Showing posts with label Globe and Mail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Globe and Mail. Show all posts

02 December 2024

The Globe 100 133 of 1924: Hammond's Organ



The Globe 100 was published ten days ago – November 22nd – so this annual look at the newspaper's best book picks of a century past may seem late.

It is not. November is far too early.

The Globe's picks for 1924 were published on December 10th of that year. Eight pages in total, all but one dominated by ads, it was cobbled together by Arts editor M.O. Hammond.

Melvin Ormond Hammond 
It's clear that his heart just wasn't in it. Consider this from Hammond's introduction:
Certain folks like history and biography under the evening lamp. Others – younger and more romantic, perhaps – want poetry. A few ask for essays and fine reading of a reflective type, something different from the cross-word puzzle. Some desire serious studies of a devotional character. Probably the reading preferred by the largest class is fiction.
Ho-hum.

Was the Arts editor behind this dreary headline?


The whole thing makes for exhausting reading, though there is much of interest. For example, the first page features this, which to that time was the greatest recognition of Canada's authors in the annual list:

What's more, only Canadian books feature on the page, beginning with Chez Nous by Adjutor Rivard. 


Chez Nous is listed amongst the works of fiction. I'd been led to believe it is a book of reflection and reminiscence. Archie P. McKishnie's Mates of the Tangle and Yon Toon o' Mine by Logan Weir seem similarly misplaced. I've not read the three, so may be wrong. In fact, I haven't read any of the 1924 Globe picks in Canadian fiction:

La Roux - Johnston Abbott [Edward Montague Ashworth]
The Divine Lady - E. Barrington [L. Adams Beck]
The Master Revenge - H.A. Cody
The Trail of the Conestoga - B. Mabel Dunham
A Sourdough Samaritan - Charles Harrison Gibbons
The Quenchless Light - Agnes C. Laut
The Garden of Folly - Stephen Leacock
 Mates of the Tangle - Archie P. McKishnie
Slag and Gold - Phil H. Moore
Julie Cane - Harvey J. O'Higgins
The Locked Book - Frank L. Packard
Chez Nous - Adjutor Rivard
Jimmy of the Gold Coast - Marshall Saunders
The Smoking Flax - Robert Stead
Lonely O'Malley - Arthur Stringer
The Wayside Cross - Mary E. Waagen
Fireweed - Muriel Watson
Gordon of the Lost Lagoon - Robert Watson
Yon Toon o' Mine - Logan Weir [J.B. Perry]

That's eighteen titles in all – the previous year had only eight! – yet there are absences, the most notable being The Land of Afternoon by Gilbert Knox [Madge Macbeth], the year's grand succès de scandale.


Nearly every year, the Globe errs by including a "new" work that is not new at all. In 1924 it was Lonely O'Malley, a reissue Arthur Stringer's 1905 semi-autobiographical second novel.

Three that made the cut.
What's particularly interesting about the error is that the ever-prolific Stringer published three new novels in 1924 – Empty Hands, Manhandled, and The Story without a Name (the latter two co-authored by Russell Holman ) – the most of any year in his very long career.

Six that didn't.
The list of foreign fiction features all the names one would expect, like Galsworthy, Masefield, and Walpole. This is the one that has really stood the test of time:

Foreigners don't do too well in the 1924 list, contributing just eighty-six titles. Canadian books number forty-seven, more than any previous list. Somehow, Hammond believes there are fewer. He's particularly down on Canadian verse, lamenting that it has been "a rather a slim year in new poetry so far as Canada is concerned;" but then he presents a list of eight titles, seven of which are Canadian:

Canada My Home - Grant Balfour
Dream Tapestries - Louise Morey Bowman
Flower and Flame - John Crichton [N.G. Guthrie]
The New Spoon River - Edgar Lee Masters
Verses for My Friends - Bernard McEvoy
A Book of Verses - Gertrude MacGregor Moffat
White Wings of Dawn - Frances Beatrice Taylor
Eager Footsteps - Anne Elizabeth Wilson

