Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 222

A big tip of the hat and nod of respect this fine weekend to journalist Stephen Maher for doggedly pursuing a story which so many others picked up, dropped, allowed to escape and subsequently forgot. I refer, of course, to our prime minister's long promised history of the earliest days of the Dominion's national winter sport.

Last we heard – eleven months ago – the book had been subject to a bidding war. Mr Harper himself was to have chosen the winning publisher on 1 March 2012, but as noted on year nine, day 39 of this watch, no publisher stepped forward to claim victory. The prime minister's representative in this matter, Westwood Creative Agency, was similarly silent. Thanks to Mr Maher we now know that the lucky girl was Simon & Schuster Canada. Publication will take place sometime this year.

Today's news raises questions. The first concerns the participation of Greg Stoicoiu, a researcher who, like Preston Manning's George Pepki, has next to no web presence.

Mr Stoicolu has posted a few pleasant sketches on the Elboya Heights Community Association's Facebook page and had a whimsical cartoon published in the March 2012 edition of the Society for International Hockey Research's online Bulletin.* I should add that he is also amongst the dozens of people thanked for providing information on movie exhibition in Reel Time: Movie Exhibitors and Movie Audiences in Prairie Canada, 1896 to 1986, just out from Athabaska University Press.

Given the prime minister's day job and self-imposed constraint which allowed the history a mere fifteen minutes work a day, Mr Stoicoiu's contribution must be very substantial. Skeptics have raised the spectre of ghostwriters. I've never been a believer myself, and am more than willing to take the word of Bruce Westwood, founder and president of Westwood Creative Agency. As reported in Mr Maher's article:

“Remember this has not been ghosted,” he [Bruce Westwood] said. “This is Harper’s writing. It’s surprisingly good.”

Surprisingly good. How's that for hype!

Never mind. What really caught my eye was Mr Westwood's comment that he's read only parts of the manuscript.

Only parts? Of what most certainly will be one of the biggest Canadian books of the decade?

It is finished, right?

* With the news, some are again making a big deal of the prime minister's membership in the Society. Once more, I point out that membership is open to anyone with thirty bucks to spare.

Related posts:

Ignatieff's Ink and Harper's Hockey Book
The Harper Hockey Book Watch (Updated!)
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Eight, Day 253
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 39

Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 236
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 237
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 27
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 77
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Fin (et raison d'être)

About Those Old New Canadian Library Intros (with some stuff on Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese)

Before I'm accused of being ungrateful, allow me this: The old New Canadian Library was good for this country. As a university student, I was happy to ignore its abridgements, poor production values and ill-advised selections. The introductions, however, were hard to stomach. I was then new to Canadian literature – we did not study such things Quebec's public schools – and yet could already see that many of the NCL intros were inept, inaccurate and factually incorrect.

Answers as to why so many were so flawed are found in New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978, Janet Friskney's invaluable study of NCL's best days. The author tells us that founder Malcolm Ross was adamant that there be introductions, quoting: "I thought it would be useful even for teachers, many of whom were teaching Canadian books for the first time and who had never studied Canadian literature."

As Prof Friskney notes: "in many cases, an NCL introduction was one of the earliest, and sometimes the first piece of critical analysis to appear about a particular work."

Such a sad state of affairs. The blind led the blind... and yet things did improve. In 1962, Hugh MacLennan wrote Ross that the NCL was on its way to becoming "one of the most important things in Canadian publishing." He went on to praise the series for making available the previously unavailable and scarce, adding: "These, with the introductions, are building a true body of relationship between critic and author and the public."

(MacLennan's Barometer Rising had already found a place in the series, and would soon be joined by Each Man's Son.)

All this brings me to Carlyle King's Introduction to Wild Geese, Martha Ostenso's big book, which I reread just yesterday. The intro first appeared when Wild Geese joined the NCL in 1961, and was reprinted until 1996, when it was replaced with an afterword by David Arnason.

Thirty-five years.

I first read these words from Prof King in 1986:

Where to begin? How about with that third sentence, in which King describes the literary landscape of 1923 Canada:

Callaghan was on the Left Bank in Paris among the American expatriates, trying his hand at stories for the little magazines of experimental writing...

No, Morley Callaghan was then studying law at the University of Toronto. It was in 1929 that Callaghan first visited the Left Bank, by which time he was a published author comfortably installed within Charles Scribner's stable.

...Grove, who had written for twenty years in the intervals of an itinerant farm-hand's existence, did not get a first novel into print until 1925.

