Love During Wartime

Return to Today
Margerie Scott
London: Peter Davies, 1961
213 pages

Vanessa Gray and Don Temple met in a streamy wartime canteen. She was an English Rose, working the counter; he was an American serviceman who found her attractive. After Vanessa's exhausting shift, Don hired a cab, whisking them to her Chelsea flat. Once there, Dan warmed a hot-water bottle and tall glass of milk, and Vanessa fell asleep in his comforting arms. The two didn't become lovers that night, but would the next morning. They both knew their's was a was a one-time, two-time, six or seven-time thing.

Don was married to Mary Nell, a "delicate" woman born and raised in his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. I would've used the word "fragile" in place of "delicate." Never in the best of health, Mary Nell was convinced pregnancy would kill her, and so red-blooded American Don had been living a chaste life. Vanessa, single, was struggling with the recent deaths of her mother and RAF pilot brother Brian.

All this is backstory.

The novel's first sentence is far from brilliant, but I like it: "When the letter from Arizona arrived, Vanessa knew it was too late; twelve years too late."

You see, twelve years have passed since the lovers' last tryst, after which Don returned to Kalamazoo. In that time, Vanessa met and married Bill, a cousin of her childhood friend Philip Tennant. Injured in the war, poor Bill expired before their first wedding anniversary... tragically, before he could consummate the marriage. Vanessa now lives in the country, sharing the house in which she's been raised with her father, her elderly nanny, and a housekeeper of sorts named Marie-Teresa.

Don has written to say that he'll be visiting England in September. Because – I'm guessing – he didn't want to splurge on air mail, it is September. Don arrives on the very day his letter is received.

Marie-Teresa, who loves an audience, is positively giddy, whilst nanny refuses to hide her displeasure. The old girl remembers a weekend during the war when this married man dared visit. Vanessa's papa is displeased for much the same reason. 

Why is this man visiting now, after all these years?

Don is not so sure himself, though Mary Nell's death must have something to do with it.

The Kalamazooian has never been able to get over his wartime fling. He thinks that seeing her again might exorcise memory and desires. Or maybe, just maybe, he and Vanessa can start from where they left off, Bill be damned!

When Don learns that Bill is dead, he moves quickly in proposing marriage.

Vanessa's acceptance took me aback. Over the previous ninety-one pages, I really thought I'd come to know her. 

Return to Today is a novel of disruption – and with disruption comes action. Friend Philip is the first out of the gate. He'd had a wartime tumble with Vanessa himself, after which his own marriage proposal had been rejected. Ever since, sad sod Philip has sat, spending the intervening years thinking that the woman he loves will one day come around. Don's intrusion fires a new campaign to win Vanessa's heart.

Emily, Philip's mother, sees the American's intrusion as a threat to her own plan to wed Vanessa's father. 

And then we have Marie-Teresa; what's her reaction? Though a minor character, a refugee of unknown origin, she's is by far the most intriguing. Publisher Peter Davies is spot-on in describing Marie-Teresa as "a loveable dark-haired bundle of complications."

Peter Davies also describes Return to Today as a comedy. I'm not so sure it is, though there was one passage that raised a chuckle. It won't have the same effect out of context, so I won't bother sharing. 

Return to Today spans four days, which the author divides into six sections:

• Friday Morning
• Friday Evening
• Saturday
• Sunday
• Monday Morning
• Monday Evening

I recommend reading Friday Morning through Sunday; on Monday Morning the novel begins to fall apart because it's then that Scott really goes for laughs.

This is a shame, because the first four sections had me thinking that Return to Today was certain to make the annual Dusty Bookcase list of books worthy of a return to print.

It won't, which is not to suggest that it isn't worth your time.

A query: On the evening they meet, Venessa tells Dan "some people think my name is odd."

Is it?

Dan thinks so, asking "is it French or something?"

Was Vanessa such an unusual name eighty years ago?

The Windsor Star
2 December 1961

Object and Access: An attractive hardcover featuring dark blue boards, the jacket illustration is credited to Val Biro. My copy was purchased earlier this year from the very same UK bookseller who sold me Dove Cottage. Price: £8.00. There's some evidence that McClelland & Stewart published a Canadian edition, but I've never seen it.

As of this writing, two copies are offered for sale online. At £11.75, a jacketless copy of the Peter Davies edition is the cheapest. Ignore that. The copy you want to buy is listed by a bookseller in Ashland, Oregon, who offers the Peter Davies edition and the McClelland & Stewart edition of Scott's second novel The Darling Illusion (1954). Both have jackets. Both are inscribed by the author. The price for this two-book lot is US$44.00.

You know what to do.

Related posts:

They Fell in Love With the Actress

In Search of Margerie Scott

A Crooked Cousin in a Cunning Cottage

Dove Cottage
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]

London: Abelard-Schulman, 1958
192 pages

Jan Hilliard's third novel, the curtain rises on the cramped three-room flat shared by underpaid, middle-aged bank clerk Homer Flynn, wife Dolly, and mother-in-law Mrs Bigelow. Sister-in-law Grace, a secretary at an advertising agency, lives across the hall. Grace's husband, Raymond, lost a foot in the Second World War, and with it the will to do much of anything. Mrs Bigelow thinks the world of Raymond, and very little of Homer.

