Wild Geese on Film (Part I): Wild Geese

The first of three addendums to the recent review of Martha Ostenso's 1925 bestselling novel.

Released in the autumn of 1927, Wild Geese is a lost silent film, though you wouldn't know it looking at the IMDb entry:

My thinking is that the star ratings concern the novel; it's either that or they were left a couple of decades back by computer savvy centenarians who remembered the film from when they were young. 

Montreal Gazette, 21 May 1928

I doubt the latter is true, but let's pretend.

What would they have seen?

I've had to rely on ninety-eight-year-old reviews, none of which are terribly long or contain much detail. The one published in the 7 December 1927 edition of Variety is the most interesting:

The reference to a "Minnesota household" intrigues. The novel is set in the fictional farming community of Oeland, which is generally accepted to be in the very real province of Manitoba. 

Judging from surviving stills, "poor wig outfitting" seems fair.

Eve Southern played Judith Gare. That's Anita Stewart as Lind Archer on the right. Of the cast, Russell Simpson, who portrayed Caleb Gare, is hands down the best remembered today. He was cast as Pa Joad in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath.

Russell Simpson as Caleb Gare and Belle Bennett as wife Amelia in Wild Geese.  

The reviewer makes no mention of the film's ending, but others do. Apparently, it isn't nearly so positive as Ostenso's.

Returning to those IMDb ratings, I note that no one left an actual review. My thinking is that the one star ratings were left by frustrated high school students looking for a shortcut. This and other Goodreads reviews suggest as much.

And so, this anecdote:

In 1985, I work part-time in a Montreal video store. For context, this was the year in which Betamax was suffering death throes. Come autumn, kids who'd previously rented Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Risky Business abruptly shifted focus to The Natural, the 1984 Barry Levinson film about a middle aged has been who becomes a baseball legend. Set in the early twentieth century, 48-year-old Robert Redford played the lead.

The sudden demand caught the store's owners off-guard. We had eight copies of The Breakfast Club and nearly as many of Police Academy but just one of The Natural. As it turned out, students in nearby Bialik High School had been assigned the Bernard Malamud novel upon which the film is based. 

A young man not much older than the kids I was serving, I'd seen The Natural. Much as I like Levinson and Redford, I did not like their collaboration. My issue was wasn't so much with the body rather the ending, which is diametrically opposed to Malamud's perfect, perfectly depressing conclusion. 

It's also very over the top.

Let this be a lesson, kids.

Read the book.

Related post:

Wild Wild Geese

Wild Wild Geese

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

358 pages

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

There were many, many more printings to come.

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

It is now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a later passage, Lind admires Judith in turn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm hesitating...

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

This can't be considered a spoiler, right?

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

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

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

Still haven't.

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

Martha Ostenso beat them to it.

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

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

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

I don't doubt it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Black Magician - R.T.M. Scott

Related posts:

Wild Geese on Film (Part I): Wild Geese

About Those Old New Canadian Library Intros

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

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s

Martha Ostenso's Forgotten Masterpiece?

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

The Pan Jalna (and the careening Jalnawagon)

The Ten Best Book Buys of 2022 (plus gifts!)

This year will be forever remembered as the one in which Sexpo '69 was added to my collection. An elusive book, published in 1969 by Brandon House of North Hollywood, I spent at least two decades on its trail. My pursuit ended this past summer. The book set me back over one hundred dollars.

I'm betting it was worth every penny and that Lisa and considerate, gentle, sophisticated Bobbie will not disappoint.

"What?" I hear you say. "You mean you haven't read it!"

No, I have not. Too busy.... so busy that I didn't visit the Strand during last month's trip to New York. I did find time for Trump Tower, but only because it was so close to my hotel. I expected to be underwhelmed, and was more than underwhelmed. This was during the weekend of the New York City Marathon, and yet the place was nearly deserted. 

The length of my tie is not a political statement.

Each of this year's ten best book buys was found online, which is a sad state of affairs given recent travels. These are the remaining nine:

Behold the Hour

Jeann Beattie
Toronto: Ryerson, 1959

Jeann Beattie won the Ryerson Fiction Award for Blaze of Noon (1950), her debut novel. Behold the Hour, her second and last, is set in the early days of CBC television. I didn't think much of the novel, but illustrator Ken Elliott's dust jacket is a favourite.

A Daughter of To-day

Mrs Everard Cotes (Sara

   Jeannette Duncan)
New York: Appleton, 1894

Not at all what I expected.

What did I expect? At twenty-one, I read Duncan's classic, The Imperialist, but remember nothing.

Not only a beautiful volume, but one of the year's two best reads.

