Wild Wild Geese

Wild Geese
Martha Ostenso
New York: Dodd, Mead. 1925

358 pages

The winner of the inaugural $13,500 Dodd-Mead-Famous-Players-Pictorial Review Prize, Wild Geese was a sensation. Consider this from my book's copyright page:

There were many, many more printings to come.

In 2009, the year the Dusty Bookcase began, I would not have considered Wild Geese eligible for inclusion. Wild Geese was neither neglected nor forgotten.

It is now.

Look no further than the late New Canadian Library for evidence. An early addition – #18! – the novel was something of an NCL staple. Today, aging copies printed in 2008 await purchase in Penguin Random House's Ontario warehouse.

The 1961 first NCL edition (left); the 2008 final NCL edition (right).

Wild Geese was not on the syllabi of my Canadian Literature courses. I felt I'd dodged a bullet. A young man living in cosmopolitan Montreal, I had no interest in stories of struggling farming families on the prairies.

Wild Geese is a story of a struggling farming family on the prairies. Caleb Gare is the patriarch. Hardworking, cold, cruel, and miserly, he is a character we've seen before. Angela is Caleb's cowed wife. Drained of all joy, she too is familiar. Caleb keeps their four children close, but not to his heart. He sees them as little but unpaid labour and is ever ready to smother all aspirations and dreams in order to keep them on the farm. None have ventured farther than ten miles, except to bring cattle to Nykerk, a larger small town than nearby Yellow Post. Caleb does not allow his wife and children to attend services in the Yellow Post church. He brings home sermons which he alters to serve his purpose.

Twenty-year-old twins Martin and Ellen are the eldest and so have suffered the longest. Martin shares his father's dedication to farming, but nothing more. When not attending to the crops and livestock, he works at improving the various outbuildings. Martin has been salvaging wood and fragments of old windows with the hope of one day constructing a proper home for the family. Ellen is broken. She sees a blurred world through second-hand glasses as she stumbles about, all the while thinking of Malcolm, a boy who once kissed her. Charlie, by far the youngest of the four Gare children, is something of a ghost. As a character, he barely exists, yet is Caleb's favourite. Between the twins and Charlie stands Judith, the problem child. Caleb considers this daughter during a late night survey of his land: 

Caleb lifted the lantern and examined the wick. Things would turn out to his liking. He would hold the whip hand. Judith, yes, she was a problem. She had some of his own will, and she hated the soil . . . was beginning to think she was meant for other things . . . getting high notions, was Judith. She would have to be broken. She owed him something . . . owed the soil something. The twins, they would stay—no fear of their deserting. Martin and Ellen would not dare to leave; there was no other place for them. And Amelia, she was easy . . . yes, yes, she was easy, Amelia was!

Caleb's hold on Amelia has to do with a secret.

As a young man he'd pursued Amelia only to place a distant second to gallant Des Jordan. Tragically, Jordan's life was soon cut short by a bull. Unmarried Amelia gave birth to a son who was handed over to Catholic priests. How Amelia ended up Caleb's wife is left up to the imagination. I expect her family's extreme poverty had something to do with the marriage..

Only Caleb knows about the child. For more than two decades he has used this knowledge to render Amelia subservient. She lives in fear of exposure and the disgrace it will bring her and the children she's had with Caleb.

Twenty-four-year-old Martha Ostenso
Canadian Singers and Their Songs
Edward S. Caswell, ed.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1925

Into this toxic household comes Lind Archer, the new schoolteacher. She will be lodging with the Gares as their home is one of the closest to the school (and because Caleb, a trustee, will be getting money from the school board). Martin and Emily avert their eyes during Miss Archer's first meal in the Gare home, but not Judith; she is intrigued. Later in the evening, circumstance forces Judith to share her bed with the new teacher:

She watched Lind taking off her trim outer clothing. When she saw that she wore dainty silk underthings she glanced at her more covertly. She made no comment.

   After both girls had undressed, Judith picked up a string of amber beads Lind had placed on the stand near the bed.

   There was also a pair of ear rings of the same limpid yellow substance.

   “Wild honey! Drops of wild honey!” Judith exclaimed in a whisper. “Just the color of you!”

The arrival of pretty young Miss Archer, her jewelry, tailored clothing, and dainty dainties provide a glimpse of a world quite unlike her own. In an early scene, Judith removes her rough work clothes and lies naked beside a pond. Thoughts turn from her father, Lind, hunky neighbour Sven Sandbro, then back to her father: 

Oh, how knowing the bare earth was, as if it might have a heart and a mind hidden here in the woods. The fields that Caleb had tilled had no tenderness, she knew. But here was something forbiddenly beautiful, secret as one’s own body. And there was something beyond this. She could feel it in the freeness of the air, in the depth of the earth. Under her body there were, she had been taught, eight thousand miles of earth. On the other side, what? Above her body there were leagues and leagues of air, leading like wings—to what? The marvelous confusion and complexity of all the world had singled her out from the rest of the Gares. She was no longer one of them. Lind Archer had come and her delicate fingers had sprung a secret lock in Jude’s being. She had opened like a tight bud. There was no going back now into the darkness.

