Oh, Little Man!

Chipmunk
Len Peterson
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1949
299 pages

Claude Widgewood specializies in buns at Toronto's Modern Baker. He's an expert at adding just the right amount of cinnamon. The other bun-makers aren't so exacting. They don't care. There's no better employee than Claude, and yet he's afraid of being dismissed. Proulx is the problem. Claude considers this co-worker a Communist intent on spreading the Red Octopus's tentacles into his workplace. Leaving for home at the end of his shift, a notice of a union meeting is thrust into Claude's hand. He hides it in his coat pocket, fearful that Mr Cadenza, the bakery owner, is watching. Is he? What about Mr Spidafora, the Assistant Manager?  

Claude tries to rid himself of the notice on the crowded streetcar home. Sliding it from his coat, he lets it loose to drop on the floor. It does not. The sheet is wedged between himself and an elderly woman with purple hair. She gives him a look when he tries to shimmy it loose.

Chipmunk may be a comedy, but its humour is dark. The eyes of Messrs Cadenza and Spidafora are a definite concern, but Claude's greater worry is the tall man in trench coat standing idly outside the bakery cleaning his fingernails with a comb. Claude is almost certain that he's with the Special Branch of the Mounties investigating subversive activities. 

The chill of the Cold War permeates. Whether at the bakery, traveling to and from the bakery, or drinking in a tavern with his friend Mott Kilsoonski, Claude is on edge. It is a mistake to drink so much:

When sober, Claude idolizes Kilsoonski. The man fought in Italy, the man was wounded in Italy, while Claude never even made it overseas:

The first Medical Officer who examined him said he had shoulders like a bird, and all those who examined him afterwards agreed; he had the narrowest shoulders they had ever seen.

The war three years in the past, Mott is a rising talent in the boxing world. He defeated Andy Anzopoulis in his most recent fight at the Gardens.

Mott is one of the three most important people in Claude's life. His friendship with the boxer extends back to pre-war years when the big man rescued him from a bunch of mean-talking thugs. Claude's relationship with young tough Nick Yakyuchuk, the most recent, came about when he volunteered with the "Great Big Brothers." The baker is meant to provide moral guidance and an upstanding male role model. Nick has just returned from a juvenile detention centre. Nick's mother, a prostitute, is intimidating because she is such a good looking woman. Claude is ever wary, thinking that she will make some sort of move. Besides, he has a wife.

This is the novel's most unbelievable ingredient.

The marriage between Claude and Faustina Widgewood is unlike any other I've encountered in Canadian literature. He's as small as she is large, but that isn't it. Faustina is cold and distant, sometimes pushing him away. Then there are times she draws him so close that her knitting needles poke. They wrestle in their marital bed – brutally and violently – but slight Claude always wins and Faustina is satisfied.

It's tempting to dismiss Claude as so many do – as a weakling – but there is strength in his imagination. This muscle he has exercised since childhood in picturing his father, a soldier passing through on way to the Great War... or so his mother told him. As a child, he came up with a believable story about his "widowed mother." It has served him well. Though he has altered it slightly over the years, this is the one Faustina knows.

Of course, it is that same imagination that is the greatest source of torment.

Chipmunk is a first novel. After publication, Len Peterson spoke of his plans for a second novel, but it never appeared.

I can see why.

In a 16 August 1955 letter to Norman Levine, Jack McClelland responds to a the former's Times Literary Supplement piece titled 'Canadian Writers Come into Their Own.'

McClelland has this to say about Levine's praise for Len Peterson: "as a novelist in the Canadian scene, [Peterson] is hardly worth mention. He hasn't produced a book-length script for about seven years, and even at that he probably showed more promise than anything else."

Chipmunk does show promise. It is one of the strongest debuts I've ever read.  

Len Peterson was first and foremost a playwright. At thirty-two, his age when Chipmunk was published, he was also English Canada's leading radio dramatist. The CBC paid so much better than McClelland and Stewart. 

A man has to make a living.

Claude Widgewood would tell you as much.

About the title:

About the novel:

Trivia: A Len Peterson-scripted CBC Radio adaptation aired in March 1950.

Object: An attractive hardcover in navy blue cloth. The jacket design, superior to most published in 'forties Canada, is credited to German immigrant Robert Langstadt (1912-1987). Nearly everything I know about the artist is found on this McMaster Museum of Art page. It is well worth a read.

My copy was purchased online two years ago from an Ontario bookseller. Price: US$15.00. 

Access: McClelland & Stewart did not reprint. There have been no other editions. Seventy-seven-year-old copies are listed online for as little as fifteen Canadian dollars. At $100, the most expensive is inscribed by Len Peterson to author and academic Sylvia De Vrenet. If you have the money, this is the one to purchase.

Read for the 1949 Book Club hosted by Karen and Simon.

