book by Stringer. Have you even read one?"

I haven't, but smarting from the comment I've since tackled this short story. I'd always meant to read "Woman-handled" because of "Manhandled," a longer Stringer story that appeared in the Post the previous year (11 March - 29 March, 1924). It was brought to the screen by Paramount. Gloria Swanson played the lead.

The James H. Crank illustration the Saturday Evening Post chose to introduce "Woman-handled" is an odd in that it depicts the climax. 

The opening scene is urban. It's set in New York's Waldorf Astoria, where novelist Baran Bowerman, author of The Passionate Year, has just concluded the third of three talks to various ladies social groups. Amongst the rapt-eyed, fawning female readers he encounters sporty young horsewoman Glenna van Gelder, who ribs him for accepting these sorts of engagements with their pink carnations, hothouse violets, and macaroons.

"Why you're eating it up!" she says. "You love it! And if I don’t get out of the way of this adoring army they're going to trample me down.”

Baran Bowerman is drawn to Glenna van Gelder. The attraction has nothing to do with alliteration, rather that she is so different than the delicate women who typically attend his talks. Later, whilst walking down Fifth Avenue, Glenna's ribbing turns to mockery:

"You’re smothered in women... You're drowned in them. You’re like that Duke of Clarence who tumbled right into his vat of wine. You're so tangled up with petticoats you can’t breathe.”
   The handsome young author laughed, but his laugh was a defensive one. “Oh, I can still breathe,’’ he protested, with barricading lightness. ‘‘And there’s always safety, remember, in numbers.”
   “Is there?” asked the solemn-eyed girl at his side. “Isn’t there danger of getting your soul clogged up with talcum powder?”
   “I can’t see that it’s left any knock in the engine,” averred the pink-cheeked author. "I still have my two- hour work-out with my trainer every day.”
   “I know stout ladies who do the same.”

She later warns Baran that he's being "effeminized without knowing it."

From this point on Stringer's story becomes rather silly. The next morning they meet in Central Park, where Baran seeks to demonstrate his non-existent equestrian skills. This in turn leads to fisticuffs – not with Glenna van Gelder, you understand, rather with her riding partner. The novelist next makes for the west in order to toughen himself up. Interestingly, it is the Canadian west, not the American. More interesting still, is the arrival of a "movin' picture outfit," making a western.

My critic, a friend, will be pleased to learn that I've invested a further fifty-five minutes of life viewing Womanhandled, the Hollywood adaptation of "Woman-handled."

It was worth it.

More in next week's post.

Related post:

Gloria Gets Groped 

Pearl White is The White Moll!

The Moving Picture World
2 October 1920

A follow-up to last week's post on Frank L. Packard's The White Moll.

TheWhite Moll was the fifth Frank L. Packard book to be adapted by Hollywood. It followed Tinseltown's take on his 1914 novel The Miracle Man by a matter of months. The Miracle Man is considered one of the great lost silent films. I first wrote about it thirteen years ago, sharing the two minutes and twenty seconds of known footage. Since then a further thirty-nine seconds has been found.

Huzzah!

Here's what we now have:

 

Of the eight Packard novels I've read, The Miracle Man is the best by far. It concerns a faith healer in Maine whose activities attract the attention of a criminal gang. Wanting in on what the grift, they leave the Big Apple for the Pine Tree State, only to find that there is no grift. The White Moll is something altogether different. It was published in 1920, when Packard was all in on thrillers; The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917) and The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1919) had been his two biggest sellers.

As a novel, The White Moll has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, but the film was steeped in a baptismal font. I write with confidence, though I haven't seen Hollywood's adaptation. Like The Miracle Man, it's a lost silent. If anything, The White Moll is even more lost in that not so much as a frame has been found. Everything I know of the movie comes through reviews and descriptions found in one-hundred-and-four-year-old newspapers and magazines. 

The screenplay is credited to E. Lloyd Sheldon (1886-1957), who is best remembered for Tess of the Storm County (1922). It starred Toronto girl Mary Pickford; The White Moll starred Pearl White. She'd made a name for herself as "Queen of the Serials," the 20-chapter Perils of Pauline (1914) being the most popular. The White Moll was intended as White's first step toward becoming the Queen of the Features. 

