Showing posts with label Hood (Robert Allison). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hood (Robert Allison). Show all posts

01 December 2021

The 1921 Globe 100 206: Don't Mention the War


The Globe, 3 December 1921
The 1921 edition of 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' the Globe's annual list of best books, begins on a positive note: "Author's and publishers have had an unhappy experience during the past few years owing to conditions which they could not control, but the current season has a distinctly better tone."

The Great War must surely have ranked as the preeminent condition. There were years in which the conflict came close to dominating 'Recent Books and the Outlook.' The 1920 edition had an entire section devoted to books about the war:


Not only is the Great War barely mentioned in the 1921 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' just three of its 206 books are related to the bloodshed just twenty-four months past. Great War poetry disappears entirely... and with it poetry. I exaggerate, but only slightly. Eight volumes of verse are listed, down from nineteen the previous year; four are Canadian:
My Pocket Beryl - Mary Josephine Benson
Later Poems - Bliss Carman
Bill Boram: A Ballad - Robert Norwood
Beauty and Life - Duncan Campbell Scott
I'm not familiar with any of these titles, but have read and reviewed Robert Service's 1921 Ballads of a Bohemian. To this point, the Bard of the Yukon had been a 'Recent Books and the Outlook' favourite;' I'd thought Ballads of a Bohemian a shoo-in. Is Bill Boram: A Ballad so much better? I must investigate.

As in years past, fiction makes up the biggest category; their number is seventy-two, the star being If Winter Comes by A.S.M. Hutchinson:


Hutchinson's achievement aside, the Globe is disappointed by foreign offerings:
Fiction in other countries has been disappointing during the last year, and has certainly not proved as rich as biography or history. American readers fall into two classes says the New York Times Book Review, those who like John Dos Passos' "The Three Soldiers" and those who do not.
The correct title is Three Soldiers.

It doesn't make the list.

My copy
(New York: Doran, 1921)
Where foreign writers of fiction disappoint, Canadians flourish. A record twenty-four Canadian fiction titles figure. Or is it twenty-three? Twenty-two?
The Lone Trail - Luke Allan
Anne of the Marshland - Lady Byng
Barriers - Lady Byng
To Him That Hath - Ralph Connor
The Lobstick Trail - Douglas Durkin
The Gift of the Gods - Pearl Foley
Red Meekins - W.A. Fraser
Maria Chapdelaine - Louis Hemon [trans W.H. Blake]
Maria Chapdelaine - Louis Hemon [trans Andrew Macphail]
The Quest of Alistair - Robert A. Hood
The Hickory Stick - Nina Moore Jamieson
Little Miss Melody - Marian Keith
The Conquest of Fear - Basil King
Partner of Chance - H.H. Knibbs
The Snowshoe Trail - Edison Marshall
Purple Springs - Nellie McClung
Rilla of Ingleside - L.M. Montgomery
Are All Men Alike? - Arthur Stringer
The Spoilers of the Valley - Robert Watson
Let's ignore the misspelling of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's surname, shall we. Louis Hémon's, too. Interesting to see both Maria Chapdelaine translations, don't you think? What really intrigues is the inclusion of Basil King's The Conquest of Fear.


As my 1942 World Library edition (above) suggests, The Conquest of Fear is a work of philosophy. The Globe describes it at a novel:


The inclusion of Arthur Stringer's Are All Men Alike? is just as intriguing. The author published two books in 1921, the other being his heart-breaking roman à clef The Wine of Life. By far the finest Stringer I've read thus far, my dream is to one day bring out an edition featuring the twenty-four James Montgomery Flagg illustrations it inspired.

My collection of the Globe's 1921 Canadian "fiction" titles
Is Are All Men Alike? superior to The Wine of Life?

I haven't read it, nor have I read Jess of the Rebel Trail or Little Miss Melody. I have read Miriam of Queen's and The Window Gazer, both of which disappointed. The Empty Sack is my very favourite Basil King title, and yet it too pales beside The Wine of Life.

Or is it better? Are they all better?

What do I know? I think Three Soldiers is the best novel of 1921.

Yes, I'm one of those who like it.
Posted by Brian Busby at 3:00 AM 0 comments
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17 December 2018

The Globe 100 179 of 1918



One month after the Armistice, the post-war world is in many ways unrecognizable. Consider this from the front page of the December 7, 1918, Globe:


The Austro-Hungarian Empire is gone... and so too is "The Season's Best Books in Review," the Globe's annual gathering of the year's finest titles. I was a fan of the latter (not the former), writing about it here, here, and here.


