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! 

From Tangled Torment to Tepid Romance

Carried by Storm
May Agnes Fleming
New York: Carleton, 1880
400 pages

The first sentence holds a promise of things supernatural:

Miss Ventnor is Olga Ventnor, fairest of all the beautiful women in Carried by Storm. The house, known as "the red farm-house," is just one of many rentals on John Abbott's vast estate. His home, "Abbott Wood," is far more lavish:

A grand Elizabethan manor, with turrets, and peaked gables, and quaint, vine-clad stone porches, and painted windows, with stone mullions.
   It is new, and it looks three hundred years old at least, and reflects some of its seeming grandeur and antiquity upon its master, perhaps. And Mr. Abbott needs it. He is painfully new.

A novel could be written about John Abbott.

At first, Carried by Storm looks to be Olga Ventnor's story, reaching back in time to when she was a girl of ten living outside the New England town of Brightbrook. The only child of Colonel Ventnor and his fragile yet exquisite wife Mrs Ventnor, Olga is "the very last daughter of the house, born, if ever embryo belle and heiress was yet, with a golden spoon in her mouth." The colonel is adamant that his inherited riches remain in the family, so arranges for his pre-adolescent daughter to wed her artistic post-adolescent cousin Frank Livingston. Oh, and aren't his parents proud! Says Frank's mother:

"You need never lower your family, nor slave yourself to death painting pictures now, my dearest, dearest boy! Olga Ventnor’s fortune must be simply immense – immense!"

Age eighteen, Frank doesn't take it too seriously:

“All right, mother,” says Frank, still grinning; “and when is it to be – this week or next? Or am I to wait until she grows up? I am on hand always; when you want me please to ring the bell."

Nevertheless, flippant Frank has no issue with being dispatched to Brightbrook for the summer to woo his ten-year-old Olga. Once there, he acts as a babysitter, playing games and drawing pictures to amuse his pretty little cousin.

The following summer is very different. Olga, now eleven, is irritated by Frank. Her cousin doesn't spend nearly as much time with her, breaks promises, and stumbles into Ventnor Villa in the wee hours. Frank tells her that he's been spending time in town when in fact he has been partying down at the red farm-house. Frank is sweet on eighteen-year-old Lora, one of the two shapely dark-haired daughters of violent, ne're-do-well drunk Giles Sleaford. There's music and dancing and lager and whisky and codfish chowder and barbecue rabbit and more lager and more whisky.

A third girl, an awkward twelve-year-old redhead, also lives in the red farm-house. The townsfolk refer to her as "Sleaford's Joanna," taking her to be the man's youngest. The name could not be more appropriate; Sleaford considers her as his property, Sleaford's property, supposedly rescued from a gutter somewhere. Sleaford's Joanna is nothing more than an unpaid servant, a slave, and is beaten daily:

That he has not killed her outright in one of his fits of fury is not due to him, one of the Sleaford boys or girls generally interfering in bare nick of time. Their drudge is useful, they do not want her beaten to death, or the prying eyes of the land brought to bear on their rustic household.

How different her life is from Olga Ventnor's!

Later that same summer, the two girls cross paths in the woods one particularly dark evening Olga is lost and frightened. Seeing Olga, so pretty, her hair so golden, dressed in such fine and expensive clothing, Joanna is consumed by jealousy. That the Ventnor girl, raised in such privilege, is so weak, so helpless, and so fearful breeds hatred.

Twelve-year-old Joanna comes very close to stabbing eleven-year-old Olga to death that night. It's a good thing she doesn't because the woodland encounter sets in motion a series of events that change Joanna's life for the better. Thanks to kindly Geoffrey Lamar, John Abbott's stepson, she receives a private education from Miss Rice, the tutor at Abbott Wood. Leonora Abbott, Geoffrey's dainty, very pretty young half-sister, endears herself to the gutter waif such that Joanna feels no desire to murder her. Mrs Abbott praises Joanna's lovely singing voice and bestows a steady stream of adornments, most of which are appropriated by Lora and her sister Liz. John Abbott avoids her like the plague – which one I'm not sure – but why? Geoffrey and his mother wish Joanna to live with them at Abbott Wood, but Giles Sleaford will not allow it. John Abbott is relieved by the refusal. Again, why? Might the answer also solve the mystery as to why Brightbrook's wealthiest man allows such a disreputable man as Sleaford on his land? Where is Sleaford getting his money from, anyway?

