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 not 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” fro 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 take out 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.

Related post:
Blue Plaque Special: Maritime Edition

Go West, Young Woman

The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d]
251 pages

In the summer of 1985, I bought a copy of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and read it from cover to cover. This is nowhere near as impressive as it might seem; what I read was the original two-column 843-page edition (1983), not the two-column 1099-page second edition (2001). Nevertheless, it was through the Companion that I first learned of Arthur Stringer. The author's entry, penned by Dick Harrison, amounts to little more than a half-page. Here are some of the things I learned:

• born 1874 in Chatham, Ontario;
• studied at the University of Toronto and Oxford;
• wrote for the Montreal Herald;
• established his literary career in New York;
• "made an enduring contribution to Canadian literature with his prairie trilogy: Prairie Wife (1915), Prairie Mother (1920), and Prairie Child (1921)."

Harrison gets the titles of the trilogy wrong – The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, and The Prairie Child are correct – but never mind, what stuck with me was Prairie. As decades passed, I forgot all about Chatham, Toronto, Oxford, Montreal, and New York, and came to think of Stringer as a Western Canadian. It wasn't until 2009, when I read The Woman Who Could Not Die (1929), my first Stringer, that I was reminded he was an Ontario boy. A Lost World novel set in the Canadian Arctic, I liked it well enough to keep reading and begin collecting his work.

My Arthur Stringer collection (most of it, anyway).
Cliquez pour agrandir.

Admittedly, much of my interest has to do with his enviable popularity, the deals he cut with Hollywood, and his marriage to Jobyna Howland. This is not to suggest that I didn't like the books themselves. My favourite Canadian novel of the early twentieth-century is Stringer's The Wine of Life (1921), which... um, was inspired by his marriage to Jobyna Howland.

A second admission: I put off reading The Prairie Wife, the first volume in Stringer's "enduring contribution to Canadian literature," for no other reason that it is set in rural Canada. Before you judge, I rush to add that this Montrealer has lived in rural Canada these past two decades. Country living attracts, but not novels set in the country. This may explain how it is that I was swept up by its early pages.

The Prairie Wife takes the form of a series of entries, written over the course of more than a year to someone named Matilda Anne. Its writer, Chaddie, begins by describing a voyage from Corfu to Palermo and then on to the Riviera. She is of the moneyed class – that is until Monte Carlo, where Chaddie receives a cable informing that the "Chilean revolution" has wiped out her nitrate mine concessions. Made a pauper, Chaddie's first action is to dismiss her maid; the second is to send word to her German aristocrat fiancé:

I sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all the while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxes duly piled up in tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav — which made me quite calmly and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!

After a respectable period of mourning lost wealth, Theobald Gustav throws her over. Just as well, really, because the Paris Herald had reported on of a traffic accident that had occurred when he'd been in the company of a "spidery Russian stage-dancer." On the rebound, Chaddie proposes to Scots-Canadian Duncan Argyll McKail, whom she'd met in Banff the previous October. He is too much in love and far too practical to turn her down.

And so, this is how Chaddie, an American socialite who'd shared the company of Meredith and Stevenson, and had sat through many an opera at La Scala, ends up in a one-room shack with flattened tin can siding on the remote Canadian prairie.

Duncan – annoyingly, his bride refers to him as "Dinky-Dunk" – is a civil engineer from the east. He's got it in his mind to make a fortune through farming, and has purchased a 1700-acre parcel of land one hundred or so kilometres northwest of, I'm guessing, Swift Current.

"He kept saying it would be hard, for the first year or two, and there would be a terrible number of things I'd be sure to miss," Chaddie writes Matilda Anne. 

No doubt!

Harrison doesn't use the term "Prairie Realism" in his Stringer entry, but I will; The Prairie Wife is a good fit with later novels by Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, and Robert Stead. Can we agree that Prairie Realism was never terribly realistic? Though pre-Jazz Age, Stringer's story begins as a crazy Jazz Age adventure in which a carefree debutante marries a man she may or may not love. In her earliest pages to Matilda Anne, she writes:

O God, O God, if it should turn out that I don't, that I can't? But I'm going to!  I know I'm going to! And there's one other thing that I know, and when I remember it, It sends a comfy warm wave through all my body: Dinky-Dunk loves me. He's as mad as a hatter about me. He deserves to be loved back. And I'm going to love him back. That is a vow I herewith duly register. I'm going to love my Dinky-Dunk.