Other titles from 1949 covered at the Dusty Bookcase:

Arctic Rendez-vous - Keith Edgar

The Cannibal Heart - Margaret Millar

Crazy to Kill - Ann Cardwell [Jean Makins Pawley]

Death Be My Destiny - Neil H. Perrin [Danny Halperin]

Dirty City - Michael Young

Frustration - Henry C. Clayton

The House in Brook Street - Ronald Cocking

The House on Craig Street - Ronald J. Cooke

He Learned About Women - Ted Greenshade

The Invisible Gate - Constance Beresford-Howe

Love is a Long Shot - Alice K. Doherty [Ted Allan]

Mr. Ames Against Time - Philip Child

No Place in Heaven - Laura Warren

Pagan - Jack Romaine [Tedd Steele]

Perilous Passage - Arthur Mayse

Sin for Your Supper - Milton Douglas

Soft to the Touch - Clark W. Dailey

Strange Desires [Strange Desire] - Alan Malston [Alan Marston]

Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street - Al Palmer

This was Joanna - Neil H. Perrin [Danny Halperin]

Torch of Violence - Gerald Laing [Tedd Steele]

Toronto Doctor - Sol Allen

The Winter of Time - Raymond Holmes [Raymond Souster]

More than any other year! 

Looking Back on Lot's Wife

Lot's Wife [La Femme de Loth]
Monique Bosco [trans John Glassco]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1975
151 pages

De temps à autre, un mot, une phrase, entendus malgré moi, me frappent comme un autre soufflet immérité.

– La Femme de Loth, Monique Bosco, 1970

There was a time in this great land when translations of French-language books were published with near exclusivity in hardcover. There were no second printings and there were no paperback reissues. I'm thinking of titles like In Quest of Splendour (Pierre le magnifique), Orphan Street (Un Chaîne dans la parc), and The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel (L'épouvantail).

Lot's Wife met the very same fate.

I was a child when La Femme de Loth was published. I was an adolescent when it appeared in English translation. I was adult when I first read Lot's Wife. I was an older adult when I wrote Monique Bosco to ask about her working relationship with the translator. This was when I was working on A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of John Glassco. The letter I received in response was generous and gracious. She'd had very limited correspondence. Though they were both living in Montreal they'd never met.

I never met Monique Bosco, either. She died two years after posting that letter, just short of her eightieth birthday.

Author photo on the jacket of Lot's Wife.

I wish our correspondence hadn't ended there. She was a remarkable woman and this novel is one of the best to come out of 1970s Quebec. It was an extraordinary decade.

Lot's Wife opens with the narrator addressing a physician. These aren't the very first lines, but they are my favourite:

You're used to passing terrible sentences on people. Your technique is remarkable. First deliver the blow: the illness may be fatal. Then announce the remedy: amputation. The solution is hailed with positive joy. Those condemned to an imminent death are equally "reasonable." As a reward, the pretty joys of the invalid world are danced before them.

Though not obvious at first, the physician was her married lover. He's ended their decade-long affair and has sent her off for two weeks in Venice to recover, as if from surgery. What we're reading is the narrator's writing. She's writing because she cannot sleep. She cannot do anything but write. The text, disjointed and at times confusing, consists of 240 numbered segments that skip back and forth in time. The shortest, not more than two or three sentences, tend to be self-revelatory. The longer touch here and there on past events in her life. The total is addressed to her former lover.

She was the unwanted child of a Jewish mother and Catholic father, both blessed with good looks she did not inherit. Her earliest memories are of Paris. As clouds of the Second World War begin drifting westward, the small family relocates to New York. This proves a disaster for two reasons, the least of which has to do with her parents' broken English and inability to find employment. The second has to do with a dark episode she had always kept hidden.

Fortunes change with a chance encounter with a family friend. This results in relocation to Montreal where the narrator's parents thrive while striving to avoid any and all news of the country they left behind.

As the narrator grows into womanhood and the Nazis occupy Paris, her parents show the first signs of middle-age. Self-absorbed, they cling to what remains of youth with such desperation that they attempt to recast their daughter as more of a friend than a child. Their campaign is cut short when both die in an automobile accident on the way back from a ski trip in the Laurentians. Their adolescent daughter survived because she'd been left alone in their Montreal apartment.

Much of what the narrator writes she's told no one, not even the physician. She shares it now through her writing – the humiliations and horrors of a short-lived marriage included – though she knows it won't make a difference. The only person she has ever loved, the person she still loves, has cast her aside. She goes over her past because she cannot imagine a future. She doesn't want a future:

God was right. Those must be saved who value life enough to flee, following their noses, letting flames devour the wreckage behind them. Lot and his family. His daughters are young, their life is all before them. But for the old wife, it is her whole past that is being swallowed up. So she turns her head, trying to see what is happening – and what has happened. She looks back, breaking the commandment. Poor old woman. In the Bible you have no name. Lot's wife, that was enough.

It's not until the second half of the novel that the narrator reveals that her name is Hélène. The physician's name is Pierre. She was not his wife, though she very much wanted to be.

Monique Bosco published seventeen volumes in her seventy-nine years, consisting of novels, short story collections, and verse. La Femme de Loth is the best known, having received the 1970 Governor General's Award for French-language Fiction. A half-century after publication, Lot's Wife remains the lone translation of her work.

