Romance Amongst the Racists

The Window-Gazer
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1921

Lured by the offer of lodging, Great War veteran Prof Benis Harrison Spence has left his aunt's altogether too busy Ontario home for the quiet of coastal British Columbia.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Spence is burdened by several ounces of shrapnel and a nervous disorder, both souvenirs from his time at the Front; rest is just what the doctor – physician friend John Rogers – ordered.

Unfortunately, host Herbert Farr turns out to be an unstable, unlovable charlatan. The man's home is nothing more than a leaky, albeit spacious, cottage shared by daughter Desire and Chinese servant Li Ho. Spence has no sooner arrived when he collapses from stress placed upon his shrapnel-filled leg. Weeks pass, during which the professor is nursed back to health by young Desire.

Make nothing of her name.

Theirs is a platonic relationship with a foundation formed by shared interests and outlook on life. Neither cares much for marriage – "a hideous thing," says Desire. Spence proposes just the same as a means of freeing his newfound friend from her crazy father's clutches. Believing the professor to be the sort who will one day find true love, Desire declines. The quick thinking Spence comes up with a sad story about losing the love of his life, a blonde girl named "Mary", to another, which leads her to reconsider. After all, the professor is not a man to "love twice."

The pair run off to Vancouver, are married, and share a chaste working honeymoon in separate tents on fictitious Friendly Bay. They soon settle in Bainbridge, an Ontario town beset by blonde Marys.

Canadian Bookman, February 1922

Recounting the plot doesn't quite do this novel justice. On the surface, The Window-Gazer is a simple romance, without the cocaine addiction, opium addiction, kidnapping and worker exploitation that are key to previous Mackay novels. The unpleasantness lies below in the twin veins of race and racism that run through the book. The reader will spot this first in Spence, who is studying the "primitive psychology" of Indians. The professor is sitting with Desire when he encounters his subject for the first time:

"A Jap?" exclaimed Spence in surprise.
     "No. He's Indian. Some of the babies are so Japaneesy that it's hard to tell the difference. Father says it's a strain of the same blood."

Spence's aunt allows that she doesn't mind having her luggage handled by Pullman porters, but she does worry that her nephew's new bride might be part Indian. Her concern is shared by the gentile ladies of Bainbridge. "Well, if Indian blood can give one a skin like hers, I could do with an offside ancestor myself!" one writes in a letter.

And then we have Li Ho, who is described by a less than honest boatman as "one of the Chinkiest Chinamen I ever seen." For much of the novel, Farr's servant appears as a stereotype out of… well, something published early last century. He speaks in a manner that will make today's reader cringe – "Me much glad Missy get mallied" – only to be revealed as the most intelligent of Mackay's creations. Indeed, he is the one character to really display character. In the end, Li Ho proves to be the hero of the novel, a fact ignored by reviewers of the day.

I wonder why?

About the title:

When I was younger and we lived in towns I used to wander off by myself down the main streets to gaze in the windows. I never went into any of the stores. The things I wanted were inside and for sale – but I could not buy them. I was just a window-gazer. That's what I am still. Life is for sale somewhere. But I cannot buy it.

Object: A 308-page hardcover bound in blue cloth. The design was shared with the American edition published by Doran. I've not seen a dust jacket for either. I purchased my copy for $3.75 last December from a London bookseller

Access: The Doran and McClelland & Stewart editions enjoyed just one printing each. As might be expected, Library and Archives Canada has neither. Does Interim Librarian and Archivist Hervé Déry care? Perhaps not – after all, the man is an economist, not a librarian or  archivist. Anyway, his position is only interim; it's been only a year since James Moore appointee Déry took over from disgraced James Moore appointee Daniel J. Caron. What's the rush?

Twenty-eight copies of the McClelland and Stewart edition are held by Canadian libraries, though only the Toronto Public Library and Vancouver Public Library serve the… um, public.