It was in 1905 that Frederick Philip Grove – or, as King seems to prefer, "Philip Grove" – published his first novel. The "itinerant farm hand's existence" included a stretch in Austrian prison, bohemian living in Berlin and Paris, drinks with Andre Gide and H.G. Wells... and I won't go into his crossdressing wife with the birdcage bustle.

The truth about fraudster and faux-Swede Grove – German Felix Paul Greve – was revealed in 1971 through the sleuthing of D.O. Spettigue. While King cannot be faulted for his 1961 Introduction, one wonders that it continued to be used as the new millennium approached.

Carlyle King informs that Grove, Callaghan and Ostenso stand outside "the Sunshine School of Canadian fiction", in which "human nature is fundamentally noble and Rotarian morality always triumphs. The main characters are basically nice people. Nobody ever suffers long or gets really hurt or says "damn.'"

Oh, dear.

In 1923, the most recent of "Louisa [sic] M. Montgomery's long series of 'Anne' books" was Rilla of Ingleside (1921). A novel set during the Great War, it sees one of our dear Anne's sons taken prisoner by the Hun as another is slaughtered on the battlefield. It's true that the latter is "killed instantly by a bullet during a charge at Courcelette", but I'm not at all convinced this is what King meant in writing that nobody ever suffers long.

Can we at least agree that in this case a character "really gets hurt"?

A good many characters are killed in Ralph Connor's The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land – some suffering long before they die.

And "damn"?

There's a whole lotta cussin' goin' on in the novel, much of which comes from the sky pilot himself:

Yes, there's venereal disease, too.

Is it any wonder that no reference to "the Sunshine School of Canadian fiction" is found outside Carlyle King's writings?

Related post:

About Those Ugly NCL Covers

A Canadian Bookshelf Conversation

My recent conversation with the charming Julie Wilson. Pulp novels, literary hoaxes, the Edwardian John Glassco, and the neglected and forgotten in our literature – you'll find it all here at Canadian Bookshelf.

Words of Hate for Maria Monk

Maria Monk was born 195 years ago today in Dorchester, Lower Canada (now Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec). The "Awful Disclosures" published under her name were just one awful part of an awful life that ended tragically in a New York City prison thirty-two years later. Neither the date of her death, nor her place of burial were recorded, but this didn't stop poet John J. MacDonald (a/k/a James MacRae) from putting poison pen to paper. From his self-published Poems of J. J. MacDonald, a Native of County Glengarry (c. 1877):

EPITAPH FOR MARIA MONK

Whoever ye are by this tomb that shall go,
Beware lest ye tread on the filth that’s below,
For under this monument lowly are laid
The mortal remains of a comical jade.

Ye swine that by accident hither come round,
Refrain from disturbing or turning the ground,
Or else you will die from inhaling the air;
Ye feathering songsters, be cautious, take care.

The only exception 'tis proper to make:
That Methodist preachers full freedom may take,
For they loved and accompanied her while she lived,
And from them she special attention received.

In actuality, it wasn't "Methodist preachers", but Presbyterian clergymen who used poor Maria in creating the hoax. There is a difference.

An early, hand-tinted photograph of St Marys, Ontario showing MacDonald's church, Holy Name of Mary (right) and one of the town's two Presbyterian churches (left).

Related posts:

Maria Monk's Immortal Book

Pornography of the Puritan

Maria Monk and the Kennedy Campaign

The Squire Hardman Hoax: Naughtiness Abounds

Squire Hardman

George Colman [pseud. John Glassco]

[Foster, QC]: Pastime Press, 1966

Squire Hardman ranks as John Glassco's most accomplished, audacious and outrageous hoax. It's also by far the least common of his books – fifty copies – which pretty much explains why it has received so little attention. Infamous, yet unknown, like the very best literary hoaxes the work's history is as complex as it is entertaining.

At 1320-lines, Squire Hardman is one of the very few poems that Glassco wrote with any ease – but then, he rarely struggled when writing pornography. His inspiration was The Rodiad, a flagellantine fantasy in verse that is ascribed erroneously to the nearly-forgotten English playwright George Coleman the Younger. Glassco's Squire Hardman is similar in style and theme, though it does depart in one important manner; where in The Rodiad the flagellator is a man, the hand wielding the whip in Squire Hardman belongs to a woman. Here Glassco's own fantasies and desires hold sway.