Exhibitors Herald
4 August 1920

The best review I've read is also the worst. Published on in the Chicago Daily Tribune on August 16, 1920, it pulls no punches:

And thats just the start!

Critic Mae Tinée – real name: Frances Peck Grover – isn't completely down on the film. She praises the camera work and sets as "good," and describes Richard Travers, who played the Adventurer, as the only punk actor. It's the religious elements that offend:

Some things transpire in a church at the start of the picture that quite seriously offend one's good taste. The production will go better when the scenes utilizing the image of Christ crucified are omitted.

Christ crucified!

Reading through the reviews, I've managed to cobble together a plot that owes little to Packard's novel. William M Drew appears to have walked a wider trail, so I quote from his recent biography of Pearl White, The Woman Who Dared (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2023):

The White Moll cast Pearl as Rhoda, a thief from the underworld slums. Her life is transformed when she has a vision of Christ during a church robbery in which her father is killed. Becoming known as the "White Moll," she dedicates her life to reforming criminals. One of them, the "Sparrow," is a burglar who catches her fancy. Her activities as a settlement worker arouse the antagonism of the the "Dangler" (played by John Thornton  Baston), the leader of a criminal band, who clashes with her throughout the film. Her idealism wins out as she succeeds in bringing the "Dangler" to justice and finds love with the "Pug" (Richard C Travers), another reformed crook. In the course of these adventures, Pearl disguises herself as Gypsy Nan, a toothless hag who not "one fan in a million could guess" was the beautiful actress.

The Rhoda of the novel is a young woman who has been raised in comfort by a loving father, a well-positioned, well-respected mining engineer. She dedicates herself to caring for the poor after witnessing their squalid living conditions. The "Sparrow" appears late in the novel in her time of need. He is not someone who has captured her fancy. In the novel the "Dangler" is gang leader Pierre Dangler. He has no idea Rhoda is working against him. The "Pug" is not a reformed crook, rather an upstanding young man who has infiltrated Dangler's gang so as to bring them to justice.

The 7 August 1920 Moving Picture World reports:

The story is considered by Frank L. Packard, its author, to be the most powerful novel he has ever written, truly reflecting underworld existence.

What, one wonders, did the author make of such a radical departure from his story? As I've not had a chance to comb through the Frank L. Packard fonds at Library and Archives Canada, all I have to go on are these two paragraphs from a letter he wrote producer William Fox, as quoted in the 21 August 1920 edition of Moving Picture World: 

Note that praise does not extend E. Lloyd Sheldon.

I wonder whether Packard, a devout Anglican and congregant of Montreal's St James the Apostle, would have objected to the depiction of the crucified Christ (uncredited), or whether he would've embraced the religious elements, particularly after the success of The Miracle Man.

Le Canada
11 September 1920

On the other hand, The Miracle Man is so much better.

Right?

I suppose we'll never know.

Related post:  

A Feminine Jimmie Dale

Images of a Lost Film of a Forgotten Novel

A Feminine Jimmie Dale?

The White Moll
Frank L. Packard
New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1931
306 pages

Walt Disney failed to interest NBC in Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal. His biographers haven't made much of this, but evidence suggests it irked. He'd first read Jimmie Dale's adventures in adolescence, and would act them out with childhood chum Walt Pieffer. What roles they'd played are unknown. I like to think one of the Walts played Marie Lasalle, the Tocsin, but that's just me.

In 1952, fifty-one-year-old Disney purchased the rights to Jimmie Dale – “motion picture, photoplay, television, radio and/or any other adaptations of every kind and character” – and held onto them, even after NBC declined.

In an alternate universe, Disney managed to convince the network and Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal became a cathode-ray tube hit. The adventures of a millionaire masked crimefighter, it would've pre-dated and perhaps even inspired ABC's Batman and The Green Hornet. A Gold Key comic was pretty much guaranteed. In this alternate universe, it might've spawned spin-offs, some featuring the White Moll, which publisher George H. Doran positioned as "a Feminine Jimmie Dale."     

