Lilian Vaux MacKinnon and Her Critics

A fleeting follow-up to the previous post:

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon earned a English B.A. (Honours) at Queen's, though I don't see much evidence of this in Miriam of Queen's. What the university's website describes as a "critical success" received a mixed bag of reviews. The harshest appraisal comes from an anonymous critic in the December 1921 edition of Canadian Bookman:

The book gives one the idea that Mrs. MacKinnon enjoyed her student life under "Geordie" Grant to the full, and wants to enable others to see it as she did, but is handicapped in her effort by a desire to stick to literal facts. It is somewhat as if one were to attempt to describe  the life of a great university by reproducing a sophomore's diary.

There's more, of course, but I've chosen these words because they touch on the autobiographical nature of the novel. It's this reading of Miriam of Queen's – as a roman à clef – that brought the most positive reviews, like this one in The Ottawa Citizen:

Many of the characters in "Miriam of Queen's" will be recognized. There is for instance her father, a good civil servant. "Roderick Campbell had been in the government employ in increasingly responsible positions since he had moved to Ottawa from the Island of Cape Breton. Highly esteemed, reserved to the point of austerity, a scholarly man, books were his favorite pastime." The Campbell's lived "in a substantial brick house set among the trees" in the Capital.

Like Miriam, Lilian Vaux MacKinnon called Ottawa home, and like her heroine she travelled widely. The Citizen review describes Marion of Queen's as being "almost Dominion-wide in its scope, the scenes extending from the countryside to Cape Breton to the cities of eastern, middle and western Canada."

And so I'm left shaking my head over this:

Canadian Bookman, June 1922

Never assume that a reviewer has actually read the book in question.

Related post:

Back to School with Miriam of Queen's

Canada's 100 Best Books? 102? 111?

Something strange stumbled upon yesterday, this list intended for "people in other countries interested in Canadian literature" from the 1 May 1948 edition of the Ottawa Citizen. Odd and awkward, it was cobbled together at the behest of UNESCO by a committee of eight: E.K. Brown, Philip Child, William Arthur Deacon, F.C. Jennings, Watson Kirkconnell, Lorne Pierce, B.K. Sandwell and W. Stewart Wallace. How anti-commie kook Kirkconnell justified his participation I cannot say.*

The headline in the Citizen is deceiving. Yes, it's meant to be a list of the 100 best, but there are eleven too many. Most of the overrun comes courtesy of Mazo de la Roche's Whiteoak Chronicles, which then numbered ten volumes. The others? Well, one might just be Tom MacInnes' Collected Poems, which doesn't exist.

As I say, odd and awkward. William Osler didn't write The Master Word, but he was the author of The Master-Word in Medicine; Joseph Schull's The Legend of Ghost Lagoon is listed as The Legend of Lost Lagoon; and poor B.K. Sandwell suffers the indignity of being called B.S. Sandwell.

"A list of Canadian books of special merit written in French is also to be compiled by a similar committee", we're told. By whom? Who knows. I find no trace of the committee or its list. What we're to make of the inclusion of Pierre Esprit Radisson's Voyages – recorded as Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson – on the English-language list I cannot say.

Despite the flaws, it's all good fun... for me, at least. So many unfamiliar titles, so many unfamiliar names and so much to explore, the list begins with a forgotten collection of short stories by Will R. Bird:

Sunrise for Peter – Will R. Bird
The Strait of Anian – Earle Birney

Brown Waters – W.H. Blake
North Atlantic Triangle – John Bartlet Brebner
A Dryad in Nanaimo – Audrey Alexandra Brown
James Wilson Morrice – Donald W. Buchanan
The Search for the Western Sea – Lawrence J. Burpee
Now That April's Here – Morley Callaghan
Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell – Wilfred Campbell
Bliss Carman – James Cappon
Bliss Carman's Poems – Bliss Carman
Klee Wyck – Emily Carr
Jean Racine – A.F.B. Clark
Christianity and Classical Culture – Charles Norris Cochrane
Postscript to Adventure – Ralph Connor
Father on the Farm – Kenneth C. Cragg
Collected Poems of Isabella Valancy Crawford – Isabella Valancy Crawford

