The Dustiest Bookcase: U is for Underwood

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

The English Governess
Miles Underwood [John Glassco]
Paris: Ophelia Press, 1960 [sic]
290 pages (in two volumes)

Is The English Governess Canada's biggest selling work of erotica? If not, then the honour goes to Harriet Marwood, Governess, its non-identical twin. I don't suppose we'll ever know; they've both appeared under different titles and disguises, most often clothed and sold by pirates. The above was printed by Taiwanese freebooters. Glassco spent much of the 'sixties and 'seventies going after Collector's Publications of Covina, California for this unauthorised edition:

Publisher Marvin Miller may not have paid the author, but he at least gave credit; most pirated editions of The English Governess are attributed to Anonymous.

Miles Underwood was just one of Glassco's many noms de plume. The novel's original publisher, Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, claimed the pseudonym to be of his own making, when in fact it was Glassco’s creation alone. In a 1967 letter to his friend Milton Kastello (aka Milton Douglas) wrote that it was “dreamed up on an hour’s notice to meet a printer’s deadline in Paris in 1959 [sic]. It signifies a man who would be under by miles and miles."

It's entirely possible that the Underwood name inspired Under the Birch, the title Girodias slapped on the novel after French authorities seized and destroyed copies of The English Governess. 

The English Governess was the subject of the seventh Dusty Bookcase post – nearly thirteen years ago! I covered the novel exhaustively in A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of Glassco, but have never written what might be termed a "review."

One day.

For now, I'll encourage you to hunt down the novel. There's a reason for the sales.

A bonus: An edition of The English Governess I'd not seen before today.

Related posts:

Canada's Olympians, Part III

Pictures of Harriet

More Marwood

American Pirates and Canadian Counterfeiters

Milton Douglas, Canadian Author?

A Novel That Killed a Novelist?

In Quest of Splendour [Pierre le magnifique]
Roger Lemelin [trans. Harry Lorin Binsse]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1955

Roger Lemelin's first three novels were published within five years of each other. Au pied de la pente douce (The Town Below), his 1947 debut, was a bestseller. The following year, Les Plouffes (The Plouffe Family) achieved even greater sales, and then went on to became the country's first hit television series. Lemelin's third, Pierre le magnifique didn't fare so well.

The dust jacket of this lonely printing of the English translation depicts the author in repose. I expect Lemelin was deep in thought, though it is hard not to see him as defeated. Long dead critics thought little of Pierre le magnifique, and weren't all that excited by its translation. The Americans, who had published English-language editions of Lemelin's first two novels, took a pass. It would be three decades before he wrote another novel... and that work, Le crime d'Ovide Plouffe (The Crime of Ovide Plouffe), wasn't very good.

In Quest of Splendour is a very good novel. My greatest quibble has to do with its title, but this is the translator's fault; Pierre le magnifique is much better.

Pierre is Pierre Boisjoly, the nineteen-year-old son of a widowed charwoman. Highly gifted and somewhat handsome, he has benefitted from a good education thanks to the patronage of Father Loupret who sees the makings of a cardinal in Pierre. The young man is certainly on the right path, but on the very day of his graduation from Quebec's Petit Séminaire he's thrown off-course by a brief encounter with another young man.

It's not what you think.

Through that young man – name: Denis Boucher – Pierre meets Fernande, whose features are "exactly those of the girl who for years had slept in the depths of his senses." Such is her beauty that the student has no choice but to abandon all plans for the priesthood. That evening, having informed Father Loupret of his decision, he visits Denis and Fernande in their small bohemian flat. Pierre has his first sip of beer and, lips loosened, lets slip that his mother spotted an envelope stuffed with cash while cleaning the home of Yvon Letellier, his wealthy Petit Séminaire rival. Intent on stealing the money so as to pay for his new friend's education, Denis dashes off to the Letellier's. Pierre sets off to stop him. The pair meet up at the house, struggle, and accidentally knock over Yvon's grandmother. She dies on the spot.

The Globe & Mail, 19 November 1955

No one sees the death as at all suspicious – she was old and frail – but Pierre flees the city just the same. He isn't so much running away from the law, but his future past as a Catholic priest. The young man ends up in a lumber camp, where he is exposed to Marxism. Pierre sides with the camp's owner, only to find that he has cast his lot with a violent, unstable drunk who hires prostitutes for the pleasure of beating them. Upon his return to Quebec City, he finds that liberal Father Lippé, the teacher he held above all others, has been placed in a mental institution. The priest's mistake was to enrol in independent sociology classes taught by European schooled Father Martel (read: Georges-Henri Lévesque).

