Showing posts with label King (Basil). Show all posts
Showing posts with label King (Basil). Show all posts

08 December 2025

The 1925 Globe 110: Less Motoring, More Reading


Much to my dismay, this year's Globe 100 was published late last month. I thought I'd made it clear last year that November is too early. This annual round-up of the year's best books should never appear before December. How is it that a conservative newspaper is so willing to flout tradition?

Four books from the Globe's 1925 and 2025 lists.
Published on the second Wednesday in December, the 1925 list is introduced by Arts editor M.O. Hammond, who shares his concerns regarding motoring, dancing and radio, while repositioning books as something other than diversions:  


"It is a good year for books," writes Hammond, and yet at 110 titles the 1925 Globe list is far shorter than any previous year. For goodness sake, the 1920 list numbered 264!

I suspect the Globe advertising department was somewhat to blame. The list runs just three pages, and in terms of column inches the feature attracted less than a third of the last year's advertising. Of the companies that did place ads, Eaton's wins for including this:


How I'd love to see a photo the Book Advisor's "special nook."

(Apologies, I didn't mean that to sound filthy.)

The 1925 Globe 110, consists of nine categories:
Travel
Juvenile
Economics & Sociology
Poetry & Drama
Fiction by Canadian Writers
British & Foreign Fiction [sic]
History & Biography
Religion & Theology
Essays
Canadians are represented in every one save 'British & Foreign Fiction' (naturally) and 'Economics & Sociology' (make of that what you will). More than ever, Canadians dominate 'Poetry & Drama' taking nine of the ten titles:
Far Horizons - Bliss Carman
Canadian Singers and their Songs - Edward S. Carswell
Pillar of Smoke - John Crichton [Norman Gregor Guthrie]
Songs of a Bluenose - H.A. Cody
Low Life: A Comedy in Three Acts - Mazo de la Roche
British Drama - Allardyce Nicoll
Little Songs - Majorie L.C. Pickthall
Wayside Gleams - Laura G. Salverson
The Sea Wall - Lyon Sharmon
Locker Room Ballads - W. Hastings Webling
To my surprise, three of the ten feature in my collection:


The introduction to the two fiction categories comes courtesy of C.C. Jenkins. He begins: "Glancing over the past year's lists of fiction, one is moved to the comment that, though there are a few outstanding works, [there are] none that give promise of greatness." 

Here are eight 1925 novels that did not make the Globe's 1925 list:
Dark Laughter - Sherwood Anderson
Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
No More Parades - Ford Maddox Ford
Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - Anita Loos
Carry On, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf 
Where Hammond was concerned of strain, stress, and restlessness in post-war society, Jenkins writes of nervousness and hysterical predilections of its fiction, all the while gently assuring the reader that these conditions are abating:
Fiction is slipping back into its old groove – that of merely telling a story and telling it as well as possible  – which groove, after all, may be followed with permanent success. That is what the reader has demanded in the past and what he will continue to demand in the future. 'Jazzed ' literature is but a passing phase, which has just about seen its day.
He's partial to old standbys like James Oliver Curwood, Jeffery Farnol. Ellen Glasgow, A.S.M. Hutchinson, William J. Locke, George Barr McCutcheon, and Stewart Edward White, all of whom are included in this list.

For the second year running, Canadian fiction writers score eighteen titles:
Glorious Apollo - E. Barrington
Treading the Wine Press - Ralph Connor
The Scarlet Sash - John M. Elson
The Golden Galleon of Caribee - Gordon Hill Grahame
The Living Forest - Arthur Heming
Day Before Yesterday -Fred Jacob
The High Forfeit - Basil King
Brains, Limited - Archie P. McKishnie
Painted Fires - Nellie McClung
Emily Climbs - L.M. Montgomery
Broken Waters -  Frank L. Packard
The Power and the Glory - Gilbert Parker
The Crimson West - Alex Philip
When Sparrows Fall - Laura Goodman Salverson
The Laughing Birds - Archibald Sullivan
The Chopping Bell and Other Laurentian Stories - M. Vitorin
Captain Salvation - Frederick William Wallace
I own four, yet have read only Wild Geese... and that just this October!