Joanna reaches adulthood, despite all the beatings. Newspaperman George Blake has fallen in love with her, proposes, and suggests they run off to New York to get married. Joanna accepts, but only because she sees elopement as a means of escape.

In 1906, pulp publisher Street & Smith severed Carried by Storm in two, then sold the second half as Love's Dazzling Glitter, "a sequel to Carried by Storm." Being twenty-six years dead, the author had no say in the matter.

  

A very clean cut, I regret to say that it makes perfect sense. Love's Dazzling Glitter opens with a chapter titled a 'The New Life Dawn' ('In Which Joanna Finds Her Fortune' in the original). Here, Joanna, newly arrived in New York, rises and then descends from her rented attic room:

Joanna's new dawn is so bright as to be disappointing. She has run away from kind, supportive fiancé George Blake and has taken lodging with washerwoman widow Mrs Gibbs and her shoe-shining son. She has no money, but manages to cover room and board by handing over an expensive crimson wool shawl she'd stolen from Liz. At first, Mrs Gibbs dismisses the young woman as yet another come to New York with dreams of becoming a star of the stage. But Joanna surprises:

“I intend to work,” she says steadily, “there is no kind of housework, I think, I cannot do. I am very strong, and very willing. I can wash, iron, cook – I have done it all my life.”

Joanna never washes, irons or cooks, again.

While ironing, Mrs Gibbs hears Joanna singing to her infant, fatherless daughter and decides that she must introduce her new tenant to Prof Ericson, whose bedding she washes. Not only is Prof Ericson "a teacher of music and singing," his bother is a theatre empresario!

Joanna is an immediate sensation. No longer "Sleaford's Joanna," as "Jenny Wild" she tours North America and Europe, receives a second marriage proposal, inherits a vast estate, and most happily, is reunited with the long-suffering mother she had never known.

Disappointingly, the red farm-house is not haunted. One character is stabbed to death in an upstairs bedroom – no points for guessing who; a half-point for guessing the murderer – but no apparition appears. A weak case may be made that Carried By Storm features something of the supernatural in the form of an otherworldly guiding hand. Might this explain the remarkable series of coincidences in the final chapters? 

Joanna's second marriage proposal comes from Frank Livingston. In a different way, it is also his second marriage proposal – the first was rejected by Cousin Olga. Frank sees Joanna off on another tour and is returning to his studio in Manhattan when a young woman is struck down at his feet by two runaway horses. Though he doesn't recognize her at first, the victim is little Leonora Abbott, now all grown up. In rescuing her, he is reunited with his old friend Geoffrey Lamar... who is now a physician, which is handy considering, you know, his sister. John Abbott now dead, the doctor, his mother, and his sister, abandoned Abbott Wood long ago, having learned that Sleaford's Joanna is the true heir to the man's fortune. They've been searching for her ever since! Frank Livingston brings that hunt to an end. That very same day, Joanna just happens to spot one of Sleaford's sons working for the railroad; it is through him that se learns she is an heiress.

An odd novel from an unconventional novelist, I do recommend Street & Smith's Carried by Storm. Love's Dazzling Glitter is a definite pass. 

Of the eight Fleming novels I've read to date, this is by far the most disappointing; not that this dissuades me from reading the remaining thirty-nine.

Trivia (not really): It is mentioned in passing that Colonel Ventnor (ret'd) "had served with distinction in the far West." Those familiar with the history of the American West in the mid-nineteenth century may take issue.

Object: A well-constructed hardcover purchased two years ago for ten American dollars from a bokseller in New York State. The novel itself is followed by eight pages of publisher adverts for volumes by A.S. Roe, Allan Pinkerton, Augusta J. Evans, Celia E. Gardner, Josh Billings, Julie P. Smith, M.M. Pomeroy, Violet Fane, Miriam Coles Harris, Marion Harlon, Mary J. Holmes, Mrs E.P. Miller, Capt Mayne Reid, and others. Not one name was familiar to this reader, but I am intrigued. Ten May Agnes Fleming novels also feature.