The White Moll
Frank L. Packard
New York: Doran, 1920

The White Moll is not Jimmy Dale en femme, though the two share the talent of impersonation. Both move though a grotty New York beset by poverty, drug addiction, alcoholism, and crime. The Gray Seal, Jimmy Dale is heir to a great fortune, while the White Moll, Rhoda Gray – note the surname – is of the lowly upper middle class. Her mining engineer father had worked for an English concern in South America until ill-health forced him to New York for medical consultation. Papa required an operation, but before it could take place petty thief  Pete "the Bussard" McGee broke into the Grays' flat. He was caught by father and daughter, spilled some sob story starring a sickly wife and hungry, unclothed kiddies, and was let go. The following morning, a curious Rhonda investigates to find Pete was telling the truth about his godawful life.

Sadly, Rhoda's father does not survive his operation. Left an orphan of modest means, she dedicates her young self to saving people like Pete from a life of poverty and crime. Rhoda comes to be known amongst the down and out as "The White Moll," the name coming from the Bussard, who'd introduced her to his invalid wife with these words:

“Meet de moll I was tellin’ youse about, Mag. She’s white – all de way up. She’s white, Mag; she’s a white moll – take it from me!”

Rhonda is about three years into her do-gooding when she visits a dying old hag known as Gypsy Nan. She soon learns that Nan is not the woman's true name, nor is she an old hag... but she is dying. In her final hours, the unnamed woman removes her disguise. As life slips away, the woman known as Gypsy Nan seeks salvation by telling the White Moll of a heist that will go down that very night. Rhonda tries to thwart the crooks, but is nabbed by Rough Rorke of the NYPD. She's saved by a seemingly drunken passerby who wrenches Rhonda from Rorke. Fleeing, she ends up in Gypsy Nan's hovel and adopts the role of the old hag.

The set-up, the only thing to add is that the seemingly drunken passerby was more than likely sober. The man who rescued Rhonda, referred to as "the Adventurer," weaves in and out of the novel, much like the Tocsin does in the adventures of Jimmie Dale.

I expect you know where that relationship will lead. Packard was a commercial writer and knew how to please his audience. 

Disney take note.

Trivia (or not): In 1920, the Fox Film Corporation released a film adaptation that that owed very little to the novel. The subject of next week's post.

Access: First published in the pages of The Blue Book Magazine (August 1919 - January 1920), the novel's first  edition is either the Copp, Clark (Canada) and Doran (United States). Both can be read online through the Internet Archive. My copy is one volume in the 1931 Gray Seal Edition set of Packard's works.

Two copies of Copp, Clark's Canadian first edition are currently listed for sale online, but no copies of the Doran.

Related post:

Whatever Happened to Jimmie Dale?

Gilbert Parker's Hollywood Ending

Being an addendum to last week's post on Gilbert Parker's The Money Master. 

Of the eighteen Gilbert Parker screen adaptations, The Money Master is the only one to be undertaken by the author himself. In his filmography, it follows closely behind Behold My Wife! (1920), a George Melford production based on the author's 1893 bestseller The Translation of a Savage.

That Behold My Wife! was Hollywood's second adaptation of the novel in seven years speaks to the author's popularity. A third adaptation followed.

But this post is about The Money Master... or not. The advertisement at the top of this post comes from an advert Paramount placed in the March 1921 edition of Motion Picture News.

Look for the asterisk.

cliquez pour agrandir

This was three months from release and still there'd been no decision as to the title. The film premiered on 26 June 1921 as A Wise Fool. Though it is preserved in the Library of Congress, I see no evidence that there has been a screening within living memory. What little I know of A Wise Fool comes through publicity shots and reviews, the former being surprisingly uncommon.

The image above, from the August 1921 edition of Exhibitors Herald, features Carmen Barbille (Alice Hollister) serenading her daughter Zoé (Ann Forrest), suggests one difference between A Wise Fool and its source; in the novel, Carmine last sees Zoé as a young girl.

Apologies for the the spoiler.

Anyone considering The Money Master as an autumn read is advised to skip the rest of this post as I'll be comparing the plots of novel and film.

The Money Maker concerns Jean Jacques Barbille, the fortunate heir to generations of wealth grown in rural Quebec. He takes some of those riches to Paris, where he is not recognized as the man of importance he believes himself to be. As noted in last week's review, his reception outside the French capitol meets expectations, though this is to do with capital (apologies, again). On his return voyage aboard the Antoine, Jean Jacques meets the beautiful Carmen Delores and her ne'er-do-well father. The two are fleeing Spain on account of papa Sebastian backing the losing side in Spain's recent civil conflict. The Antoine strikes a submerged iceberg off the shore of Gaspé. Jean Jacques is rescued by Carmen and the two marry.