More, please.

Dedication:

Trivia: Curiously, McClelland & Stewart rejected Lot's Wife as the title of the translation and kept pushing the nonsensical The Woman of Lot. The pressure was such that in desperation Glassco offered an alternative: You Found Me Beautiful.

The critic's rave: Glassco's translation was well received. The only negative review I've found came from Pat Barclay. In the 19 July 1975 edition of the Victoria's Times-Columnist, Barclay writes that it "brings with it the whiff of the original French in its clipped yet dramatically effective phrasing. I found it dreary, depressing, almost maudlin – yet at the same time impressively well planned and presented."

The critic concludes:

Two things:

It's Hélène, not Helene.

No committee "one mad spring day in 1970, decided to select Lot's Wife [here I assume the critic means La Femme de Loth] as the winner of a Governor General's award [sic]" for the simple reason that La Femme de Loth was released in the autumn of that year.

Object and Access: A slim hardcover with black boards and a jacket by David Shaw. Does the woman depicted not resemble Margaret Atwood?

As I write, five copies are listed online with prices beginning at $9.95. Mine was purchased in 1999 from The Word in Montreal. Price: $60.

La Femme de Loth was first published in 1970 by Robert Laffont. I was surprised to learn that the novel is no longer in print. It was last published in 2003 by Bibliothèque québécoise.

Related posts:

A Novel That Killed a Novelist?
Langevin's Masterpiece; McClelland's Disappointment

Lost in Translation

Margaret Laurence: 100 Years

Margaret Laurence was born one hundred years ago today. Is recognition appropriate in a blog devoted to Canada's forgotten, neglected, and suppressed writing? I'd say so. Laurence was popular and celebrated in her day and remains so today, yet she was also a lightning rod for censors.

Leading the charge was Reverend Sam Buick of Peterborough's Dublin Street Pentecostal Church, who considered The Diviners blasphemous, adulterous, and profane. Did the preacher's ire have something to do with his similarity to the novel's Reverend Jake Flood? He never addressed the issue.

My first Margaret Laurence book, A Jest of God, was a gift from my uncle, David Busby, a canon in the Anglican Church. It was also my first signed book. Published in 1978, it's part of a series of Seal reissues which I would argue are the most attractive mass market paperbacks ever published in this country. 

Missing is The Stone Angel, her masterpiece, but that's only because I couldn't find a decent image online.

Ah, what the hell. Here's a copy being offered on Ebay.

Starting out in the book trade, I was surprised to find that Laurence, whose novels were so ubiquitous as to be found in drug stores, were out of print in the United States. When they did return, it was with an academic press. My English cousins had easier access through Virago.

American and British reissues of A Jest of God:
University of Chicago Press (1993) and Virago (1987)

For years I worried that Margaret Laurence would fade from Canadian consciousness, but her name is still strong. True, we don't see her  books sold in drug stores, but then books are no longer sold in drug stores. I see Laurence lauded by English bloggers, most notably Simon at (Stuck in a Book) and Ali (Heavenali), and sense that her profile has actually risen in UK. 

Wishful thinking, perhaps, but it warms the heart of this stranger.

Jean Margaret Laurence (née Wemysse)
18 July 1926, Neepawa, Manitoba -
5 January 1987, Lakeside, Ontario

RIP

Related post:

Margaret Laurences's Cauliflower Soup

Mist of Morning on a Monday Morning

Mist of Morning
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1919
407 pages

"We're piling up fireworks all around — just suppose that some one, with a screw loose, should take a fancy to see them go off?"

Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's longest novel, Mist of Morning meanders, but I enjoyed the meandering. It begins with a Dickensian scene. Young David Greig is brave enough to deliver a parcel to stern Widow Ridley's house. A little girl in bright red turban and Persian shawl answers:

“You boy!” said the little girl. “What do you mean by coming to the front door? Go round to the back directly!”

David stands his ground; he's been sent by the minister.

The boy isn't at the door a minute, but his presence echoes. Frances, the little girl's much older cousin, worries about the disruption it has caused. The old woman is already calling down from her upstairs room, certain that the mirror in the front parlor has been broken. 

The little girl's name is Rosme. It is a name her aunt, Widow Ridley, dislikes intensely, but then she doesn't care for the girl herself. Like Frances, Rosme is someone she's been saddled with, all because their respective parents died. 

David reappears later that afternoon, peering at Rosme over Widow Ridley's high garden wall. The girl has been pretending to be Joan of Arc, but together they become pirates, sail the waves of long grass in the unkempt grounds, plundering ships, and burying treasure until one is called in for dinner. Pirate David returns home to be told by the man he'd believed was his father that his real father has died. And so a Dickensian bookend to a childhood encounter.

Isabel Ecclestone Mackay isn't Dickens of course, but I've enjoyed her novels just the same. She wrote five in total. Mist of Morning, her third, was the only one I'd not read. As I say, it meanders. Though more than a decade passes before David and Rosme meet again, anyone up on Dickens or Mackay will know that the relationship between the two characters is key. By this point, both are living in Toronto. David is a newly-graduated engineer. Rosme, the very example of the New Woman, is the brains of a small advertising firm.