Chaddie continues:

But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a strong man? To be able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that leaves him rather white and shaky in the voice and trembly in the fingers, and seems to light a little luminous fire at the back of his eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow, the same as an animal's when your motor head-lights hit them!

There's a clear separation between the opening pages and the rest of the novel. Whimsy gives way to practicality, as Duncan chases his fortune. Remarkably, Chaddie settles on the prairie, and into matrimony, rather nicely. Harrison writes of "disillusionment as the marriage deteriorates," but this reader saw nothing of the kind. True, there are moments of discord, as in the strongest of marriages, but Dinky-Dunk and Chaddie – he calls her "Gee-Gee" – are soon in one another's arms. She does come to love her Dinky-Dunk.

The frontispiece of the A.L. Burt photoplay edition, c.1925.

I don't know what Harrison means when he writes of Chaddie's "mature resolve as she begins an independent life on the Prairies." The married couple only become closer as the novel progresses, and the two are increasingly reliant on a slowly growing cast of characters. The earliest, hired man Olie, is a silent Swede who at first can't keep his eyes off Chaddie. This male gaze has nothing to do with objectification, rather her ridiculously impractical city dress. Pale Percival Benson Wodehouse, whom this reader suspects to be a remittance man, is next to appear. He was sold the neighbouring ranch from "land chaps" in London. Nineteen-year-old Finnish Canadian Olga Sarristo enters driving a yoke of oxen. Two weeks earlier, what remained of her family had burned to death in their own shack one hundred or so miles to the north. To Chaddie, stoic and stunning Olga is like something out of Norse mythology, "a big blonde Valkyr suddenly introducing herself into your little earthly affairs." Olga is a welcome addition to the farm; every bit as capable physically as Olie and Duncan. Last to arrive is Terry Dillion, a fastidious young Irishman who had once served in far off lands with the British Army.

Together they support Duncan's big gamble, which involves putting all he has on a sea of wheat covering his 1700 acres. Threatened by draught, fire, and hail, the crop survives, making him a wealthy man. His riches are further increased by a new rail line to be built across his land. The final pages have Duncan and Chaddie poring over house-plans mailed from Philadelphia. "We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through," she writes Matilda Anne. 

The Prairie Wife is the first Stringer novel I've read with a woman narrator. Early pages aside, I found Chaddie's voice oddly convincing. This audio recording by Jennifer Perree, stumbled upon in researching this novel, reinforced my conviction. An enjoyable story, an entertainment, it left me wanting to hear more from Chaddie.

And there is more!

Stringer wrote more than forty novels, but The Prairie Mother is the only one to spawn a sequel, The Prairie Mother (1920)  – and then another in The Prairie Child (1922).

Like Dinky-Dunk, Stringer really knew how to make a buck.  

Favourite sentence:

The trouble with Platonic love is that it's always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.

Bloomer: 

I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't actively dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie does. I've been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such physical grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves.

Trivia: In 1925, The Prairie Mother was adapted to the silver screen. A lost film, the trade reviews I've read are lukewarm, mainly because there is no gunplay. Chaddie is played by comedic actress Dorothy Devore, one of many who fell in making the transition to talkies. New to me is Herbert Rawlinson, who played Duncan. Olga is played by Canadian Frances Primm, about whom little is known, A pre-Frankenstein Boris Karloff plays Diego, a character that does not feature in the novel. Most interetsing to the silent film buff is Gibson Gowland (Olie), the man who played McTeague in Erich von Stroheim's Greed.

Motion Picture Magazine, December 1924 

Object: My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller located in Winterton, Lincolnshire. Price: £9.00. Sadly, the jacket illustration is uncredited.

The rear pushes all three books in Stringer's trilogy, The Prairie Child not yet available in a bargain edition. The flaps feature a list of other Hodder & Stoughton titles, including works by Canadians Ralph Connor (The Sky Pilot of No Man's Land [sic]), Hulbert Footner (The Fugitive Sleuth, Two on the Trail), Frank L. Packard (The Night Operator, The Wire Devils, Pawned), Robert J.C. Stead (The Homesteaders), and Bertrand W. Sinclair (Poor Man's Rock).