Eighty-one copies are listed for sale online, but seventy-seven of these come from print on demand vultures. As is invariably the case, they provide some amusing covers. Tutis has a good one, but my favourite comes from Read How You Want, which not only changes Desire's gender and transports her to Paris, so that she/he might to look over the Rue de Miromesni.

Not one of the other four copies has a dust jacket. At US$25, the cheapest is a Good copy of the Doran edition. Next up in terms of price – US$35 and US$47 – are two passable copies of that issued by McClelland & Stewart.  The Vermont bookseller with the absurd prices is trying to flog a "discoloured from damp" signed copy of the first edition – whether Doran or McClelland and Stewart he does not say. Either way, at US91.98 it is horribly overpriced; no one is much interested in signed Mackay's – except, maybe, me.

Frank L. Packard's Wire Thriller (and others)

My review of Frank L. Packard's The Wire Devils, newly reissued by the University of Minnesota Press, is now up on the Montreal Review of Books website. You can read it here.

How good it is to see Packard return to print. Yes, some of the man's work has been available from POD publishers, but just how much confidence can one have in things like this "Frank L. 1877-1942 Packard" edition from Nabu Press.

Wait, isn't that Montreal's Spiš Castle? You know, the one built by 12-century Hungarians?

Amazon.ca sells Nabu's The Wire Devils for $31.54, and the new University of Minnesota Press edition at $12.96. I recommend the latter – and not because I'm cheap. The UMP's is not only free of the "missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc." that plague Nabu, but includes a very fine Introduction by Robert MacDougall of the University of Western Ontario.

Prof MacDougall describes the novel as a wire thriller, late 19th and early 20th-century works that use the railroad, telegraph and telephone "as a backdrop for adventure." Dime novelist Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey penned Fighting Electric Fiends (1898) and his Street & Smith stablemate Franklin Pitt served up Brothers of the Thin Wire (1915), but I think it was Canadians, in Packard and Arthur Stringer, who dominated the genre.

The Wire Devils first appeared as a serial that ran over six issues in The Popular Magazine (20 March - 7 June 1917), was published in Canada by Copp Clark, the US by George H. Doran and A.L. Burt, and in the United Kingdom enjoyed two Hodder & Stoughton editions.

Messrs Dey and Pitt would've envied Frank L. Packard's success, but I'd argue that the true King of the Wire Thrillers was the handsome, savvy Arthur Stringer.

As far as I can tell his first foray into the genre was a short story, "The Wire Tappers", published in the August 1903 issue of Smart Set. I've not seen it, but am willing to bet that it was the basis of Stringer's 1906 novel of the same name.

The next year brought Phantom Wires. By far the most commercially successful wire thriller, it saw editions from Little, Brown, Musson, McClelland & Stewart and Bobbs-Merrill, It's likely that the last, a cheapo from A.L. Burt, appeared in 1924.

Even in 1906 and 1907, when first editions of The Wire Tappers and Phantom Wires sat on bookstore shelves, the wire thriller must have seemed a touch old-fashioned. "Look!" exclaims the heroine of the latter "they're talking with their wireless!" Stringer anticipated the future by following the two with The Gun Runner, a novel in which a wireless operator from Nova Scotia plays hero.

Whither the fax thriller?

The Wire Tappers
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922

Entering the Unknown with Frank L. Packard

The Four Stragglers
Frank L. Packard
Toronto: Copp Clark, 1923

It's hard to know just what to expect when picking up a Packard; reference books offer little or nothing, archived reviews are few, and with one or two or three exceptions book bloggers have given him a pass. Add to all this the sad fact that the dust jackets to his books are almost always missing, as is the case with this soiled, stained, beat-up copy I spotted last October in the "FREE" box at Montreal's Cheap Thrills.

A few pages into this free book, I was beginning to think that it might just end up being my favourite Packard novel. Although that first flush of excitement gave way to disappointment, I don't regret the read.