Forget the old lady's death, it's here in the second of the novel's three parts that things become really interesting. Lemelin's The Town Below surprised this reader, born in the early years of the Quiet Revolution, with its mockery of the Catholic Church. In Quest of Splendour goes much farther. Here the Church is depicted as corrupt, punitive and insincere, working with the provincial government to suppress dissent and education. Quebec's Attorney General, who happens to be Yvon's uncle, plays the Communists, enlisting them to smear while targeting moderate liberals for acts of violence. Of course, in real life – our world – the position of Attorney General was not held by Yvon's uncle but by Premier Maurice Duplessis.

Students of history will recognize the risk.

In Quest of Splendour is as ambitious as it is bold; a brave work by a man who had everything to lose in its writing. Is it really so surprising that reviews in Duplessis' Quebec were lacklustre?

Lemelin's least known novel, it is his best.

About the author:

(cliquez pour agrandir)

Object: Two hundred and eighty-eight dense pages bound in dull grey boards with burgundy print. Sadly, the jacket illustration is uncredited. I purchased my copy twenty-eight years ago in Montreal. Price: two dollars.

Access: Pierre le magnifique is in print from Stanké. Price: $13.95. The scarcity of the original, published in 1952 by the Institut littéraire du Québec, is a reflection of its failure in the marketplace.

Harry Lorin Binsse's translation also fared poorly. The McClelland & Stewart was followed the next year by a British edition published by Arthur Baker. As far as I can determine, neither enjoyed more than one a single printing.

Very Good copies of the Canadian edition are being sold online for as little as US$6.50; the British, which shares the same jacket, will set you back just a touch more. At 875 rupees and change, India's Gyan Books offers a print on demand version. Pay no heed, I am certain they're breaking copyright.

An Ontario bookseller offers signed copies of both the Institut littéraire du Québec and McClelland & Stewart editions at US$35 each. Trust me, they're worth it.

Related posts:

Dirt Old Town

What's Going on with The Plouffe Family?

Boum!

Of American Pirates and Canadian Counterfeiters

I received an email recently from a publisher who took exception to a post on pirated John Glassco titles at my other blog. "Hey there," he begins, "actually, we're not quite without permission on Glassco."

Not quite.

He then goes on to acknowledge that he "may be without permission" for one of the works in question. "Amazon won't carry it, and the thing was going for $500 used before I came along," he writes in defence.

You see, the man is performing a public service.

I stand by my words, which are supported by contracts and correspondence found in the Glassco fonds at Library and Archives Canada.

As I've not responded to this email, it seems unfair to identify this particular publisher.

Not responded?

Oh, I would have, but his concluding remarks rather rubbed me the wrong way:

Too bad you didn't contact me before. I have around 14k paying customers on the site, not to mention half a million visitors each month to —. Some of these readers might have been interested in your book.

He's referring here, of course, to A Gentleman of Pleasure, my new biography of Glassco. Well, I happily sacrifice any sales that I might have enjoyed in associating myself with this individual and his various ventures. One is, after all, known by the company one keeps.

No pun intended.

With the spread of POD technology and ebooks, it's hard to imagine that the problem of piracy won't grow, perhaps returning us to the turbulence and tumultuousness of earlier times. I'm reminded of poor Mark Twain, whose pocketbook took shots from Canada in a copyright war between the United States and the British Empire. In the end, of course, it was the writer who suffered the most.

Same as it ever was.

Twain wrote about his frustration with pirates – counterfeiters, he called them – in a 1 October 1880 letter to Congressman Rollin M. Daggett. The letter, with entertaining p.s., can be found online here at the Mark Twain Project.

Dear Daggett—
I want to go to Washington, but it ain’t any use, business-wise, for Congress won’t bother with anything but President-making. My publisher got me to send a letter of his to Blaine a month or two ago, in which our grievance was fully set forth. I didn’t believe Blaine would interest himself in the matter, & I was right. You just get that letter from Blaine, & cast your eye over it, & try to arrive at a realizing sense of what a silly & son-of-a-bitch of a law the present law against book-piracy is. I believe it was framed by an goddamd idiot, & passed by a Congress of goddamd muttonheads.
Now you come up here –that is the thing to do. I, also have Scotch whisky, certain lemons, & hot water, & struggle with the same every night.
Ys Ever
Mark

If you want to see how thoroughly foolish section 4964 is, just read it & substitute the words “U. S. treasury note” for the w “copy of such "counterfeit U. S. treasury note" for the words "copy of such book."
My books sell at $3.50 a copy, their Canadian counterfeit at 25 & 50 cents. If I could sieze [sic] all the Canadian counterfeits I could no more use them to my advantage than the Government could use bogus notes to its advantage. The only desirable & useful thing, in both cases, is the utter suppression of the counterfeits. The government treats its counterfeiters as criminals, but mine as erring gentlemen. What I want is that mime mine shall be treated as criminals too.