Access: The Prairie Wife first appeared in 1915, published serially over four issues of the Saturday Evening Post (16 January - 6 February). That same year, it appeared in book form in Canada (McLeod & Allen) and the United States (Bobbs-Merril). Both publishers used the same jacket design:

Evidence suggests that The Prairie Wife is Stringer's biggest seller. A.L. Burt published at photoplay edition tied into the 1925 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer adaptation. Is that Boris Karloff as Diego on the right?

At some point, Burt went back to the well to draw Prairie Stories, which included all three novels in Stringer's prairie trilogy. As far as I've been able to determine, The Prairie Wife last saw print in The Prairie Omnibus (Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), in which it is paired with The Prairie Mother. 

Used copies of The Prairie Wife can be purchased online for as little as US$8.95.

Related post:

That's Entertainment

Ten Kicks at the Can for A.E. van Vogt

Destination: Universe
A.E. van Vogt
New York: Signet, 1958

160 pages

I began this book wondering if I hadn't been too hard on A.E. van Vogt. Science fiction was an adolescent passion, and like so many abandoned in adulthood – superhero comics being the prime example – I can be overly critical.

I didn't read van Vogt as a kid; had I known he was Canadian I would've. In middle age, his novel The House That Stood Still (1950) served as my introduction. It begins well, reading like a decent pulp thriller, but things take an abrupt turn, the writing changes, and then comes a second turn, more changes, and near complete disintegration. I agree with Fletcher Pratt, who wrote in the 17 December 1950 New York Times that "it is frequently impossible to understand precisely what is going on."

And Pratt liked the novel.

I was similarly baffled, was less impressed, and even more confused by his other 1950 "novel" Masters of Time, my second van Vogt. 

A decade passed. I felt no urge to give van Vogt another try, which is not to say that I wasn't curious. Surely he couldn't be so bad a writer as all that; after all, the man was a graduate of the Palmer Institute of Authorship.

Popular Mechanics, June 1949

And so in March, I made a commitment to read van Vogt's short story collection Destination: Universe before year's end.

A master of time myself, I finished with three weeks to spare.

Destination: Universe proved to be one of 2022's weakest books, but was not nearly so difficult to get through as Jeann Beattie's Blaze of Noon or Mrs Savigny's A Romance of Toronto. Most of its ten stories get off to a running start, propelling the reader for at least a couple of pages. But they soon become bogged down in a problem faced by the protagonist and his various attempts to find a solution. There's a good amount of repetition, explanation, and description of some future technology or other.

'Enchanted Village' concerns the first landing on Mars – a crash, really – which leaves one lone survivor who stumbles upon an uninhabited village that attempts to reconfigures itself to his needs. The visitor is repeatedly frustrated by his inability to communicate with his new home. I found the story memorable for the unnecessary twist in the penultimate paragraph.

'A Can of Paint,' provided a welcome touch of humour. In this story, space explorer Kilgour defies Earth's laws in voyaging to Venus, thus becoming the first human to visit the planet. He emerges from his cigar-shaped spaceship into a field of long green grass,  breathing in the air, "tinglingly sweet and fresh and warm." and almost immediately spies a cube – note: not "can" – containing paint. It spreads over his body, endangering his life as he races against time to find a means of removing it.

The 1953 first Signet edition.

Of the ten, the stand out story is the first, 'Far Centaurus.' Its plot centres on a five hundred year voyage to Alpha Centauri undertaken by acquaintances and friends Pelham, Blake, Renfrew, and narrator Bill. Pelham, has invented a drug, Eternity, which enables humans to live in non-degenerative hibernation for decades on end. Throughout the centuries, the four return to consciousness, but only briefly and never at the same time. Bill, the first to emerge, finds Pelham's decomposing corpse. On his second awakening, 150 years later, he finds a note from Blake expressing concern about Renfrew's mental health. Bill is awoken a third time by an alarm. Through viewers, he sees another spaceship on fire, but can do nothing to help, and so takes another hit of Eternity. Bill awakens for the fifth time as the spaceship is reaching its destination, only to discover that the planet they'd thought might be habitable had been settled centuries earlier. Travel between Earth an Alpha Centauri now takes three hours.

Renfrew loses his mind and van Vogt loses his way.