Not long ago, Homer suffered the loss of Aunt Harriet, his late mother's sister. In absence of a will, solicitors Ramsey, Claxton and Stone have advised that he may be next of kin. Aunt Harriet was a widow. Her only child, Claude, ran away at sixteen, taking with him a fair amount of cash and jewellery belonging to his mother and her boarders. This crime was followed, years later, by newspaper accounts of Claude's ill-fated attempt to conquer Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Mrs Bigelow dreams that Claude's inheritance might provide just enough money to purchase a donut-making machine. She wants to start a business called "Granny's Greaseless Donuts." Dolly dares hope for $5000, all the while telling her husband that his expectations of $10,000 are far too high, and that he will only be disappointed. As it turns out, Homer inherits $250,000, roughly three million in today's dollars. Add this amount to the sale of Aunt Harriett's large Victorian house, bathed in the red lights of Lavinia Street. Mrs Bigelow is quick to question the source of the dead woman's wealth:

"I aways thought there was something funny about those boarders of hers. Her young ladies, she used to call them. 'What do they do?' I asked her, that time I went to see her. 'They're secretaries,' she said. 'Then why are they at home today?' I asked. 'It's their day off,' she told me. In the middle of the week."

Mrs Bagelow catches herself, demonstrating momentary restraint in recognition that, of a sudden, Homer has the upper hand in their relationship. She wants her son-in-law to move the family to the Riviera, but having spent a career in banking he is far too practical. Instead, Homer purchases a large country cottage for his wife and mother-in-law. Homer, who had always wanted to grow his own vegetables, fruits, and flowers, tends to his gardens with hired hand Mr Newby. Mrs Bigelow, who was never really interested in selling donuts, embraces the opportunity offered to become a landscape painter. In doing so, she attracts the romantic attention from neighbour George, an amiable wealthy widower who made his money selling fish. Dolly, the novel's least defined character, is just happy that her mother and husband are happy.

It's all very pleasant until the evening their cottage receives an unexpected, unkempt visitor. The man claims to be Aunt Harriett's son Claude, but is he? Homer, who hasn't seen his cousin in decades, is convinced. Claude – at least, the man calling himself Claude – lays claim to Aunt Harriett's riches, all the while admitting that there is a catch:

"I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. I'm going to lay my cards on the table. The minute I prove I'm Claude Jeffries, the police will move in, I'd spend the next twenty years behind bars. However," he raised his voice as Homer was about to say something, "there's no law saying a man can't inherit money because he happens to be in jail. You know of any such law?" 
   "I know very little about such things."
   "Take it from me, there's no such law. Now, the way I look at it Homer, we're both in a spot."
   "You're in a spot," Mrs. Bigelow said, but in a small voice. 
   "So here's what we'll do. I'll stay on here with you folks, share my inheritance with you. In return, you'll protect me, keep my true identity secret."

And so, Cousin Claude becomes "Claude Richards," Homer's childhood friend, back from adventures in Africa. Claude Richards is a travel writer, which serves to explain why Grace and Raymond, who are not in on the secret, had never before met the man. Because Claude believes the police are on his trail, he lies low under the pretence that he is recovering from "jungle fever." This, combined with Homer, Dolly, and Mrs Bigelow's understandable reluctance to discuss Claude only serves to make him a more intriguing figure, firing interest and desire in Grace and hired girl Eloise:

Knowing the value of first impressions, she did not want to be seen by him until tomorrow, when, her hair washed and set, she would be wearing her pink jersey sweater over her new brassière with the pointed cups.

Abelard-Schuman sold Dove Cottage as a "thoroughly delightful, completely comic and utterly frivolous novel." And it is. Enjoyable light entertainment, it reminded me of nothing so much as an afternoon attending local community theatre.

A good time was had by all.

About the author:

Object: A hardcover with Kelly green boards. The jacket illustration, depicting Claude, is by the talented William McLaren. Purchased in February from an Oxfordshire bookseller – price: £18.50 – it looks to have been a review copy.

Access: All evidence suggests that Dove Cottage enjoyed no more than one printing. The year after publication, the novel reappeared as a "new story of suspense" in the Star Weekly Magazine.

Star Weekly Magazine, 22 August 1959

There have been no paperback editions. There have been no translations.

By Any Other Name: Onoto Watanna's Hyacinth

The Heart of Hyacinth
Onoto Watanna [Winnifred Eaton]
New York: Harper, 1903
251 pages

Read last month, I've put off writing about The Heart of Hyacinth because I still don't know what to think. 

To begin with, this is a novel written by a Canadian of Chinese and Scots heritage, born and raised in Montreal, who passed herself off as Japanese. The story takes place in Japan, which the author had not visited.