   Sven Sandbo, he would be home in May, so they said. Was it Sven she wanted, now that she was so strangely free? Judith looked straight above her through the network of white birch and saw the bulbous white country that a cloud made against the blue. Something beyond Sven, perhaps . . . Freedom, freedom. She dipped her blistered hands down into the clear topaz of the pool, lifted them and dipped them and lifted them, letting the drops slip off the tips of her fingers each time like tiny cups of light. She thought of the Teacher, of her dainty hands and her soft, laughing eyes . . . she came from another life, another world. She would go back there again. Her hands would never be maps of blisters as Jude’s were now, from tugging a calf out of a mud-hole. Jude hid her hands behind her and pressed her breast against the cold ground. Hard, senseless sobs rose in her throat, and her eyes smarted with tears. She was ugly beyond all bearing, and all her life was ugly. Suddenly she was bursting with hatred of Caleb. Her large, strong body lay rigid on the ground, and was suddenly unnatural in that earthy place. Then she relaxed and wept like a woman. . . .

Given the year of publication, it's unsurprising that the homoerotic elements of the novel were not remarked upon by reviewers. They were most certainly not acknowledged decades later in Carlyle King's inept 1961 New Canadian Library introduction. 

In a later passage, Lind admires Judith in turn:

Lind thought how wildly beautiful she looked in the unnatural glamour: the able grace of her tall young body; her defiant shoulders over which her black hair now fell; the proud slope of her throat and breast.

This is likely the most homoerotic passage in Canadian literature up to 1925:

Afterwards Judith came up to Lind in the loft and sat down on the bed, watching the Teacher wash her face and neck and long smooth arms with a fragrant soap. Lind turned and surprised a peculiar look in the girl’s eyes. Judith grew red and leaned back on the pillows.
   “It makes my mouth water to watch you do that,” she said. “It’s so—oh, I don’t know what it is—just as if somebody’s stroking my skin."

   “Why don’t you use this soap, Judith? I have lots of it. I’ve told you so many times to use anything of mine you like. Next time you expect to meet Sven—” Lind lowered her voice and smiled roguishly at Jude—“let me fix you all up, will you? Nice smelling powder and a tiny drop of perfume in your hair. He’ll die of delight, Judie! Just die.”
   Judith chuckled and ran her hands over her round breasts.
   “It doesn’t take perfume to kill him,” she murmured.
   Lind looked at her, stretched full length across the bed. What a beautiful, challenging body she had! With a terrible beginning of consciousness, like a splendid she-animal, nearly grown.

   “Let me comb your hair, Lind, will you?” Jude asked.

   The Teacher sat down on the floor beside the bed and Judith loosened the long skeins of bronze hair that fell all about her shoulders. Judith loved to run her fingers through it, and to gather it up in a shining coil above the white nape of Lind’s neck. Lind talked to her about things of the outer world, as she often did when they could be alone together. But presently Ellen’s voice came up from below, the thin, usual protest. Judith fastened Lind’s hair up with a single pin and left her. Lind thought that her step was a little lighter than it had been.

Far more erotic than anything in 1928's The Well of Loneliness, is it not?

I don't mean to suggest that Wild Geese be categorized a lesbian novel. This straight cis male saw Judith's attraction toward "the Teacher" as something other. In Lind, overall-wearing farm girl Judith sees the fantastic. It isn't that she wants to be with Lind, rather that she wants to be like Lind or perhaps even wants to be Lind.

Both young women have romantic relationships with men. Judith and Sven's begins in the backstory; Lind's is with...

I'm hesitating...

Lind's is with Mark Jordan, the son Amelia had with Del Jordan. I'm sharing this only because it is revealed early on. 

This can't be considered a spoiler, right?

It's interesting that Lind is so often referred to as "the Teacher." I don't believe she has a great deal of influence on the events that lead to the climax, though her "dainty hands" push gently toward the inevitable. From the first page, a dark cloud hangs over the Gare farmland. Caleb is calculating, manipulative, and cruel, crossing and at times threatening his neighbours.

He will reap what he sows. The day of reckoning is coming.

Ten months ago, I posted a list of what I considered the best Canadian novels of the 1920s. I listed nine because I'd not yet read Barney Allen's They Have Bodies and The Magpie by Douglas Durkin, Ostenso's future husband.

Still haven't.

In any case, I was certain that one would make it an even ten.

Martha Ostenso beat them to it.

Wild Geese is one of the best Canadian novels of the 1920s or any decade.

Trivia I: Wild Geese bested over 1500 other submissions to win the Dodd-Mead-Famous-Players-Pictorial Review Prize. The US$13,500 awarded Martha Ostenso in 1925 is the equivalent of roughly US$240,000 today.

Trivia II: Wild Geese has enjoyed no less than three movie adaptations, the earliest being the 1927 lost silent film of the same name. The most intriguing is the second, Ruf der Wildgänse (1961), which IMDb claims is the first Austrian movie to be filmed almost entirely in Canada.

I don't doubt it.

The novel was last adapted in 2001, as the made for Canadian made for TV movie After the Harvest starring Sam Sheppard.