Squire Hardman would be Glassco's only self-published book. In 1966, fourteen years after composition, he hired a printer in Waterloo, Quebec to produce the fifty, along with a handbill offering the book at ten dollars, postage-paid. This advertisement, describing Squire Hardman as “unquestionably the most brilliant flagellantine poem ever written", was subsequently mailed to academic institutions in Canada and the United States.

As he had in composing the poem, Glassco went to great lengths to mimic the early nineteenth-century style that had been employed in The Rodiad, right down to the title page. He was justifiably proud, writing poet Daryl Hine: “The introduction is in my best dated and documented style of Hoaxery; the nice title-page, decorations, layout are all mine too; I even stuck the labels on the covers."

Central to the hoax was a five-page Introduction, written by Glassco, in which he discusses Colman while comparing and contrasting The Rodiad and Squire Hardman:

The truth is that the two poems can be ascribed to Colman on the basis of internal evidence alone; and strong as this is, it is not really conclusive. All that can be affirmed with certainty is that both poems are by the same hand, and that their brilliance cannot lower the reputation of a writer who usually compounded coarseness with the graver faults of hypocrisy and dullness – from both of which these two poems are at any rate free.

In this mischievous bit of prose, Glassco feigns wonder that The Rodiad has been "reprinted many times”, while its "companion piece", Squire Hardman has been all but ignored. The hoaxter himself considered reprinting, even going so far as to commission illustrations from Philip Core (then a 15-year-old schoolboy). However, the idea was abandoned and the artwork was relegated to a brown paper envelope. A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of Glassco, features one of Core's previously unpublished illustrations.

Object: A well-constructed 68-page book with grey card stock cover. Issued in an edition of fifty copies, each is numbered in Glassco's hand.

Access: Fifteen copies are held by libraries in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. The remaining 35 are, presumably, in private hands. My copy was purchased twenty-two years ago for US$100 from a New York bookseller – I've not seen a single copy for sale since.

Though Squire Hardman has never been reprinted on its own, the poem is currently available alongside The Rodiad, "Punishment Day", "I Never Saw Her Coming" and "The Nursery Tea" in an anthology titled Punitive Poetry. The publisher, AKS Books of Bexhill-on-Sea, Essex, also sells Glassco's other flagellantine classic The English Governess. Both are published without the permission of the author's estate. Very naughty.

Cross-posted – with minor variations – at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

John Glassco, Ghostwriter

Relations and Complications
H.H. The Dayang Muda of Sarawak
London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1929

Bibliographer M. Clark Chambers lists Relations and Complications as Kay Boyle's first book. Although I take exception, we would at the very least agree that it is not the work of the Dayang Muda of Sarawak.

Née Gladys Milton Palmer, of the Huntley & Palmer biscuit empire, Her Highness led the most extraordinary life. Oscar Wilde, Alphonse Daudet and John Ruskin dined at her family's table, as did her godfather George Meredith.

George Meredith with the Dayang Muda's mother, undated.

A woman of amazonian beauty, in 1904 she married Bertram Brooke, whose grandfather, having wrestled approximately 125,000 square kilometres of Borneo from the Sultan of Brunei, was the first White Rajah of Sarawak.


It's not at all difficult to see what encouraged publisher John Lane to draw up a contract for the Dayang Muda's biography. Unforeseen was the sad fact the lady was anything but a memoirist. As Boyle describes it, “her valiant attempts to relive the memories of all she had been, or had not been, served no purpose except to stun her into silence.” And so, the Dayang Muda hired Boyle as a ghostwriter.

Just how many of these words rightfully belong to the American author is a matter to be debated. In her revised – bastardized, really – edition of Robert McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together, Boyle writes that the then-18-year-old Glassco, hired to type the manuscript, "inserted in the mouths of the long-dead great additional flights of repartee and far more brilliant bon mots than I had managed to invent alone.”

Robert McAlmon tells all through his roman à clef The Nightinghouls of Paris, in which Sudge Galbraith (Buffy Glassco) works with Dale Burke (Kay Boyle) on the final draft of the Princess of Faraway's story:

The new script of the memoirs was beautiful, for Sudge typed well and got the manuscript up with professional competence. Later, when the book appeared it had a slight success, but anybody knowing the Princess knew that all the dainty wit and bright malice in the book were Sudge’s. Dale had furnished Irish gaiety and wit here and there, but she admitted that Sudge slipped in the best cracks. He had a talent for drawing old dames and gents with cruel caricature, and while his contributions to the book were trivial, the memoirs were so trivial that Sudge’s contribution took on profundity.