Hammond is far more positive when it comes to Canadian history and biography, recommending titles both familiar (Canadian Federation by Reginald George Trotter) and unfamiliar (Memoirs of Ralph Vansittart by Edward Robert Cameron). I'd forgotten about John Buchan's Lord Minto. As a biography of a past Governor General by a future Governor General, it is probably worth a look, but the book I most want to read is Pioneer Crimes and Punishments in Toronto and the Home District by James Edmund Jones: 

A readable record of early of early methods of administering justice, which shows the progress toward humane treatment made during the past century. The writer, one of Toronto's Police Magistrates readily admits the is room for further improvement.
I'm less likely to read Presbyterian Pioneer Missionaries in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia by Rev Hugh McKellar, D.D.

Continuing on a personal note, what surprised me most about Hammond's list is that I hadn't read one of its forty-seven Canadian titles. A Passage to India, on the other hand...

Nope, haven't read that one either.

In my defence, not one of the forty-seven Canadian titles on the 1924 Globe list is in print today.

No surprise there.

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22 July 2024

A Mid-Century Modern Country House Mystery


Harsh Evidence
Pamela Fry
London: Wingate, 1953
172 pages

Because this is a Canadian country house mystery, the house isn't terribly old and servants not so numerous. Rocky Crest is located on a private island in a lake somewhere in Northern Ontario. Belonging to wealthy Toronto businessman J.H. Charleston, it is a two-storey mid-century modern, complete with floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows and – here I assume – Danish furniture.

J.H. has invited employees and their spouses for a relaxing weekend, though no one is at all relaxed. Guests include:

  • Randy Matthews, the top copywriter with Charleston & Synge Advertising. He's here with wife Ann, who worries that his time at the company is limited.
  • Iris Martin, dress designer, owns a Bloor Street shop in which J.H. has chosen to invest. She is the latest in in Randy's "long string of entanglements."
  • Peter Fairweather, a commercial artist working within the Charleston business empire, has brought his wife Lois, "a small, bird-like woman in her mid-thirties."
  • Gordon Goodman, an accounts executive with Charleston & Co is also present, with his wife, "that silly Marion," in tow.

And then there's protagonist Beth Manley. The daughter of a "Toronto University" professor who died far too young, she's the editor of Glitter, J.H.'s latest and most ambitious publishing venture. Unlike the others, this is her first visit to Rocky Crest. Very much outside her element, she's found a friend in Ann, who warns against "Charlestonitis":

"New arrivals to Rocky Crest are particularly susceptible. First symptoms are a dampness in the palms and an irresistible urge to say 'Yes' every time J.H. opens his mouth."
A cautious soul who is very much outside her comfort zone, Beth is made more tense upon learning that her former lover, journalist Paul Manning, is due to arrive.

She awaits Paul's arrival, just was the reader awaits the discovery of the dead body described in the italicized first paragraph: 

In time she would be found—but not yet. The shock and terror of her discovery were still to come. Now she floated peacefully at the edge of the island, the spreading web of blonde hair framing her clear, pale face, the wet green silk of her dress clinging to breast and thigh. Her ballerina slippers were gone—it had been easy for the water to pull them away. And as the small waves lapped her cheeks, her head moved as though she turned it in her sleep. But she was not sleeping.

It's Beth who finds the body. She'd given liquor to steady herself as things begin spinning out of control.

De döda talar ej [Harsh Evidence]
1956

Harris, Charleston's handyman, fishes the lady from the lake. He takes the body to the toolshed, which everyone somehow agrees is appropriate, and then sets out for the mainland and the police. His departure is followed by a sudden storm, leading all to wonder if he'll be coming back at all.

But, look, a boat!

It's not Harris, nor the police, rather late arrival Paul:

Marion flung herself upon him.
   "Paul, darling! We're so glad to see you! We've had the most dreadful time!
Harsh Evidence may be a Canadian country house mystery, but the characters speak like proper Brits.