Object: An attractive hardcover in printed boards, I really like the endpapers:

I purchased my jacketless copy for roughly fifteen years ago. I can't quite remember where, but I do recall paying one dollar.

Access:  The novel first appeared in the August and September 1925 numbers of Pictorial Review. 

That autumn, Wild Geese was published in hardcover by McClelland & Stewart (Canada) and Dodd Mead (United States). Hodder & Stoughton's British edition appeared as The Passionate Flight, the novel's working title.

Wild Geese is still available Penguin Random House, but there's no need to give Bertelsmann SE & Co KGaA any more of your money; plenty of used copies are listed online at prices ranging from C$4.00 (the 1989 NCL edition) to £77.00 (first UK edition, sans jacket). The best buy is a copy of the 1925 McClelland & Stewart first Canadian edition, avec jacket, at $13.00.

In Canada, the novel entered the public domain in 2014. It can be read here – gratis – through the wonderful faded page.

There have been several translations: Norwegian (Graagass), German (Ruf der Wildgänse), Danish (Vildgæs), Spanish (Almas sometidas), Polish (Krzyk dzikich gęsi), and Slovinian (Klic divjih gosi), 

I read Wild Geese for the 1925 Club, the tenth anniversary club of clubs dedicated to reading and reviewing books published in a specific year. 

Remarkably, of the 43 books from 1920s that have been covered on this blog over the years, Wild Geese is only is only the second to have been published in 1925. The other is:

The Black Magician - R.T.M. Scott

Related posts:

Wild Geese on Film (Part I): Wild Geese

About Those Old New Canadian Library Intros

(with some stuff on Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese)

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s

Martha Ostenso's Forgotten Masterpiece?

A 49-Year-Old Fifty Shades? S&M from M&S?

The Pan Jalna (and the careening Jalnawagon)

The Urban Leacock

Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914
310 pages

On my most recent visit to Montreal I purchased a copy of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. It isn't that I hadn't one already, rather that I didn't have this particular edition. A thing of beauty, thus a joy forever, it is illustrated throughout by Seth. 

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2013

It follows the 1999 McClelland & Stewart coffee table book illustrated by engraver Wesley W. Bates.

All to say that Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is still very much a thing in this country. It outshines and outsells the author's fifty other books combined. Throw in posthumous publications, if you like; I still stand by my words.

Much of the appeal of Sunshine Sketches has to do with structure. Unlike previous collections, its twelve stories – each labelled a "Chapter" – share the same characters and Canadian small town setting. It stands with this collection as the closest thing Leacock ever came to writing a novel.*

Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich too has stories presented as chapters. Like Sunshine Sketches, its recurring characters move about a common setting, only this time that setting is urban and American.

The first chapter, 'A Little Dinner With Mr. Lucullus Fyshe,' sets the stage by introducing the elm-shaded, Grecian-columned Mausoleum Club on Plutoria Avenue, located in a metropolis all evidence suggests is also named Plutoria. Fyshe, who is chief director of the People’s District Loan and Savings and president of both the People’s Traction and Suburban Company and the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative, has learned that a member of the English aristocracy, Duke of Dunham, is visiting the United States. Fyshe intends to mine some Old World money; the idle rich are always looking for more, it seems. Mergers are particularly effective. Fyshe himself had brought about a merger of four soda-water companies, "bringing what was called industrial peace over an area as big as Texas and raising the price of soda by three peaceful cents per bottle." Things with the Duke don't go quite as he'd hoped, but there is no harm done; Fyshe's wealth continues to grow.

Indeed, the idle rich only get richer, the sole exception being their newest member, Tomlinson, the central figure of 'The Wizard of Finance' and 'The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson.' Once a struggling bush farmer, he anticipates Beverley hillbilly Jed Clampett, though the gold discovered on his Ohio land is of the traditional kind, not black Texas tea. Tomlinson's newfound wealth is unwelcome and is slowly destroying his family. Son Fred, once a strapping seventeen-year-old, has taken to a sofa in the Grand Palaver Hotel, where he lies in flowered dressing gown next to a pack of cigarettes and box of chocolates with blinds drawn and eyes half-open.

American Magazine, June 1914.
Illustration: F. Strothmann

'The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown,' the fourth chapter, was inspired by the 1912 Montreal visit of Abdu'l-Bahá, eldest son of founder the Bahá'í faith Bahá'u'lláh. As such, it has become the most notable and notorious. A nouvelle a clèf, here Abdu'l-Bahá becomes "celebrated Oriental mystic" Yahi-Bahi, a leader in the new cult of Boohooism. "Many things are yet to happen before other's begin," is a prophesy this reader has taken to heart.

Not every Arcadian adventure takes place in Plutoria. Come summer those of the city's leisure class make for the country. One such member is Newberry, who worked with Fyshe on the merger that birthed the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative. Mr Newberry is a firm believer in "getting right out into the bush and putting on old clothes,":

This was why he had built Castel Casteggio. It stood about forty miles from the city, out among the wooded hills on the shore of a little lake. Except for the fifteen or twenty residences like it that dotted the sides of the lake, it was entirely isolated. The only way to reach it was by the motor road that wound its way among leafy hills from the railway station fifteen miles away. Every foot of the road was private property, as all nature ought to be.
   The whole country about Castel Casteggio was absolutely primeval, or at any rate as primeval as Scotch gardeners and French landscape artists could make it. The lake itself lay like a sparkling gem from nature’s workshop—except that they had raised the level of it ten feet, stone-banked the sides, cleared out the brush, and put a motor road round it. Beyond that it was pure nature.