It's a beautifully written work. The opening pages seduce with descriptions of Sendai and the surrounding countryside. Minute, seemingly insignificant elements are added. All is dreamlike and idyllic. At some point a kindly Presbyterian missionary couple land. A modest church is built and there are some converts to the faith. Years pass, the minister's hair grows white, and his beloved wife dies. Then comes an English vessel carrying ill-behaved sailors and officers. They woo the daughters of Sendai, only to leave them; but one Englishman stays behind. He brings a young woman, Aoi, to the elderly missionary, and they marry. There the Englishman stays, loving his newfound land, loving his wife even more, and fathering a son. All of a sudden, the Old World – his old world – descends into conflict, and he is called to join the battle.

Aoi awaits a promised return that is not to be. After a lengthy silence, letters arrive in a foreign script and language. She takes them to the missionary who informs that her husband is dead.

Komazawa, the fatherless son, is a carefree child, unaffected by all that has passed. His life changes with the arrival of a dying "white" woman in the family home. She has brought with her a baby girl. The local doctor recommends that an English counsel be informed, but the boy balks; the white woman has entrusted the infant, Hyacinth, to his mother, and in her arms she will stay. If anything, the son is the greater protector and teacher of the girl. 

The Heart of Hyacinth is a stone skipping across a lake. It touches fleetingly on scenes and events, leaving the reader to imagine what has happened in between. The ageing missionary reaches the point at which he must hand the mission to another. His replacement, Mr Blount, has the strength that comes with youth, but is in every other way a lesser man. He lacks his predecessor's appreciation of the local people and their culture; love is absent.

At Blount's insistence, the adolescent Komazawa is sent off to study in England:

"He is, in fact, one of us. He has the physical appearance, somewhat of the training, and, let us hope, the natural instincts of the Caucasian. It would be not only ludicrous but wicked him to continue here in this isolated spot, where he is, may we say, an alien."

Komazawa does not return until four years later. In his absence, Hyacinth attends school in Sendai. Classmates laugh, pointing at her brown hair, and the sensei views the girl as a curiosity. She is taught that people from the West are barbarians and savages. When Komazawa reappears in English clothing, Hyacinth shuns him. When he changes into Japanese dress they embrace.

Hyacinth knows she is the adopted daughter of Aoi, whom she considers her mother. Born and raised in Japan, the girl thinks of herself as Japanese. Crisis comes with her betrothal to Yamashiro Yashida, son of the wealthiest family in Sendai. In opposing the union, Blount discovers that Aoi is not Hyacinth's natural mother – like the Yamashiro family, he had assumed that she and Komazawa shared the same parents. Then comes the discovery that both of the girl's parents were "Caucasian." The revelation comes as no surprise to the reader, who will remember her mother's dying hours, but to Hyacinth it is shocking and devastating. 

The Heart of Hyacinth is a novel about identity and self-identity. At its heart – there is no better word – it confronts issues of race and nationality, questioning how we perceive ourselves and others. The beauty of its prose contains an ugly reality that sadly remains twelve decades later. 

Object: The Heart of Hyacinth is one of the most beautiful books in my collection. The "decorations," which appear on every page, are credited to Kiyokichi Sano, about whom I can find next to no information.

I'm not so sure whether his hand also produced the four full-colour book plates. I suspect not.

My copy was purchased four years ago in Toronto.

Access: In 2000, after languishing out-of-print for nearly a century, The Heart of Hyacinth was revived by the University of Washington Press. Its edition includes an introduction by Samina Najmi.

Remarkably – astonishingly – copies of the 120-year-old first edition can be purchased online for as little as US$3.25. An Ontario bookseller hopes to sell his for US$105.00, but the one to buy is offered by a bookshop in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. Wrapped in wax paper in original presentation box, it can be purchased for US$71.65.

I expect it to be gone within minutes of this post.

No one who buys this novel will be disappointed.

The Heart of Hyacinth can be read online through this link to the Internet Archive.

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Beauty Ignored and Neglected
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Alberta Gothic

Go West, Young Woman

The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d]
251 pages

In the summer of 1985, I bought a copy of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and read it from cover to cover. This is nowhere near as impressive as it might seem; what I read was the original two-column 843-page edition (1983), not the two-column 1099-page second edition (2001). Nevertheless, it was through the Companion that I first learned of Arthur Stringer. The author's entry, penned by Dick Harrison, amounts to little more than a half-page. Here are some of the things I learned:

• born 1874 in Chatham, Ontario;
• studied at the University of Toronto and Oxford;
• wrote for the Montreal Herald;
• established his literary career in New York;
• "made an enduring contribution to Canadian literature with his prairie trilogy: Prairie Wife (1915), Prairie Mother (1920), and Prairie Child (1921)."