The well-loved olive green book is a first edition of Emily Climbs.
Though Wild Geese leads the 'Fiction by Canadian Writers' list, it's clear Jenkins does not share my enthusiasm:


I know it's been just just two months, but the impression Wild Geese left in this reader's mind is still quite deep. Jenkins isn't terribly keen on Canadian novelists and short story writers. "Fiction writers of Canada have made a formidable contribution to the world's lighter reading" isn't much of compliment. Ralph Connor's Treading the Wine Press is described as a "story with strong characters but somewhat weak in continuity and plot interest." Characters in Frank L. Packard's Broken Waters are "mere automatic, made to fit the story's needs." Alex Philip receives faint praise for The Crimson West:"a powerful bit of work, not outstanding in a literary way, but very creditably done."

Jenkins is much more complimentary of The High Forfeit by long-time Dusty Bookcase favourite Basil King:


This is one of the first books I ever bought by Rev King. How is it I still haven't read it?

Nineteen-twenty-five is the pinnacle of twentieth-century English-language literature, yet as far as the Canadian is concerned, it's little more than a dead zone. The most notable novel that did not make the Globe's list is R.T.M. Scott's The Black Magician.


It is right that it didn't make the cut.

The Canadian non-fiction titles, typically travel books, collections of sermons, and dry political biographies penned by allies, surprises with the inclusion of Marjorie Pickthall: A Book of Remembrance. A favourite volume in my library, it's a beautifully produced, loving tribute to a once-celebrated, now forgotten writer, put together by those who clearly shared great affection for their departed friend.


Marjorie Pickthall's posthumous Little Songs is listed amongst the years's best poetry collections. Like the others, it is long out of print. The good news is that two of the forty Canadian titles on the 1925 Globe 110 are in print today: Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese, Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery, and Painted Fires by Nellie McClung.*

Three is thrice the average for these century-old lists!

I like to think the Canadian books on the 2025 Globe list will fare even better. I also like to think that in one hundred years book publishing will still exist.
* When first posted, I'd written that only two titles, Wild Geese and Emily Climbs, were in print today. A reader's comment reminded me that Painted Fires was revived in 2014 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Thank you, Melwyk!

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26 May 2025

On an Eminent Author's Lost Film


A brief addendum to last week's post on Basil King's 1912 novel The Street Called Straight.  

Seven Basil King novels have made it to the silver screen thus far, the earliest being a 1915 adaptation of The Wild Olive (1910). The most recent, Tides of Passion, is based on King's 1903 novel In the Garden of Charity.


One hundred years have passed since Tides of Passion – last month marked the centenary of its release – and yet I hold out hope that further adaptations are on the way.

The film called The Street Called Straight was the first of two Basil King features produced by Eminent Authors Pictures Inc. EAP, as I'm sure it was never known, was the short-lived brainchild of Samuel Goldwyn and Rex Beach. Their idea was to focus less on big stars and more on the writers who'd penned the novels upon which the films were based. Other Eminent Authors included Gertrude Atherton, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Rupert Hughes, Gouverneur Morris, and Charles E. Whittaker. and of course, Beach himself.

Moving Picture World, 21 February 1920
In the early years of Hollywood – 1919 and 1920, to be precise – this might've seemed a great idea. It certainly appealed to me... but then I thought of how I'm nearly always disappointed by film adaptations. And, really, how many people saw Fight Club for not other reason than it is based on a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk?

Moving Picture World, 6 March 1920
The man tasked with reducing The Street Called Straight, a 415-page novel to 4986 feet of film, was Edward T. Lowe, Jr, (1890-1973). He's best known, I suppose, for House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). This is not to suggest that King played no part in bringing The Street Called Straight to the screen. If trade magazine accounts are to be believed, the author was an active participant and was often present on set.

King was so keen on the new medium that he came up with ideas for future films. Earthbound (1920), his second Eminent Authors picture, was based on an original story that reflects his growing interest in spiritualism. Sadly, it is another lost silent. One-hundred-and-five-year-old reviews suggest that it ranks with The Miracle Man, Hollywood's adaptation of fellow Canadian Frank L. Packard's novel of the same name, as one of the great lost silent films.