Access: According to Susan Dorward's invaluable 'A Working Bibliography of Texts by May Agnes Fleming,' Carried by Storm was first published in 1878 and 1879 editions of the New York Weekly and the London Journal. It first appeared as a book in 1879, published in New York by Dillingham. My Carleton edition followed the next year. As far as I can tell, Street & Smith's 1906 two volume Carried By Storm/Love's Dazzling Glitter marks the last time the novel was in print.  

Related post;

Falling Hard for May Agnes Fleming

Our Little Life: Dressmaker Meet Cheesemonger

Our Little Life: A Novel of To-Day
J.G. Sime
London: Grant Richards, 1921
394 pages

Jessie Georgina Sime's debut novel begins with a tale of decline. In the eighteen-sixties, the residences at the confluence of O'Neill Street and Drayton Place were amongst the most desirable in Regalia. In the decades that followed, as the city's wealthy gravitated westward, the grand homes became less attractive. At the dawn of a new century they were bought on the cheap by a "Business Woman" who had them divided into small apartments:

The fact of the Buildings having begun life as a cluster of semi-detached dwelling-places explained certain odd constructions in the flats; also the many undesired intimacies—common taps of water on the landings, verandas that belonged to everyone and no one—that the inhabitants so reluctantly shared with one another. The Apartment House was the uncomfortable place it was because when it had been "made over" comfort had been the last thing in anyone's mind.

The Business Woman named the buildings the Penelope Apartments after herself, but soon found them too much to deal with. She signed the buildings over to a French Canadian in exchange a small sum to be followed by yearly payments. The French Canadian promptly flipped the property, thus setting off years of legal squabbling leading to further neglect.

The residents of the Penelope Apartments, known as "Penelopians," include labourers, drunkards, dope sellers, chorus girls, and prostitutes. They're interesting on the whole, but only two are fully drawn. What at first looks to be a novel about disparate and disreputable tenants and their interactions soon centres on the relationship between Katie McGee and Robert Fulton. 

Katie McGee lives in a modest first-storey flat on the Drayton side of the Penelope Apartments. A forty-six-year-old spinster, she makes a living as a dressmaker. Her workdays are spent in the homes of Regalia's upper-middle class, ripping apart last season's gowns so as to make use of the fabrics for the next.

Irish-born, Katie came to Regalia as a child, brought with older sister Mary by their widowed mother. Canada is the only home Katie can remember.

It is a familiar story.

Robert Fulton has a small flat on the third floor of the Penelope Apartments' O'Neill side. His story is less familiar and isn't revealed until fairly late in the novel. An English Cambridge graduate, he has somehow ended up serving at the butter and cheese counter of the Arundel Meat, Grocery, Fruit, Vegetable and Dairy Produce Market. He doesn't enjoy the work:

How Robert hated those prosperous women who came and shopped! How he detested the clipped intimations of their Canadian voices. He loathed their shrillness and their arrogance and their clumsiness of movement (it had taken his labor in the store to show him that women are more clumsy in their movements than men). He hated them from head to foot, and he felt certain that if he could see inside them he would hate them more.

Katie McGee is nothing like the women Robert serves. She'd never be able to afford the market's offerings. The same can be said of Robert. Both earn $1.50 for a day's work, the difference being that dressmaker's employers provide breakfast and lunch.

Their relationship begins in the backstory with an act kindness. Robert saw Katie struggling with a sack of coal for her flat and had insisted on carrying the burden.

Our Little Life is a portrait of a woman and man who would never known one another had they remained overseas. Katie's initial interest in Robert is as a possible partner; we first see her rushing to her flat so as to prepare a meal and herself for his arrival. She is older than Robert, Robert is "younger than his years," but still a girl can hope. A lonely woman drawn to the finer things in life, she looks up to a man who had not only received a fine education, but had once practiced a profession she had wanted for herself.

There is no envy, only awe.

It needs be said that Robert Fulton is nowhere near as interesting as Katie finds him. A bastard (historical definition), he was raised by a kindly woman who'd agreed to take on the task. Robert had wanted for nothing. Well-travelled, Robert chose Canada for his new home. He was provided with a substantial amount of money, which he promptly lost through a poor investment. Robert then looked to support himself as a schoolteacher, but for reasons left unsaid he resigned.