Of the ending, Colin Wilson wrote that van Vogt had "no idea of how to finish his story." 

I suggest that van Vogt had no idea of how to finish any story. The main thing I've learned in reading the man is that he could have a good idea for a beginning, and might even craft a pretty good middle, but that is it.  Am I wrong? I ask because I have only twelve examples to go on.

I'm not interested in reading a thirteenth.

Bloomer:

"He turned. His horny body towered above the man."

Trivia: In 2004, sixty years after it was first published in the pages of Astounding Stories, 'A Can of Paint' was adapted to the screen in a 24-minute short. 

 

Object and Access: The third Signet printing, my copy, a gift from a friend, is a bit worse for wear. The Stanley Meltzoff cover illustration imagines a scene not found in the book. 

Within the pages of my copy I found this bookmark for Canadian Children's Literature. It appears to date from 1997.

A receipt suggests that it was once purchased for $3.50 at Ottawa's Book Bazaar.

The collection was first published by Pellegrini & Cudahy in 1952 as Destination: Universe! Signet dropped the exclamation mark for this printing. There have been many other editions from many other publishers over the years, but as far as I can determine the collection is currently out of print.

Used copies are numerous and cheap.

Destination: Universe! has been translated into French (Destination univers), Italian (Destinazione universo), Romanian (Destinat̨ia univers), and Swedish (Destination universum).

Related posts:

The Dustiest Bookcase: V is for van Vogt
SF, not S/M

Wasting Time With A.E. van Vogt

The Dominatrix of Time (and other fantasies)

The Homoerotic A.E. van Vogt

Quebec City Noir

Whispering City
Horace Brown
Pickering, ON: Global Publishing, 1947
190 pages

Whispering City may be Canada's very first film noir. This 75-year-old paperback may be the very first novelization of a Canadian film. The heroine of both is Mary Roberts, a young crime reporter with Quebec City newspaper l'Information. Mary is preparing to leave work one day when she receives a call that a woman has been hit by a truck. The accident victim, faded vidette Renée Brancourt, was once a big deal in Quebec until her lover, Robert Marchand, plunged over Montmorency Falls. The struggle to accept his death led Renée to be institutionalized. In recent years, she'd been living in a squalid flat on rue Sous-le-Cap in Quebec's Lower Town.

La rue Sous-le-Cap. Quebec City, 1947

Renée has held firm to her belief that Robert's death was no accident. She tells Mary as much from her Hôtel-Dieu hospital bed, pointing an accusing finger at Albert Frédéric.

Surely not! The man is not only the most respected lawyer in Quebec, he's a patron of the arts!

Frédéric is currently supporting talented Michel Lacoste, whose Quebec Concerto will soon be making its debut at the Palais Montcalm. Unfortunately, the composer's work on final revisions s stymied by Blanche, his shrew of a wife. Just you try working on your concerto with big band music blaring in the background. Can't be done.

Michel breaks her 78. She slaps him. He storms out, ties one on, and shows up in the wee hours at Frédéric's palatial home. It isn't long before Michel passes out. When he does, Frédéric dons the composer's overcoat and sneaks off to the Lacoste flat. His intent is to murder Blanche, just as he had Robert Marchand all those years earlier, but he arrives to find she's committed suicide. A note is pinned to her pillow, which Frédéric quickly pockets.

The following morning, Frédéric convinces a hungover and confused Michel that he killed his wife in a fit of rage. The lawyer then offers the composer a deal: Frédéric will work to save Michel from the hangman if he kills Mary Roberts. The reporter's investigation of the old Marchand murder is getting too close to the truth.

The story and screenplay are straight out of Hollywood – Americans George Zuckerman and Michael Lennox wrote the former; Americans Rian James and Leonard Lee wrote the latter – but adapt well to Quebec City.

Brown sticks close to the script, though there are departures. He improves on the dialogue and wisely does away with the talkative sleigh driver who introduces the film. Brown gives Mary Roberts a backstory as an American who had begun her career writing for a New York tabloid. In one memorable scene not featured in the film, Mary and Frédéric discuss Canadian painters. If anything, Brown depicts the lawyer as a more sinister figure – clearly a psychopath – making the book all the more dark.