Flash forward thirteen years. Jean Jacques lives at the family home, Manor Cartier in the parish of St. Saviour's, with Carmen and their little girl Zoé. A happy soul, his passion for business has come to consume and he is taking family life for granted.

No, that's unfair. Jean Jacques dotes on Zoé, who loves him so much.

But what of Carmen?

Mme Barbille has been sneaking around with master carpenter George Masson, whom M Barbille had hired to construct a flume. Once the project is completed, the lovers plan to flee the parish.

George and Carmen as imagined by illustrator André Castaigne.

Jean Jacques discovers his wife's infidelity and confronts George. He has the perfect opportunity to murder his wife's lover, but does not. 

I won't go into their exchange except to say that it is the very best part of the novel.

George jilts Carmen. Though Jean Jacques forgives his wife, she disappears, leaving her daughter behind.

We flash forward again, this time to Jean Jacques' fiftieth birthday, where he realizes that Zoé has fallen in love with Gerard Fynes:

He was English – that was a misfortune; he was an actor – that was a greater misfortune, for it suggested vagabondage of morals as well as of profession; and he was a Protestant, which was the greatest misfortune of all.

Faced with Jean Jacques' disproval, the two elope. It's now Zoé's turn to disappear. 

Jean Jacques goes into a complete tailspin. The modest growth of his inherited wealth is reversed. The decline is hastened by his thieving father-in-law, a dishonest cousin, and a fire that destroys his flour mill. Rather than declare bankruptcy or accept financial aid from the widowed Virginie Poucette, he allows creditors to move in. All Jean Jacques manages to save for himself is a bird cage that had belonged to Carmen and Zoé's pet canary. With nothing to anchor him to St Saviour's, Jean Jacques leaves for Montreal where – quite by chance – he encounters Carmen on her deathbed. In her last moments, they reconcile. Our hero then sets out for the Canadian west, where there had once been a sighting of Zoé and her husband.

Because this synopsis is taking far too long, I won't go into Jean Jacques' attempted murder of Carmen's last lover, and will instead cut to the discovery that he has a granddaughter. The Protestant actor father is dead, Zoé died shortly after childbirth, and the baby is now with a wealthy woman who'd been unable to conceive.

I won't go into their exchange except to say that it is the very worst part of the novel.

For reasons both unclear and unconvincing, Jean Jacques leaves his granddaughter, never to see her again. He marries Virginie Poucette and lives his remaining years on three hundred and twenty acres of land "near the Rockies" he'd bought for Zoé decades earlier. 

I realize that was long. In rushing through the ending I kept pace with the novel.

The comparison with A Wise Fool will be much shorter because I haven't seen it – who has? – and so rely on century-old reviews. The most detailed, found in the 3 June 1921 edition of Variety, suggests that the film followed the plot of the novel quite closely up to the point at which Jean Jacques loses his fortune. This includes a scene in which he destroys the guitar left behind by the absent Carmen.

 

James Kirkwood as Jean Jacques Barbille.

As in the novel, after losing his wife, his daughter, his livelihood, and his possessions, Jean Jacques becomes something of a wanderer, his only companion being the caged canary. 

Had Parker read McTeague?

The Variety reviewer was none too impressed, summing up all that follows in just two sentences:

 

In The Money Master, Jean Jacques comes upon Carmen in a hovel, not a nunnery. She dies within the hour. For all his years of searching, the desperate father never sees his daughter again. Zoé cannot return to him because she is dead. Her husband Gerald died a pauper. Their child is raised by a wealthy woman who refuses to let Jean Jacques so much as touch his granddaughter.

For the film, Parker cut the three deaths and the very existence of Zoé and Gerald's daughter. 

Would that we could see that film! I'm curious as to its depiction of life in rural Quebec, much praised in by American critics, and the character Virginie Poucette. Played by Californian Truly Shattuck, the Canadien isn't mentioned in so much as one review I've found.

Should be be concerned about Virginie?

Gilbert Parker knew what he was doing. As early as 1921, he recognized the Hollywood Ending.

I expect Virginie did just fine.

Related posts:

The Rise and Fall of a Peacock Philosopher
Behold the Translation of a Savage on Film!