One-Way Street
Dan Keller [Louis Kaufman]
London: Hale, 1960

Flee the Night in Anger, Keller's first novel, is unique as the only post-war pulp to be set in both Montreal and Toronto. There's a fair amount of travel back and forth. This second and last novel, a very attractive hardcover, begins with a man arriving in Toronto from Montreal. Will he return? The title may provide a clue.

Murder by Accident

Leonie Mason [Joan Suter]

London: C & J Temple, 1947

Following East of Temple Bar (below), Murder By Accident was the second novel by Joan Suter. Both were published the year she divorced her first husband, left England for Canada, married again, and began writing as Joan Walker. The author hid her first two novels. Why she did is a mystery. This novel is another.

And the Town Talked

Martha Ostenso

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Ted Allan and Hugh Garner were published by News Stand Library under pseudonyms – not so Martha Ostenso! And the Town Talked first appeared in a 1938 edition of McCall's. Where it doesn't appear is in any Canadian reference book.

The Blowtop

Alvin Schwartz

New York: Dial, 1948

The author's first novel. Published twenty years before he gave up the United States for Canada, it is set in Greenwich Village and concerns fallout stemming from the murder of a local pusher. Did I read somewhere that one of the characters is based on Schwartz's friend Jackson Pollack?

East of Temple Bar

Joan Suter

London: C & J Temple, 1946

Another favourite cover, it graces the hidden debut novel of a woman who would one day win the 1954 Stephen Leacock Medal for Pardon My Parka and the 1957 Ryerson Fiction Award for Repent at Leisure. I liked the novel for its depiction of a time and place in which one could make a decent living as a writer.

Lost House

Frances Shelley Wees

Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1949

As Ricochet Books series editor, I've returned two Wees novels to print. Lost House, a gothic thriller involving drug runners in remote British Columbia looked to be a possible third. Sadly, it is not one of the author's best.

The second book ever published by Harlequin!

A Question of Judgement
Phyllis Brett Young

London: Allen, 1970

Phyllis Brett Young published six books between 1959 and 1969 — and then nothing in the remaining twenty-seven years of her life. One wonders what happened. A Question of Judgement, her last, was first published in 1969 by Macmillan of Canada. This British edition, which appeared the following year, has the better cover.

This year the Dusty Bookcase received several gifts and review copies.

I'd long been an admirer of Dick Bourgois-Doyle's exploration of Leacock Medal winners. After reaching out, the author not only sent a signed copy of What's So Funny? (Burnstown, ON: Burnstown Publishing, 2016), but invited me to speak on Joan Walker and Ted Allan. 

Quebec history and literature enthusiast Helen Meredith gave me this copy of Kurt W. Stock's All Quiet on the Russian Front (Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket, 1973), which she spotted at a Montreal Salvation Army Thrift Store. Another in the Simon & Schuster's short-lived "series of original Canadian books." I'd never seen a copy.

Novelist Lee Goldberg, publisher of California's Cutting Edge Books, sent three newly-reissued novels – initially published between 1948 and 1961 – with Canadian settings: Muriel Elwood's Heritage of the River, Robert McCaig's The Burntwood Men, and The Tall Captains by Bart Spicer.

Karyn Huenemann of Canada's Early Women Writers gave me a copy of The Ninth Vibration and Other Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922) by Theosophist and mystic L. Adams Beck. Like Sexpo '69, The Ninth Vibration and Other Stories sits near the top of my TBR pile.

Here's looking forward to next year's book purchases.

Here's hoping some will be found in physical book stores.

Related posts:

The Ten Best Book Buys of 2021... and much more!
Ten Best Book Buys of 2021 (& Three Great Gifts)
The Twenty Best Book Buys of 2019
Best Book Buys of 2018 (four of which were gifts)
Ten Best Book Buys of 2017 (one of which was a gift)

The Ten Best Book Buys of a Very Bad Year (2016)

Ten of the Best; Spanking Good Book Buys of 2015

Done With Buying Books (2014)

An Egotist of Yesterday

Accidents Never Happen in a Perfect World

Martha Ostenso's Forgotten Masterpiece?
A Forgotten Novelist's Hidden Debut
On the High Heels of Pleasure
The Incomplete Repent at Leisure

Dope. Danger. One Doll
Talking Joan Walker with Dick Borgeois-Doyle

Talking Ted Allan with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle 

Martha Ostenso's Forgotten Masterpiece?