Moving Picture World, 11 December 1920
The Street Called Straight is also a lost film. In fact, every screen adaptation of a King novel – In the Garden of Charity, Let No Man Put Asunder, The Inner Shrine, The Wild Olive,  The Street Called Straight, The Lifted Veil, The Dust Flower – is lost. And so, given that it is likely no one alive has actually seen The Street Called Straight, we rely on contemporary reviews to give some sense of what we're missing.

What surprises most is that every review describes a film that in no way deviates from the source material. Hell, Fight Club deviates from the novel. Do not get me started on 1998's The Patriot.



Screenwriter Lowe's adherence to the plot is unlike anything I've seen in a silent film. The longest description I've found, published in the 21 February 1920 edition of Moving Picture World, could serve as a summary of the novel itself:


Did that serve as a spoiler? You knew Olivia and Peter would end up together in the end, right? 

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19 May 2025

The Long and Winding Street

The Street Called Straight
By the author of The Inner Shrine [Basil King]
New York: Harper, 1912
415 pages

Olivia Guion seems a most dislikable character. As a young woman of eighteen she quite literally turned her back on a marriage proposal. Olivia had not said a word, rather she'd stood up and, "fanning herself languidly, walked away."

See what I mean?

The young man left seated awaiting her reply was Peter Davenant. His love for Olivia was such that he could not help himself, even though he expected rejection.

But silence?

At thirty-three, Davenant is again seated next to Olivia, this time as the last minute substitute at a dinner party hosted by her father. She pretends that they've never met, while Davenant is so modest as to believe that she does not remember him. Olivia engages in polite conversation – "Twice round the world since you were last in Boston? How interesting!” – before turning to the other guests with animated talk about her forthcoming marriage to dashing Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley of the Sussex Rangers.

After the final course, the ladies retire to another room leaving Davenant alone with Olivia's father Hector Guion and her much older cousin Rodney Temple, Director of the Department of Ceramics in the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts. Davenant's evening becomes still more uncomfortable as unwitting and unwilling witness to Guion admission that he.... Well, what exactly?

Hector Guion is one of the most respected men in Boston. He heads an investment firm, established by his grandfather, which handles the old money of Old Money. Guion appears to have brought the business to new heights, as evidenced by his increasingly lavish lifestyle, when in fact Olivia's papa has been embezzling his clients' investments. Now, the jig is up. Guion expects the evening will be his last as a free man.

Peter Davenant is an entirely different sort. His entrée to the dining table shared by Guoins and Temples comes by way of adoption. Born Peter Hallett, "his parents according to the flesh" were missionaries in China. Both died young, leaving their church to care for their son. He spent several years in an orphanage before being taken in and given a new name by childless Bostonians Tom and Sarah Davenant. Thus was the boy elevated to a level that would, at age twenty-four, bring the humiliating marriage proposal.

As the narrator notes, "the years between twenty-four and thirty-three are long and varied." In those nine years, Davenant amassed a significant fortune through an investment in a copper mine somewhere in the region of Lake Superior. These newfound riches cut Davenant loose from all moorings, setting him adrift. He has indeed been twice around the world since leaving Boston. On his second tour du monde Davenant returns to the Chinese city of Hankou, his birthplace.

Hankou, China, c.1880, about the time Davenant would have been born.

Before then, he'd known very little of his schoolteacher mother and physician father. Davenant reads hospital records written in his father's hand, visits his mother's grave, and finds the place at which their modest home had once stood:
It was curious. If there was anything in heredity, he ought to have felt at least some faint impulse from their zeal; but he never had. He could not remember that he had ever done anything for any one. He could not remember that he had ever seen the need of it. It was curious. He mused on it – mused on the odd differences between one generation and another, and on the queer way in which what is light to the father will sometimes become darkness in the son.
   It was then that he found the question raising itself within him, “Is that what’s wrong with me?”
   The query took him by surprise. It was so out of keeping with his particular kind of self-respect that he found it almost droll. If he had never given himself to others, as his parents had, he had certainly paid the world all he owed it. He had nothing wherewith to reproach himself on that score.
And yet, Peter Davenant (né Hallett) does reproach himself.

Back in Boston, in the aftermath of the dinner party, he decides to rescue Hector Guion by giving him his riches. Olivia is another beneficiary in that the gift will enable the Guion family to dodge a scandal that might otherwise endanger her engagement to Rupert Ashley. Hector Guion is eager to accept the offer, but not so his daughter... until she realizes that several elderly women might be cast out on the street as a result of her father's transgression. 