Dominion of the North – Donald Creighton

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks – Robertson Davies
The Government of Canada – Robert MacGregor Dawson
Whiteoak Chronicles – Mazo de la Roche
The Law Marches West – Cecil E. Denny
Complete Poems –  William Henry Drummond
Grand River – Mabel Dunham
The Art of the Novel – Pelham Edgar
A Study on Goethe – Barker Fairley
Poems – Robert Finch
Fearful Symmetry – Northrop Frye
Arctic Trader – Philip H. Godsell
Napoleon Tremblay – Angus Graham
Earth and High Heaven – Gwethalyn Graham
Pilgrims of the Wild – Grey Owl
Fruits of the Earth – Frederick Philip Grove
Over Prairie Trails – Frederick Philip Grove
A Search for America – Frederick Philip Grove
Brave Harvest – Kennethe M. Haig
Sam Slick – Thomas Chandler Haliburton
All the Trumpets Sounded – W.G. Hardy
Saul – Charles Heavysege
The Drama of the Forests – Arthur Heming
Father Lacombe – Katherine Hughes
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada – Anna Brownell Jameson
Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America – Paul Kane
Lord Elgin – W.P.M. Kennedy
The Golden Dog – William Kirby
Bride of Quietness – Alexander Knox
Selected Poems of Archibald Lampman – Archibald Lampman
Lake Huron – Fred Landon

Leacock Roundabout – Stephen Leacock
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town – Stephen Leacock
From Colony to Nation – A.R.M. Lower
Out of the Wilderness – Wilson MacDonald
Collected Poems – Tom MacInnes
The Honourable Company – Douglas MacKay
Barometer Rising – Hugh MacLennan
Tales of the Sea – Archibald MacMechan
Lord Strathcona – John MacNaughton
The Master's Wife – Andrew Macphail
In Pastures Green – Peter McArthur

The Champlain Road – Franklin Davey McDowell
The Unguarded Frontier – Edgar McInnis
Who Has Seen the Wind – W.O. Mitchell
Roughing It in the Bush – Susanna Moodie
Gauntlet to Overlord – Ross Munro
Lord Durham – Chester W. New
Mine Inheritance – Frederick Niven
Pindar – Gilbert Norwood
The Master Word – William Osler
A Book of Canadian Stories – Desmond Pacey
When Valmond Came to Pontiac – Gilbert Parker
The Complete Poems of Marjorie Pickthall – Marjorie Pickthall
Collected Poems – E.J. Pratt
Voyages of Peter [sic] Esprit Radisson – Pierre Esprit Radisson
His Majesty's Yankees – Thomas H. Raddall
Wisdom of the Wilderness – Charles G.D. Roberts
The Leather Bottle – Theodore Goodridge Roberts
The Incomplete Anglers –  J.D. Robins
Toronto During the French Regime –  Percy J. Robinson
As for Me and My House – Sinclair Ross
Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter – Laura Salverson
Flashing Wings –  Richard M. Saunders
Legend of Lost [sic] Lagoon –  Joseph Schull
The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott –  Duncan Campbell Scott
In the Village of Viger – Duncan Campbell Scott
Wild Animals I Have Known – Ernest Thompson Seton
The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe – Elizabeth Simcoe
Man's Rock –  Bertrand W. Sinclair
Egerton Ryerson –  C.B. Sissons
Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier –  Oscar Douglas Skelton
The Yellow Briar – Patrick Slater

The Book of Canadian Poetry –  A.J.M. Smith
Policing the Arctic – Harwood Steele
Sir Frederick Banting –  Lloyd Stevenson
The Friendly Arctic –  Vihjalmur Stefansson
Under the Northern Lights –  Alan Sullivan
Plowing the Arctic –  G.J. Tranter
Salt, Seas and Sailormen –  Frederick William Wallace
James Wolfe –  W.T. Waugh
The Owl Pen –  Kenneth McNeill Wells
The Birth of Language –  R.A. Wilson
The Canadians –  George M. Wrong
The Rise and Fall of New France –  George M. Wrong

What, no Wacousta?

I've read six.

* "At the close of the Second World War, the Russians took a leading part, along with 'capitalist imperialists,' in organizing another League of Nations, the so-called 'United Nations.' and the Communist Party of the U.S.A. joined in a psalm of praise over the new turn in policy."