The Four Stragglers opens in the darkness of an unnamed battlefield during the Great War. Cut off from their respective units, three soldiers take refuge in a thicket; a fourth lies dead or unconscious a few metres away. Flares flying above reveal faces, and the cognizant come to recognize that they'd all played parts in a daring jewel heist not two years earlier.

It's a confusing, chaotic scene. Shouldn't it be? Shells rain down, a munitions dump explodes in the distance and somewhere out there march Germans with bayonets. Then there's that fourth straggler lying on the ground. The idea that he might be listening in on the reunion forces cryptic conversation. Eventually, one of the other three raises his rifle and fires:

     The first man screamed out:
     "Christ! What have you done?"
     "I think he was done in anyway... It was as well to make sure."

Dead. Dead. And yet the next flare that hangs in the heavens reveals that his body has disappeared.

We're transported suddenly to the Claremont, an exclusive gentleman's club in London's West End. The Armistice now more than three years in the past, the reader is listening in on a conversation between Sir Harris Graves and Captain Francis Newcombe. A man of obvious privilege, Sir Harris has the means and the time to pursue criminology as a sort of hobby. His current focus is the aforementioned theft and its connection with an elusive, infamous East End criminal known as Shadow Varne. The captain, transfixed, expresses concern:

"I fell impelled to say to you that, if this man is what you describe him to be, is so dangerous as you say he is, I would advise you, Sir Harris, in all seriousness to leave him – to Scotland Yard."

Sir Harris stands fast... and is murdered before morning. If it hasn't already, the reader's suspicion will fall on Newcombe, who is not only revealed to be the straggler who shot the injured soldier, but Shadow Varne himself.

I found the most interesting aspect of The Four Stragglers revolved around the idea of the T.G. – the Temporary Gentleman – a man who through obtaining commission would be permitted privileges heretofore enjoyed only by members of a certain class. For Varne, as Captain Francis Newcombe, lasting entry to a once closed-off world is made possible through wartime heroics. "I became a Permanent Gentleman", he tells doomed Sir Harris. "Democracy! Private Francis Newcombe – Captain Francis Newcombe – Francis Newcombe, Esquire."

Packard's novels are always peppered with the fantastic and improbable; for much of The Four Stragglers I took Newcombe's rise as another example. But then I thought of our own Sir Arthur Currie, GCMG, KCB, a man who himself rose from the lowest ranks. I don't mean for a second to suggest that Currie was a murderer – just an embezzler.

Object: The first Canadian edition, my copy appears to have been first owned by a man named Donald Shipley. A 1925 Christmas gift from "Claude", it bears the label of Wendell Holmes, a bookseller in London, Ontario.

Access: Canadians, look to your universities – of the public libraries, only Toronto's serves.

The Canadian first shares plates with the Doran American first and a later Burt reprint. It wasn't until 1934 that the Hodder & Stoughton British first appeared. Together, more than couple of dozen copies are listed for sale online. They begin at £4.00, but the one to buy is a $15 copy of the Canadian first with dust jacket by A.D. Rahn. The most expensive – forty dollars –  comes from an ill-informed bookseller  who writes: "THIS A 1923 HARDCOVER BOOK IT IS EXTREMLY [sic] RARE BOOK IT HAS A NAME INSIE [sic] THE COVER AND HAS BEEN READ THE BINDING IS SUNNED AND HAS NO JACKET THE CORNERS ARE BUMPED AND THE PAGES ARE TANNED EVENLY."

Čtyři zaběhlíci, a Czech edition, was published in 1928. Apparently the National Library of the Czech Republic has a copy.

Back to School with Miriam of Queen's

Miriam of Queen's

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1921

Imagine, a Canadian college novel published just one year after This Side of Paradise.