Late in life, Boyle wrote Chambers that of the seventeen chapters, she had had nothing to do with the final two, believing that these had been written by Glassco and forgotten poet Archibald Craig, the Dayang Muda's cousin.

In his own Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco claims to have been nothing more than the typist. Typical of a man given to humility and self-abasement; typical also of one who took delight in literary subterfuge.

Object: A fairly thick book consisting of 271 pages and 29 plates, ending anti-climactically with a further six pages of advertisements for other John Lane titles. My copy seems to have suffered from a horrible skin condition (now in abeyance).



Access: Uncommon. Worldcat lists only seven libraries that hold copies – all in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Canadians and Malaysians are out of luck. Only two copies are currently listed for sale online. Though damaged, the cheaper is priced fairly at €275. Those with even deeper pockets will want to consider the more expensive volume. Offered by a Maryland bookseller at US$750, it features Boyle's signature and telling comment: "This was the hardest writing I have ever done." A man with pockets full of lint, for years I kept an eye out for an affordable copy. In all that time, I spotted not one in a dust jacket (which I'm beginning to believe did not exist). I bought my copy for US$85 from a California bookseller in the long, hot summer of 2004.

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

In Search of George Pepki, Poet

Yesterday's Globe and Mail featured a short work of fiction by Preston Manning. Titled "2018: The new health care", it's of a particular, peculiar, unnamed genre in which political types imagine a future where their greatest fantasy is realized.

I don't know... let's call it porn.

What Mr Manning does – what all who write these pieces do – is set up a row of carefully chosen dominos, each in itself a fantasy, which when set in motion culminate in the greatest fantasy of all.

Call it a climax.

Here Mr Manning imagines the election in Quebec of a "reform-minded government", the death of the Bloc Québécois, a Wikileak that exposes "media executives, editorialists, journalists and television personalities" as health care hypocrites and a "Nobel Prize-winner [sic]" who has Liberals and New Democrats eating crow. And the greatest fantasy of all? The abolition of medicare, of course:

The House, now enlightened by science and buoyed with Christmas cheer, unanimously approved a motion endorsing the "mixed systems" approach to health care and commending it to all provinces and territories. The motion specifically affirmed that such a system was completely compatible with the Canadian way, since, as all members had always known in their hearts, "mixed systems are the very essence of Canada’s national identity."

God bless us, every one!

As I say, one man's fantasy... but what interests me is the domino that Mr Manning calls "The Pepki Case":

George Pepki was a retired Alberta farmer who suffered from a kidney ailment and was referred by his family doctor to a specialist. While waiting for over four months to see the specialist, George's condition became critical and his family rushed him to the emergency ward of an Edmonton hospital. After waiting there for more than six hours and receiving no help, the family in desperation flew George to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he was diagnosed, treated and released within 72 hours. The family sought to recover the entire cost of the unauthorized trip and treatment from Alberta Health Services, which refused to pay. The Pepkis then took Alberta to court, the case eventually reaching the Supreme Court of Canada about the same time as Quebec was instituting its health-care reforms.

George Pepki is one of only two names featured in "2018: The new health care". The other, Nobel Prize winner Dr Lars Aalborg, is a figment of Mr Manning's imagination, but George Pepki is very much a real person. How do I know? Because Mr Manning has mentioned George Pepki before – from the floor of the House of Commons, no less. Here's Mr Manning on 2 October 1996 debating Bill C-45:

Thinking of the ineffectiveness of bureaucratic action in these areas, the inability of bureaucratic measures and institutions to protect people or to rehabilitate criminals, I am reminded of a poem by the Canadian poet George Pepki, inspired by the children's nursery rhyme "Humpty-Dumpty'':

Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

And what is the moral to this little rhyme?
A moral with meaning for men in our time?
The moral is this, and its lesson is true:
There are certain things that the state cannot do.

If all the King's horses and all the King's men
Cannot put an egg together again,
Is it not a false hope, an illusion, a sin,
To ask civil servants to reconstruct men?

Now, we don't hear much poetry recited in the House of Commons, so you'll understand why this particular poem and the proud Pepki name have stayed with me. But here's the thing: in the fourteen years since, I've not seen another poem by "Canadian poet George Pepki". Not only have there been no volumes of verse and nothing in our little magazines, no more than this morsel from Hansard has made its way onto the web.