All looks to work out until Ashley arrives from the Old Country and thrusts a spanner into the works.  

There is much to admire about Basil King's novels, intricate plots being foremost. The Street Called Straight is an exception. Though simple, it is no less enjoyable owing to the ways in which the story affects its characters. Hector Guion is the first to undergo transformation.

Harper's Magazine, February 1912

The years between twenty-four and thirty-three are indeed long and varied, but so too are the years between eighteen and twenty-seven. No one character is stronger and more attractive than the woman who at age eighteen walked away from a marriage proposal fanning herself.

Bloomer: This one is far longer than the norm. Bear with me.

We begin with Devenant being in "a position from which he could not withdraw," facing "a humiliation to be dislodged from." I'm probably making too much of his moments "face to face with Olivia Guion" and am really going out on a limb with "laying up the treasure," but the final two sentences most certainly qualify as a bloomer:

As he was apparently able to shoulder it, it would have been better to let him do it. In that case he, Peter Davenant, would not have found himself in a position from which he could not withdraw, while it was a humiliation to be dislodged from it. But, on the other hand, he would have missed his most wonderful experience. There was that side to it, too. He would not have had these moments face to face with Olivia Guion which were to be as food for his sustenance all the rest of his life. During these days of discussion, of argument, of conflict between his will and hers, he had the entirely conscious sense that he was laying up the treasure on which his heart would live as long as it continued to beat. The fact that she found intercourse with him more or less distasteful became a secondary matter. To be in her presence was the thing essential, whatever the grounds on which he was admitted there.
Trivia: Published anonymously in May 1912, all that was known was that the same hand had penned The Inner Shrine, which had been biggest selling novel of 1909. There had been suggestions that Edith Wharton or Henry James had written that novel and its follow-up The Wild Olive (1910).

In 1912, The Street Called Straight was the second biggest selling novel in the United States. In 1910, The Wild Olive had made only number three.


Object and Access: An attractive hardcover in crimson boards with gold type featuring eight illustrations by American artist Orson Lowell (1871-1956).

A first edition, I purchased my copy in error. What I'd meant to order was a signed first edition from the very same bookseller. It set me back US$100. The signed copy was US$125.

I regret nothing.

The book's healthy condition was no doubt aided by the notice that appears on its front flap (right).

As I write, just one copy of the first edition in jacket is listed online. Price: US$100. A jacketless copy in not so great condition is being offered by a Nova Scotia bookseller at C$5, which seems an incredible bargain. 

The British first, published in 1912 by Methuen, is nowhere in sight, though later printings are available for purchase.

In 1920, Grosset & Dunlop issued a photoplay edition with plates from the film. Copies start at US$13.50.

The novel first appeared – or began appearing – as a serialization that ran in Harper's Monthly Magazine during the first seven months of 1912. The book landed in bookstores in the fifth month of that year.

The Street Called Straight is available online in both book form and serialization courtesy of the Internet Archive. Those who choose to read the novel in serialization will be rewarded with four Lowell illustrations that were not included in the finished product. I've included one of the February 1912 illustrations above, but this one from January 1912 is by far my favourite:


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02 January 2025

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s


In my twenties, the 'twenties – by which I mean the 1920s – seemed the height of art, film, decadence, glamour, and romance.

I'm not sure I was wrong.

The decade also saw the the height of the novel, though perhaps not in Canada. My CanLit profs assigned works by Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove and Martha Ostenso. How they paled beside Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Forster, Hemingway, Joyce, Wharton, and Woolf! But then, what might one expect from a country of a mere nine million?

Time has passed, during which I've come to recognize that the keepers of the canon have messed up in so very many ways. 

As we're now half-way through the 2020s, I present this list of the nine best Canadian novels of the 1920s. Not one of the authors received so much as a passing mention in my CanLit courses.

By no means definitive, I've limited the list to nine titles because I've yet to read Douglas Durkin's The Magpie (1923) and They Have Bodies (1929) by Barney Allen (Sol Allen). From what I know of the two, it's likely that at least one would round out a top ten. I'll be making a point of reading both this year and will keep you informed. But for now:

The Thread of Flame
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1920

In the aughts and tens of the last century, King topped American bestseller lists with The Inner Shrine, The Wild Olive, and The Street Called Straight, though his two best books date from the twenties. This one involves a man who lost his memory whilst fighting in the Great War, but don't let that put you off.