–  Watson Kirkconnell, "Communism in Canada and the United States",

Canadian Catholic Historical Association Report 15 (1947-1948)

Freedom to Read Week: Generals Die in Bed (II)

The Ottawa Citizen, 2 June 1930

LONDON, June 2 – Slurs on British generals and attacks on the behavior of Canadian troops as set forth in the book by Charles Yale Harrison, "General's Die in Bed," are repudiated in the press today by Lieut.-Colonel Colin Harding of the Fifteenth Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who served in the First Canadian Division in France and was closely allied with the Canadians throughout the war.

He wants to know why the author should wait twelve years to smudge the memory of fifty-six thousand Canadians who lost their lives fighting for the British Empire and discredit the services of those who survived. As for the alleged looting of Arras, Col. Harding demands the author's authority for the incident, and also for the alleged shooting down of defenceless German prisoners in revenge for torpedoing of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle. The colonel thinks that such books show the necessity for censorship before they are offered to the public as they are calculated to provoke ill-feeling between nations and act as a deterrent to peace.

Freedom to Read Week: Generals Die in Bed (I)

The Ottawa Citizen, 30 May 1930

NEW YORK. May 30. – Charles Yale Harrison, youthful author of the book "Generals Die in Bed," is surprised at the storm which followed publication of the book in London. Mr. Harrison, who served with the 14th Battalion Royal Montreal regiment in France and Belgium in 1917 and 1917 [sic], thinks the critics who have held his book slandered Canadian troops are unjustified. The author is on the staff of the New York newspaper, Bronx Home News, in the capacity as he himself puts it of a "newspaperman, not a journalist."

He told the Canadian Press today he was surprised at reports that his book might be banned in Canada. It will be published here in June and arrangements had been made for publication in the Dominion.

"For me to sneer at the fighting qualities of the Canadian soldier would be to sneer at myself," he said. "I want it distinctly understood that the Canadian Expeditionary Force was the best fighting unit in the field. Vimy Ridge, Ypres, the Somme, Cambrai and Mons speak for themselves."

War in Real Light.

Referring to criticism that the book showed Canadian soldiers in an untrue light morally. Harrison held he tried to picture war "as it really happened – not as some spinster ladies thought it should happen. War is dirty, disgusting and the sooner the world realizes that modern warfare is a demoralizing business the better it will be for the world."

Harrison has been criticized for stating Canadian troops looted Arras. He maintained he is correct in this but stated that "realizing the circumstances under which the town was looted. I did not consider that this in any way reflected upon the heroism and courage of the Canadian troops."

His attention was called to an editorial in which the London Daily Mail terms the book "slanderous."

"It is," Harrison said, "but it does not slander the troops of the C.E.F. It slanders war – and it is about time that a little of false glory with which war is enmeshed is torn away."

Harrison, who managed a Montreal motion picture theater following his return from France, says he works on a small paper because he finds it gives him leisure for writing.

Dyson Carter's Long Exercise in Political Pathology

Despite Moscow's best efforts, it wasn't until a decade or so after the collapse of the Soviet Union that I first became aware of Dyson Carter. Northern Neighbors, "Canada's Authoritative Independent Magazine Reporting on the U.S.S.R.", which he edited for some 32 years, was not something I saw on news stands. I didn't notice his books, including those published by the Communist Party of Canada, though they were distributed in the thousands at home and abroad.

In my defence, I point out that Carter is not found in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature or Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. He is very much a forgotten figure, as is reflected in The Canadian Encyclopedia entry, which has yet to record his death.

Further defence: Nearly all of Carter's books were published before I was born. What's more, his moment in the sun had come decades earlier. In 1940, Carter published Sea of Destiny, a much-discussed work in which he warned that undefended Hudson Bay could be used by the Nazis for an invasion of North America. The following year, months before the United States entered the Second World War, Carter predicted the development of the atomic bomb. It would, he wrote, bring a sudden end to the conflict.

The Portsmouth Times, 5 May 1940

In 1942, Carter's first novel, Night of Flame, drew considerable praise from the New York Times and the Globe and Mail. In the Ottawa Citizen, reviewer W.J. Hurlow described Carter as possessing a talent "only a little down the street from genius... We cordially hail Mr. Dyson Carter as a Canadian writer of brilliant possibilities."

Possibilities require opportunities, and for a Communist like Carter these became fewer with the advent of the Cold War. Just look what happened to Night of Flame. The 1942 first edition was published in New York by Reynolds and Hitchcock. Four years later, the novel was reissued in Canada by Collins White Circle. But by 1949, when American paperback giant Signet looked to do likewise, authorship had to be hidden behind a nom de plume.