When yesterday's Globe and Mail hit the stands I'd all but forgotten George Pepki, but he's now very much front of mind. Has the poet actually suffered a kidney ailment? Did his family fly him down to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona? Was he really diagnosed, treated and released within 72 hours? Is there a case now winding its way to the Supreme Court? Or is Mr Manning simply imagining a future in which these trials will be visited upon George Pepki?

I've written the former Reform leader about the poet George Pepki, but have yet to receive a response.

Update: On 4 January I received a very generous email from Preston Manning in answer to my queries. Mystery solved... for me, at least; Mr Manning has asked that I keep the contents confidential. It's my hope that one day he'll share the secret of George Pepki with the public at large.

Hard Copy

Mention here is a bit late, but not so much that one can't pick up a copy as a last minute stocking stuffer. The new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries features the debut of The Dusty Bookcase on paper. Subject? Nothing less than John Glassco's most intricate piece of hoaxery: The Temple of Pederasty. Banned in Canada, pulped in the United States, its history is one involving deception, forgery, plagiarism, smuggling and a cold government bureaucrat.

I'll say no more except to point out that the very same issue features a very fine piece by Zachariah Wells' on The Mulgrave Road, Harry Bruce's 1951 collection of verse.

Neglected, not suppressed.

Maria Monk and the Kennedy Campaign

Hard to get much work done this past weekend, what with the din drifting across the border, so it seems somehow appropriate that I came across the item below, printed fifty years ago today in the 23 March 1960 edition of the Milwaukee Journal.

Click to enlarge, as they say.

A full 124 years after publication – a full 124 years after it was discredited – and still Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was being paraded about by religious bigots. Here it joined old frauds Abraham Lincoln's Warning and the bogus Knights of Columbus Oath, along with newer works like Do you Want the Pope for a President?, written specifically with Kennedy in mind. I dare say that the book credited to Montrealer Maria is the most interesting of the bunch.

Though there's little fun to be found in a hoax built upon a brain-damaged prostitute, a smile might be raised by Don W. Hillis' If America Elects a Catholic President. The prolific pastor wrote a good many works, including Tongues, Healing and You, What Can Tongues Do for You? and Is the Whole Body a Tongue? My favourite is The Mini-Skirt Speaks. I present the first four paragraphs:

I want to make it clear that I am a Christian miniskirt. That is, I go to church every Sunday. What's more, I attend an evangelical Church. Of course, I am not the only Christian miniskirt in town. There are many others who go to my church.

Though we represent a variety of colors and patterns there is one thing we have in common. We all have a way of revealing attractive thighs, especially when the legs are crossed. They tell me that's the most comfortable way to sit.

Unless I am misreading the situation we seem to make our wearers a bit self-conscious. At least the girl who wears me is always tugging at my hem. Though I am not an expert on human nature, this appears to indicate some kind of complex.

I have also noted that we miniskirts have the ability to attract a good deal of masculine attention even at church. At first I took pride in the fact that men are fascinated by my pattern and color design. However, just this morning I heard the preacher say that this was not really what the young men (some not so young) were looking at. Though I was all ears when he started to preach, "The Appeal of a Miniskirt," I was embarrassed before he was through.

Imagine the stories Ann Coulter's little black dress could tell.

My thanks to Marc Fischer of Public Collectors for the image of Pastor Hillis' tract.

Related posts:

Maria Monk's Immortal Book

Pornography of the Puritan

Words of Hate for Maria Monk

Christmas Comes Early

Books are Best

The Globe, 18 December 1909

William Briggs may be gone, but the publisher's words are as true today as they were a century ago. Books are best... and not only for Christmas. So, with the holiday season approaching, I point out the three books covered here this past year that are actually in print.

Montreal Confidential

Al Palmer

Montreal: Véhicule, 2009

$12.00

A most welcome surprise. After nearly six decades, Al Palmer's Montreal Confidential returned to print last month. Where the original seemed fairly designed to fall apart, this new edition benefits from proper printing, 22 photographs and illustrations and, most of all, a four-page "Appreciation" by William Weintraub.

The English Governess

John Glassco

Ottawa: Golden Dog, 2001

$19.99

The English Governess is currently available from a number of publishers, but Golden Dog's is by far the superior, owing to a 10-page Introduction by Michael Gnarowski. A friend of the author, he provides a fascinating account of the curious history of our best-known work of erotica.