The Rise and Fall of a Peacock Philosopher

The Money Master;
   Being the Curious History of Jean Jacques Barbille,

   His Labours, His Loves and His Ladies
Gilbert Parker

Toronto: Copp Clark, 1915
360 pages

I bought my first Gilbert Parker book at a library sale in the mid-eighties. By 1990, it was gone, though I have no idea where. My fault, of course. I'd paid it little attention because Parker himself wasn't paid much attention. His name had never once come up in university courses. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, then my bible, doesn't accord the man so much as one of its 1199 pages, despite popularity and critical acclaim (both now a century past).

I couldn't even remember which Parker I'd owned back then. What I did remember was an illustration and caption depicting a miserable man traveling to Quebec in the company of a beautiful woman who seemed intent on marriage. Imagine my surprise when in researching this recent read I came upon:

The image of the reluctant groom threw me because Parker depicts him as being extremely keen on marrying the woman in the funnel.

The fiancé, Jean Jacques Barbille, is heir to a fortune built over four generations. Having transformed these inherited riches into slightly greater riches, the Canadien has an idea to visit the land of his ancestors, where he expects to be recognized as a man of great importance. Paris disappoints, but folks in the nether regions appreciate his money and so accord deference. Satisfied, Jean Jacques sets off for home with purse depleted, comforted by the knowledge that his various endeavors, save one or two, are moderately successful. 

Whilst crossing the Atlantic aboard the good ship Antoine, Jean Jacques encounters Spanish Amazon Carmen Delores – she of the funnel – and Sebastian Delores, her father. They are on the run because papa – the sinister figure at the funnel's base – had been on the losing side of Spain's most recent power struggle. If anything, young Carmen suffered a far greater loss in that her lover Carvillho Gonzales was executed for his efforts:

Carmen had made up her mind from the first to marry Jean Jacques, and she deported herself accordingly – with modesty, circumspection and skill. It would be the easiest way out of all their difficulties. Since her heart, such as it was, fluttered, a mournful ghost, over the Place d’Armes, where her Gonzales was shot, it might better go to Jean Jacques than anyone else; for he was a man of parts, of money, and of looks, and she loved these all; and to her credit she loved his looks better than all the rest.

In short, Jean Jacques looks a lot like Carvillho Gonzales.

The Money Master is the twentieth book I've reviewed here this year. It follows James De Mille's The Cross and the Lily (1874) and Grant Allen's The Great Taboo (1890) in being the third to feature a shipwreck. Parker's takes place when the Antoine strikes an iceberg off the shore of Gaspé. Jean Jacques sees Carmen safely bestowed on a lifeboat, before giving up his spot to a crying fifteen-year-old boy. This he does, despite being not that strong a swimmer.

Fortunately, the Spanish Amazon is a strong swimmer. When her lifeboat overturns, she makes for a floating chair, and then uses that chair to save Jean Jacques from drowning.

James Cameron take note.

  

Jean Jacques and Carmen marry in the Gaspé, much to the disapproval of the gentle townspeople of St Saviour:

It was bad enough to marry the Spanische, but to marry outside one’s own parish, and so deprive that parish and its young people of the week’s gaiety, which a wedding and the consequent procession and tour through the parish brings, was little less than treason.

But what a story! The romance of it all is so great as to encourage the curious to travel as much as forty miles to catch a glimpse of the couple during Sunday mass. Carmen never corrects the presumption that she was saved by Jean Jacques and not the reverse. 

Jean Jacques Barbille is a man with "a good many irons in the fire." Given the opportunity, he'll sell you insurance and lightning rods. His inherited riches grow not by leaps and bounds, rather by unsteady steps as taken by a toddler.

He fancies himself first and foremost a philosophe. Though he never quite articulates his philosophy, Jean Jacques is quick to share that he spent a year at Université Laval. He carries with him a small volume titled Mediations on Philosophy, which he bought in Quebec before sailing for France.

Jean Jacques is an egotist and something of a dandy, all the while being a good man. He is kind, treats his workers well, forgives debts, and is generous toward the less fortunate. The man's greatest fault relates to the home. He is so taken with his reputation and many business concerns that Carmen feels neglected; this in turn results in the most interesting scenes I've read in an old novel this year...

And, you know, I've read twenty.

Carmen does not feature in the scene, though she does in the next, which is easily the second most interesting scene.