Before befriending Katie, he'd devoted his evenings to setting down his thoughts on immigration with the intent of producing a volume of essays. After befriending Katie, the better part of his evenings are spent in her small flat reading lengthy passages – featured in the novel –  as she listens intently, understanding little, but always ready with a compliment.

This is the novel's great flaw.

The reviewer in the Liverpool Daily Post (14 July 1921) puts it best:

Miss Sime has much to unburden herself of about Canadian conditions and Canadian folk. subjects on which Miss M'Gee is specially voluble, while Robert is writing a book upon them in intervals of leisure from the groceries counter. The novel is long in consequence. We might fairly retitle it "Our Little Life at Great Length." To deny it merit would be unfair to the effect produced by the amazing minutæ of which it is built up. It is not tedious; you may call it a feat of entertaining prolixity.

Our Little Life is set in the final fourteen months of the Great War, a conflict that has a surprisingly small presence. Robert, who had tried to enlist, had been been "turned down":

As he had come away from that rejection he had brought with him a mind torn in two: he had felt relief... and he had felt a miserable sense that he was being forcibly turned back from the only real duty that lay before him. This double attitude of his persisted. Had he been at the War, had he waited in the terrible trenches and rushed over No Man's Land into the German trenches opposite – he would undoubtedly have been miserable. But he could not have been more miserable than he was in the Arundel Store, feeling day after day that he was degradingly safe.

At one point, Robert accompanies Katie to a sort of going away party for Mac, a Penelopian he'd never met:

Robert and Mac looked at one another. Possibly the fact that Mac limped so that he was unable to go back to the front, while Robert had never got even so far as the drill-ground in the Campus may have had something to do with it. Possibly a certain half-bakedness together with the most complete certainty in himself that Mac had may have exasperated Robert unduly: undoubtedly the question that leaped to Mac's mind the instant he set eyes on Robert, "What's he doing here? What's he done for his country?" complicated the situation.

I risk making too much of these brief passages. As with Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's Mist of Morning (1919), read earlier this year, I was focussed on the march of time.

Our Little Life begins in the late autumn of 1917. The summer of 1918 is very hot. One evening, Robert suggests an outing Summer Park. He's heard customers at his counter talking about how much cooler it is there. They travel by there by streetcar moving first through a through French Canadian neighbourhood, then one populated by Eastern European Jews. Sicilian, Chinese, Syrian, Bulgarian, German, Polish neighbourhoods follow. He treats Katie to a chicken dinner and concert. It is the most magical evening of her little life.

The Armistice is to come, but not before the Spanish Flu.

Trivia I: The city in which Our Little Life takes place is referred to as "Regalia" ninety-seven times in the novel, but the Canadian reader will recognize it as Montreal. The façade slips on page 265:

By the time Beta's body had been brought back to Montreal to be buried and Mrs. Morphy's ground-floor across the court was empty and bare, it was May.

Not to worry, there's no real spoiler in the above.

Trivia II: Midway through Our Little Life, quite unexpectedly, one of Katie's clients presents her with two tickets to a talk by a touring Irish poet was is clearly modeled on W.B. Yeats. Sime first met the poet and dramatist as a girl growing up in Cheswick. In her privately printed memoir Brave Sprits (1952), she writes of  attending the poet's 1903 and 1914 Montreal lectures. 

Trivia III: The climax of the novel takes place on 7 November 1918, the day of the False Peace:

The Hamilton Spectator, 7 November 1917

Object and Access: Bound in blue boards with black type, my copy is the first UK edition. It was purchased in four years ago from bookseller in Arlington, East Sussex. Price: £17.50.

The front free endpaper features mysterious notations:

Any ideas?

The 1921 Grant Richards' British first was joined the same year by editions from F.G. Goodchild (Canadian) and Frederick Stokes (American). It would appear that none received a second printing. As I write, no copies of the 1921 editions are listed for sale online.

The good news is that the novel returned to print in 1994 when it was added to the Tecumseh Press Early Canadian Women Writers series. Used copies are just as uncommon as the Richards, Goodchild and Stokes editions, but you can purchase it today through this link to the publisher.

Between Exhaustion and Expression

Shackles
Madge Macbeth
New York: Waterson, 1927
282 pages

The first three pages of Shackles take the form of a letter written by the author to her friend Aimée. Do not read it before the novel itself! It contains a doozy of a spoiler.