Les Demi-civilisés

Jean-Charles Harvey

Montreal: Éditions Typo, 2005

$12.95

Perhaps in deference to Cardinal Villeneuve, Amazon and Chapters/Indigo don't bother offering this book. Interested parties are directed to the the publisher's website or their local independent. Incredibly, the first printing of Fear's Folly (1982), John Glassco's important translation, is still available. The most modest of paperbacks, at $27.95 it seems a touch pricey, but just think of the storage costs that have run up these past 27 years.

A trio of others, The Whip Angels, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and Glassco's completion of Aubrey Beardsley's Under the Hill, are all being exploited available through various POD publishers. But, honestly, no one wants to find something that looks like this under their tree.

Pictures of Harriet

Google Harriet Marwood, the heroine of John Glassco's The English Governess and Harriet Marwood, Governess, and you'll find the top site brings this image of a 'Professional Disciplinarian and Spankologist' located in New York City. The visitor is told that this 'no nonsense lady... takes her inspiration from a renowned, stern English governess of longstanding literary fame and believes in the expert application of all manner of traditional domestic corporal discipline as needed and/or deserved.'

I'm not so sure this is how the author imagined his creation, though I can say with great certainty that the modern Ms. Marwood's clothing isn't at all correct.

Glassco commissioned dozens of illustrations for his erotic works – Squire Hardman (unused), The Temple of Pederasty (banned), Fetish Girl (rejected) and The Jupiter Sonnets (unpublished) – but nothing at all for Harriet, governess to Richard Lovel. The only sense we have of how Glassco saw his creation is found in his writing. Here she is, as first viewed through the eyes of Richard's father:

Mr. Lovel saw before him a tall young woman in her middle twenties, dressed with quiet elegance. A brunette with a very white skin, she wore her dark, almost black hair in a plain style under her small bonnet, parted from forehead to crown and drawn smoothly back to a heavy chignon at the nape of her strong, graceful neck. Her brow was well-shaped and intellectual, the nose was straight, short and full of energy, the mouth rather wide, with full underlie, the chin quite prominent. Everything in her face and pose denoted decision and force; but her glance, reserved, serious, even academic, could not conceal the warm brilliance of her violet-grey eyes.

The first published version of Harriet and Richard's romance, The English Governess (Paris: Ophelia, 1960), had no cover illustration; nor did the reissue Under the Birch (Paris: Ophelia, 1965). It wasn't until the appearance of the more polite telling of this love story, Harriet Marwood, Governess (New York: Grove, 1967), that the heroine was finally depicted.

As with Fetish Girl, Glassco hated the cover. Here he complained that the model, 'though well constructed', had 'the countenance of a mental defective'.

This poor failed Harriet reappears recast on the cover of the 1970 Grove edition of Yvonne; or, The Adventures and Intrigues of a French Governess with Her Pupils, an erotic novel first published in 1899.

Of the other depictions of the flagellating governess, Glassco would have only seen the first two. Sadly, his opinions are unrecorded.

Tuchtiging tot Tederheid [Harriet Marwood, Governess].

Anonymous [Gerrit Komrij, trans.]

Amsterdam: Uitgeversij de Arbeiderspers, 1969.

Tuchtiging tot Tederheid? Rough translation: Discipline to Tenderness.

Harriet Marwood, Governess

John Glassco

Toronto: General, 1976.

The lone Canadian edition of the cleaner version, and the only one to be printed under Glassco's name. It features an intentionally misleading Preface written by the author.

Harriet Marwood, Governess

Anonymous

New York: Grove, 1986.

An edition that perpetuates the misconception that the novel dates from the time of Queen Victoria. From the back cover: 'A curious exploration of the private lives of outwardly uptight Victorians... Alongside such classics as My Secret Life, Pleasure Bound, A Man with a Maid, and The Pearl, Harriet Marwood, Governess takes its place as one of the outstanding works of erotic fiction produced in the Victorian era.'

The English Governess

Anonymous

New York: Masquerade, 1998.

Harriet as a poor man's Bettie Page. There is nothing in the packaging to suggest that the book doesn't take place in the 'fifties.

The English Governess

John Glassco

Ottawa: Golden Dog, 2000.

The sole Canadian edition of The English Governess, and the only one to appear under the author's real name. It has a great advantage over previous editions in that it features a highly informative introduction by Michael Gnarowski.

Recommended highly.

Later that same day: Roger Ebert writes of books and his inability to rid himself of the 'scandalous The English Governess', bought 'in a shady book store on the Left Bank in 1965'.

A longer version of this post – more pictures! – appears at A Gentleman of Pleasure, a blog devoted to things Glassco.

Related post:

Canada's Olympians (Part III)
More Marwood