Harrison gets the titles of the trilogy wrong – The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, and The Prairie Child are correct – but never mind, what stuck with me was Prairie. As decades passed, I forgot all about Chatham, Toronto, Oxford, Montreal, and New York, and came to think of Stringer as a Western Canadian. It wasn't until 2009, when I read The Woman Who Could Not Die (1929), my first Stringer, that I was reminded he was an Ontario boy. A Lost World novel set in the Canadian Arctic, I liked it well enough to keep reading and begin collecting his work.

My Arthur Stringer collection (most of it, anyway).
Cliquez pour agrandir.

Admittedly, much of my interest has to do with his enviable popularity, the deals he cut with Hollywood, and his marriage to Jobyna Howland. This is not to suggest that I didn't like the books themselves. My favourite Canadian novel of the early twentieth-century is Stringer's The Wine of Life (1921), which... um, was inspired by his marriage to Jobyna Howland.

A second admission: I put off reading The Prairie Wife, the first volume in Stringer's "enduring contribution to Canadian literature," for no other reason that it is set in rural Canada. Before you judge, I rush to add that this Montrealer has lived in rural Canada these past two decades. Country living attracts, but not novels set in the country. This may explain how it is that I was swept up by its early pages.

The Prairie Wife takes the form of a series of entries, written over the course of more than a year to someone named Matilda Anne. Its writer, Chaddie, begins by describing a voyage from Corfu to Palermo and then on to the Riviera. She is of the moneyed class – that is until Monte Carlo, where Chaddie receives a cable informing that the "Chilean revolution" has wiped out her nitrate mine concessions. Made a pauper, Chaddie's first action is to dismiss her maid; the second is to send word to her German aristocrat fiancé:

I sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all the while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxes duly piled up in tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav — which made me quite calmly and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!

After a respectable period of mourning lost wealth, Theobald Gustav throws her over. Just as well, really, because the Paris Herald had reported on of a traffic accident that had occurred when he'd been in the company of a "spidery Russian stage-dancer." On the rebound, Chaddie proposes to Scots-Canadian Duncan Argyll McKail, whom she'd met in Banff the previous October. He is too much in love and far too practical to turn her down.

And so, this is how Chaddie, an American socialite who'd shared the company of Meredith and Stevenson, and had sat through many an opera at La Scala, ends up in a one-room shack with flattened tin can siding on the remote Canadian prairie.

Duncan – annoyingly, his bride refers to him as "Dinky-Dunk" – is a civil engineer from the east. He's got it in his mind to make a fortune through farming, and has purchased a 1700-acre parcel of land one hundred or so kilometres northwest of, I'm guessing, Swift Current.

"He kept saying it would be hard, for the first year or two, and there would be a terrible number of things I'd be sure to miss," Chaddie writes Matilda Anne. 

No doubt!

Harrison doesn't use the term "Prairie Realism" in his Stringer entry, but I will; The Prairie Wife is a good fit with later novels by Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, and Robert Stead. Can we agree that Prairie Realism was never terribly realistic? Though pre-Jazz Age, Stringer's story begins as a crazy Jazz Age adventure in which a carefree debutante marries a man she may or may not love. In her earliest pages to Matilda Anne, she writes:

O God, O God, if it should turn out that I don't, that I can't? But I'm going to!  I know I'm going to! And there's one other thing that I know, and when I remember it, It sends a comfy warm wave through all my body: Dinky-Dunk loves me. He's as mad as a hatter about me. He deserves to be loved back. And I'm going to love him back. That is a vow I herewith duly register. I'm going to love my Dinky-Dunk.

Chaddie continues:

But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a strong man? To be able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that leaves him rather white and shaky in the voice and trembly in the fingers, and seems to light a little luminous fire at the back of his eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow, the same as an animal's when your motor head-lights hit them!

There's a clear separation between the opening pages and the rest of the novel. Whimsy gives way to practicality, as Duncan chases his fortune. Remarkably, Chaddie settles on the prairie, and into matrimony, rather nicely. Harrison writes of "disillusionment as the marriage deteriorates," but this reader saw nothing of the kind. True, there are moments of discord, as in the strongest of marriages, but Dinky-Dunk and Chaddie – he calls her "Gee-Gee" – are soon in one another's arms. She does come to love her Dinky-Dunk.

The frontispiece of the A.L. Burt photoplay edition, c.1925.

I don't know what Harrison means when he writes of Chaddie's "mature resolve as she begins an independent life on the Prairies." The married couple only become closer as the novel progresses, and the two are increasingly reliant on a slowly growing cast of characters. The earliest, hired man Olie, is a silent Swede who at first can't keep his eyes off Chaddie. This male gaze has nothing to do with objectification, rather her ridiculously impractical city dress. Pale Percival Benson Wodehouse, whom this reader suspects to be a remittance man, is next to appear. He was sold the neighbouring ranch from "land chaps" in London. Nineteen-year-old Finnish Canadian Olga Sarristo enters driving a yoke of oxen. Two weeks earlier, what remained of her family had burned to death in their own shack one hundred or so miles to the north. To Chaddie, stoic and stunning Olga is like something out of Norse mythology, "a big blonde Valkyr suddenly introducing herself into your little earthly affairs." Olga is a welcome addition to the farm; every bit as capable physically as Olie and Duncan. Last to arrive is Terry Dillion, a fastidious young Irishman who had once served in far off lands with the British Army.