Shackles is the sixth of Madge Macbeth's thirteen novels and has a novelist as its main character. This was almost enough for me to set it aside.

Are novelists really so common?

The novelist at the centre of Shackles is Naomi Lennox. She lives in a fairly comfortable house with barrister husband Arthur and semi-invalid relation Uncle Toby. There are no children, which given Arthur's nocturnal expectations is something of a miracle. 

Uncle Toby has recently returned from a trip south where he was surprised and extremely pleased to encounter people who new his niece's writing. He was even asked for an interview with one of the local papers! Arthur is not so impressed – in fact, is not impressed at all. A selfish, petulant, and stubborn man, Arthur resents the fleeting minutes his wife finds to steal away to her desk and is dismissive of the results.  

Shireen Dey is Naomi's closest friend. She too is a novelist – a very successful one. Her home life is quite different. Husband David, who she calls "Doolydear," not only takes care of the house but manages her career. He has recently sold the rights of one of her novels to the motion picture people. Lively, full of life, and aware of her limitations as a writer, I quite liked Shireen until she exposed herself as a racist. This occurs in an exchange which pretty much encapsulates Arnold's views of his wife's writing. Arnold speaks first:

"Man’s sphere throughout the ages seems to me to have been one of protection, provision. My simple philosophy is expressed in the idea of service. So far as I can see it, men have served their women faithfully – even to paying the supreme sacrifice in times of war. Is it too much to expect – say fifty per cent service in return?”

   “I admit,” Shireen answered, “that there are too many women in whom the commutual sense, the reciprocal sense, is lacking. They want to eat their cake and have it, too. Like the slaves in the South, they achieved freedom too suddenly. They don’t know how to use it. Mentally, physically, economically, they are parasites. They will not last. Think of the others, however; of the women whose mental development and chosen sphere of endeavour – whose creative ability – justifies them in demanding the identical type of freedom that is accorded men. What of the woman artist, musician, decorator, physician, lawyer? Suppose, to drive home my argument more clearly, you were a novelist, would you not claim the independence necessary to pursue your vocation?”

   Arnold observed that unless he were one of the great masters of literature, he could not imagine himself engrossed with the business of writing, at all. Comparatively few men, he ventured, devoted themselves exclusively to literature of that sort.

   “In other words,” Shireen cut in, “you mean to imply that they do something useful as a regular profession and scribble as a hobby or a pastime?”

   “That expresses pretty closely what I mean."

Would it surprise you to learn that Naomi has a lover? She's been seeing Hugo Main. A man of strong opinions on all sorts of things, he's really quite a bore. The best that can be said of Hugo is that he admires Naomi's intellect. Whether there is more to the attraction is uncertain; the two never share anything more than a kiss and an embrace. Hugo pressures Naomi to run away with him to New York, promising to be her own Doolydear.

Can she do it? Will she do it? What Naomi wants most is the freedom to work on The Book of the Hour, her second novel. She takes a bold first step one night remaining at her desk when Arnold expects her in bed. The second step comes in engaging a maid. What with the money brought in through her writing they can afford it. Besides, her hire, Jennie McQuaig, will free up time to be more productive and bring in more money.

It is impossible to read Shackles today without thinking of A Room of One's Own (1929). Is it not remarkable that the novel was published three years earlier? How has it escaped Virago's notice?

Macbeth writes in the book's opening letter:

Woman is passing through a cultural transition. Instinctively, she is bound to the old order of things; intellectually, she clamours for the new. And vacillating, she stands between them.

That doozy of a spoiler concerns the ending. Were it not for the letter I wouldn't have seen it coming. 

See if you don't agree.

Trivia: In the January of last year, I put together a list of the very best Canadian novels of the 1920s. I held it to nine because I'd yet to read Douglas Durkin's The Magpie (1923) and Barney Allen's They Have Bodies (1929); one of the two was sure to make the cut. I've since read The Magpie. Sure enough it made the list, rounding out the top ten. Shackles too deserves a spot. In adding it, I'm bumping Madge Macbeth's pseudonymous roman à clef The Land of Afternoon (1924).