The dialogue between the two as young adults is endearing and every bit as playful as it was all those years ago in the Widow Riley's overgrown garden. What a shame then that their paths hadn't crossed a month or two earlier, before David became engaged to raven-haired Clara Sims, a fellow boarding house tenant. This is how his fiancée is first described:

Clara was ready for bed and the loose kimono she wore had slipped back from her white shoulders leaving them bare above the filmy nightdress which clung to her supple figure with less than classic scantness. Seen so she was superbly young, beautiful, virile, and quite without a soul.

Though she very much has the look, Clara isn't quite the classic femme fatale. She'd set her sights on David not for love, lust, revenge or fortune, but because she'd recognized in him a man who would become a stable provider. Their engagement is the resulted of a clever trap, with David as rube. It would read like a Leacock short story were it not for tragic consequences. It begins during a dark and stormy night when Clara enters David's room on the pretence that a burglar is in hers:

Still dizzy with dreams he turned, only to feel sure that he was dreaming still. The door, the door into the hall, had opened and was just closing, while inside it and bright against it’s dark panels, her hand still on the door-knob, stood a girl in a red kimono. David in his first dizziness thought he had never seen the girl before. She was startlingly strange — all red and white with black hair tumbled about her shoulders. White face, red lips, red drapery over something white, from beneath which a white foot peeped. A midnight dream of a girl, with dark eyes and —.

There's that kimono again. While reading the novel I became entangled in women's clothing. There are so many descriptions providing clues as to just when the novel takes place. A discussion over at Clothes in Books was of great help. Another indication is David's work on making an aeroplane engine that would enable commercial air travel. We learn eventually that it is the autumn of 1913 when Rosme and David reconnect. Storm clouds of the coming Great War begin to gather, casting a gloom over the last quarter of the novel, introducing elements of intrigue and betrayal. A man is shot to death.

The murder didn't come as a shock – not after the author's previous novels. The plot of The House of Windows, her debut, involves the abduction of a child. In Up the Hill and Over, her second novel, it's drug addiction. Reducing Mackay's novels to short strokes doesn't do justice. They are not message novels, nor are they thoroughly dour. Her characters are for the most part perfectly pleasant and kind. There are more moments of levity than gloom and despair. I'm just sorry that there aren't more Isabel Ecclestone Mackay novels to read.

Mist of Morning isn't her best – that would be Blencarrow – but it was a happy place to land. What's more, it has a happy ending, with Rosme and David uniting in the end, just as we knew they would.

Will they live happily ever after?

Well, let's just say that the novel ends in the final days of July 1914 and leave it at that.

Favourite passage: Two women in the novel run Toronto boarding houses, the most interesting being Rosme's Madam Ramses, an unfortunate woman cursed with a masculine appearance and a sixth sense. She's described in entertaining detail, but this picture of Mrs Carr, David's landlady, takes the cake:

She was a frosty person with a grim eye. Her aspect was calm, her mouth tight and her nose suspicious. Long ago there had been a Mr. Carr but he had departed to a better world and left no traces. Perhaps he realised that Mrs. Carr had been intended by the discerning fates to be the widowed keeper of a select city boarding-house. Her eye alone had marked her out for this.

Trivia: Late in the novel, David invites Rosme to accompany him on a canoe excursion on Toronto's Humber River.

These words were published six years after Pauline Johnson died. Mackay was a close friend of the poet and oversaw publication of the posthumous Legends of Vancouver. 

Object and Access: A block of a book in grey cloth with black type and design. Sadly, my copy lacks the dust jacket. It was purchased online in 2020 from an Ottawa bookseller. Price: US$23.00. The front free endpaper features a the address label of Helena Jones. 

I remember these labels from elementary school. They were like tape and came in a red transparent plastic case that wasn't much different than a tape dispenser except that one had to lick the labels like a stamp.

16 Powell Street, Ottawa in 2024

As I write, no copies are listed for sale online

Related posts:

The Hell That is Retail: 1912 Edition

Ontario, Opium, and Cocaine

Romance Amongst the Racists

The Promise of a Man, a Mother in So Much Pain

Of Problem Children and Adolescent Angst

Sunburst
Phyllis Gotlieb
New York: Fawcett, 1964
160 pages

Sorrel Park is no place to live, but this wasn't always so. A smallish city not far from Chicago, it was once a place of industry and well-paying jobs. During the "Open-The Door-In-Eighty-Four" policy, immigrants from Western Europe flooded in until it all went horribly wrong. First came the 1994 nuclear reactor explosion and resulting deaths. The federal government was quick to impose a press ban, the city was sealed off, martial law was imposed, the old coal plant was fired up, and the rest of the country continued on as before.