Whispering City is far from a great film – its current 6.2 rating on IMDb seems fair – though I must say it gets better with each viewing. See for yourself; the film is now in the public domain. Of the muddy prints available on YouTube, this appears to be the best:

Sadly, Brown's novelization is nowhere near so accessible. This is a shame because his Whispering City improves on the film. It's easily the best Horace Brown novel I've read.

I wouldn't be surprised that it gets better with each reading.

Dedication: 

Paul L'Anglais was the producer of Whispering City and its French-language version La Forteresse.

Fun fact: In 1952, the film Whispering City was rereleased under the title Crime City. Seems a bit unfair to Quebec, especially when one considers that there's only one criminal.

Object: A mass market paperback bound in thin glossy covers. Whispering City is one of a very few books published by Brown's Global Publishing Company. Curiously, the spine features the name of its distributor, Streamline Books. I purchased my copy a year ago from a Burlington, Ontario bookseller. Price: US$89.95.

The novel is preceded by an enthusiastic foreword by the author followed by a "CAMERA-QUIZZ" in which readers are challenged to place twelve stills from the film in the correct order.

Don't mean to brag, but I had no trouble.

Access: The University of Calgary has a copy.

Related posts:

Horace Brown: Saturday Matinee

Horace Brown: Fritzi in Flight or a Coincidence?

Horace Brown: From Penthouse to Pavement

No Whack on the Side of the Head

Born Again Infidel

The Right of Way

Gilbert Parker

New York: Grosset & Dunlap, [c.1907]
419 pages

I don't like it when a novel opens with a line of dialogue; seems so lazy. The first sentence of the The Right of Way has got to be the worst:

"Not guilty, your honor!"

And yet, I really enjoyed The Right of Way. The story begins in a crowded Montreal courtroom on a sweltering August day. The acquitted is a mystery man. Charged with the brutal murder a timber baron, he'd offered nothing more than his name. Through much of the trial, Charley Steele, the prisoner's counsel, had appeared indifferent to his client's fate, only to rise, "quietly, unnoticeably drunk," and give a most brilliant defence... which, of course, leads back to the novel's first sentence.

After returning to his office, Charley considers his victory:

"I was dull, blank, all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen, against me; and then that bottle in there — and I saw things like crystal! I had a glow in my brain, I had a tinge in my fingers; and I had success, and” — his face clouded — “he was as guilty as hell!”

Charley drinks a great deal. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of this interesting novel, composed as the temperance movement was growing, is its depiction of alcohol as something that can both inspire and destroy. In Charley it does both. 

He marries the aforementioned Kathleen, though he does not love her. To Charley, she is "the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory of sensuous purity, no more capable of sentiment than himself."

In other words, Kathleen is a trophy wife.

It makes sense that of the sixteen illustrations that decorate this edition, only one features Kathleen. Even before the marriage, Charley had a reputation as the most brilliant lawyer in Montreal. As his practice flourishes, his marriage withers. Unbeknownst to his wife, Charley has taken to slumming it at Charlemagne's, a working man's tavern to the east of Montreal's east end. Here Parker's omniscient narrator turns discreet. Sure, Charlemagne's serves drinks, but for Charley barmaid Suzon is the greater draw. The regulars, primarily farmers and river-drivers, put up with Charley's presence until the night he decides to make a grand show of his intellect.

Badly beaten, he's thrown into the St Lawrence, only to be pulled onto a raft piloted by the very man who's acquittal features on the novel's first page. The two drift eastward toward the outskirts of the town of Chaudiere, at which the supposed murderer – “he was as guilty as hell!” – has a lonely cabin. Charley is nursed back to physical but not mental health. A head wound has left him as a child. He remembers nothing of his past and lives each day as something of an innocent, until operated on by a "great Parisian surgeon," who happens to be visiting his brother, the local curé.

Charley regains his memory, and with it his ability to read. And this is how he discovers, by way of a newspaper story, that seven months have passed, that he's been declared dead, and that his wife is now married to Captain Thomas Fairing, a former rival for Kathleen's hand.

Charley faces a dilemma:

What was there to do? Go back? Go back and knock at Kathleen’s door, another Enoch Arden, and say, "I have come to my own again”? Return and tell Tom Fairing to go his way and show his face no more? Break up this union, this marriage of love in which these two rejoiced? Summon Kathleen out of her illegal intercourse with the man who had been true to her all these years?

I believe that last sentence counts as a bloomer.