Together they support Duncan's big gamble, which involves putting all he has on a sea of wheat covering his 1700 acres. Threatened by draught, fire, and hail, the crop survives, making him a wealthy man. His riches are further increased by a new rail line to be built across his land. The final pages have Duncan and Chaddie poring over house-plans mailed from Philadelphia. "We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through," she writes Matilda Anne. 

The Prairie Wife is the first Stringer novel I've read with a woman narrator. Early pages aside, I found Chaddie's voice oddly convincing. This audio recording by Jennifer Perree, stumbled upon in researching this novel, reinforced my conviction. An enjoyable story, an entertainment, it left me wanting to hear more from Chaddie.

And there is more!

Stringer wrote more than forty novels, but The Prairie Mother is the only one to spawn a sequel, The Prairie Mother (1920)  – and then another in The Prairie Child (1922).

Like Dinky-Dunk, Stringer really knew how to make a buck.  

Favourite sentence:

The trouble with Platonic love is that it's always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.

Bloomer: 

I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't actively dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie does. I've been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such physical grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves.

Trivia: In 1925, The Prairie Mother was adapted to the silver screen. A lost film, the trade reviews I've read are lukewarm, mainly because there is no gunplay. Chaddie is played by comedic actress Dorothy Devore, one of many who fell in making the transition to talkies. New to me is Herbert Rawlinson, who played Duncan. Olga is played by Canadian Frances Primm, about whom little is known, A pre-Frankenstein Boris Karloff plays Diego, a character that does not feature in the novel. Most interetsing to the silent film buff is Gibson Gowland (Olie), the man who played McTeague in Erich von Stroheim's Greed.

Motion Picture Magazine, December 1924 

Object: My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller located in Winterton, Lincolnshire. Price: £9.00. Sadly, the jacket illustration is uncredited.

The rear pushes all three books in Stringer's trilogy, The Prairie Child not yet available in a bargain edition. The flaps feature a list of other Hodder & Stoughton titles, including works by Canadians Ralph Connor (The Sky Pilot of No Man's Land [sic]), Hulbert Footner (The Fugitive Sleuth, Two on the Trail), Frank L. Packard (The Night Operator, The Wire Devils, Pawned), Robert J.C. Stead (The Homesteaders), and Bertrand W. Sinclair (Poor Man's Rock).

Access: The Prairie Wife first appeared in 1915, published serially over four issues of the Saturday Evening Post (16 January - 6 February). That same year, it appeared in book form in Canada (McLeod & Allen) and the United States (Bobbs-Merril). Both publishers used the same jacket design:

Evidence suggests that The Prairie Wife is Stringer's biggest seller. A.L. Burt published at photoplay edition tied into the 1925 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer adaptation. Is that Boris Karloff as Diego on the right?

At some point, Burt went back to the well to draw Prairie Stories, which included all three novels in Stringer's prairie trilogy. As far as I've been able to determine, The Prairie Wife last saw print in The Prairie Omnibus (Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), in which it is paired with The Prairie Mother. 

Used copies of The Prairie Wife can be purchased online for as little as US$8.95.

Related post:

That's Entertainment

An Egotist of Yesterday

A Daughter of To-day
Mrs Everard Cotes (Sara Jeannette Duncan)
New York: Appleton, 1894

392 pages

Of all the novels I've read this year, A Daughter of To-day has the very best opening scene. Miss Kimpsey, a spinster teacher in small town Sparta, Illinois, calls on local society matron Mrs Leslie Bell. Because her visit is unexpected, Miss Kimpsey must wait in the drawing room. The educator casts an eye about noting volumes on loan from the circulating library, the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Doré print, the arrangement of Japanese dolls, and the absence of bows and draperies:

Miss Kimpsey's own parlour was excrescent with bows and draperies. "She is above them," thought Miss Kimpsey, with a little pang.

Miss Kimpsey is concerned for Elfrida, Mrs Bell's fifteen-year-old daughter. In a recent essay, the girl quoted Rousseau, whom Miss Kimpsey believes "atheistical" and "improper in every way."

When told of this, Mrs Bell hides disappointment in learning that the Rousseau quotation wasn't in the original French.

Elfrida Bell, daughter of to-day, doesn't feature in the first chapter; she is only as others see her... No, that's not right. During their meeting, Mrs Bell presents Miss Kimpsey with a cabinet photograph for which Elfrida "posed herself." The girl is seen as she wants to be seen.

Fairly beautiful and somewhat talented, Elfrida is easily the most graceful and artistic fish in Sparta's small pond. An aspiring painter, she's enrolled in a Philadelphia art school. When results don't meet Mr and Mrs Bell's expectations, Elfrida is sent to study under Monsieur Lucien in Paris. Sadly, her Hungarian cloak draws more notice than her work.