Marion's slobbering excitement at Paul's arrival is tempered somewhat by J.H., who tells the journalist about the drowned woman. No sooner has his story ended than Marion stumbles upon a heart-shaped locket in the grass. It would appear to have fallen while Harris was carrying the body to the toolshed. Paul inspects it and turns a whiter shade of pale:
"I think she was my wife." 
Turns out he's right.

Beth had no idea that Paul was once wed. When the two are alone, he relates a sad, sordid story of love and betrayal... and then it's off to dress for dinner!

The women go all out. Ann dons on a white dinner dress that possesses "a rakish charm," Lois engulfs herself in yards of grey velvet topped by a little pearl cap, and Iris has "poured herself into a strapless dress which appeared to be made of black sequins." You'd think the dress designer would have the advantage, but it's Beth who makes the biggest splash:


Gentlemen! Lady! I remind you that this very afternoon a woman, Paul's ex-wife Lizette, was found dead floating not far from this very house. Beth, you were the one who found her. Randy, Gordon, you walked down to the shoreline to help retrieve the body. 

The 26 September 1953 Globe and Mail review features some backhanded praise:


I didn't think much of J.H.'s guests, Beth included, but these intolerable four-flushing types are what makes Harsh Evidence worth reading. Careerists all, we dodge them in life, but are drawn to them in print.

All enjoy a perfectly lovely dinner, after which Peter tinkles the ivories and Iris does a substandard Dietrich imitation. The host waltzes with Lois in all her velvet, then suggests a game of Kidnapped.

Kidnapped?

Kidnapped is one of Randy's creations. It's something like Hide and Go Seek, but with teams and rhyming clues.

What fun! But how strange.

The novel's great flaw lies in the callous and peculiarly uniform behaviour by a group of people who had mere hours earlier witnessed Harris retrieve of the body of a dead woman. Some of this may be explained away by the slow reveal that Paul was not the only member of the party to have, let's say, known Lizette.

Kuolleet eivät puhu [Harsh Evidence]
1957
It's not often that I share a spoiler. I do so here because Harsh Evidence is unique in Canadian mystery writing of the time.

As the novel's mid-point approaches, Ann tells tells Beth about Iris's tragic history. The father was disinherited for marrying a chorus girl, Iris's mother. After losing what remained of his money in the crash of '29, he took a drive out a window. J.H., a friend of the family, paid for an exclusive girls' boarding school from which Iris was subsequently expelled. It's only in recent years that the two resumed cordial relations:
"It's certainly romantic," Beth said. "Positively Victorian. Somehow it doesn't fit Iris."
   "There are a lot of things about Iris that don't fit," Ann said slowly.
   "Oh? What, for example?"
   "Well, the men she collects – considering how hard she works at being a glamour girl – they're a pretty queer bunch."
I identified the last sentence as a bloomer, but the final chapters led me to reconsider. By this point, the reader has come to see Lizette Manning (née Lily Roberts) for what she was, a femme fatale who had mined men for money and sex. The twist comes when it is revealed that Lizette saw another mark in Iris, who confronts her on the morning of the afternoon her body would be found.

Ultimately, it's Gordon who exposes the murderer:


Interestingly, Iris herself had used sex – or the promise of sex – to get Randy to agree to a scheme involving the sale of insider information to J.H.'s competitors.

For these reasons alone, Harsh Evidence is worth a careful second reading. 

About the author: Following early, lazy research on Miss Fry, the newly released 1931 census provides a touch more information. Pamela Fry is recorded as the 14-year-old English-born daughter of John and Charlotte Fry. The family had emigrated to Canada in 1928. The Frys lived at 46 Spencer Avenue in Toronto, sharing the house with Edward and Freda Jones and their three daughters.

The house still stands, though you can't see much of it in this 2020 Google Maps Street View.


Object and Access: A hardcover consisting of pale green boards and post-war paper, only the dust jacket illustration renders it attractive. Credit goes to Patric O'Keeffe, about whom I know very little.

The novel can be found at Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, New York University, Occidental University, Trinity College Dublin and, most remarkably, the Atmore Public Library in Atmore, Alabama.

Here's to the Atmore Public Library! 