The list as it now stands (in chronological order):

The Thread of Flame - Basil King

The Empty Sack - Basil King

The Wine of Life - Arthur Stringer

The Hidden Places - Bertrand W. Sinclair

Pagan Love - John Murray Gibbon

The Magpie - Douglas Durkin

"Cattle" - Edith Eaton

Shackes - Madge Macbeth

Blencarrow - Isabel Mackay

All Else is Folly - Peregrine Acland

I'm certain there'll be more changes. Despite my decades-old interest in Allen – see my reviews of The Toronto Doctor (1949) and The Gynocologist (1969) – I still haven't read They Have Bodies.

Object and Access: Yellowing pages bound in tan cloth, I purchased my copy in 2019 as part of a lot. It once belonged to Emma Bailey, but which Emma Bailey? The 1921 Canadian census records thirty Emma Baileys living in Canada. The 1931 census features twenty-seven, which narrows the field very slightly. 

As my copy is the first American edition, there is a possibility that Emma Bailey may not have been living in Canada. The true first edition was published in Ottawa in 1926 by Graphic. A Toronto bookseller has two copies for sale online, both with dust jackets, both at $250. So as to encourage a sale, I'm sharing an image of the one I'd choose.

My birthday is in twenty-four days.

The least expensive jacketless copy is listed at US$41.50. As I write, just one Waterson copy is listed for sale online. At US$72, it too lacks a dust jacket. 

Shackles returned to print in 2005 as part of the Tecumseh Press Early Canadian Women Writers Series. Twelve years later, Invisible Publishing followed with its own edition. Both are still available, meaning that after many decades out of print today's reader has two editions from which to choose.

Shackles can be read online here thanks to the good folks at the faded page.

Related posts:

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s
The Great War and Its Discontents

Our Strangest Novel?
Still Strange (if a little less so)

Living Through Another Cuba

The Tent of the Wicked
Robert Switzer
New York: Signet, 1956
128 pages

We begin in a despot's bedroom. Six soldiers enter, one throws the light switch, and the country's president is ordered out of bed. His mistress is a sound sleeper.

This is the end of the Small Man's rule. He'd been expecting it. 

Where readers expecting it?

In June 1949, on the occasion of the author's eighth short story for Esquire, the magazine reported that publishers had been urging Robert Switzer to write a novel. Did The Tent of the Wicked meet their expectations? Was it shopped around? Whatever happened, it didn't arrive for another seven years – and then only as a mass market paperback. 

That opening scene is also the first in his story 'The Small Man,' which had appeared in Esquire's March 1955 issue. Not identical, but pretty damn close, it runs from the beginning to the first line break: 

cliquez pour agrandir

'The Small Man' is not a long story. This is the rest:

The violent final scene is much the same as another in the novel. Though the paragraphs between don't feature in any way, they do follow the Small Man's changing fortunes.

The publisher's pitch has it that The Tent of the Wicked takes place in "a Latin American country." I can do one better in identifying that country as Cuba. Its hero is Paul Rezzado, a young man who works for a travel agency in "the Capital." Much like Jonathan Richman, he falls in love with a bank teller. Her name is Angela. Their relationship is so passionate, so intense, so maddeningly enduring that Paul feels in need of a break. After pushing his employer for a temporary transfer, he leaves for two months' work in San José and doesn't return for a full three years. When he does, Paul finds Angela married to a plump businessman who is also father to her unborn child. She'd given up waiting sometime around the thirtieth month.

Just as well, really. Angela had been faithful, but not Paul. Besides, there was that old promise he'd made to return in sixty days, not eleven hundred.

Paul goes back to San José, where he befriends a married teenaged prostitute. He calls her "Doll-face," a nickname neither she nor anyone else understands. She vanishes, then reappears with a face that looks nothing like a doll's. The new police official in town had abducted her, raped her, tortured her, and disfigured her before dumping her back onto the street. Paul kills the man taking care that no one knows...  but word gets around. San José sees him as a hero and his fame begins to spread. Other men begin following his example, taking on the authorities like their hero Rezzado. Paul wants none of this, but more men join in and the government feels threatened. He becomes a hunted man until the military surrenders to public will and joins his side.