 American Magazine, July 1914.
Illustration: F. Strothmann

The passage comes from the 'The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins,' which concerns an innocent dimwit and how he came to marry an older woman with four adult sons. My favourite of the eight stories chapters, it begins:

Meanwhile, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is looked after by Captain Cormorant of the United States Navy. If not Cormorant, there's Lieutenant Hawk:

Or if Lieutenant Hawk is also out of town for the day, as he sometimes has to be, because he is in the United States army, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is taken out by old Colonel Shake, who is in the State militia and who is at leisure all the time. 

 I do like a good love story.

'The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph' and 'The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing,' concern Plutoria Avenue's impressive Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches. Rev. Edward Fareforth Furlong, the charismatic youngish minister of St. Asaph, appears throughout Arcadian Adventures. Whether accompanying a fair lady harpist of his choir on flute or dancing "the new episcopal tango" with the daughters of elderly parishioners, he's a popular figure – so much more fun than St. Osoph's Rev Dr McTeague with his lectures on philosophy and focus on Hegel.

Rev James Barclay (1844-1920) of St Paul's Presbyterian Church, Montreal, 
model for Rev Dr McTeague and grandfather of painter Marian Dale Scott.

The balance between the two churches shifts dramatically with St Osoph's appointment of Rev Dr Uttermust Dumfarthing. An unpleasant, unfriendly, judgmental man who is unlikely to acknowledge a parishioner encountered on Plutoria Avenue, he is given to talk of burning souls and eternal damnation and so becomes all the rage. The decline in St Asaph's fortunes, as reflected in near-barren communion plates, is all too evident. Where once Newberry had pushed for expensive expansions of the Episcopalian church – dynamiting the entrance so as to construct a Norman gateway, for example – he and other mortgage-holders grow concerned. There being too much uncertainty, the men work to bring about a merger of the two churches. Creation of this "United Church" is in the hands of Mr. Furlong, senior, who is not only the father of the rector of St. Asaph’s, but  also president of the New Amalgamated Hymnal Corporation, and director of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ, Limited.  He is joined in this good work by Newberry, of course, along with Skinyer, a partner in the law firm Skinyer-Beatem. Mr Furlong lays out the terms to Mr Newberry: 

"All the present mortgagees will be converted into unified bond-holders, the pew rents will be capitalised into preferred stock, and the common stock, drawing its dividend from the offertory, will be distributed among all members in standing. Skinyer says that it is really an ideal form of church union, one that he thinks is likely-to be widely adopted. It has the advantages of removing all questions of religion, which he says are practically the only remaining obstacle to a union of all the churches. In fact, it puts the churches once and for all on a business basis.”
   “But what about the question of doctrine, of belief?” asked Mr. Newberry.
   "Skinyer says he can settle it,’’ answered Mr. Furlong.

In the final chapter, the gentlemen of the Mausoleum Club set their sights on civic politics with Lucullus Fyshe leading the charge for clean government: "He wanted, he said, to see everything done henceforth in broad daylight, and for this purpose he had summoned them at night to discuss ways and means of action."

The enduring popularity of Sunshine Sketches has us associating Leacock with small towns. This makes sense. I will note, however, that the man himself lived most of his life in cities. I won't pretend to have read all his writing, but what I have read tends to be set in urban and suburban settings. For this reason, I tend to think Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich is more representative of Leacock's work.

Of course, as a city boy, I may be biased. What I can say without prejudice is that it is every bit as true as The Theory of the Leisure Class, only funnier.

*  In fact, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town has been described as a novel. Canadian Book Review Annual describes it as such. On the other hand, it also has it that the book is "set in the little Town of Sunshine."

A Bonus: 

The Montreal Gazette, 19 December 1914

Object and Access: A first edition, sans jacket, I purchased my copy forty or so years ago at Montreal's Word Bookstore, not a half-kilometre to the east of McGill University's Stephen Leacock Building. Price: $5.00.

The least expensive copy listed online is a 1989 New Canadian Library mass market edition offered at US$2.80 by a Dallas bookseller who dares charge US$100 in shipping to Canada. At US$778, the most expensive is a Bell & Cockburn first edition in "very good," very rare dust jacket. It is being sold by a Monterey bookseller. Shipping for this copy is US$18.

The book to buy is a jacket-less signed copy of the first UK edition, published in 1915 by John Lane. Price: £375 (w/ £18 shipping). I share the bookseller's image so as to encourage repatriation.

Fifteen-year-old "new" New Canadian Library copies of Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich are available from Penguin Random House Canada at $22. Though I do recommend Gerald Lynch's introduction, at $19.95 you can do better with the Tecumseh Press Canadian Critical Edition edited by D.M.R. Bentley. 

First editions, sans jacket, are listed for sale online at under ten dollars.