I purchased my copy earlier this year from a UK bookseller. Price: £7.50.  As I write, one copy of the Wingate edition is listed at the very same price I paid. Though lacking the jacket, it seems a good buy.

In 1956, New York's Roy Publishers published the first and only American edition. I've never seen a copy.

Harsh Evidence has enjoyed two translations, the first being the Swedish De döda tala ej (1956). This was followed by a Finnish translation titled Kuolleet eivät puhu (1957). Neither cover depicts a scene that features in the novel. Ditto the frocks.

Harsh Evidence has never been published in Canada. 

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04 June 2024

Three Weeks a Lady



Three Weeks
Elinor Glyn
New York: Macaulay, [c. 1924]
245 pages

I misread "IMMORTAL ROMANCE" as "IMMORAL ROMANCE," which I expect was the publisher's intent. The very definition of a succès de scandale, when first published in 1907 Three Weeks was denounced, banned, seized, and destroyed. This went on for years. Consider this Toronto Globe. story from 11 April 1911: 

Three Weeks shares something with Fifty Shades of Grey in being a novel read primarily by women. Nurse Sneed reads it to Baby Peggy in The Family Secret. A switchboard operator is shown reading it in Buster Keaton's Seven Chances.


My favourite appearance is in an oft-censored scene from the 1930 Mickey Mouse short The Shindig. 

Horace Horsecaller, Clarabelle Cow's date, pulls on her tail to announce his arrival. The bell around her neck rings, naked Clarabelle hides the book beneath straw and then gets dressed. I will not comment on the scene in which Mickey pulls on Minnie's bloomers because this post is about Three Weeks, which is far more family friendly.

The premise of Three Weeks is simple. Handsome, blonde, twenty-two-year-old son of privilege Paul Verdayne, "young and fresh and foolish," has fallen for Isabella Waring, secretary to his mother, Lady Henrietta.

And why not!

Isabella shares his passion for sport and the sporting papers, happily washes his terrier Pike, and is in every way an equal partner in the hunt. All is good until "one terrible day Paul unfortunately kissed the large pink lips of Isabella as his mother entered the room."

Lady Henrietta, is horrified; not so Paul's father:

"Let the boy have his fling," said Sir Charles Verdayne, who was a coarse person. "Damn it all! a man is not obliged to marry every woman he kisses!"
Lady Henrietta begs to differ – to her a kiss seals a betrothal – and so she is quite horrified at the prospect of a "daughter of the middle-classes" being brought into the family. Son Paul is is soon sent on a three week tour of the continent "for his health."

The first of three memorable scenes centres on Paul's final meeting with Isabella:
Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little distance, but for the lady's scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to distinguish her sex.
   "Good-bye, old chap," she said "We have been real pals, and I'll not forget you"
   But Paul, who was feeling sentimental, put it differently. "Good-bye, darling," he whispered with a suspicion of tremble in his charming voice. "I shall never love any woman but you — never, never in my life."
   Cuckoo! screamed the bird in the tree.
Paris bores Paul because he can think of nothing but Isabella. The same is true of Lucerne, until one fateful evening, whilst dining alone, he is seated at a table in view of another lone diner. This is the novel's greatest scene. In its eleven pages there is but one word of dialogue –"Bon" – the rest consists entirely of descriptions of the two people dining at separate tables. One, a woman, is seemingly oblivious as to Paul's presence, while Paul is all too aware aware of her. He is at first judgemental ("Who could want roses eating alone?"), then irritated ("The woman had to pass him — even so close that the heavily silk touched his foot.), and then unsettled:
Her face was white, he saw that plainly enough, startlingly white, like a magnolia bloom, and contained no marked features. No features at all! he said to himself. Yes — he was wrong, she had certainly a mouth worth looking at again. It was so red. Not large and pink and laughingly open like Isabella's, but straight and chiselled, and red, red, red.
    Paul was young, but he knew paint when he saw it, and this red was real, and vivid, and disconcerted him.
Try as he may, Paul cannot help but compare Isabella to this woman. Whether Paul falls in love with the woman then and there is up for debate; that he does fall in love with her is not.