The Empty Sack
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1921

The best King novel of the nine I've read, this involves the Folletts, transplanted Nova Scotians living comfortably in New York City until the aging patriarch is let go by his employer. The drama that unfolds has less to do with the economic devastation than it does the struggles in adapting to a post-Great War world.
The Wine of Life
Arthur Stringer
New York: Knopf, 1921

In his time, Stringer was dismissed as a writer with an eye on the market. This work, an outlier, was inspired by his ill-fated marriage to statuesque Gibson Girl Jobyna Howland. It's Stringer's most literary novel as evidenced by the fact that it was rejected by his usual publisher Bobbs-Merrill only to be picked up by Alfred Knopf. 

The Hidden Places
Bertand W. Sinclair
Toronto: Ryerson, 1922

A novel about a veteran of the Great War written by a man who never served, The Hidden Places can seem absurd at times, and relies too much on coincidence, but it is interesting for its damning indictment of the treatment of men who returned from the conflict scared and disfigured.
Pagan Love
John Murray Gibbon
Toronto: McClelland &
   Stewart, 1922

The most cutting Canadian novel of the decade, it has three targets: the self-help industry, corporate culture, and gender norms. Criticisms of the first two bring insight, but that of the last makes Pagan Love one of the most intriguing Canadian novels of the twentieth century. 

"Cattle"
Winnifred Eaton
New York: Watt, 1924

A late career novel written by a Montrealer of Chinese and English parents who'd achieved fame by passing herself off as a Japanese princess. Eaton's final years were spent on an Alberta ranch belonging to her husband, inspiring this violent, disturbing novel set in cattle country.

The Land of Afternoon
Gilbert Knox [Madge
   Macbeth]
Ottawa: Graphic, 1924

Scandalous in its day, something of a head-scratcher in ours, The Land of Afternoon provides further evidence that romans à clef tend to age poorly. There are biting satirical sketches, but who are the models? Even then, I expect few outside Ottawa had a clue. 
Blencarrow
Isabel MacKay
Toronto: Allen, 1926

The last novel from a writer who never shied away from unpleasant topics: drug addiction, child abduction, worker exploitation, racism, mental illness. Domestic abuse and its effect on a wife and daughters permeate this one, yet it is not a message novel.  


All Else Is Folly: A Tale of
   War and Passion
Peregrine Acland
Toronto: McClelland &
   Stewart, 1929

The great Canadian novel of the Great War. Written by one who was there, it is highly autobiographical and would've been banned had the author's father not been so well connected. Praised by Ford Maddox Ford and Frank Harris.

A century later, two are in print. They were not when I first read them. In fact, all nine had been out of print since the early 'thirties. Ten years ago, I played a part in reviving All Else is Folly as part of Dundurn's Voyageur Classics series.


Winnifred Eaton's "Cattle" was reissued in 2023 by Invisible Publishing. It was reviewed at the Dusty Bookcase here back in 2014.


If given the opportunity to bring another back, I'd chose John Murray Gibbon's Pagan Love. It is the most remarkable, unconventional, and challenging Canadian novel of the decade.

Or is that They Have Bodies?

I aim to find out.

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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 second and final 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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02 November 2023

Abraham's Bosom and the Great Change of Life



Abraham's Bosom
Basil King
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918
54 pages

A short story masquerading as a novella, Abraham's Bosom first appeared in the March 30, 1918 edition of The Saturday Evening Post. Its publication nearly coincided with Germany's devastating spring offensive, which resulted in more than 862,000 Allied dead and wounded. 


Abraham's Bosom begins in a doctor's office. Berkley Noone, first rector of St Thomas, is told that he is suffering from the very same rare disease that had afflicted organist Ned Angel. A "near-sighted fellow with a limp," Angel had trained the choir of St Thomas for forty years – "without salary" – only to be dismissed by Noone after sharing his diagnosis.

Abraham's Bosom frontispiece.
The organist died two months later.