And the Town Talked
Martha Ostenso
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949
159 pages

The town is Bloomhill; the talk is of Elsbeth Payson. A few days before her eighteenth birthday, young Doctor Frederick Stowell catches Elsbeth at the Van der Water house. Priscilla Van der Water, a former "acrobatic dancer" now married to a brickyard foreman, is giving the girl a lesson on how to do a split. Stowell is horrified; Elsbeth lives in wealthy North Hill, and girls from North Hill do not visit Patchtown, Bloomhill's working class neighbourhood. The doctor orders her away, but she stands her ground: "Did you know, Freddie, that even for classical or professional ballroom dancing you should be able to do what's known as a 'split'?"

Elsbeth Payson's dream is to become a professional dancer. Her late mother approved, which is how she came to know Priscilla Van der Water in the first place. Her father, also late, looked to set his daughter off on a more conventional path, and so left almost everything to his two spinster sisters.

Almost everything. 

On her birthday, Elsbeth is due to receive an inheritance of three thousand dollars (roughly $68,350 today). She intends to take the money, travel to New York, and study dance. A long-held plan, it comes off almost as Elsbeth had always envisioned, except that she's accompanied by pregnant Patchtowner Sadie Miller, whose fiancé was killed in one of Bloomhill's frequent industrial accidents.

Spanning 1933 and 1936, And the Town Talked is a Depression-era novel. I was interested in tensions between Bloomhill's classes, particularly after reading this early passage:

But And the Town Talked isn't much concerned with the plight of the proletariat. Though treated with sympathy, they're all pretty much the same: hard-working, cheerful, largely content with their lot in life. The exception is bad boy Cecil Andrews, who left Bloomhill's Patchtown for a life as a professional musician. He's a complex character, but only in relation to the others – Elspeth included.

Because And the Town Talked is my first Martha Ostenso – I have not read Wild Geese – I cannot speak as to whether it is "in her vigorous and inimitable style." I can say, without reservation, that Ostenso's writing in this novel is on par with most News Stand Library authors. The plot is rushed at times, particularly in the concluding pages, which may have something to do with writing to word count.

And the Town Talked first appeared, marginally longer, in the February 1938 edition of McCall's.* Later that same year, Ostenso published Mandrake Root, which was subsequently translated to Norwegian, Hungarian, and Czech. Other novels followed: Love Passed This Way (1942), O River, Remember! (1943), Milk Route (1948), The Sunset Tree (1949). Her last book has my favourite title: A Man Had Tall Sons (1958). All were published by Dodd, Mead, but not And the Town Talked, which somehow ended up with a cheap paperback house located in the suburbs of Toronto, and is missing from nearly all her bibliographies.

And this is why I read it. 

Is And the Town Talked a masterpiece, as News Stand Library claims? Most certainly not!

Is Wild Geese a masterpiece, as academics have claimed? Here's hoping.

I'm moving my copy to the night table.

* Thanks to bowdler of Fly-by-Night, who spared me the task of comparing the McCall's and News Stand Library versions. His finding is that the latter cut short four of the novel's twenty-two chapters.

Object: A typical News Stand Library production, meaning that there is certain to be some sort of flaw. In this case, centre margins are so tight as to make it nearly impossible to read. 

My copy was purchased earlier this year. Price: C$60.

The cover – uncredited – misleads in that Elsbeth has no child. Is she babysitting? Or is that meant to be minor character Sadie Miller?

Access: As of this writing, no copies are listed for sale online. It's held by Library and Archives Canada and six of our academic libraries.

The February 1938 McCall's can be read through this link to the Internet Archive. 

Related post:

About Those Old New Canadian Library Intros

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

Laura Salverson's 'For Canada' for Canada Day

A poem – and prayer – by Laura Salverson, from Wayside Gleams, her only collection of verse, published in 1925 by McClelland & Stewart.

For Canada 

               Grant us, O Lord, within the coming year.
               Some vision of our noble destiny... 

*  *  *  * 

               Give unto us the strength to face anew
               Adversity and sorrows... or again
               Good fortune, with that valiant humbleness
               Which ever marks a depth of inward grace;
               Grant us, we pray, sincere, courageous hearts.
               Wide sympathies, with minds that seek to see
               In giving joy, and pride in honest toil,
               In beauty, truth, and good for all mankind;
               For every race, for every land, we pray;
               Lift them, O God, from out enthralling thought
               And prejudice, that they, directing, find
               Thy presence manifest on land and sea.
               But last, O Lord, for this is our Canada
               We crave Thy blessing and eternal aid;
               Keep her fair soul unflinching, aye, and true
               That she, among the nations, may arise.
               Made string with the greatness from the fount within,
               Imbued with love that knows not any death,
               This gracious land, so young, so little tried.
               O'er-shadow her with Thy own righteousness.
               That she may stand a New Jerusalem
               Where man, by giving much, may gather more;
               Where thy same speech and creed of kindliness
               At last take root to flourish far and wide,
               Till thereon in very truth become
               The citadel of justice on earth.  