Related posts:

Average Leacock for the Average Man

Lunar Attractions; or, The Leacock I Like
Professor Leacock Sets the Stage
Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?

Morley Callaghan's Red Ryan Rocket

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

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

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

More Joy in Heaven has both.

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

Callaghan is lazy.

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

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

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

Contemporary reviewers were not fooled.

Callaghan modelled Caley on Norman "Red" Ryan, a career criminal who had been killed by police on 23 May 1936, eighteen months before publication. It was big news.
 

The Globe, 25 May 1936

Like Caley, Ryan was held up – no pun intended  – as a model of reform. He was fêted and given plumb jobs,  including a weekly radio show, only to be gunned down ten months later during the botched robbery of a Sarnia liquor store.

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

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

I'm guessing Edmund Wilson would concur.

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

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

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

The 1960 and 2009 NCL editions.

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

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

Why those novels, I wonder?

I read More Joy in Heaven for The 1937 Club.

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

Related post:

James de Mille's Antarctic Death Cult
A Quiet, Mildly Depressing Depression-Era Debut

Average Leacock for the Average Man

Winnowed Wisdom
Stephen Leacock
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1926
300 pages

The author's sixteenth book of humour in as many years, one wonders how he managed; it's not as if Professor Leacock had no day job.

Winnowed Wisdom came in mid-career with the best of his writing in the past. Look no further than the six-page italicized preface for evidence:

It is the especial aim of this book to make an appeal to the average man. To do this the better, I have made a study of the census of the United States and of the census of Canada, in order to find who and what the average man is.
     In point of residence, it seems only logical to suppose that the average man lives at the centre of population, in other words, in the United States he lives at Honkville, Indiana, and in Canada at Red Hat, Saskatchewan. 
     In the matter of height the average man is five feet eight inches, decimal four one seven, and in avoirdupois weight he represents 139 pounds, two ounces, and three pennyweights. Eight-tenths of his head is covered with hair, and his whiskers, if spread over his face...  

You get the idea. Still, this made me laugh:

The percentage of women in the population being much greater in the eastern part of the country, the average woman lives one hundred and five miles east of the average man. But she is getting nearer to him every day. Oh yes, she is after him, all right!

The thing with Leacock is that even his most middling work has something that catches the light and shines. The same might be said of the collections themselves; Winnowed Wisdom may be weak, but three of its essays – 'How We Kept Mother's Day,' 'The Laundry Problem,' and 'How My Wife and I Built Our Home for $4.90' – were included in Laugh With Leacock: An Anthology of the Best Work of Stephen Leacock (1930).

Deservedly so.

This early passage from 'The Laundry Problem' had me sold:

In the old days any woman deserted and abandoned in the world took in washing. When all else failed there was at least that. Any woman who wanted to show her independent spirit and force of character threatened to take in washing. It was the last resort of a noble mind. In many of the great works of fiction the heroine's mother almost took in washing.

This comes later:

In the old days if you had a complaint to make to the washerwoman you said it to her straight out. She was there. And she heard the complaint and sneaked away with tears in her eyes to her humble home where she read the Bible and drank gin.

J.B. Priestley looked at Winnowed Wisdom and selected 'Our Summer Convention' and 'At the Ladies Culture Club' for 1957's The Bodley Head Leacock (aka The Best of Leacock).

I wouldn't have chosen either. 

My Winnowed Wisdom favourites have never featured in a Leacock anthology, so I thought I'd share. Each is as relevant today as a century ago.

The first, 'The Outline of Evolution,' is the second of Prof Leacock's 'The Outlines of Everything' essays.

It begins:

It seems that recently there has been a lot of new trouble about the theory of evolution in the schools. Either the theory is being taught all wrong or else there is something the matter with it. For years it had seemed as if the doctrine of Evolution was so universally accepted as to lose all its charm. It was running as a close second to Spherical Trigonometry and Comparative Religion and there was no more excitement about it than there is over Anthropology.

     Then suddenly something seems to have happened. A boy in a Kansas public school threw down his book and said that the next time he was called a protozoon he’d quit the class. A parent in Ostaboola, Oklahoma, wrote to the local school board to say that for anyone to teach his children that they were descended from monkeys cast a doubt upon himself which he found intolerable.

I never experienced such a fuss, but then I attended school in Montreal.

Sounds smug, I know. Given what's going on in the republic to the south, I can't help it.

My second favourite essay is titled 'Are We Fascinated with Crime?'

I've never been much fascinated myself, though I once made a good living writing true crime books published under a nom de plume. This was a decade ago. The books were sold around the English-speaking world – French and Polish translations appeared in other spheres – and I got a fair cut.

There's been talk about the rising interest in true crime, but I don't buy it. The fascination pre-dates London's Police Gazette. Montreal had Police Journal, and, in my day, Photo Police and Allo Police. 

Allo Police, 16 September 1984

As a younger man, I watched 48 Hours, Unsolved Mysteries, America's Most Wanted, and...

Mea culpa.