Elfrida desires to be seen by others "as an artist and a Bohemian." That she achieves the latter with no effort – it is in her nature – makes it all the more difficult to acknowledge her limitations in the visual arts:

Elfrida was certain that if she might only talk to Lucien she could persuade him of a great deal about her talent that escaped him – she was sure it escaped him – in the mere examination of her work. It chafed her always that her personality could not touch the master; that she must day-after day be only the dumb, submissive pupil. She felt sometimes that there were things she might say to Lucien which would be interesting and valuable for him to hear. 

Misfortune strikes when Mr Bell's midwestern investments go south. Slim funds are sent overseas so as to enable their daughter's return to Illinois. Elfrida instead makes for London, where she looks to reinvent herself as a writer.

It is both trite and apt to describe Elfrida as complex. A young woman who lives for art and the life of an artiste, her behaviour can be infuriating. "'I know I must be difficult,'" she says when sitting for English portraitist John Kendal:

"Phases of character have an attraction for me – I wear one to-day and another to-morrow. It is very flippant, but you see I am honest about it. And it must make me difficult to paint, for it can be only by accident that I am the same person twice."

Nothing comes quite as one might expect. The author takes a great risk in centring the climax on our heroine's reaction to Kendal's portrait.  

A Daughter of To-Day was read in one go on July 22nd, the hundredth anniversary of Sara Jeannette Duncan's death. It was hard to put down. Writing to-day, I realize it was read too quickly. The more I consider, the more I see – much like Elfrida as she casts a critical eye on her portrait.

Trivia (or not): Sara Jeannette Duncan's mother was born Jane Bell. Elfrida's closest friend is named Janet.

Object: My copy, the first American edition, was purchased earlier this year from a Kentucky bookseller. Price: US$24.95. A thing of beauty, the image above doesn't come close to doing it justice. The novel proper is followed by four pages of adverts for Appleton editions of Rudyard Kipling, Wolcott Balestier, Beatrice Whitby, Egerton Castle, Edward Eggleston, and Maarten Maartens.

Access: First published in 1894 by the Toronto News Company (Canada), Appleton (United States). and in two volumes by Chatto & Windus (Great Britain).

Both the Toronto News Company, and Appleton editions can be read online through the Internet Archive.  

The novel was reissued in 1988 by Tecumseh. Print on demand vultures offer this edition.

That ain't Elfrida Bell.

Ralph Connor's Canada Dry

Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police:
   A Tale of the MacLeod Trail
Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon]

Toronto: Westminster, 1912
454 pages

We begin on an Inverleith rugby pitch. Scotland is up against Wales in the International. It's a close contest, in part because Allan Cameron, fierce-fighting half-back of the Scottish line, hasn't been playing up to snuff. In the dying minutes, the Scots get a lucky break when the ball comes tumbling Cameron's way. He hesitates, and the promise of victory turns to defeat.

"Oh-h-h-h, Cam-er-on!" is the novel's first sentence. What has happened to Scotland's star player?

The answer is drink.

This is not to suggest that Cameron was under the influence during the game, rather that "he was out of condition; he had let himself run down last week, since the last match, indeed, got out of hand a bit."

The loss isn't the worst of it. Days later, Cameron faces arrest for passing a forged cheque. He doesn't remember doing so, but is unable to deny the charge because... well, you know, drink. 

The half-back is saved from arrest by Miss Brody, rugby-loving niece of the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Scotland, and Cameron's conscience is later cleared when a dishonourable drinking buddy owns up to the crime. However, the damage has been done; Cameron has decided to give up drink, give up his studies, and make a new life for himself in Canada, envisioning himself "a wealthy rancher, ranging over square miles of his estate upon a 'bucking broncho,' garbed in the picturesque cowboy dress."

Instead, he ends up a low-level clerk at a Montreal shipping company.

The job doesn't last long – something to do with losing his temper and throwing his superior against a wall – and so, newly unemployed, Cameron does what we've all done in the same situation by taking in a travelling circus. There he chances upon farmer Tom Haley and his son Timmy who've come to the city to take in the show and purchase provisions for the family farm. Sadly, young freckle-faced Timmy winds up outside one of the drinking tents dotting the circus grounds as inside his father – rather sloshed – begins dipping into the money meant for baking flour and such. Cameron comes to the rescue by dragging Tom out, beating back "circus toughs" in the process.

Grateful and somewhat sobered by the violence, Tom offers our hero a position on his farm, twelve miles outside of town. Cameron accepts. Before long, he's proven himself an expert milker of cows, hoer of beets, player of bagpipes, and temperate role model to young Timmy. Over the course of the growing season, unrefined Mandy, the farmer's daughter, falls for the new hired hand, which scares Cameron into setting out for the West.

Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police is divided fairly evenly into three books, each with very different settings: Inverleith, Montreal and surrounding countryside, and the Canadian West. As a reader I found the first the most entertaining. As a Montrealer, the second held some interest, but only because it depicted a unilingual city that never existed. The last third, in which our hero finds an enemy in a whiskey trader, held the most action, but there's only so much fisticuffs and gunplay I can take. Its depiction of "our Indians" and mythologizing of the NWMP was particularly hard to stomach:

To the whole country the advent of the police proved an incalculable blessing. But to the Indian tribes especially was this the case. The natives soon learned to regard the police officers as their friends. In them they found protection from the unscrupulous traders who had hitherto cheated them without mercy or conscience, as well as from the whiskey runners through whose devilish activities their people had suffered irreparable loss.
     The administration of the law by the officers of the police with firm and patient justice put an end also to the frequent and bloody wars that had prevailed previously between the various tribes, till, by these wild and savage people the red coat came to be regarded with mingled awe and confidence, a terror to evil-doers and a protection to those that did well.

In the introduction to his anthology Best Mounted Police Stories (Edmonton: U of Alberta Press, 1978), Dick Harrison writes that Connor "did more to create the literary image of the Mountie than any other writer." He doesn't say whether this is a good thing, but I'll suggest it is not.

At the end of it all, I was left wondering whether early readers of Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police were a touch disappointed. As Connor's title suggests, Cameron does indeed join the force, but this doesn't happen until the twenty-second of the novel's twenty-five chapters. By this point, I'd long since lost interest; the late introductions of Big Bear, Crowfoot, Louis Riel, and other historic figures to Cameron's story only irritated.  

Ultimately, Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police turned out to be another of those novels that gets off to a fairly good start, but quickly loses momentum, grows tired and begins to wander, much like Cameron on the pitch at Inverleith.

I've nothing more to add. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get a drink.

Bloomer: "When a fellow gets on the bum and gets into a hole he knows well that there'll be a lot of people tumbling over each other to get him out, hence he deliberately and cheerfully slides in."

Trivia: The novel was adapted to the silent screen in 1921 as Cameron of the Royal Mounted; an interesting title change given that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had replaced the North-West Mounted Police (note the hyphen) just the previous year.

Filmed in Banff, directed by son of Toronto Henry MacRae, unlike the vast majority of silent-era films Cameron of the Royal Mounted is not lost!

Well, not entirely.

The first three of its nine reels are preserved at Library and Archives Canada.

Object and Access: An embossed hardcover, typical of its time, mine is a first Canadian edition. The book was purchased eight years ago in London, Ontario. At most, it set me back two dollars.

Used copies are plentiful and cheap. Of those listed for sale online, Doran's first American edition in uncommon dust jacket is the one to buy. Price: US$40.00.

The Internet Archive offers several editions online, including the Westminster, which can be be read through this link. Sadly, there was no photoplay edition.

Related posts:

Dale's Dumb Luck; or, A Mountie Messes Up

The Atomic Dale; or, The Mounties Mess Up?

Queen Remembers a Forgotten Book

Joan Suter, Angus Hall, and the Collector in Me

I've got several paying projects on the go, all with tight deadlines, meaning there won't be any reviews here for the next month or so. Something to do with feeding the family, you understand.

However, I did want to share a few things about one of those paying projects: a review of Joan Suter's novel East of Temple Bar for my column in Canadian Notes & Queries. 

Until this year, Joan Suter's name meant nothing to me; I encountered it while researching Joan Walker, whose 1957 novel Repent at Leisure I reviewed here in January. Not much has been written about Walker or her career; most of what has, jacket copy included, refers to Repent at Leisure as a debut novel.

Marriage of Harlequin
Joan Walker
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1962

I have Daryn Wright and Karyn Huenemann to thank for setting me straight. Their Joan Walker entry at Canada's Early Women Writers brings the revelation that Repent at Leisure wasn't the author's first novel, or even the second, but the third. Published in 1946 under her maiden name, East of Temple Bar was Walker's true debut. The same year saw her follow-up, Murder by Accident, which appeared under the pseudonym "Leonie Mason."

Copies of East of Temple Bar aren't plentiful, but they are inexpensive. I wanted the dust jacket, so and splurged all of £7.50 on mine. Money well spent, it brought this front flap:

East of Temple Bar was published in London by C & J Temple. A fragile pale green hardcover with thin pages, its worthy of study by those interested in supply constraints faced by printers in post-war England. My copy, purchased online from London's Small Library Company, once belonged to British novelist Angus Hall (1932-2009). As he would have been thirteen or fourteen when it was published, I'm guessing Hall bought it used when he was a young Fleet Street journalist.

East of Temple Bar revolves around Eve Smith and Hugh Fenwick, two friends who meet while working on Fleet Street. Like Hugh, Angus Hall became a film and theatre critic. Like Eve, he eventually left Fleet Street for a life as a novelist.

Hall's first novel, Love in Smoky Regions, was published in 1962 by Constable. It appears to have been very well-received; just look at the TLS quote on the cover of this paperback edition:

The High-Bouncing Lover (Hammond, 1966) was his second novel. Apparently, it's about a failed writer. I can't help but note that The High-Bouncing Lover was one of the working titles for The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's first commercial failure.