Charley chooses to stay in Chaudiere, where he finds work with the town's elderly tailor. The locals are suspicious if not hostile, particularly after the stranger lets slip that he is not a Catholic. His acceptance comes gradually, aided by his friendship with the curé and numerous good deeds. He gives to the Church, he gives to those in need, he provides free legal advice, and he saves a man's life by leaping on the back of a runaway horse (as soldiers look on). Oh, and he also translates Oberammergauer Passionsspiele to French, provides illustrations to go with the text, and designs and sews the costumes for Chaudiere's passion play.

What risks becoming a tiresome train of good deeds, is saved through the introduction of lovely Rosalie Evanturel, the postmaster's daughter. Charley is in love for the first time, but knows he cannot marry her. He also knows he cannot share his reason. And so their love is accompanied by tension and, on Rosalie's part, a measure of resentment. Though this illustration suggests otherwise,  their scenes together are oddly contemporary, rising well above Victorian melodrama.

And make no mistake, The Right of Way is a Victorian novel. What's more, it was a popular Victorian novel, bringing with it coincidence and contrivance. Sleepwalking does figure. It is a fever fantasy about a man who is given a second chance at life. For it to work, the reader must believe that Charley not only acknowledges his wrongs, but cares so much for Kathleen, a woman he never loved, that he cannot return to reclaim his wealth and his social standing. 

The Charley of Chaudiere is not the Charley of old. Might it be that his brain surgery wasn't wholly successful?

Trivia: The working title was Charley Bell.

Trivia II: In a candid introduction penned for the twenty-volume Works of Gilbert Parker, the author reveals that Charley Steele was based on someone – sadly unnamed – whom he'd known as a boy.

Trivia III: The Right of Way was adapted for the stage (1907) and twice to the silent screen (1915 and 1920). Both films are lost. In 1931, it returned to the screen as a talkie. In this clip Loretta Young (Rosalie) and Fred Kohler (Jo, the murderer) bravely attempt French Canadian accents.

  

Probably better as a silent film.

Object: One of the nicer Grosset & Dunlap's in my collection, this "SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION" uses the plates and A.I. Keller illustrations from the 1901 Harper first American edition. The novel proper is followed by twelve pages of ads for other Grosset & Dunlap titles. I purchased my copy earlier this year from a Las Vegas bookseller. Price: US$12.99.

Access: Anything but a rare book, in 1901 The Right of Way was the fourth biggest selling novel in the United States. The following year, it held the sixth spot. I'm betting it did even better in Canada

Online prices range from US$1.89 to US$185.01. As expected, there's nothing at all special about the most expensive, a Grosset & Dunlap reprint lacking jacket. A New York bookseller lists the 1931 Grosset & Dunlap photoplay edition for US$76.00. The most intriguing is a Nelson Library edition "in RARE Color DustJacket of Dead Man on Floor & Woman Kneeling with Apron, Holding Back a Large Brown Dog with Sharp Teeth," offered at US$60.00 by a California bookseller. Something similar does feature in the novel, but the scene is inconsequential (and the man involved isn't dead).

Several editions are available for download at the Internet Archive.

Ralph Connor's Canada Dry

Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police:
   A Tale of the MacLeod Trail
Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon]

Toronto: Westminster, 1912
454 pages

We begin on an Inverleith rugby pitch. Scotland is up against Wales in the International. It's a close contest, in part because Allan Cameron, fierce-fighting half-back of the Scottish line, hasn't been playing up to snuff. In the dying minutes, the Scots get a lucky break when the ball comes tumbling Cameron's way. He hesitates, and the promise of victory turns to defeat.

"Oh-h-h-h, Cam-er-on!" is the novel's first sentence. What has happened to Scotland's star player?

The answer is drink.

This is not to suggest that Cameron was under the influence during the game, rather that "he was out of condition; he had let himself run down last week, since the last match, indeed, got out of hand a bit."

The loss isn't the worst of it. Days later, Cameron faces arrest for passing a forged cheque. He doesn't remember doing so, but is unable to deny the charge because... well, you know, drink. 