I was fascinated with crime. We are all fascinated with crime. In 1926, Leacock recognized as much, all the while questioning our interest: 

If a rich man is killed by his chauffeur in Tampa, Florida, and his body hidden in the gasoline tank, why should you and I worry? We don’t live in Tampa and we have no chauffeur and gasoline is too expensive for us to waste like that.

     Yet a whole continent will have to sit up and read a column of news about such a simple little event as that.

I read the professor's article as BBC and New York Times reports on the arrest of the Long Island Killer vied for my attention. 

The Montreal Gazette, 7 December 1957

Busby? Preistley? You tell me who chose better. Winnowed Wisdom can be read online here courtesy of the fine folks at the Faded Page.

Whatever you decide, I guarantee the average man will something that amuses, as will the average woman.

Object: One of the many Leacocks purchased up over the years at the McGill Book Fair. I'm fairly certain this one, a first American edition, was picked up in the early 'nineties. Price: $2.  

Access: First published by Macmillan (Canada), Dodd, Mead (United States) and John Lane (United Kingdom). The Macmillan and Lane editions feature the same dust jacket illustration by John Hassall.

The cover of the Dodd, Mead edition is by Jazz Age illustrator John Held, Jr.

In 1971, Winnowed Wisdom was added as #74 to the New Canadian Library. It holds the distinction of being the first NCL title without an introduction. It survived long enough to benefit from the third series design.

Related posts:

Lunar Attractions; or, The Leacock I Like
Professor Leacock Sets the Stage
Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?

James De Mille's Antarctic Death Cult

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
[James De Mille]
New York: Harper & Bros, 1888
306 pages

Forty years ago this month, I sat on a beige fibreglass seat to begin my first course in Canadian literature. An evening class, it took place twice-weekly on the third-floor of Concordia's Norris Building. I was a young man back then, and had just enough energy after eight-hour shifts at Sam the Record Man.

The professor, John R. Sorfleet, assigned four novels:

James de Mille - A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888)

Charles G.D. Roberts - The Heart of the Ancient Wood (1896)

Thomas H. Raddall - The Nymph and the Lamp (1950)

Brian Moore - The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960)

These were covered in chronological order. I liked each more than the last. The Luck of Ginger Coffey is the only title I wholeheartedly recommend, which is not to suggest that I didn't find something of interest in the others.

The earliest, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, intrigued because it overlapped with the lost world fantasies I'd read in adolescence. Here I cast my mind back to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar, my parents' copy of James Hilton's Lost Horizon, and of course, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

De Mille's novel begins aboard the yacht Falcon, property of lethargic Lord Featherstone. The poor man has tired of England and so invites three similarly bored gentlemen of privilege to accompany him on a winter cruise. February finds Featherstone and guests at sea somewhere east of the Medeira Islands, where they come across the titular cylinder bobbing in becalmed waters. Half-hearted attempts are made at opening the thing, until Melick, the most energetic of the quartet, appears with an axe.

As might be expected – the title is a bit of a spoiler – a strange manuscript is found within. Its author presents himself as Adam More, an Englishman who, having been carried by "a series of incredible events to a land from which escape is as impossible as from the grave," sent forth the container "in the hope that the ocean currents may bear it within the reach of civilized man."

More would have every right to feel disappointed.

Featherstone and company, while civilized, are not the best civilization has to offer. In the days following the discovery, they lounge about the Falcon taking turns reading the manuscript aloud, commenting on the text, and speculating as to its veracity.

More writes that he was a mate on the Trevelyan, a ship chartered by the British Government to transport convicts to Van Dieman's Land. This in itself sounds fascinating, but he skips by it all to begin with the return voyage. Inclement weather forces the Trevelyan south into uncharted waters "within fifteen hundred miles of the South Pole, and far within that impenetrable icy barrier which, in 1773, had arrested the progress of Captain Cook."

No one aboard the Trevelyan is particularly concerned – the sea is calm and the skies clear – and no objections are raised when More and fellow crew member Agnew take a boat to hunt seals. Fate intervenes when the weather suddenly turns. In something of a panic, the pair make for their ship, but efforts prove no match for the sea. They are at its mercy, resigned to drifting with the current, expecting slow death. And yet, they do find land, "a vast and drear accumulation of lava blocks of every imaginable shape, without a trace of vegetation—uninhabited, uninhabitable." A corpse lies not far from the shore:

The clothes were those of a European and a sailor; the frame was emaciated and dried up, till it looked like a skeleton; the face was blackened and all withered, and the bony hands were clinched tight. It was evidently some sailor who had suffered shipwreck in these frightful solitudes, and had drifted here to starve to death in this appalling wilderness. It was a sight which seemed ominous of our own fate, and Agnew’s boasted hope, which had so long upheld him, now sank down into a despair as deep as my own. What room was there now for hope, or how could we expect any other fate than this?

More and Agnew provide a Christian burial and return to their boat hoping, but not expecting, to be carried to a better place. Whether they find one is a matter of opinion. The pair pass through a channel that appears to have been formed by two active volcanoes, after which they encounter humans More describes as "animated mummies." They seem nice, until they reveal themselves as cannibals. Hungry eyes are cast on Agnew. He's killed and More escapes.  