But who is she?

The "lady" – by my count the descriptor is used nearly two hundred times – is never named. An older woman, perhaps ten years older, the lady is very much the dominant in their relationship. She initiates Paul into the ways of love and Paul responds in the manner of most twenty-two-year-old heterosexual males. Three evenings pass between five-star hotel dining and sin on a tiger skin:


This is the scene that made Elinor Glyn famous. It is the scene that inspired these lines of verse (sometimes attributed to George Bernard Shaw):
                                   Would you like to sin
                                   With Elinor Glyn
                                   On a tiger skin? 
                                   Or would you prefer
                                   To err with her
                                   On some other fur?
It's the scene for which she is best remembered today – and it is not at all what I expected. 

Look carefully  and you will see that


is followed by this:


There is no sex in Three Weeks.

How disappointing!

The best scenes now past, Three Weeks shifts its focus to the lady's teachings on the nature of love and, well, nature. These lectures, coupled with extensive travel itinerary, consume much of the middle-third. It all seems a bit slow and repetitive, but the pace picks up in the third period.


What impressed most wasn't the plot, rather the author's ability to mine the male mind. This is best demonstrated in Paul, but extends to Sir Charles and his friend Captain Grigsby, both of whom display unhealthy interest in Paul's relationship with the lady. 

Three Weeks is an immortal romance. It lives on in that it is read, though perhaps not as a work of literature. What I know for sure is that it is in no way immoral. 

Object and Access: A bulky red hardcover with four plates of scenes used in promoting the 1924 Hollywood adaptation. I do like the jacket; not only does California girl Aileen Pringle as the lady feature, the rear flap and cover have advertisements for other Glyn titles.

Three Weeks enjoyed sales in the hundreds of thousands. It is not at all hard to find, which is not to say that I've ever come across a one in a Canadian bookstore. I blame Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney.


My copy was purchased earlier this year from a Northampton, Massachusetts bookseller. Price: US$45.00 (w/ a further US$ 30.00 for shipping).

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12 May 2024

Growing up with Mother



Miranda
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard -Schuman, 1960
247 pages 

Miranda is the mother of two daughters, the younger being Rose, the narrator of this novel. Rose calls her mother Miranda, as encouraged by Miranda because Miranda would rather be taken for an older sister.

Miranda has aspirations. She married Alfie Arnold with the expectation that he would raise her above the class into which she'd been born. They are a good match – he loves her dearly, she really loves him –except that Alfie is content with living a modest life on his aunt's small Sussex farm. Miranda will have none of it. At her urging, the family is uprooted, trading Aunt Eliza's farm for a much larger one in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley. The Arnolds are able to do this only with the financial assistance of a Government of Canada program designed to bring agricultural labourers to the country. This is not to suggest that Miranda herself has any intention of working herself. She had her fill during the Great War, when she's served as a Park Lane parlourmaid. Again, Miranda has aspirations:

The Arnolds spend three years in Cheswick, living in a small house on the farm of Mr and Mrs Saunders. Alfie, a cheerful soul by nature, is happier than he's ever been. Not so Miranda. In Canada, she'd expected her family would "stand out like a pearl among the stones," but the locals take no particular notice. The farming couple's warmth and friendliness, so appreciated by Alfie and the girls, only serves to irritate. One particular Sunday road trip to Grande Pré, complete with the recitation of select lines from Evangeline and an account of the Acadian Expulsion, was almost too much for Miranda to bear. And then came Mrs Saunders' offer, filled "with such enthusiasm and goodwill," to teach Miranda Canadian ways and customs:

"Why should I learn their damned customs?" Miranda demanded as soon as she got my father home. The story of Evangeline had not gone over too well with her. She suspected Mrs. Saunders was being anti-British. "What's the matter with English customs?
   "She was only trying to help," Alfie said in a placating voice.
   "Saying she'd make real Canadians out of us in no time! I never heard of anything so insulting. I didn't come to the colonies to be one of them."