I expected nothing quite so impressive from Miriam of Queen's. That said, what I'd thought would be a light fin de l'été read turned out to be the year's toughest slog; it took three runs at the first chapter before I found my footing. The opening pages bring Elizabeth Danvers, Aunt Laura, Mrs Roderick Campbell, Pauline, Sedley, John Hielanman, Aunt Hannah, Cora Hotchkiss and, of course Miriam. Many more will follow. Most, though not all, are related in some way to one another – but how? It's much like being thrust into a wedding reception at which one knows no one. Indeed, a wedding is in the offing, as Mrs Roderick Campbell reveals:

"You're getting another son, Ellen. Isn't that the modern form of consolation? And a bookish sort like Sedley, too." She turned suddenly to listen. "That is not his voice now is it? Mr. Rutherford's, I mean. It sounds familiar, though."
     "And so it should be, my dear," Mrs. Danvers rejoined, rising and leading the way across the hall. "It should be familiar, since it is your own nephew's – Fyfe Boulding, you know. He is to have a little part in tomorrow's ceremony, just a bit of distraction because of his connection."

I'm of the opinion that there's much to be learned from bad writing. In Miriam of Queen's lessons come  on every page, and are of such clarity that I feel no need to do anything but present. This paragraph comes at the end of Miriam's first year:

And at last came the days of the trial, when Convocation Hall was turned into a vast arena, where the competitors gathered in mortal combat and the witnesses were those bygone seers on the wall who, unmoved, had witnessed many a struggle, from their eventual element of calm, and whose lofty gaze inspired the frantic souls below to fight on. Elbowed by a science man on one hand, by a theologian on the other, Miriam wrote away. All her store of hardy-won knowledge was registered once and for all on paper, before the cares of this work-a-day world should have blotted it out. There was something fitting in the act, and a feeling of triumph visited those well-doers who were enabled to give an account at last of the laborious days they had lived.

Prose such as this leaves little room for plot. Miriam, our heroine, attends Queen's and looks on as dramatic events envelope others. Kind-hearted Cousin Sedley makes the mistake of marrying a vicious and vacuous flirt. Cousin Fyfe, a ne'er do well, is arrested, tried, and sent to Kingston Penitentiary. But before this takes place, in the most dramatic scene, both fall in the drink whilst playing hockey:

They are coming from all quarters. The ice is blackening with fleet figures. Will it be too late? The girls are lying flat and Elizabeth has caught Sedley's foot and Miriam, Elizabeth's, and the living chain moves nearer. Slowly, slowly, and oh, how carefully! Up, up and cautiously, cautiously! Out of the deathly waters, over the treacherous edge, Fyfe Boulding is drawn to safety. Then, just as the cry of thanskgiving rises to their lips, the ice gives way under double strain. there is an ominous crack, the sound of heavy body splashing down, and as Boulding creeps to safety Sedley Danvers goes down, down, into the icy waters of Lake Ontario.
     Stretch out your stick to save him now! If he can come up! Will he strike under the ice? Will the current bear him away? Or is there a chance, one chance in a thousand, that he may be seen again? The crowd presses nearer, strong arms stretch out to aid. Yes, there it is, that dark, struggling, helpless object at the edge of the break. Too late! Down, down it goes, while a cry of anguish breaks from the lips of the onlookers. Once more, once it comes. Now, men, now! They reached him , they drag him out, white and sodden and spent. Miriam, turning in horror from that death-like form, looks into Hugh Stewart's face.
     "Oh, Hugh,!" she screams. "Take me home! Take me home! Sedley is drowned! Don't you see? Sedley is drowned!"
    But no! It is a collapse, consequent on shock and exhaustion.

As I say, there's much to be learned from prose such as this.

The Regina Leader-Post, 17 December 1921

Any value in Miriam of Queen's lies in what it captures of student life at Queen's University during the earliest years of the last century. Though their debut novels were published so close together, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Lilian Vaux MacKinnon were of different generations. Mrs MacKinnon graduated from Queen's in 1902, a decade before the petting parties of Princeton. Her university experience – and Miriam's – consisted of muscular Christianity, college songs and fleeting glimpses of the Very Reverend George Monro Grant.