Shandy Johnson was born in Sorrel Park on June 3rd, 2011 to second generation Americans. Her father's family came from Denmark, changing their surname from Jensen along the way. Shandy's mother was named Mary O'Brian; as might be supposed, her family immigrated from Ireland. Until the explosion, Mary cleaned the offices at the nuclear facility, after which she was transferred to the coal plant. Shandy's father worked in both, even after being being struck on the back of the head with hot material. The wound would never close.

Shandy's birth, seventeen years after "the Blowup," came as a surprise. Her parents had assumed they'd been rendered sterile, but here they were in their forties with a baby girl. The joy they experienced as parents was short lived: "I was three and a half when they died, and since I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old, that means I can't have really known them for more than two years..."

The novel begins on Shandy's thirteenth birthday. A strong-willed, savvy girl, she spends much of it evading capture. It didn't begin this way. Shandy had been celebrating the day with a vanilla cone and licorice stick when spotted. Shandy is a target because she is unusual. "I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old," suggests something, don't you think?

New York: Berkley, 1983

Years earlier, not long after Shandy was born, dozens of Sorrel Park teens, offspring of the men and women exposed to radiation from the explosion, went on a violent rampage. It lasted no more than a few hours, but was devastating just the same. Much of the downtown lay in ruins, thanks entirely to newly awakened telepathic and telekinetic powers. It was only through dumb luck in the form of a freak accident that authorities were able to round them up. They've lived ever since in "the Dump," a prison compound equipped with a device that shields the outside world from their abilities. What sets young Shandy apart is that her mind cannot be read by those imprisoned in the Dump. She is a mutant amongst mutants, and thus of great interest to the government. 

I've never been one for stories in which radiation exposure brings the superhuman – something to so with having seen film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at an early age, I suspect. It's probably the reason why the Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four never really appealed. 

The Hulk #1, May 1962

Yet Sunburst did appeal. It would be enough to say this all comes down to Shandy, but all the characters are brilliantly drawn. There's Jason Hemmer, who first spots the girl. He is the one mutant who cooperates with the authorities, and so is tasked with finding others. Colonel Prothelo was assigned to Sorrel Park in the aftermath of the Blowup. The son he fathered in Sorrel Park instigated that night of destruction. Cigar store owner Ma Slippec is a fleeting character, but just as fully formed. It was she who took in the orphaned Shandy, provided a modicum of stability, and introduced her to bootlegging in what is a dry city.

Of course, at the centre of it all is Shandy, a tall, awkward looking girl who is bothered by her flat chest. She longs for adolescence to really kick in, all the while worrying that she'll also develop abilities that will lead her to incarceration the Dump.

Sixty-two years ago, Fawcett positioned Sunburn as "A Science Fiction Classic of Tomorrow," and here we are in that past's tomorrow. While we don't have superhuman mutants, we do have government and corporate surveillance, suppression, manipulation and brutality. Sunburn is a classic of today.

About the author: 

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom)

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom) was born in Toronto one hundred years ago today. She attended the University of Toronto (BA, 1948; MA, 1950) where, I'm guessing, she met her husband (see: Dedication).

As far as writing goes, she was known first a poet. In 1961, John Robert Colombo's Hawkshead Press published her a pamphlet of verse. Sunburst landed in 1964, the very same year as Within the Zodiac, her first book of poems.

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964

Phyllis Gotlieb is remembered more as a writer of science fiction than as a poet. Her bibliography features twelve books in the genre, including A Judgement of Dragons for which she received the inaugural Aurora Award. 

New York: Berkley, 1980

Phyllis Gotlieb died in Toronto on 14 July 2009 at the age of eighty-three.

Dedication:

Kelly is the author's  husband, Calvin Carl Gotlieb, CM FRSC (27 March 1921 - 16 October 2016), considered the father of Canadian computing.

Of Phyllis Gotlieb's twenty other books, the one I'm most interested in reading is Phyllis Loves Kelly, (Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries, 2014), a posthumous collection of poems written to her husband over the course of their sixty year marriage.

Object and Access: A typical Fawcett Gold Medal mass market paperback original in excellent condition, it showed no sign of having been read before I got to it. I took good care.

The novel first appeared, abridged, in Amazing Stories (March - May 1964). 

Two years after the Fawcett, Coronet published the first British edition. 

When cropped, the image looks like a 'sixties LP I'd buy in a second.

Other editions followed in Australia from Eclipse (1969) and the United States from Berkley (1978). In 2002, Insomniac Press published the only Canadian edition to date as part of its Bakka Books series. 

The novel is currently available from Wildside Press of Cabin John, Maryland.

The six-decade-old Fawcett first edition is cheap in more than one way. Prices listed online range from US$6.00 to US$19.00. Condition is not a factor. At under twenty-one dollars, two signed copies of the Insomniac edition tempt, but the one you really want is a copy of the Fawcett the author inscribed to Miriam Waddington (and was subsequently owned by Maurice Forget, OC). It is being sold for $36.00 by a Gatineau bookseller.

Sunburst has been translated into French (Psycataclysme) and German (Die Geißel des Lichts).