S L C

Thirteen decades later, it's still enough to make one reach for Scotch whiskey, certain lemons and hot water.

Bottoms Up, Shy Photographer

Reading The Queers of New York a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about Jock Carroll, under whose editorial direction the book was published. A fine photographer, but not much of an editor, he's at least partly to blame for the novel's failings. Truth be told, Carroll wasn't much of a writer either, though he did have a number of titles to his credit. The first edition of Bottoms Up (1961) is the most sought-after, but only because it was published by the infamous Olympia Press. Carroll's only novel, it is perhaps the blandest piece of writing Maurice Girodias ever passed off as "erotica".

It's a wonder that Bottoms Up thing ever made it into print – that it was republished seems not improbable, but impossible. And yet, for more than a decade the novel was available in one form or another. There were at least thirteen editions, published in six counties, making Bottoms Up one of Canada's all-time best selling novels. Carroll once boasted that it had moved close one million copies. The editions below go some way in backing up his claim.

Bitte recht scharf

Bremen: Schünemann Verlag, 1963

Not only the first translation, but the first hardcover edition in any language. The German was followed by Italian (Il Fotografo Timido, 1967) and Danish (Den blufærdige fotograf, 1969) translations.

The Shy Photographer

New York: Stein & Day, 1964

Retitled, Carroll's novel kicked off Stein & Day's "Olympia Press Series". Short-lived, ill-fated, the series actually began and ended with The Shy Photographer. The cover was also used on the first British edition, published in 1964 by Macgibbon & Kee.

The Shy Photographer

New York: Bantam, 1965

The first and only legal American paperback edition. "Candy with a camera!" exclaims, um... whoever wrote the cover copy, I guess.

The Shy Photographer

London: Panther, 1965

"The novel that's loaded with heaven-ly nudes". Not true.

The image was also used for the 1970 German paperback edition.

Bottoms Up

Covina, CA: Collectors Publications, 1967

A pirated edition produced by the notorious Marvin Miller. "FIRST AMERICAN PRINTING" is the claim. Again, not true.

The Shy Photographer

London: Panther, 1967

A droog takes a photograph. Whoever designed the second Panther edition seems to have been intent on representing both titles.

Wholly unappealing. And is not superimposing the author's name across some guy's ass just a tad insulting?

Il Fotografo Timido

Collana: Longanesi, 1970

The first Italian paperback edition recycles the hardcover image (which was in turn borrowed from the Bantam paperback). Of all the translations, the Italian is by far the most common.

Il Fotografo Timido

Collana: Longanesi, 1972.

A later Italian edition, the last in any language, continues the tradition of misrepresentation. Protagonist Arthur King does not become a photographer for Playboy, and at no point does he don a pair of purple panties.

There has never been a Canadian edition.

Related post:

Canada's Olympians (Part IV)

Three Centuries of Piracy

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain

Toronto: Rose-Belford, 1873

The Governess [The English Governess]

Miles Underwood [pseud. John Glassco]

Coniva, CA: Collectors Publications, 1967

Under the Hill

Aubrey Beardsley/John Glassco

n.p.: Kessinger, 2010

Canada's Olympians (Part IV)

Bottoms Up

Jock Carroll

Covina, CA: Collectors Publications, 1967

Strange to think that this novel, which receives no mention in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, sold something close to one million copies. It is an astonishing figure, one that comes from the author himself - and, Jock Carroll's reputation being what it is, I don't doubt it for a second.

Carroll was a very good journalist and a gifted photographer, but not much when it came to writing fiction; it's no great loss to Canadian letters that Bottoms Up was his only novel. That said, this is a pleasant enough read, capturing something of a heady time when magazines were flush with cash and booze flowed freely. A fish out of water story, it centres on Arthur King, a Swampy Cree from the shores of Hudson Bay and his zany adventures as a photographer for Light, a New York-based magazine. Along the way he encounters tough-talking journalists, a prostitute with a heart of coal and a human cannonball who fancies himself a great painter. But none are so interesting as Gloria Heaven, a character modelled closely on Marilyn Monroe. Carroll famously spent several days photographing the screen goddess near the start of her career, shots that were later published in Falling for Marilyn: The Lost Niagara Collection. His writing about the encounter suggests little embellishment; Gloria and Marilyn share the same background, body, behaviour and reading material (Thomas Wolfe, The Prophet and The Thinking Body by Mabel Ellsworth Todd). Conversations that Carroll says he had with Monroe are also found in the novel.