Could Joseph McCarthy and company really be so easily deceived? Yes, yes they could.

Carter was born and raised in a religious household, surrounded by the troubled youth that his parents sought to save. In his own youth, he turned away from Christ and towards Lenin, only to see – and recognize – the lies of the Soviet Union laid bare by glastnost. In 1990, at age eighty, he wrote one friend, "I publicized so many Soviet 'achievements' that were total falsifications that I consider my 'work' an exercise in political pathology."

Dyson Carter's contributions to this country's literature are slight, and his oeuvre might hold little interest outside the world of academe, but is it not time for The Canadian Encyclopedia to acknowledge his death?

Related post: A Communist's Bodice Ripper?

A Bank Swindler Tries to Cash In

The Confessions of a Bank Swindler

Lucius A. Parmelee

Waterloo, QC: Duval, 1968

The author begins by boasting that a member of the Canadian Banking Assocation once suggested he be offered a pension as an inducement to retire, adding: "I achieved fame of a sort and did very well." These more modest words set the tone.

Born in 1889, Lucius Parmelee was blessed in being a member of family of affluence and influence. Newspaper editor and three-term Liberal member of parliament Charles Henry Parmelee – that's him on the right – was an uncle. Another uncle once served as Quebec's Minister of Protestant Education. The latter's good work is reflected in this, nephew Lucius' only book; until Conrad Black, The Confessions of a Bank Swindler was likely the best written work by a Canadian criminal. I provide as evidence this passage in which the author looks back to his earliest years in Waterloo, Quebec:

One must remember that in this day there was no auto, radio, TV, and the thousand and one distractions, which are today offered to gratify our jaded appetites. Nor were they distracted by the innumerable incidents of a bizarre, and even sinister nature, which is the record of our daily lives. I do not agree with the French philosopher Rousseau, that the solution to the world's ills consist of a return to a state of nature. I do feel that there have been times in the past history of mankind, when the clock of destiny could well have been arrested, for a temporary breathing space, at least. Our characteristically North American attitude of service to the Gods of progress, may well mean serving an illusion.

No common criminal.

As a young man , Parmelee set off down the straight and narrow as a bank clerk, only to develop a rooted resentment toward the very industry in which he was employed. The low pay, which our grand banks expected to be supplemented by clerks' families, led to his resignation. Parmelee tried his hand at a number of occupations, including farmhand and barkeep, but returned to the banks as an unwelcomed visitor during the Great War:

From a moral point of view I had no scruples whatever. They paid their employees atrocious wages. They offered very little in the way of a life career. They obtained subsidy from the general public, due to the fact that their employees must have help from their parents for a few years, and in the case of the institution in which I served they had no pension plan. All in all I considered them bigger, and more cowardly robbers than myself.

Make no mistake, Parmelee's crimes were not robberies; they were swindles carried out though study, impersonation and forgery. The author's criminal activity spanned three decades, interrupted by an ill-considered investment in a chicken ranch, work at a wartime munitions plant and time spent in San Quentin. His final foray into financial fraud, in 1947 Ottawa, was in his own words a "disaster". He hit the Royal Bank, the Bank of Toronto, the Bank of Montreal and the Dominion Bank, walking away with some $17,000... only to be arrested a few hours later at a railway station in Vars, Ontario. Contemporary crooks will learn no tips from The Confessions of a Bank Swindler; Parmelee's scams and schemes were dated well before his book was published. The world into which he was ultimately released, on 15 June 1955, was foreign. "Montreal proved a revelation to me", he writes, unable to reconcile the metropolis with the tranquil city of his youth. The Confessions of a Bank Swindler owes its existence to the late Weekend Magazine, which in 1956 published a rudimentary version of the memoir. I expect the reception wasn't quite what editorial director Craig Ballantyne had anticipated. Readers took considerable offence to Parmelee's unrepentant nature; the banks, it would seem, were unassailable. The swindler's memoir attracted no interest from McClelland and Stewart, Macmillan or Ryerson; it ended up being self-published through a little printer in the author's birthplace.* No fame followed. Having gone straight, the man was accorded no obituary. Crime pays.

Object: A trade-size paperback, my copy is signed and includes a Weekend Magazine clipping that appears to have been used for promotional purposes. The first edition, I think, the only other I've seen – also signed – was published in mass market by a short-lived Montreal house called Bodero.