Related post:

The Dustiest Bookcase: G is for Gotlieb

A Wedding, but No Wedding Night; or, A Sorry, Tragic Tale of Two Solitudes (in two editions)

Antoinette de Mirecourt
   or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing
Rosanna Leprohon
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973
200 pages

Antoinette De Mirecourt,
   or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing
Rosanna Leprohon
Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989
334 pages

Six summers ago, I made slow progress through Armand Durand; ou, La promesse accomplie, the French translation of Rosanna Leprohon's 1868 novel Armand Durand; or, A Promise Fulfilled. It made some sense to take on the challenge. As I noted at the time, the author's novels had been far more popular in French than in the original English. Consider The Manor House of De Villerai, which first appeared in 1859 and 1860 issues of the Montreal Family Herald. Le manoir de Villerai, E.L. de Bellefeulle's translation, was published as a book in 1861, then enjoyed four more editions, the last being in 1925. It wasn't until 2014, a full 154 years after the end of its run in the Family Herald, that The Manor House of De Villerai finally appeared in book form. Credit goes to academic publisher Broadview Press.

In the late 'eighties I began collecting Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts titles. Antionette De Mirecourt, sixth in the series, was purchased upon publication, taking advantage of the ten percent discount offered by my employer, a library wholesaler. I preferred the bland, jacketless hardcover editions because they seemed more substantial. Must add that the paperback editions, released simultaneously, weren't particularly attractive. 

This year being one dedicated to women writers (see my New Year's resolution), I decided, at long last, to read what had been Rosanna Leprohon's most popular novel amongst anglophone readers.

But which copy?

I've owned the first New Canadian Library edition for some time. Where did I buy it? When did I buy it? Somehow, its purchase is nowhere near as memorable as the CEECT edition. Might this have something to do with the ten percent discount?

The decision was easy. Madame Leprohon's title is Antoinette De Mirecourt, not Antoinette de Mirecorte, as the NCL edition would have you believe. What's more, the heroine's name is misspelled throughout the text. I would later discover that a significant spoiler appears on the front cover.

I still don't know what to make of the author portrait on the back cover.

The novel begins in November 1763, nine months after the Treaty of Paris, with Antoinette De Mirecourt's arrival in Montreal from her widowed father's Valmont seigneury. On the edge of seventeen, she has been invited by her cousin Lucille D'Aulnay to pass the winter at her elegant rue Nôtre-Dame home. Cousine Lucille is older and her husband older still, though by how much is left up to the reader's imagination. A contemplative man, Monsieur D'Aulnay devotes his days to philosophical works. Lucille's tastes run more toward romantic novels and sentimental verse.

Theirs was an arranged marriage.

Young Antoinette has always been intrigued by the structure of the union, so "with her childish inexperience, rich, poetic imagination, and warm, impulsive heart," wastes no time in asking Lucille whether she was in love with her husband when they wed:

"Oh dear, no! My parents, though kind and indulgent in other respects, showed me no consideration in this. They simply told me Mr. D'Aulnay was the husband they had chosen for me, and that I was to be married to him in five weeks. I cried for the first week almost without intermission. Then, mamma having promised me I should select my own trousseau and that it should be as rich and costly as I could desire, a different turn was given to my feelings, and I became so very busy with milliners and shopping, that I had not time for another thought of regret, till my wedding day arrived. Well, I was happy in my lot, for Mr. D'Aulnay has ever been both indulgent and generous; but, my darling child, the experiment was fearfully hazardous, – one which might have resulted in life-long misery to both parties."

"Remember Antoinette," concludes Lucille, "that the only sure basis for a happy marriage, is mutual love, and community of soul and feeling."

Is the D'Aulnay marriage happy? Not that this reader could see, though it is comfortable. Monsieur D'Aulnay is content to spend his days and nights surrounded by books, while his wife delights in being surrounded by men in uniform. The departures of the gentry to la vielle France and the retreat of the seigneurs to their seigneuries has left a social void that Lucille happily fills with English officers. Chief amongst these is Major Aubrey Sternfield. Monsieur D'Aulnay thinks of him as a "long-legged flamingo," but Lucille and sees an altogether different man:

A tall and splendidly-proportioned: figure – eyes, hair and features of faultless beauty, joined to rare powers of conversation, and a voice whose tones he could modulate to the richest music, were rare gifts to be all united in one happy mortal.

So say all the ladies.

Though Antoinette had been raised on a seigneury, she is all but overcome by the decor, perfume, gauzy dresses, and music of the contra dance of a Montreal soirée. I get it. This was Montreal when I was her age:

Major Sternfield, "handsome as an Apollo," pursues Antoinette. His success is such that the capture of her heart precedes the first letters Antoniette receives from Valmont. One contains a mild bloomer:

The first, which was from her father, was kind and affectionate; spoke of the void her absence made in the household; told her to enjoy herself to her heart's utmost desire; and ended by warning her to watch well over her affections, and bestow them on none of the gay strangers who might visit at her cousin's house, for assuredly he would never under any circumstances countenance any of them as her suitors.