*  *  *  * 

               Grant us, O Lord, within the coming year,
               The vision of our final destiny —
               A nation worthy of her ancient dead —
               A fabric perfected from deathless dreams.

In 2014, I bought this first and only edition of Wayside Gleams for one dollar. The dust jacket features an advert for eight other McClelland & Stewart books.

I haven't read one.

How 'bout you?

Related posts:

'Canada to England, July 1st 1917' by Horace Bray

'O Canada! beloved native land...'
'O Canada! our native land thou art!'
Patriotic Verse from the Garden of a Girl's Dreams
A 123-Year-Old Poem for Canada Day

Two Hurrahs for the New Dominion

Charles G.D. Roberts' Dominion Day Collect

About Those Old New Canadian Library Intros (with some stuff on Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese)

Before I'm accused of being ungrateful, allow me this: The old New Canadian Library was good for this country. As a university student, I was happy to ignore its abridgements, poor production values and ill-advised selections. The introductions, however, were hard to stomach. I was then new to Canadian literature – we did not study such things Quebec's public schools – and yet could already see that many of the NCL intros were inept, inaccurate and factually incorrect.

Answers as to why so many were so flawed are found in New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978, Janet Friskney's invaluable study of NCL's best days. The author tells us that founder Malcolm Ross was adamant that there be introductions, quoting: "I thought it would be useful even for teachers, many of whom were teaching Canadian books for the first time and who had never studied Canadian literature."

As Prof Friskney notes: "in many cases, an NCL introduction was one of the earliest, and sometimes the first piece of critical analysis to appear about a particular work."

Such a sad state of affairs. The blind led the blind... and yet things did improve. In 1962, Hugh MacLennan wrote Ross that the NCL was on its way to becoming "one of the most important things in Canadian publishing." He went on to praise the series for making available the previously unavailable and scarce, adding: "These, with the introductions, are building a true body of relationship between critic and author and the public."

(MacLennan's Barometer Rising had already found a place in the series, and would soon be joined by Each Man's Son.)

All this brings me to Carlyle King's Introduction to Wild Geese, Martha Ostenso's big book, which I reread just yesterday. The intro first appeared when Wild Geese joined the NCL in 1961, and was reprinted until 1996, when it was replaced with an afterword by David Arnason.

Thirty-five years.

I first read these words from Prof King in 1986:

Where to begin? How about with that third sentence, in which King describes the literary landscape of 1923 Canada:

Callaghan was on the Left Bank in Paris among the American expatriates, trying his hand at stories for the little magazines of experimental writing...

No, Morley Callaghan was then studying law at the University of Toronto. It was in 1929 that Callaghan first visited the Left Bank, by which time he was a published author comfortably installed within Charles Scribner's stable.

...Grove, who had written for twenty years in the intervals of an itinerant farm-hand's existence, did not get a first novel into print until 1925.

It was in 1905 that Frederick Philip Grove – or, as King seems to prefer, "Philip Grove" – published his first novel. The "itinerant farm hand's existence" included a stretch in Austrian prison, bohemian living in Berlin and Paris, drinks with Andre Gide and H.G. Wells... and I won't go into his crossdressing wife with the birdcage bustle.

The truth about fraudster and faux-Swede Grove – German Felix Paul Greve – was revealed in 1971 through the sleuthing of D.O. Spettigue. While King cannot be faulted for his 1961 Introduction, one wonders that it continued to be used as the new millennium approached.

Carlyle King informs that Grove, Callaghan and Ostenso stand outside "the Sunshine School of Canadian fiction", in which "human nature is fundamentally noble and Rotarian morality always triumphs. The main characters are basically nice people. Nobody ever suffers long or gets really hurt or says "damn.'"

Oh, dear.

In 1923, the most recent of "Louisa [sic] M. Montgomery's long series of 'Anne' books" was Rilla of Ingleside (1921). A novel set during the Great War, it sees one of our dear Anne's sons taken prisoner by the Hun as another is slaughtered on the battlefield. It's true that the latter is "killed instantly by a bullet during a charge at Courcelette", but I'm not at all convinced this is what King meant in writing that nobody ever suffers long.

Can we at least agree that in this case a character "really gets hurt"?

A good many characters are killed in Ralph Connor's The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land – some suffering long before they die.

And "damn"?

There's a whole lotta cussin' goin' on in the novel, much of which comes from the sky pilot himself:

Yes, there's venereal disease, too.

Is it any wonder that no reference to "the Sunshine School of Canadian fiction" is found outside Carlyle King's writings?

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