Miranda avoids Mrs Saunders, but does enjoy the company Dan Murphy, District Representative of veterinary supply firm B.F. Whitney. Whether the salesman sees Miranda as a pearl among the stones is debatable, but he does drop by from time to time, always when Alfie is in the fields. Dan strokes her amour propre, but nothing more. Through the salesman, Miranda gets the idea that Alfie himself might find a district representative position with B.F. Whitney. She prods, eventually applying to the company on her husband's behalf and Alfie is quickly hired. At about the same time his Aunt Eliza kicks the washtub, leaving an inheritance of £200 (roughly $16,000 today). 

"'My husband has fallen heir to his aunt's estate in Sussex,'" Rose hears Miranda tell Mrs Saunders. "She made poor old Great-aunt Eliza, who used to wear men's boots indoors and out and took her baths standing up at the sink in the scullery, sound like an offshoot of royalty."

The family relocates to Yarmouth – "which I shall call Southport" – the biggest town in Alfie's district. This raised concern in this reader, who well-remembers grade six geography class.


Southport is much more to Miranda's liking. She now lives one block from Main Street in a once grand rented house (a deal, owing to it being across the street from the jail yard), and so has frequent opportunity to show herself off. Her flapper dress is thin, and her heels too narrow to be practical, but she really cuts a figure next to the heavy coated, rubber booted fishermen's wives negotiating the slush of Main Street.

Herein lies the problem. There's not much call for veterinary supplies in an area so reliant on fishing. The land is poor and the farms hardscrabble. Alfie is miserable, casting about for customers, as his inheritance evaporates. Miranda tries to help by working part-time at Betty's Beauty Parlor, but all too quickly Alfie's position at The B.F. Whitney Company quite literally kills him.  

Miranda is devastated – again, she really did love Alfie – yet has the strength to rally. She takes in roomers and increases her hours at Betty's.* The job feeds her ego. After all, who better to work in a beauty salon than the town beauty? Without Alfie to rely upon, she reveals herself as a very clever woman, adding layer after layer to her facade, never being caught out on one of her many, many fabrications.

The Calgary Herald, 11 May 1961

This is, of course, Miranda's story, but only as seen by her youngest. As she grows into womanhood, Rose gradually comes to see – and then comes to terms – with not only her mother's imperfections, but how she is perceived, fairly or not, by others.

Reviews of Miranda were without exception enthusiastic; Walter O'Hearne raved in The New York Times (16 April 1961), as did fellow Leacock winner Joan Walker in The Globe & Mail (1 July 1961). Not that any of this meant anything in the long run.

Sadly, unfairly, Miranda is yet another novel that was printed once and then never again. In this respect, it is very much a pearl among the stones.

Will a publisher please pick it up.

*The 1931 census, records the author, age 20, as working as a hairdresser
and living in a Yarmouth rooming house.

About the author:

Object and Access: A butter-coloured cloth hardcover with violet type. I'm guessing that the jacket illustration is the author's own doing, though I could be wrong.

I'm pleased to see that Yarmouth's Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Library has copies of all the author's books.

As of this writing, I see just one copy listed for sale online. Near Fine, at US$9.25, it's a steal. The seller is located in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, which I shall call Cheswick.

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17 April 2024

Morley Callaghan's Red Ryan Rocket


More Joy in Heaven
Morley Callaghan
New York: Random House, 1937
278 pages

It's been decades since Intro to CanLit II, my second introduction to Canadian literature. Like Intro to CanLit I, the  course covered four works; all novels, all written by men. Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night was my favourite, but I do remember liking They Shall Inherit the Earth. We were told that its author, Morley Callaghan, was “perhaps the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world.” Here our professor was quoting Edmund Wilson. He made much of this, but at  twenty the name Edmund Wilson meant nothing to me.

They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935) sits in the middle of a run of three novels considered Callaghan's best. The first, Such is My Beloved (1934), involves a handsome young priest – in fiction all young priests are handsome – who befriends two prostitutes. It vies with the third, More Joy in Heaven, as Callaghan's best known novel. They Shall Inherit the Earth is not nearly so well known. You can understand why. They Shall Inherit the Earth is a story about a father and son who, to quote the cover of my old NCL edition (right), are "forced to re-examine the nature of individual conscience and responsibility." It has no sex workers, nor does it have a bank robber.