"Recent Books and the Outlook," the successor to "The Season's Best Books in Review," made its debut in that same December edition of the Globe. Though similar in appearance and length – five pages – there is a marked difference in tone, as evidenced in this early dig at our tardy allies to the south: "Of war books there is still a large output, but the situation has changed. Those dealing with actual fighting, on either great or small scale, have had their day in Canada, but they are still at high tide in the United States, which entered the war about three years later and consequently are so much behind in that respect."

A second dig follows from someone described only as a "competent critic," who notes that war verse hasn't nearly so plentiful as in previous years: "War became a mere business when the United States entered into the arena with their slogan, 'We've got four years to do this job.' No poet could become enthused over a job. This cessation of singing was inevitable, for the war had gone on long enough and had deteriorated into a debauch of mutual slaughter."

And yet, the war dominates Poetry, the first of the ten "Recent Books and the Outlook" sections:

The Volunteer and Other Poems - Herbert Asquith
Fighting Men of Canada - Douglas Leader Durkin
Canadian Poems of he Great War - John W. Garvin, ed.
Spun Yarn and Spindrift - Norah M. Holland
In the Day of Battle (revised) - Carrie Ellefscottn Holman, ed.
Poems and Plays, Volume 1 - John Masefield
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - John McCrae
War - Ronald Campbell Mcfie
The Little Marshal and Other Poems - Owen E. McGillicuddy
Gitanjali and Fruit Gathering - Rabindranath Tagore
Songs of an Airman and Other Poems - Hartley Munro Thomas
Canadian Twilight and Other Poems - Bernard Freeman Trotter
Rough Rhymes of a Padre - Woodbine Willie

"Special attention should be paid by all lovers of poetry to the work of the late Lieut. Bernard Trotter of Toronto," writes the competent critic. This may explain how it is that Trotter's book, published in in 1917 and praised in that year's "Season's Best Books in Review,"  holds a spot in this 1918 list.

Miss Holland's collection is described as "a distinct advance in Canadian literature, both in craftsmanship and haunting charm," but my eyes were drawn to this relatively lengthy review of Douglas Durkin's The Fighting Men of Canada:


To be perfectly fair to Durkin, "hell" appears eighteen times in The Fighting Men of Canada, but only once does it follow "yell":


Nevertheless, this review is something new. "The Season's Best Books in Review" was all about the Best Books, but here the Globe is including what its critic thinks is one of the worst. Of the 179 books cover in "Recent Books and the Outlook," not one is given nearly so savage a beating as The Fighting Men of Canada.

The anonymous critic does have his prejudices, as exposed in his praise of War by crazy* Scottish eugenicist Ronald Campbell Macfie, M.A., M.B., C.M., LL.D.:


We Canadians dominate the Poetry section – eight of the thirteen titles! – but falter horribly in other categories. Just two of the twenty Children's titles are Canadian, and we're completely shut out of Biography, Art, Travel and the newly-minted Reconstruction section. Our second best showing comes in Fiction, in which we manage just twelve of seventy-two titles:

The Unknown Wrestler - H.A. Cody
Battles Royal Down North - Norman Duncan
Harbor Tales Down North - Norman Duncan
The Three Sapphires - W.A. Fraser
The Fugitive Sleuth - Hulbert Footner
The Chivalry of Keith Leicester - Robert Allison Hood
The Romance of Western Canada - R.G. MacBeth
Three Times and Out - Nellie L. McClung
Willow, the Wisp - Archie P. McKishnie
The Islands of Adventure - Theodore G. Roberts
Beautiful Joe - Marshall Saunders
The Cow Puncher - Robert J.C. Stead

No word of explanation is given for the inclusion of Marshall Saunders' 1897 novel Beautiful Joe. You'll note that Norman Duncan weighs in with two titles, despite being two years dead.

RIP
Of the seventy-two  Fiction titles reviewed, the only one I've read is Robert Allison Hood's The Chivalry of Keith Leicester:


Not exactly a glowing recommendation.


Ah, hell, I didn't think all that much of it either.

Nineteen-eighteen wasn't exactly a banner year for Canadian books. No wonder our competent critic was so grumpy:
The problem of Vers Libre has fallen into neglect of late, but this mongrel form of expression has left its mark upon even some of our most orthodox poets. It is to be hoped that with the cessation of German atrocities, the atrocities committed on the fair muses by the super-vers-librists will go to the junk-heap of junkerdom.
He'd have been grumpier still had he known what the post-war would bring.

* An excerpt from Macfie's 1917 essay "Some of the Evolutionary Consequences of War":
(cliquez pour agrandir)
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Posted by Brian Busby at 6:30 AM 2 comments
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09 July 2009

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.
Posted by Brian Busby at 12:21 PM 2 comments
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