After receiving his own diagnosis, Noone walks about the city a bit before taking to his death bed. As he lies dying, the reverend reflects upon on his marriage and children. Wife Emily hovers about, propping him up in what she insists are the most comfortable positions. Their five children, whom he considers disappointments, visit from time to time. All are present during his final moments as the reverend gazes somewhat vacantly at an engraving of his favourite painting, William Homan Hunt's The Light of the World. His eyes see the lantern glowing brighter and brighter until it outshines the afternoon sun.

It takes time for Noone to recognize his passing. He'd expected an instant in which his soul would "tear its way out of his body and he should be thrust, a naked, quivering bundle of spiritual nerves, before angels and archangels and principalities and powers, and a God whose first question would be that which was put to Cain: "What hast thou done?"

Instead, he's met by Ned Angel.

As a story, Abraham's Bosom is much shorter than it appears. The diagnosis, wandering, and death bed scenes are brief; the better part of the book involves theological discussion as Angel sets Noone straight on things theosophical and what the reverend may expect now that he has passed through the "great change." It was followed six months later by King's far superior Going West, which concerns a ghostly journey shared by German and American soldiers who have killed each another in battle. 


Both are products of the author's growing interest in spiritualism, sown in Flanders and other bloody fields. In this respect, he was far from alone amongst bestselling authors – Arthur Conan Doyle, for example – but he did stand out as a popular Anglican minister who challenged church doctrine. Reverend King did not believe in death, rather the continuance of life. In Reverend Noone's case, as with everyone, there is no sudden tearing of the soul from the body, rather a gentle imperceptible "great change."


That term – "great change" – features three times in the text, and on the first of three different dust jackets Harper used to sell book (above). I suspect King himself wrote its words. Note the second paragraph:
This story will bring Comfort and Consolation to many who are in trouble of mind about the Hereafter.
In the Hereafter, as King believes it to be, those who have passed through this great change see things with different eyes. Berkley Noone sees his wife and children as themselves but themselves glorified:
Emily was again the dryad of their youthful days; but a dryad with ways of light and tenderness he had never known her to possess. Each of the children was bathed in the same beautifying radiance. He knew them – and yet he didn't know them. All he could affirm of them exactly was that his doubts and worryings and disappointments on account of them were past. He felt what Angel had just been telling him, that he was waking from some troubled dream on their behalf.
Noone's familial relationships will continue. As with the soldiers in Going West, he will be able to visit and even communicate. 

If anything, Reverend King's The Abolishing of Death (1919), an account of his experiences communicating with nineteenth-century chemist Henry Talbot – but not really – would've brought further comfort and consolation to the greiving.

Knowing the date of composition, some nine months before the Armistice, what struck me most about Abraham's Bosom is its disconnect from the Great War.  The conflict, which plays such a part in his novels  The High Heart (1917), Going West (1918), The Thread of Flame (1920), The Empty Sack (1921) is not so much as mentioned. Or might it be that the allusion is subtle? Here's Ned Angel:
"How are the Children of Dust making use of the knowledge they've gained during the last fifty years of their counting? Is it to help one another? Is it to benefit themselves? Is it to make the world happier, or more peaceful, or more prosperous? Haven't they taken all their new resources, all their increased facilities, all their approximations to Truth, all their approaches to God – the things which belonged to their peace, as Jesus of Nazareth called them – and made them instruments of mutual destruction? Aren't they straining their ingenuity to devise undreamed-of methods for doing one another harm?''
I write this nine days short of the 105th anniversary of that Armistice. 

Object and Access: My copy, which is in pretty rotten shape, was purchased seven years ago as one title in a box containing twenty or thirty old Canadian books. Price: $20.

The frontispiece featuring afflicted organist Ned Angel is one of four Walter H. Everett illustrations commissioned for The Saturday Evening Post. Interestingly, no matter the placing, all depict scenes and from the first third of the story. This image, with caption from the opening pages of the story, appears at on the final page of its Post debut:

The "timid, wild-eyed nymph of a thing who had incarnated for him all that was poetry in the year when he was twenty-eight" is Reverend Noon's wife. She's a cutie!

Online booksellers list copies beginning at five American dollars, but they'll demand a further US$30 or US$35 for shipping. Some have dust jackets, some do not. The one you want to buy is offered by a Massachusetts bookseller who promises an inscribed copy at US$75.

All claim to be offering the first edition, but as I've discovered, there are at least three variants.

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