Access: There are no copies of either edition listed for sale online; look instead to the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and the Toronto Public Library. Seven of our university libraries hold the book. Library and Archives Canada? Don't ask.

* This was the very same printer that two years earlier produced John Glassco's self-published Squire Hardman.

Related post:

The Bank Swindler's Signature

A Final Word on Manners

The Ottawa Citizen

14 November 1953

Look familiar? What we have here is the Mind Your Manners publicity sheet from Monday's post reproduced word for word and passed off as a book review. The Ottawa Citizen seems to have been quite keen on promoting this guide; five months later, it devoted the better part of a two-page spread to 13 cartoons inspired by the book:

These cartoons show artist Peter Whalley's reaction to a new dictionary of etiquette written by Claire Wallace and Joy Brown and titled Mind Your Manners. Whalley's interpretations are fortunately not everyone's. The authors say they could only be Whalley's.

Mind Your Manners is the outgrowth of a column on etiquette which writer-commentator Wallace syndicated to 25 newspapers across Canada between 1945 and 1949. It was bought and published by Harlequin Books, of which Joy Brown is an editor. The first printing of 30,000 has been followed by a second and seems to justify the authors' belief that there was a need for a new simplified guide to Canadian manners.

The Ottawa Citizen

24 April 1954

It would not be considered proper behaviour, I suppose, to question the motives of the paper's editors. That said, I will point out that this latter piece also reads like a Harlequin press release. Let me leave you with that thought, along with a few sample cartoons and one final rule.

Related posts:
On Addressing a Duke's Eldest Son's Younger Son

More Manners Minding

Freedom to Read Week – Thursday

The Leader-Post, 7 January 1938

The Ottawa Citizen, 7 January 1938

'Snainef spelled backwards is Fenians'

The Passionate Invaders

John Clare

New York: Doubleday, 1965

Had it not been for the nineteenth-century English poet John Clare, I doubt that I would've noticed this novel, found several weeks ago in a London thrift store. The Canadian John Clare meant nothing to me, though he did once serve as editor for a number of Toronto-based periodicals. Here he is in a 1948 advert for Maclean's:

The Ottawa Citizen, 18 February 1948

Just how well Clare practiced his precepts in the short story format I cannot say – there is no collection – but this, his first and only novel, is a great disappointment. Here I admit that I was hoping for another forgotten, entertaining satire like The Chartered Libertine by Ralph Allen (top row, first from the left). Instead, what I encountered was a slight, self-indulgent work. Oh, but the cover held such promise!

All centres on Magnus Dillon, a wise-cracking Toronto magazine editor who is assigned to track down "The Snainef", a group of Canadian terrorists intent on invading the United States. Truth be told, he barely tries. Despite great pressure from his boss, Dillon spends most of his time drinking and thinking about the past.

There's no suspense in this "SATIRIC, RICHLY COMIC SUSPENSE NOVEL"; the author doesn't want us on the edge of our seats, he'd rather we sit back as he recounts the boyish pranks Dillon pulled during his stint in the RCAF. (Clare served as a flight lieutenant during the Second World War.) There's also a lengthy history of our hero's favourite watering hole, an inconsequential four-page letter from a friend, and Dillon's rather dry attempts to explain Canada and Canadians to any and all Americans he encounters. The greater part of The Passionate Invaders passes before protagonist and reader so much as encounter the Snainef.

Throughout it all, the prose coughs, sputters and chokes. Witness the beginning of chapter two:

Gus had driven half the distance from his office to the Carfleet house (he was going to meet his wife at the party – she was diving out with a friend), when it occurred to him that Charlie Carfleet might well be a likely suspect after all.

The author told Scott Young (top row, second from the right) that Doubleday accepted his novel "on sight". Clare further claimed that the publisher asked for no changes: "They didn't lay a glove on it."

Shame, really.

An aside: I can't help but feel that the folks down in New York were hoping for a success along the lines of Leonard Wibberley's The Mouse that Roared and its many spinoffs.

Trivia: The Passionate Invaders cover art is by the late Eldon Dedini, best remembered for his New Yorker and Playboy cartoons.

Object and Access: Found in public libraries across the United States, though only that belonging to the City of Toronto serves north of the border. Rob Ford might just put an end to that. Those looking to purchase this, the first and only edition, will find that Very Good copies start at US$8. Two booksellers from an alternate universe are asking US$75 and US$99 respectively.