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is not a Hollow Earth novel, though inattentive readers have described it as such. More's boat enters a sea within a massive cavern, where he encounters a monster of some sort and fires a shot to scare it off.

The boat continues to drift, emerging on a greater open sea. It's at this point – 53 pages in – that the real adventure begins.

Here More encounters the Kosekin who, despite their small stature, appear much healthier than the animated mummies who killed and consumed his friend Agnew. They're also extremely generous, ever eager to give More whatever his heart desires. He is soon introduced to Almah, a fair beauty who, like himself, is not of their kind.

Through Almah, More learns the language, customs, and culture of the Kosekin and their topsy-turvy polar world. They are a people who crave darkness and shun light. Self-sacrifice serves as the shell surrounding their core belief, so that they look to rid themselves of wealth and influence. The least is the most venerated. The local Kohen, whom More comes to know best of the Kosekin, shares a sad story:

"I was born," said he, "in the most enviable of positions. My father and mother were among the poorest in the land. Both died when I was a child, and I never saw them. I grew up in the open fields and public caverns, along with the most esteemed paupers. But, unfortunately for me, there was something wanting in my natural disposition. I loved death, of course, and poverty, too, very strongly; but I did not have that eager and energetic passion which is so desirable, nor was I watchful enough over my blessed estate of poverty. Surrounded as I was by those who were only too ready to take advantage of my ignorance or want of vigilance, I soon fell into evil ways, and gradually, in spite of myself, I found wealth pouring in upon me. Designing men succeeded in winning my consent to receive their possessions; and so I gradually fell away from that lofty position in which I was born. I grew richer and richer. My friends warned me, but in vain. I was too weak to resist; in fact, I lacked moral fibre, and had never learned how to say 'No.' So I went on, descending lower and lower in the scale of being. I became a capitalist, an Athon, a general officer, and finally Kohen."

Again, 'tis sad, but the Kohen's own weakness is to blame. He displays greater strength when confronting his own mortality. Like all Kosekin, the Kohen longs for the day when his life will end. His people refer  to Death as the "King of Joy." Almah does her best to explain to a disbelieving More:

"Here," said she, "no one understands what it is to fear death. They all love it and long for it; but everyone wishes above all to die for others. This is their highest blessing. To die a natural death in bed is avoided if possible."

The Kohen tells the story of an Athon who had led a failed attack on a creature in which all were killed save himself. For this, he was honoured: 

“Is it not the same with you? Have you not told me incredible things about your people, among which there were a few that seemed natural and intelligible? Among these was your system of honoring above all men those who procure the death of the largest number. You, with your pretended fear of death, wish to meet it in battle as eagerly as we do, and your most renowned men are those who have sent most to death.”

A Strange Manuscript in a Copper Cylinder shares something with Burroughs in that adventure, prehistoric beasts, and a love interest figure. What sets it apart is the quality of writing; De Mille's is by far the superior. No doubt some readers – my twelve-year-old self would've been one – will be irked by Lord Featherstone and his three guests, who see in More's manuscript an opportunity to philosophize and expound theories on linguistics, geography, and palaeontology. Oxenden, the quietest of the group, speaks up providing the most fascinating passages in remarking on the similarities in Kosekin, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu beliefs.

Melick alone expresses skepticism in More's story, dismissing the manuscript as a bad romance: "This writer is tawdry; he has the worst vices of the sensational school – he shows everywhere marks of haste, gross carelessness and universal feebleness." Unflattering comparisons to DeFoe and Swift are drawn.

A Strange Manuscript in a Copper Cylinder demonstrates none of the things Melick describes. Forty years later, I have no hesitation in recommending the novel; it is richer and more rewarding than I remembered.

Wish I'd known what my thoughts were on first reading. There may be a paper written for Prof Sorfleet's class in the crawlspace beneath our living room.

Object and Access: All evidence suggests that A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder was written in the 1865 and 1866. It was first published posthumously and anonymously in the pages of Harper's Weekly (7 Jan 1888 - 12 May 1888). My copy, a first edition, features nineteen plates by American Gilbert Gaul. The copy I read as a student was #68 in the New Canadian Library (1969). I still have it today, along with the Carleton University Press Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts edition (1986). Neither was consulted in writing this review, but only because they're in that damn crawlspace.

The NCL edition is out of print, but the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts edition remains available, now through McGill-Queen's University Press. It has since been joined by another scholarly edition from Broadview Press (2011).

Used copies of are easily found online. Prices for the Harper & Bros first edition range between US$65 and US$400. Condition is a factor, but not as much as one might assume. The 1888 Chatto & Windus British first (below) tends to be a bit more dear.

Translations are few and relatively recent: Italian (Lo strano manoscritto trovato in un cilindro di rame; 2015) and Hindi ( एक तांबा सिलेंडर में पाया एक अजीब पांडुलिपि, 2019).

Best Books of 1922: Amidst a Flood of Mediocrity

Published one hundred years ago today, the 1922 Globe round-up of the year's noteworthy books doesn't display much by way of enthusiasm. The three pages – previous years had five – begin with a reference to something once said by long-dead Englishman George Crabbe. It really sets the tone:

The trend may be away from fiction, but fiction makes for nearly half of the Globe's list. And I can't help but note that not one science title features.