The novel's second scene takes place in the Presidential Palace where Paul, Provisionary President of the Republic, meets with General Avilia and captains of industry identified only as "the oilman," "the cattleman," "the communications man," and "the banker.":

These men could be designated by their specialities, their near-monopolies, but actually they were inter-involved, the banker owning parts of oil well and the cattleman sharing in silver mines. They did not own everything in the country but, between them, they owned a part of everything and repesented those who owned the rest.

What good can come from a meeting such as that?

The novel's climax owes nearly everything to Switzer's October 1955 Esquire story 'The Death Bringers.'

As the title suggests, there is no happy ending.

Robert Switzer's last known work is the 1961 novel I Was Going Anyway. It's the best Canadian noir novel I've read this year, if not entirely original. Switzer mined three of his old Esquire stories, the earliest being 'Death of a Prize Fighter,' which appeared all the way back in the June 1949 issue. 

'The Small Man' and 'The Death Bringers' were both published in the fifteen months leading to The Tents of the Wicked. Were they segments of a work in progress or simply reused for his debut novel?

I don't expect we'll ever know nor does it matter. The Tents of the Wicked is one hell of a book.

Trivia: In 'The Small Man' the Paul Rezzado character is named Jesus Rezzado. This Anglican caught several echoes of the New Testament in the novel itself.

The Rezzado character in 'The Death Bringers' is named Perez, which is the surname of the man Angela marries in The Tent of the Wicked. 

Object and Access: A paperback original, there have been no subsequent printings or editions. The cover illustration does not reflect a scene in the novel.

As I write eight copies are listed for sale online, ranging in price from US$4.00 to US$33.00. All booksellers are in the United States. A word of caution, the bookseller asking US$33.00, the most dear by far, charges a further US$99.50 to ship what is a slim mass market paperback that weighs less than a sparrow. 

Related posts:

Bringing It All Back Home
Robert Switzer, Esquire

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

Bringing It All Back Home

 

I Was Going Anyway
Robert Switzer
New York: Macmillan, 1961
121 pages

Robert Switzer flew under my radar for decades, it was only last month that I first read his name. I shelled out a bit extra for a copy of I Was Going Anyway with a dust jacket and am glad I did. The rear flap features some very interesting information about the man:

I expect there is some exaggeration in the description of the author's vagabond upbringing. The 1931 Canadian census finds Robert, age eight, living in Saskatoon with his two older siblings and their parents Franklin K. Switzer ("Dentist") and Edna Irene Switzer ("Home Maker"). While it is true that his 1949 Esquire story 'Death of a Prize Fighter' had been widely anthologized, most notably in Prize Stories of 1950: The O. Henry Awards (New York: Doubleday, 1950), it was not his Esquire debut. 

 The first appeared in the magazine three years earlier when Switzer was twenty-three:

'No End to Anything' was followed by eighteen more stories, 'Death of a Prize Fighter' included, all published in Esquire. I've yet to find a single Robert Switzer story appearing in another magazine. The run ends in April 1957 with 'A Terrible Tomorrow,' a story about the desperate search for a young missing girl and the unstable teenager accused with her abduction.

I mention these things of a reason. 

I Was Going Anyway centres on Will, a syndicated sports columnist based in Toronto, and his relationship with a woman named Dorothy, the daughter of a celebrated surgeon. They meet at a party in early winter, enjoy a bit of light flirtation, and then part. Nothing more to see here until Will sends her a Christmas gift. Dorothy responds. Next thing you know, the two have a date for New Year's Eve. They have their first kiss when the clock strikes twelve.

Will and Dorothy take things slow at first, then speed up the pace considerably, consummating their relationship during a ski weekend in the Laurentians. They return to Toronto engaged. Dorothy's widower father disapproves, but says nothing. And so, arrangements for the happy day commence. Dorothy flies off to Ottawa to consult a college girlfriend, leaving Will behind. What the bride-to-be doesn't know is that there is a woman staying in her fiancé's house.

Erie Clark had arrived a day earlier. It sort of makes sense that Will said nothing about her to Dorothy. Erie and he had never been girlfriend and boyfriend, but they used to sleep with each other. This was fifteen years ago in Montreal, when both were in their late teens. Will was struggling to find his footing in one of the dailies and Erie performed onstage at one of the city's legendary burlesque clubs. They had aspirations, but only Will's were realized. Erie, who'd planned on becoming a Hollywood star married to a wealthy man, instead ended up homeless on Will's doorstep.