According to the author's son, Carroll shopped Bottoms Up around, finally turning to Olympia Press after he'd exhausted the North American houses. Maurice Girodias accepted the manuscript, but only after it had been spiced up. The paprika is easily seen, a light sprinkling of ribald talk here and there, without any great concentration. There are no sex scenes in Bottoms Up, and I think only two passing references to the posterior. It's not at all surprising that the novel holds the distinction of being the only Canadian work published by the press to have escaped the censor.

Olympia published Bottoms Up in 1961 as part of the Traveller's Companion Series, but the real sales would have begun three years later when it appeared in England and the United States as The Shy Photographer. Handsome hardcovers from Macgibbon & Kee and Stein & Day where soon followed by mass market paperbacks.

'Candy with a camera!' proclaims the Bantam edition. Well... not really. To truly appreciate where Carroll's talents lay, I suggest Falling for Marilyn and Glenn Gould: Some Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man (the focus of Glenn Gould Estate v. Stoddart Publishing Ltd., Carroll's posthumous triumph).

Object: My copy was pirated by Collectors Publications, run by the dishonourable Marvin Miller, the very same gentleman who two months earlier ripped off John Glassco's The English Governess as The Governess.

Access: Very good copies of the first edition are generally priced at between C$30 and C$50, twice that of the Collectors Publications edition. As The Shy Photographer, it's pretty thick on the ground - paperbacks from Panther and Bantam, the Macgibbon & Kee and Stein & Day hardcovers - all can be bought for as little as C$5. The Stein & Day edition is the most interesting as the first and only book produced as part of its aborted 'Olympia Press Series'.

Related posts:
Bottoms Up, Shy Photographer

Canada's Olympians (Part I)
Canada's Olympians (Part II)
Canada's Olympians (Part III)

Canada's Olympians (Part III)

The English Governess

Miles Underwood [pseud. John Glassco]

Paris: Ophelia, 1960 [sic]

In his seventy-one years, John Glassco produced five books of verse, eight volumes of translation, and the prose masterpiece Memoirs of Montparnasse, but not one approached the sales he enjoyed with The English Governess and its sister book Harriet Marwood, Governess. Both stories of flagellantine romance between a boy, Richard Lovel, and his beautiful governess, Harriet Marwood, they're easily confused and are often described as being one and the same. Harriet Marwood, Governess, though published second, is actually the older of the two. In 1959, it was offered to Maurice Girodias, but the publisher thought it too tame. Glassco then rewrote the novel - apparently with the help of his wife - slashing it by more than half and ramping up the sex. Made to order, as The English Governess it was quickly accepted and appeared within ninety days under Olympia's Ophelia Press imprint.

The English Governess was a immediate success, a favourite in a market that relied almost exclusively on word of mouth. Reprinted after just three months, on 10 January 1961 it was suppressed by French authorities under a decades-old decree targeting 'périodiques et ouvrages de provenance étrangère'. As was his practice, Girodias reissued the banned novel using a different title: Under the Birch: The Story of an English Governess. Not much of a disguise, but more than enough to baffle the brigade mondaine. The novel has since appeared as The Governess (a pirated edition) and the misleading The Authentic Confessions of Harriet Marwood, an English Governess.

Trivia: Glassco chose not to be identified as the author, selecting Miles Underwood as a nom de plume. He kept his secret for over a year, and only began to reveal himself when seeking legal advice from F. R. Scott concerning Girodias' non-payment.

Object: My copy, printed by Taiwanese pirates, is a cheap reproduction of the first edition. I'm assuming that the novel was divided in two so as to enable the rusty staple binding.

Access: Typically found only in academic libraries, though the enlightened citizens of Toronto and Vancouver will find it on their shelves. Used copies are plentiful and inexpensive. The first edition isn't often offered for sale, and can't be had for anything less than C$300. While British and American editions are currently in print, the Canadian is recommended. Published in 2001 by Golden Dog Press, it includes a very informative Introduction by Michael Gnarowski.

Related posts:
Pictures of Harriet

Canada's Olympians (Part I)
Canada's Olympians (Part II)
Canada's Olympians (Part IV)