Reading The Money Master forty or so years after having first purchased a copy, I'm at a loss to explain how it is Gilbert Parker is so ignored.

Trivia: Adapted to the Hollywood screen in 1921 as A Wise Fool, the subject of the next week's post. 

Object: The first Canadian edition, it features seven illustrations by French artist André Castaigne, best known for having illustrated the first edition of Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. 'Tis a thing of beauty, purchased ten or so years ago in London, Ontario. Price: $2.50.

I'm also the proud owner of the Hutchinson's UK first edition, which I picked up in fin du millénaire Montreal for 30¢.

Sadly, it lacks its dust jacket (see below).

Access: The novel first appeared serialized in Hearst's Magazine (Aug 1913 - April 1914) and Nash's Magazine (Nov 1913 - Jul 1914).

As I write this, a Riverview, New Brunswick bookseller is offering a Very Good copy of the Copp Clark first edition at two dollars. There's no mention of a dust jacket, so I'm assuming that the bookseller believed it had none. Further west, a bookseller in Whitby, Ontario has a Canadian first with dust jacket!

The asking price is $100.

If you don't have the cash, consider the two dollar copy. It's a steal, particularly if you live nearby and can avoid shipping charges.

Before making your decision, consider Harper's American first with its unusual wrap-around jacket illustration, drawn from one of Castaigne's interior illustrations.

A bookseller in Portland, Oregon is offering this copy at US$35:

At the high end – US$350 – we have the Hutchinson UK first on offer from Babylon Revisited, a favourite bookseller. Must say that the cover illustration pales somewhat when compared to the work of Monsieur Castaigne.

Buyer beware, none of Castaigne's illustrations feature in the Hutchinson.

As always, print on demand copies are not to be considered.

Woodrow Wilson would agree.

Related post:

Acadian Driftwood
Of Cannibals and Christians
Gilbert Parker's Savage Novel
Behold the Translation of a Savage on Film!

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images

An addendum to last week's post on Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks. 

Of all the illustrations depicting young Paul Verdayne and his dark lady love, the worst I've seen is featured on the jacket for the 1950 Duckworth edition. The novel never once describes Paul as having a moustache. The lady's hair should be raven, not red. She dresses only in black, deep purple, and white. And does Paul not look older than his twenty-two years? The lady should be ten years his senior. They do travel by  gondola at one point, but it is covered.

The earliest editions of Three Weeks had no cover illustrations. In all likelihood the first depiction of the lady came with the frontispiece of the 1907 Duckworth first edition. I don't have a copy myself, and so am sharing this image of a copy currently being offered by Addyman Books of Hay-on Wye. A very good price at £154.50.

The description is every bit as striking as the portrait.

Duffield, the novel's first American publisher, used the above before switching to this:

And so we have two entirely different images described as "the only one available."

This early Macaulay dust jacket provides another mystery as no one has yet been able to identify the source of the photo.

I'm fairly certain that this woman is Madlaine Traverse:

The Moving Picture World, 15 June 1918

If true, I'm even more confident that the source is the 1914 film adaptation, in which Traverse plays the lady, known in this film as Sonia, Queen of Veseria.

Sadly, predictably, Hollywood's 1914 Three Days has long been lost. Not so the 1924 adaptation! My Macaulay copy is a tie-in. I chose it over this alternate cover:

The 1974 Duckworth hardcover also tempted because of the Cecil Beaton introduction, and for the glam rock-inspired cover illustration.

It reminds me of nothing so much as Bryan Ferry's tiger skin jacket, Flashbacks of a Fool, and this:

I don't know that I have a favourite cover, though I do enjoy looking over the translations. My favourite is the Czech, Tři Týdny (1925), which focusses on the gondola scene. As with the 1950 Duckworth edition, the cover is missing, but here hair colour and garb are pretty much correct...

...unlike the 1960 Digit paperback:

It has been over three decades since Three Weeks passed into the public domain. Remarkably, the only publisher taking advantage is Virago. Its cover uses a portion of Georges Clairin's 1876 Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt. Not a bad choice, though the only dog to feature in the novel is Pike, Paul's beloved terrier. The lady never meets him.

According to the Virago website, Three Weeks has sold over five million copies. Roughly two million more since the 1960 Digit edition. 

As far as I've been able to determine, there has never been a Canadian edition.

Related post:

Three Weeks a Lady