Modest mention in the 12 September 1942 Regina Leader-Post has Mrs MacKinnon as the author of two novels: Miriam of Queen's and The Guinea Stamp. I can find no record of the latter. The Queen's University Archives holds the manuscript of an unpublished romance "set near Brockville"  with the rather ribald title Hard by St. Lawrence.

Unpublished?

I'm not at all surprised.

Object: An attractive hardcover in mustard cloth. I found my copy nine years ago in a Vancouver Salvation Army Thrift Store. Price: $2.

Access: A very scarce title, it appears that the only public library carrying the book serves the good folks of Toronto; Kingston's has no copy.

Miriam of Queen's enjoyed a single run, split by McClelland & Stewart and George H. Doran. All of two editions, the latter is by far the least common. One copy of each is listed for sale online. At US$75, the less expensive is a "Fair to Good, Reading Copy" McClelland & Stewart edition. The other is the one to buy: a Near Fine copy of the American first in "Very Good plus dustjacket" for US$175.

Great price! Take note, Kingston Frontenac Public Library.

Pauline Johnson's Forgotten Heir

Canadian Poets, edited by John W. Garvin (McClelland & Stewart, 1926)

Since my piece on The Chivalry of Keith Leicester, I've had to endure some gentle ribbing from a couple of B.C. readers. Yes, I have two. Both (Did I mention I have two? At least!) appear to take issue with my insinuation that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay is something less than well-known. Eleven days later, I'm prepared to state boldly that hers is not a household name. As evidence, I cite the sad fact that Mackay's books have been out of print for well over seven decades. I add that The Canadian Encyclopedia and The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature fail to mention the author – though I do recognize that both the very fine Encyclopedia of British Columbia and Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature (edited by Vancouverite W.H. New) feature brief entries.

Mackay wasn't born a British Columbian. A native of Woodstock, her 33rd birthday passed before she first visited – and settled – in the province with husband Peter, a court stenographer. There can be no argument that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay was once well-known. She featured regularly in Harper's, Scribners', Smart Set and other great magazines of the day. Her first book, a collection of verse titled Between the Lights, appeared in 1904. Ten more volumes followed: poetry, novels and a light comedy that placed third in a 1929 American play-writing competition. All are pretty much forgotten. Mackay's lasting legacy lies as the force behind Pauline Johnson's The Legends of Vancouver (1911), published as a means of raising funds for the dying author. After Johnson's death, Mackay not only became executrix, but assumed her role as the leading lady of letters in British Columbia. Her books were published by McClelland & Stewart, William Briggs, Thomas Allen, George H. Doran, Samuel French, Houghton Mifflin and Cassell & Company. The Group of Seven's J.E.H. MacDonald provided 'decorations' for her 1922 collection of verse, Fires of Driftwood.

Mackay was known primarily as a poet, but I find her prose more interesting and inventive. Her first novel, The House of Windows (1912), begins with an abandoned baby in a department store and moves on to create a tale involving kidnapping, white slavery, secret identities and suffragettes. Sex, it seems, is at the centre of The Window-Gazer (1921).

The time has come, I suppose, to add Isabel Ecclestone Mackay to my dusty bookcase. I've ordered an old copy of Up the Hill and Over (1917), which New describes as a novel about drug addiction. What fun! Until it arrives, I'll be dipping into her 1918 The Singing Ship and Other Verse for Children (online here), which includes this mildly disturbing poem.