More Joy in Heaven has both.

Its protagonist, Kip Caley, isn't a prostitute, but he had robbed banks – so many banks that he was sentenced to life and twenty lashes. In prison, Caley underwent a transformation of some kind. There's no suggestion that he found God, though Caley did find Father Butler, the prison chaplain. Somehow, the worst man in Canada becomes the most beloved.

Callaghan is lazy.

The novel opens on Christmas Day, the day of Caley's release from Kingston Penitentiary. Father Brown is present, as is Senator Maclean, who had fought for a pardon.

Caley returns to his hometown, Toronto, where he takes a job at a hotel and nightclub that caters to sporting types. The senator arranged it all. A greeter, a position in which he never feels comfortable, all Caley has to do is welcome patrons. Everyone wants to meet the reformed man; it's great for business. Kip Caley is the toast of the town, but as months pass he seems more the man of the hour.

More Joy in Heaven is a good novel, but the greatest fiction is found on its copyright page:


Contemporary reviewers were not fooled.

Callaghan modelled Caley on Norman "Red" Ryan, a career criminal who had been killed by police on 23 May 1936, eighteen months before publication. It was big news.
 
The Globe, 25 May 1936
Like Caley, Ryan was held up – no pun intended  – as a model of reform. He was fêted and given plumb jobs,  including a weekly radio show, only to be gunned down ten months later during the botched robbery of a Sarnia liquor store.

The Big Red Fox, Peter McSherry's 1999 Arthur Ellis nominated biography of Ryan, is recommended.

More Joy in Heaven is also recommended, as is They Shall Inherit the Earth.

I'm guessing Edmund Wilson would concur.


Trivia: Ernest Hemingway covered Ryan for the Toronto Daily Star and had himself considered writing a novel with a character modelled on the man. I've often wondered whether Papa mentioned the idea to fellow Star reporter Callaghan.

Object: I purchased my copy, a first edition, in 1989 from a cart at the Westmount Public Library. Sadly, it lacks the dust jacket (above), but then what can you expect for $1.00.

Access: The novel remains in print, though I suspect the copies have been sitting in Penguin Random House for over a decade now. What's offered features the 2007 New Canadian Library cover design... and, well, the New Canadian Library is long dead.

The 1960 and 2009 NCL editions.
More Joy in Heaven was one of the earliest NCL titles. Hugo McPherson wrote the introduction to the first NCL edition; Margaret Avison wrote an afterword for the last. Penguin Random House LLC is asking $19.95, though used copies are far cheaper. First editions listed online start at US$20 (sans dust jacket) and go all the way up to US$150. For my money, the best buy is a Very Good to Near Fine copy offered by a Winchester, Virginia bookseller. Price: US$110.


I expected Italian and French translations, but have found only a Russian: Радость на небесах. The first in a three-novel Морли Каллаган volume published in 1982, it also features Тихий уголок (A Fine and Private Place) and И снова к солнцу (Closer to the Sun).

Why those novels, I wonder?


I read More Joy in Heaven for The 1937 Club.

After all these years, the only other 1937 title I've reviewed at The Dusty Bookcase is John by Irene Baird.

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18 December 2023

The Globe's Best Books of 1923: 'Canadian Authors Can Be Read With Pleasure, Profit and Pride'


The Globe, 10 December 1923

Three men feature on the first page of the 1923 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' the 'Globe 100' of its day. The first, Paul A.W. Wallace, is recognized for his debut, Baptiste Larocque: Legends of French Canada. The second man, W.J. Healy, wrote Women of Red River, which was "arranged and published under the Women's Canadian Club of Winnipeg by Russell, Land, and Company." Norris Hodgins, the third, was recognized for Why Don't You Get Married.

All three are Canadian and all three are new to me.