He let her in.

What exactly does Erie want from Will? I don't think she herself knows. If pressed, I'd say the answer is shelter from the storm. A second guess, related to the first, would be that she just wanted the company of someone whom she'd known to be kind. Those fifteen years had been rough. Like me, critic Ron Gobin was struck by this passage, quoting it in his review for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (23 April 1961):

This is how Erie is introduced:

These passages are gems. To my knowledge, I Was Going Anyway is the first and only time they ever appeared in print. The same can be said for most every other – but not every other. I Was Going Anyway includes dozens of sentences lifted from the author's Esquire stories. It also includes the better part of 'Death of a Prize Fighter,' reworked to include sportswriter Will as witness.

I had no reason to suspect this when reading the novel. I Was Going Anyway is seamless, so smooth, so polished that it reads as if it was written in one feverish go, beginning with the first word and ending with the last. I didn't catch on until I began reading Switzer's short stories.

A case self-plagiarism? I suppose, but I'll give him a pass. 

The June 1949 edition of Esquire reports that the short story writer had turned down repeated offers from publishers wanting a novel. Switzer would eventually write two for Signet before I Was Going Anyway. The first, The Tent of the Wicked (1956), was a paperback original. The following year he was hired to provide a novelization of Albert Lewin's screenplay for The Living Idol. 

I wonder whether any publisher approached Switzer about a short story collection? I'm guessing not. I'm also guessing that he saw I Was Going Anyway as an opportunity to rescue the best bits of his Esquire stories from the landfill.

This is pure speculation on my part, of course.

With few exceptions, reviews of I Was Going Anyway were very positive – "dulled by lapses into offensive language," sniffed the Buffalo Courier Express (30 April 1961) – but there was no second printing. There has never been a paperback edition. The worst part of Robert Switzer's story as a writer is that it ends here, a mere fifteen years after 'No End to Everything.' With the novel's publication, perhaps before, he went silent and vanished.

I Was Going Anyway is both his last book and his best work. It stands with The Long November, Hot Freeze, The Crime on Cote des Neiges, and The Damned and the Destroyed as the very best of post-war Canadian noir.

Trivia: The Buffalo Courier Express is extremely sensitive regarding language. Granted, I was born after I Was Going Anyway was published, but my twentieth-century eyes see only one word that might offend. In a late chapter, a Montreal Morality Squad cop named Maisonneuve fills a Toronto police detective in on the burlesque club run by Erie's old boss Piggy Latourelle:

This is the earliest use of the word I've encountered in a Canadian novel.

About the author: I've uncovered more about Robert Switzer, but this is already running long. I'll post more next Monday. Stay tuned, the jacket's author bio contains one whopping error of fact!

Object and Access: Such an odd-looking book. I bought it not knowing the page count, so was surprised when it arrived. I Was Going Anyway is a very slim hardcover, slimmer than many mass market paperbacks I have from the time, despite it's olive green boards. What's more, the yellowing pages aren't much better than newsprint.

As I write, five copies are listed for sale online, all from American booksellers. The cheapest is a library discard with "musty odor Due [sic] to age and/or environmental conditions, the pages of this book have darkened." Best to take a pass.

After that we have four copies. At US$3.99, the least expensive lacks a dust jacket. And don't you want that jacket? After that we have three, and only three, that do have the dust jacket, ranging in price from US$20.00 to US$34.00. As might be expected, the most dear is in the best condition.

Do not expect to find I Was Going Anyway in your local library. A WorldCat search suggests that the only copies held by Canadian libraries are found at Queen's University, Library and Archives Canada, and the University of Toronto's Thomas Fischer Rare Book Library.

Saskatoon Public Library take note.  

I Was Going Anyway was read for the 1961 Club hosted by Simon and  Karen. In doing so, I broke my New Year's resolution to read and review only women authors in 2026. Before you shame, it was also read for work. It was just too good not to share.

Other 1961 books I've reviewed over the years:

Bottoms Up - Jock Carroll

A Dum-Dum for the President - Martin Brett [Douglas Sanderson]

Return to Today - Margerie Scott

And for fun, here's one from 1861:

Edith Percival - May Agnes Fleming

Related post:

Robert Switzer, Esquire
Living Through Another Cuba
Silly Idol