The half-back is saved from arrest by Miss Brody, rugby-loving niece of the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Scotland, and Cameron's conscience is later cleared when a dishonourable drinking buddy owns up to the crime. However, the damage has been done; Cameron has decided to give up drink, give up his studies, and make a new life for himself in Canada, envisioning himself "a wealthy rancher, ranging over square miles of his estate upon a 'bucking broncho,' garbed in the picturesque cowboy dress."

Instead, he ends up a low-level clerk at a Montreal shipping company.

The job doesn't last long – something to do with losing his temper and throwing his superior against a wall – and so, newly unemployed, Cameron does what we've all done in the same situation by taking in a travelling circus. There he chances upon farmer Tom Haley and his son Timmy who've come to the city to take in the show and purchase provisions for the family farm. Sadly, young freckle-faced Timmy winds up outside one of the drinking tents dotting the circus grounds as inside his father – rather sloshed – begins dipping into the money meant for baking flour and such. Cameron comes to the rescue by dragging Tom out, beating back "circus toughs" in the process.

Grateful and somewhat sobered by the violence, Tom offers our hero a position on his farm, twelve miles outside of town. Cameron accepts. Before long, he's proven himself an expert milker of cows, hoer of beets, player of bagpipes, and temperate role model to young Timmy. Over the course of the growing season, unrefined Mandy, the farmer's daughter, falls for the new hired hand, which scares Cameron into setting out for the West.

Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police is divided fairly evenly into three books, each with very different settings: Inverleith, Montreal and surrounding countryside, and the Canadian West. As a reader I found the first the most entertaining. As a Montrealer, the second held some interest, but only because it depicted a unilingual city that never existed. The last third, in which our hero finds an enemy in a whiskey trader, held the most action, but there's only so much fisticuffs and gunplay I can take. Its depiction of "our Indians" and mythologizing of the NWMP was particularly hard to stomach:

To the whole country the advent of the police proved an incalculable blessing. But to the Indian tribes especially was this the case. The natives soon learned to regard the police officers as their friends. In them they found protection from the unscrupulous traders who had hitherto cheated them without mercy or conscience, as well as from the whiskey runners through whose devilish activities their people had suffered irreparable loss.
     The administration of the law by the officers of the police with firm and patient justice put an end also to the frequent and bloody wars that had prevailed previously between the various tribes, till, by these wild and savage people the red coat came to be regarded with mingled awe and confidence, a terror to evil-doers and a protection to those that did well.

In the introduction to his anthology Best Mounted Police Stories (Edmonton: U of Alberta Press, 1978), Dick Harrison writes that Connor "did more to create the literary image of the Mountie than any other writer." He doesn't say whether this is a good thing, but I'll suggest it is not.

At the end of it all, I was left wondering whether early readers of Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police were a touch disappointed. As Connor's title suggests, Cameron does indeed join the force, but this doesn't happen until the twenty-second of the novel's twenty-five chapters. By this point, I'd long since lost interest; the late introductions of Big Bear, Crowfoot, Louis Riel, and other historic figures to Cameron's story only irritated.  

Ultimately, Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police turned out to be another of those novels that gets off to a fairly good start, but quickly loses momentum, grows tired and begins to wander, much like Cameron on the pitch at Inverleith.

I've nothing more to add. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get a drink.

Bloomer: "When a fellow gets on the bum and gets into a hole he knows well that there'll be a lot of people tumbling over each other to get him out, hence he deliberately and cheerfully slides in."

Trivia: The novel was adapted to the silent screen in 1921 as Cameron of the Royal Mounted; an interesting title change given that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had replaced the North-West Mounted Police (note the hyphen) just the previous year.

Filmed in Banff, directed by son of Toronto Henry MacRae, unlike the vast majority of silent-era films Cameron of the Royal Mounted is not lost!

Well, not entirely.

The first three of its nine reels are preserved at Library and Archives Canada.

Object and Access: An embossed hardcover, typical of its time, mine is a first Canadian edition. The book was purchased eight years ago in London, Ontario. At most, it set me back two dollars.

Used copies are plentiful and cheap. Of those listed for sale online, Doran's first American edition in uncommon dust jacket is the one to buy. Price: US$40.00.

The Internet Archive offers several editions online, including the Westminster, which can be be read through this link. Sadly, there was no photoplay edition.

Related posts:

Dale's Dumb Luck; or, A Mountie Messes Up

The Atomic Dale; or, The Mounties Mess Up?

Queen Remembers a Forgotten Book