I've been following the Globe's century-old lists of best books for nearly a decade now, and so think I know what to expect. There will be a dour pronouncement – in this case, "there is a dearth of outstanding books, especially novels, at the present time" – which will, in turn, be counterbalanced by something of a positive nature:

Under the 'More Canadiana' banner are books by Americans LeRoy Jeffers, Charles Towne, John M. Clarke, Charles W. Stokes, Paul Leland Haworth, and Briton Wilfred Grenfell. The final ingredient in this messy mix is George King's self-published Hockey Year Book. Its inclusion marks the first ever mention of the sport in 'Recent Books and the Outlook.'

I can't imagine how much it would fetch today. 84 Victoria Street itself is worth a bloody fortune.

Despite the flag waving, Canadian writers don't fair all that well in the Globe's 1923 list, accounting for just 46 of the 196 titles featured. As in 1922, poets dominate: 

Ballads and Lyrics - Bliss Carman
Selected Poems - W.H. Davies*
Morning in the West - Katherine Hale
Flint and Feather - E. Pauline Johnson
The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman
Shepard's Purse - Florence Randal Livesay 
 The Miracle Songs of Jesus - Wilson MacDonald
The Complete Poems of Tom MacInnes
The Songs of Israfel and Other Poems - Marion Osborne
The Garden of the Sun - A.E.S. Smythe
The Empire Builders - Robert Stead
Woman - Albert Durrant Watson

That's twelve titles! From a nation of nine million! The Globe informs that the rest of the world produced just five collections of note!

For the second year running, we have the inclusion of The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman, of which there is no record. And so, for the second year, I'll suggest that what is being referred to is The Poems of Archibald Lampman, first published in 1900 by George N. Morang. As Ryan Porter notes, the collection enjoyed several reprints. Still, I see no evidence of a new edition in 1923, never mind 1922. I'll say the same of E. Pauline Johnson's 1912 Flint and Feather. There was a new edition of Robert Stead's The Empire Builders, which just happens to be the only poetry title I own.


Curiously, Wilson MacDonald's The Song of Prairie Land is singled out for mention in the introduction to the poetry list, yet only his The Miracle Songs of Jesus makes the cut.

Our non-fiction writers fare the worst with just four of the fifty titles listed. I don't have a copy of even one, though I am interested in the Marjorie Pickthall, "a memorial volume edited by Helena Coleman," which does not seem to exist.  

Our writers of fiction don't fare much better, contributing just eight titles to the list: 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft - Ralph Connor
Lantern Marsh - Beaumont S. Cornell
Why Don't You Get Married? - Norris Hodgins
The Happy Isles - Basil King
When Christmas Crossed the Peace - Nellie L. McClung
Emily of New Moon - L.M. Montgomery
The Viking Heart - Laura Goodman Salverson
Spirit of Iron - Harwood Steele

There were twenty-one Canadian works of fiction on the 1922 list.

Here are some that made it:

And here are some that did not:

Frank L. Packard's The Four Stragglers is at the bottom of the pile, Stephen Leacock's Over the Footlights is at the top. Between the two is Winnifred Eaton's "Cattle" – or is it Cattle? – which may just be the best Canadian novel of 1923. 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft, which I've not read, is one of my $2 Connors.  

I've long been on the lookout for Beaumont S. Cornell's lone novel Lantern Marsh because it's set in a thinly disguised Brockville, Ontario, which is where I do my weekly grocery shopping.  

Basil King's novel The Happy Isles is praised as the best since his 1909 breakthrough The Inner Shrine. I do like it, but nowhere near as much as The Empty Sack (1921).

I was once engaged to a woman who knew a woman who had been engaged to Harwood Steele. 

And so it goes.

* Correction: Roger Allen writes, "Are you sure the dozen poets are Canadian? The W.H. Davies nearly everyone thinks of - still in print - is the author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. He only became a poet because he lost a leg jumping on a train in Canada and had to go back to Britain, but that doesn't make him Canadian."

He's correct, of course. I can't explain the error, though it might have something to do with a bottle of Canadian Club sent by an aunt as an early Christmas gift. 

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