A third letter arrives shortly thereafter. Composed by Monsieur De Mirecourt, it serves to inform Antoinette that she will be marrying Louis Beauchesne, her childhood playmate. What follows is uncomfortable. Louis himself has delivered the letter. While Antoinette, an only child, has great affection, it is as a brother. Louis, who has siblings, knows that his love for her is very different than the one he feels for his sisters. What remains hidden in their encounter is this: Antoinette accepted Sternfield's ring.  

Lucille has been living vicariously through her cousin. Whether under the influence of romantic prose and poetry or the regrets of her own arranged marriage, she has pushed Antoinette into the major's embrace. This secret engagement is known only to the betrothed, and of course Lucille D'Aulney.

Antoinette De Mirecourt and Aubrey Sternfield are married at the D'Aulay residence during a particularly stormy winter evening. The master is in his library, entirely oblivious to anything happening elsewhere in this house. Regimental chaplain Doctor Ormsby is the officiant. Lucille is troubled by his appearance and manner. All is so different from her Catholic faith, but she's keen on seeing it through.  

After the ceremony, Antoinette makes an uncharacteristic stand insisting that her new husband that will keep their union secret until it is blessed by her own church. Sternfield readily agrees. As we shall see, the major has his reasons. The evening becomes even more dramatic with the unexpected arrival of Antoinette's father. He is, of course, ignorant as to what has transpired, and so is too late in laying down the law, employing another mild bloomer:

"I forbid you child, to, have any intercourse, beyond that of distant courtesy, with the men I have mentioned; and if you have entangled yourself in any disgraceful flirtation or attachment, break it off at once, under penalty of being disowned and disinherited."

What's unstated is that the "gay strangers" with whom Antoinette is not to partake in "intercourse" are the English. This is perfectly understandable. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham had taken place just four years earlier. The capitulation of Montreal was a year after that. 

A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762
Thomas Davies, 1762

I'll say no more for wont of spoiling, except to recommend Antoinette De Mirecourt to lovers of nineteenth-century romance, lovers of gothic romance, and to any Montrealer who share a love of reading. I was born in Montreal two hundred years after the novel is set and one hundred years after it was written, yet its past was not a foreign country. Descriptions of the island, the weather, and the climate are recognizable. This passage raised a smile:

It was the first really good sleighing of the season, for the few slight falls of snow that had hitherto heralded winter’s approach, descending on the muddy roads and sidewalks, had lost at once their whiteness and purity, and becoming incorporated with the liquid mud, formed that detestable, combination with which we Canadians are so familiar in the spring and fall, and which we recognize by the name of “slush.”

And here I'd assumed that "slush," like "smog," was a twentieth-century term.

Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon (née Mullins)
12 January 1829, Montreal, Lower Canada
20 September 1879, Montreal, Quebec

Rosanna Leprohon has much in common with her darker, even more successful New Brunswick contemporary May Agnes Fleming, whose Wedded for a Week; or, The Unseen Bridegroom I read earlier this spring. They may not have been sisters under the skin exactly, but they were cousins. Both were adept at writing complex plots involving romance, marriage, duplicity, nefariousness, and death. If you've enjoyed the company of one you'll like spending time with the other. And so, I've ordered a copy of The Manor House of De Villerai.

God bless our academic publishers.

Bloomer (not mild):

"God bless my soul. Miss De Mirecourt!" he ejaculated, involuntarily starting back.

Trivia (not really): The first sentence has it that the novel takes place "in year 176–, some short time after the royal standard of England had replaced the fleur-de-lys of France." As editor John C. Stockdale notes in the CEECT edition, this can only be 1763: "The year is confirmed by the fact that Madame D'Aulnay's St. Catherine's Eve party was held on a "Thursday" night; in 1763 St. Catherine's Day was Friday, 25 November.

Fun fact: Janet Friskney's New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2007) tells us that The Manor House of De Villerai was once considered for inclusion in the New Canadian Library.

Object and Access: Antionette De Mirecourt was first published in 1864 by John Lovell & Sons. A second printing followed the very same year. Such is the sorry state of Canadian literature that a first edition can be purchased online for a mere $255.

Interestingly, the Lovell edition was the last until 1973 when both McCelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library and the University of Toronto Press's Reprint Library of Canadian Prose and Poetry returned the novel to print.

The CEECT edition is still available through McGill-Queen's University Press. Penguin Random House is selling an ebook of the last New Canadian Library edition (2010), complete with copyright-free stock photo of an American Revolutionary War reenactor.

Penguin Random House charges $9.95 for a text that has been in the public domain since the nineteenth-century.

Related post:

Armand Durand; or, A Summer Project

In Canada's Green and Pleasant Land

As a Watered Garden
Marian Keith [Mary Esther Miller MacGregor]
Toronto; McClelland & Stewart, 1946
297 pages

My Marian Keith collection began with The Bells of St Stephens, purchased seventeen years ago in London, Ontario, not long after our move to nearby St Marys. I ask you, what self-respecting bibliophile could pass up a jacket like this?