By the time the 'seventies hit, Hall had made a reputation for himself as a horror writer. His 1969 novel Devilday was adapted to the screen as Madhouse (1974), starring Vincent Price.

He also wrote the novelization of this 1971 Hammer Horror:

And then there's this, which may frighten some readers:

I count sixteen titles in total, though it's hard to say for certain. Sadly, like Joan Walker (née Suter), Angus Hall is more or less forgotten. What remains of his personal library now rests with the Small Library Company. How it ended up there is an interesting story, told through this Abebooks podcast. One of the Company'a goals is "to find good homes for the books."

Angus Hall's copy of East of Temple Bar has found a good home on my Upper Canadian bookshelves. My only disappointment is that he didn't write his name in it.

Related posts:

On the High Heels of Desire

The Incomplete Repent at Leisure

A Woman Who Did

The Untempered Wind
Joanna E. Wood
Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1994
354 pages

In Henry James Morgan's Types of Canadian Women, published in 1903 by William Briggs, Joanna E. Wood is described as a "well known Canadian novelist."

She is not today.

She was not a half-century ago.

She was not a century ago.

"Meteor-like" is the word Barbara Goddard uses to describe Wood's career. In fact, it ended the very year Types of Canadian Women appeared.

The novelist was all of thirty-five.

Joanna E Wood was twenty-six when The Untempered Wind, her first novel, was published. Its heroine, Myron Holder, has had a child out of wedlock; she is "a mother, but not a wife," and so suffers the scorn of Jamestown, the small Ontario village in which she was born and raised. Myron's own mother is dead, as is her father. Her unloving grandmother is very much alive and shares a modest house with Myron and her baby boy.

When first published in 1894, The Untempered Wind proved a critical and commercial success, encouraging three printings, each featuring the same ten illustrations. The frontispiece was used on the cover of the Tecumseh edition:

Had I been involved in its publication, I would have chosen one of the illustrations depicting Myron. This is my favourite:

Still, I understand the selection. Myron may be the protagonist of The Untempered Wind, but more pages are given over to those so quick to pass judgement. Mrs Deans, the most prominent, leverages her employ of Myron as an act of sacrifice and charity: "I feel a duty to have her here, but it goes ag'in me, Mr. Long [the ragman] it does that; but there, we all have our cross and we must help along as well as we can." Other women of the village visit Myron's grandmother on the pretence of providing sympathy. Each hopes to be the one who uncovers the identity of the child's father, but not even old Mrs Holder knows his name.

Not everyone in Jamestown condemns Myron; some are too drunk to care, while others are oblivious to her situation. This reader was struck by young Bing White, an elfish lad who today's reader will recognise as displaying all the early interests and obsessions of a serial killer:

There was something hideously repulsive in this boy's secret cruelties, horrible to relate, sickening to contemplate. But the creatures he tormented, maimed, killed, knew neither anticipation nor remembrance; the "corporeal pang" was all.

A boy drawn to blood, including his own, Bing is unique in nineteenth-century Canadian literature, as is Jamestown. The village stands in stark contrast with the surrounding farmland as a place poisoned by an atmosphere of envy, greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy:

The Jamestown people, in making a pariah of Myron Holder, were not urged to the step by imperative feeling of hurt honor or pained surprise. Such faults as hers were not uncommon there; but never before had the odium rested upon one only. Besides, there had always been some "goings on" and some "talk" indicative of the affair. In Myron Holder's case, the Jamestown people had been caught napping. In such eases a marriage and reinstatement into public favor was the usual sequel, arrived at after much exhilarating and spicy gossip, much enjoyable speculation, much meditation upon the part of the matrons, and much congratulation that all had ended so well.

Myron is ostracised for not following that well-trod path. After a time, she comes to have a friend in Homer Wilson, by far the most intelligent person in Jamestown, whose ambitions have been crushed by manipulative, guilt-inducing parents. 

The Untempered Wind was first published the year before The Woman Who Did by fellow Upper Canadian Grant Allen. The latter, also a story of an unwed mother, was a succès de scandale. Wood's novel didn't raise as much stink, but it was a success. The three printings by original publisher New York's J Slewing Tait and Sons were followed in 1898 by an Ontario Publishing Company edition.

Together The Untempered Wind and The Woman Who Did stand as two of the most remarkable Canadian novels of the nineteenth century.

Neither was so much as mentioned in my CanLit classes.

Object and Access: A trade paperback with introduction by Klay Dyer, The Untempered Wind is the seventh volume in Tecumseh's essential Early Canadian Women Writers Series. I purchased my less than pristine copy eight years ago at London's Attic Books. Price: $2.23. It's available from the publisher at $17.95 (plus postage) through this link.

Current Literature, November 1894

The Tait and Sons first edition can be read online here, but this scan of the third printing – reproduced in the Tecumseh edition – is much easier on the eyes.

As of this writing, only the Tecumseh edition is listed for sale online.

Related post:

Getting to Know the Woman Who Did