The newspaper's greatest focus is on "GENERAL FICTION," by which it means fiction that is not Canadian. Babbit is recognized as the year's big title. I can't quibble because I still haven't read it. I have read The Beautiful and Damned, which doesn't feature.

My copies of the first Canadian editions

The big work of "CANADIAN FICTION" is Ethel M. Chapman's God's Green Country, a novel that is new to me. Here's what the Globe has to say:

God's Green Country is long out of print, as is every other Canadian fiction title selected by the Globe:

The Return of Blue Pete - Luke Allan [Lacey Amy]

Flowing Gold - Rex Beach

Chalk Talks - J.W. Bengough

Indian Legends of Vancouver Island - Alfred Carmichael

God's Green Country - Ethel M. Chapman

King's Arrow - H.A. Cody

Caste - W.A. Fraser

Pagan Love - John Murray Gibbon

D'Arcy Conyers - Bertal Heeney

Mortimer's Gold - Harold Horn

The Timber Pirate - Charles Christopher Jenkins

The Bells of St Stephens - Marian Keith

The Dust Flower - Basil King

The Twenty-first Burr - Victor Lauriston

Openway - Archie P. McKinshie

Over 'ere and Back Home - P. O'D

Tillicums of the Trail - George C.F. Pringle

Poisoned Paradise - Robert W. Service

Neighbors - Robert Stead

The Prairie Child - Arthur Stringer

Salt Seas and Sailormen - Frederick William Wallace

The Shack Locker - Frederick William Wallace

Ignore Flowing Gold; a Texas adventure by American Rex Beach, its inclusion is a mistake. Of the twenty-one truly Canadian titles, I've read only Basil King's The Dust Flower.  It may be the author's weakest novel – I have ten left to tackle – but I'm not surprised that it made the cut. What does surprise is the absence of Bertrand W. Sinclair's The Hidden Places, which may just be the best Canadian novel of 1922.

My collection of the Globe's 1922 Canadian fiction titles.

Four that didn't make the list.

In its selection of Canadian fiction titles, the Globe demonstrates a certain preference. Hinted at in the praise of God's Green Country, it is stated plainly in the description of D'Arcy Conyers.* 

We get all too few of such?

Really?

Most Canadian novels dating from this time have rural settings.

More, please?

The Globe is most complimentary in its opinion of Canadian verse, but not before taking a dig at the Mother Country: "In Britain, during the past year, deflation has not been confined to finance, and poetry scarcely rises above the horizon." But Canada, young Canada, imbued with "national sentiment stimulated by the war, receives refreshing satisfaction from the study of the poet's message."

Nine of the fourteen volumes of verse are Canadian:

Jean Blewett's Poems - Jean Blewett

Complete Poems of Wilfred Campbell - Wilfred Campbell

Contrasts - Lawren Harris

Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman - Archibald Lampman

Fires of Driftwood - Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

The Woodcarver's Wife and Later Poems - Marjorie L. Pickthall

Christ in the Strand and Other Poems - James A. Roy

Verse and Reverse - Toronto Women's Press Club

Impressive... until one realizes that Complete Poems of Wilfred Campbell and Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman do not exist. Going by the descriptions, I'm sure what's being referred to are The Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell and yet another edition Archibald Lampman's Poems (first published by Morag in 1900). I own two earlier editions of the latter and a very nice copy of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's Fires of Driftwood. Am willing to trade all three for a first of Lawren Harris's Contrasts.

We Canadians don't do nearly as well in the rest of the list, nearly falling flat in the "JUVENILE" category – two titles in a list of thirty-four – but we hold our own overall in contributing 47 of the Globe's 167 titles.

Of the forty-seven, Over Prairie Trails by Frederick Philip Grove is in print today as a New Canadian Library title. New Canadian Library being no more, it's old stock now housed somewhere in a Penguin Random House warehouse.

What else is in print?

Nothing?

Oh, Canada.

* In researching Bertal Heeney's D'Arcy Conyers, I stumbled upon the work of British actor, director, and screenwriter Darcy Conyers (1919-1973). Amongst his many accomplishments is the screenplay for the 1961 comedy The Night We Got the Bird. The IMDb summary promises an evening of good fun:

Cyril's family is unaware that he and his cabinet-maker employee are making and selling false antique furniture. It is only when he dies and his salesman Bernie marries his widow Julie that the truth comes out through Cecil re-appearing as a parrot, puzzlingly given as a wedding gift. When a local Brighton heavy realises he's been conned the family band together to try and fix things. 

Related posts:

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

Best Books of 1920: Beware the Bolshevik Poets

The Globe 100 One Hundred Years Ago: Poets are Struck Dumb

and Capitalism Proves Embarrassing (1919)

The Globe 100 178 of 2018

The Season's Best Books in Review - A.D. 1917:

The String of Canadian Patriotism is Fingered

The Season's Best Books in Review - A.D. 1916

The Season's Best Books in Review – A.D. 1915;

Featuring the Best Canadian Book Ever Published

A Gentleman's Gentleman Cultivates a Lady

Sex, Betrayal, and the Scars of the Great War