I'd barely heard of Marian Keith and had no idea how popular she'd once been in that area of the country. Eight more Marian Keith titles were added during our decade in St Marys. They were thick on the ground. The Bells of St Stephen's set me back four dollars, twice as much as any other. A few were rescued after having failed to sell at library book sales. Before last week, I'd never read one.

I've now read one.

Academics position Duncan Polite as Keith at her best, but as I'd never come across a copy my foray into the author's work ended up being the late career As a Watered Garden. Why this novel? Well, I'd read that the plot involved a great mystery.

The first chapter is the best. Thirty-five-year-old Islay Drummond is taking stock of the large family farmhouse off Georgian Bay, recently inherited from Great-Aunt Christena. No one knows just what to make of the bequeathal, least of all sisters Kate and Jeanette:

"More sensible if she left it to me." Jeannette had been wanting to see this since the will was read. "What a wonderful place to leave the children summers!"

Kate replies:

"Wonder she didn't saddle us with it, she knew how I hated the old farm. She was quite capable of it!" 

The answer seems to be that Islay happened by not long before the old woman died. It was the first visit in a very long time. Islay had meant to drop by again, but you know how busy things can get.

Islay plans on spending the summer at the old farmhouse, having been granted a four month leave from her employer, "the irritable and exacting Mr. Francis," but neither sister believes she'll last. Both point to the mod cons of Islay's life in the city. "She has an electric range in her apartment!" Kate exclaims. "And frigidaire," adds Jeanette.

These exchanges take place shortly before Kate and Jeanette gather their respective broods and drive away. Stoic elder brother Robert follows. He'd arrived without wife Mary and their children. Pete, who is closest to Islay in both age and affection, is the baby of the family. He lives the life playboy and so speeds off in a small little coupe, honking all the way.

If, like me, you enjoy novels dealing with family dynamics, As a Watered Garden may not be for you. Islay's siblings never return. That said, distant relatives abound. The closest is cousin Steve Laird whose farm borders hers. He's planted a vegetable garden for Islay, but doesn't appear to be interested in doing much more.

This poses a bit of a problem as Islay is intent on dedicating her four months away from Mr Francis to writing a novel:

It was her secret. Even Pete didn't know it. That winter when she broke her ankle... she'd been laid up for weeks. And somehow she'd started scribbling – little sketches of the office staff  – 'profiles' the editor called them, whisking through them competently. Ought to be a story, must have a plot. Make a real yarn of it. That's what people asked for... Well, this summer she was going to see what she could do.

What Islay wants more than anything is silence and solitude.

She won't get it. 

We know from the first that there is an ex-fiancé around and about – he threw her over years ago for a New York City party girl – but the first intrusion comes in the form of anemic waif Artie. 

How could Islay turn the boy away? Artie's memories are dominated by a draught that caused the loss of his family's farm and contributed to the deaths of his two siblings. The surviving family is newly arrived in the area, having driven over three thousand kilometers from dusty Saskatchewan.

Young Artie first appears during a downpour. As a Watered Garden being the title, I'm certain this is intentional. Later on, the house in which the boy and his parents live will be flooded during a summer storm.

There's irony for you.

Things happen, not nearly so dire, and are interesting if inconsequential. Other characters intrude on Islay's solitude and her literary effort stalls. The mystery, such as it is, concerns Great-Uncle Peter's daughter Bessie:

Great-Aunt Christena had burned Bessie’s picture up. You never talked about Bessie. Never even said her name. Even when you were very small you knew not to do that.

But why?

The answer has nothing to do with murder, adultery or anything even remotely unpleasant. Quite the opposite. It's really of a type that is common in family histories; Bessie married a man Christena disapproved of. 

The Windsor Star, 30 November 1946

Though published post-war, As a Watered Garden is set in the final summer before the conflict. I was struck that the Drummond siblings are entirely untouched the Great Depression. Every one of them is thriving. The automobiles used in their departure are spiffy. Though Islay is a secretary, hers is every bit as new and stylish. Even amongst the well-to-do, she really cuts a figure with her stylish outfits. Artie's family aside, not one character struggles with economic circumstance.

As a Watered Garden has been described as the first book in Keith's Georgian Bay Trilogy. Yonder Shining Light and Lilacs in the Dooryard followed, which take the reader through the Second World War into the post-war, though I don't expect I'll be bothering with either.

As a Watered Garden was a perfectly pleasant read, if you like that sort of thing.

The critics rave: 

The men and women with whom she peoples her books are sympathetically real and easily recognizable as those one meets in everyday life. And she herself obviously believes that everything always comes out right in the end. While her books may never make any shattering imprint upon the larger stream of literature they leave a very peasant ripple in our Canadian brook.

– Eileen Kerr, The Gazette, 7 December 1946

Object and Access: Lacking the dust jacket, bound in blue boards, my copy once belonged to E.L. MacDougall of 189 Blythwood Road, Toronto.

As I write, two copies are listed for sale online, both offered by London, Ontario booksellers. At US$20.00, the cheaper of the two has retained its dust jacket.  

Related post:

The Dustiest Bookcase: K is for Keith