Chivalry Pays (Eventually)

The Chivalry of Keith Leicester:

A Romance of British Columbia

Robert Allison Hood

Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1918

Born in Scotland, raised in England, a son of privilege, Keith Leicester lives on a ranch near the banks of the Fraser River. He is not to be confused with a remittance man; Keith's troubled past is entirely the fault of former fiancée, femme fatale Patricia Devereux, who threw him over a few years earlier. Now a solitary figure, he's taken refuge in our westernmost province, where he spends his leisure hours with his pipe, paper and dog. This quiet routine is disrupted by the unheralded arrival of the beautiful, mysterious Miss Coon – in actuality, an English heiress named Marjorie Colquhoun. Having run off on a forced engagement, she takes refuge at the homestead of her old nurse.

To misquote Elvis Costello: Chapter One, they didn't really get along. But then they don't get along in chapters two through twenty either. This despite the transplanted Scot's many chivalrous acts. Keith, who considers himself a misogynist, has 'no desire to play squire to distressed damsels', yet finds himself coming to Marjorie's aid time and time again. True to the genre, each good deed is negated by a silly misunderstanding, leaving the long-suffering reader to wonder which act of kindness will stick.

The novel takes its most dramatic turn after Hood moves the action to Vancouver, where Marjorie looks to sell her jewellery in an effort to save her former nurse's farm. She walks through a city that is entirely unrecognizable to today's reader:

Down Granville Street she went to the Post Office and then east along Hastings Street as far as the B.C. Electric Station, but although she saw all kinds of stores and many attractive windows, there was no sign of what she was in search of. There were barbers' poles and electric signs of every description, but the three golden balls were nowhere to be seen. at last she decided that she must ask some one, and she picked out for the purpose a benevolent looking old gentleman with a white beard. For anything else she would have asked a policeman, but she felt instinctively that for this it was best not to consult one of the Force.

'Why bless my soul, what did you say - a pawnbroker?' he sputtered in astonishment, evidently distrusting his ears.

Marjorie repeated her query to reassure him. He looked at her amazed.

'A pawnbroker, miss!' he repeated after her. 'No, I'm afraid not; I never heard of one here...'

Marjorie is eventually successful in her quest, only to be fingered as Slippery Sal, a 'female diamond thief that has been operating in the Eastern cities'. Once again, Keith comes to the rescue. The next chapter finds the heiress dining in 'a gown of pink' as our hero goes on and on about his adopted home.

'You've never known the charms of English Bay at sundown,' he said, waxing eloquent, 'the shimmering tints of crimson and violet and yellow and gold; the opalescent splendours as the radiance gradually dies away; the dark blues and purples of the hills outlined against the sky; the flickering lights of the fishing boats sway out near the horizon; and then, landward, the beach full of people and behind, the town all cheery with its street lamps and its countless gleaming windows.'

'It is everything you said for it and a hundred times more,' Marjorie later tells him.

Vancouver's English Bay, c. 1920.

I've spoiled very little here. Harlequin readers know that matters of the heart are never so simple. Before long several members of the English aristocracy descend on Vancouver, bringing with them a whole new set of complications.

Object: A hardcover, fairly bland for the time, it was published just before Frederick Goodchild left John McClelland and George Stewart to set up his own house. The MG&S edition uses the plates of the American published by fellow Torontonian George H. Doran.

Access: Only one copy of this 'Romance of British Columbia' is found in the province's public libraries. Non-circulating, it rests on a metal shelf at the Central Library in Vancouver. Fifteen more library copies are scattered about the country's universities and in the Toronto Public Library. One of the earliest novels set in British Columbia, it isn't to be found at Library and Archives Canada – a ludicrous situation that, given the shameful moratorium on new purchases, won't be rectified anytime soon. The good news is that used copies sans dust jacket are very cheap. I bought mine three years ago in Vancouver, certainly the centre of interest in things Hoodian, for a buck. Good copies in their 91-year-old dust jackets are often listed in the US$30 range. For about the same price, print on demand publisher Waddell Press offers an ugly 'new' edition with with a cover designed by an illiterate. One Vermont bookseller is offering a copy inscribed by Hood to Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, who is described in their sales pitch as 'another well-known author'. As well-known as Hood, I suppose. The US$298 price tag adds insult.