An Old Novel of Misspent Youth

Blaze of Noon
Jeann Beattie
Toronto: Ryserson, 1950
353 pages

The sixth winner of Ryerson's in-house All-Canada Fiction Award, the publisher made much of Jeann Beattie. As the first woman and youngest person to win the award, her victory was played up on the back jacket.

Good thing I didn't read it before the novel; it would've put me off. 

Blaze of Noon begins in fictitious Weldon, Ontario, a community almost certainly based on St Catharines, the author's hometown. Young reporter Jan Fredericks, the narrator, meets even younger reporter Reed Alexander, and a friendship is struck. Both work for the Banner, Weldon's only newspaper. Snide copy boy Tommy suggests that the two gals wouldn't have their jobs if not for the war.

He's probably right. Both were hired to fill in for guys fighting overseas.

Reed tires of the constraints of a small Canadian city and looks to New York where a friend offers a job working for the British Government. Reed is certain that she can get Jan in too, and so the pair purchase train tickets for Grand Central Station.

Jan and Reed find a flat in Greenwich Village, adopt a stay cat, and attend parties populated by people who are considered good connections. They date and sometimes double-date Tim and Pete, two thirty-somethings who are both fifteen years their senior. Nothing is made of the age difference.

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Reed, the more attractive of the two girls (this according to Jan), begins the novel as something of an ice queen. In Weldon, she's followed about by many men, the most devoted puppy being Richard Campbell, RCAF:

We heard later he had been killed in his first bombing mission. When I told Reed she sat silently in the chair, her body rigid, her eyes deepened to black and her face white. "Poor baby," she said "poor baby."

An unanticipated thaw sets in when Reed meets tall RAF officer Lauri Conroy. She's smitten, even though he treats Reed much as she'd teated her admirers. Eventually, Lauri returns to Europe, leaving her very weepy. On the rebound, Reed lands on moody John Schaeffer. When he comes out as a communist, the slow-moving story shifts to a stuttering crawl as Jan, Reed, Tim, Pete, and John discuss political philosophy and theory. They do this in letters, at restaurants, at parties, at each other's flats, on the street, and atop 30 Rockefeller Center. Really, the dialogue isn't much different after John is introduced, there's just more of it. Consider this early example, from Jan and Reed's first double-date with Tim and Pete:

Is it any wonder that Tim and Pete are bachelors?

The most interesting and atmospheric passages in the novel involve Jan and Reed's early days in New York, but like everything else, descriptions of the city and its culture soon give way to conversations about communism. The worst of it comes when Jan, Reed, Tim, and Pete visit to a "celebrated live joint on Second Avenue where one might hear the pure jazz." Once seated, they offer a tired-looking elderly man a place at their table. No jazz "enthusiast," he'd entered the club only to warm up. He too has thoughts on communism, which is shared over the course of six pages. 

Here are two. Feel free to skip. There will be no test.

cliquez pour agrandir

And the band played on.

It's all so exhausting. Dinner parties are ruined by page after page of back and forth bickering between John, the communist, and Jan, the champion of liberalism. Reed is too late in standing up to it all:

"Let's not talk about Communism or Democracy or any other political belief any more. You two argue, but you never convince each other. So... let's just stop talking about it."

Yes, stop. Please. Please, stop.

But it doesn't stop, dragging on long after John and Reed are through. After their break-up, Pete invites Jan, Reed, and Tim to yet another dinner at his apartment. "I take it," Reed says, "that we are to talk Communism."

"More intellectualizing?" Tim said with a yawn.

     "Who's intellectualizing? Pete's eyebrows lifted. "Although I was thinking of the last conversation we had before this fireplace.
     "That's right," Tim took out his pipe and began to fill it.
     "We settled it all nicely as I recall. There were some high-flown phrases I still don't get, but we tied up things. Now what shall we discuss? Books? The theatre?
     "Certainly not," Pete dug deeper into his chair. "As I recall we approached it from a psychological angle."
     "Approached it, " Tim groaned, "All right Socrates, make with the words. Don't leave us hanging..."

And yet Socrates couldn't say whether Hades was real.

Blaze of Noon was Jeann Beattie's first novel. Published when she was twenty-eight, it reads like the work of an even younger writer, less seasoned writer. It captures something of the curiosity and earnestness of youth, but little of its passion. Books? The theatre? Do any of these people have no interests outside political philosophy?

The front flap of the Ryerson edition – there was no other – promoted Blaze at Noon as "the most gripping story of 1950." The publisher's newspaper adverts describe it as the most timely: 

Regina Leader-Post, 21 October 1950

Strangers on a Train is the most gripping story of 1950.

Given last month's leak in the republic to the south, the most timely novel of 1950 may be Margaret Millar's Do Evil in Return.

How I wish it was otherwise.

Object: A bulky hardcover. The dust jacket design is uncredited. Its rear flap, listing past winners of the Ryerson All-Canada Fiction Award, is nothing less than depressing.

Access: Held by Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Kingston-Frontenac Public Library, and six of our academic libraries. As of this writing, one copy – one – is listed for sale online. A Very Good copy lacking dust jacket, at US$15.00 it seems a deal.

Related post:

Anyone Care About the Ryerson Fiction Award?

Desperately Seeking Violet
Mr. Child's Simple Story of Dramatic Suspense

The Strange Satanic Canada of a Future Past

For My Country [Pour la patrie: roman du XXe siecle]

Jules-Paul Tardivel [Sheila Fischman, trans]

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975

250 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

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Red Maple:
  How Canada Became the People's Republic of Canada in 1981
Kenneth McDonald
Richmond Hill, ON: BMG Publishing, 1975

A few years ago, Preston Manning published a short piece of fiction titled "2018: The new health care" in the pages of the Globe and Mail. It was a fantasy in which the former Reformer imagined a series of fantastical events leading to the abolition of Medicare. Think of those letters of old to Penthouse Forum: the dorm room was Alberta, cancer gave body to the blonde sorority girl and the Supreme Court was cast as her twin sister. George Pepki ignores the tie hanging on the doorknob and Julian Assange comes in for sloppy seconds.

At the time, I called it porn.

Kenneth McDonald's Red Maple is something altogether different. A horror novella, its Randall Flagg is Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the evil philosopher king who within thirteen years transforms an industrious constitutional monarchy into a lazy socialist republic.

Pierre Trudeau with Margaret Thatcher, 4 October 1981.

Its narrator is Alan Tremayne Jackson, the hardworking son of a hardware store owner. Dad dies, or so we surmise, leaving Al a thriving chain of stores and political opinions that date from the time of the Winnipeg General Strike. Fed by the former, blinkered by the latter, Al outlines the series of steps that resulted in the People's Republic of Canada.

At its heart, this is a political novella, which is not to say it lacks romance:

I met Gail about that time [1955] and though we saw as much of each other as we could I was working almost seventy hours a week and she was working, too, so one way or another it wasn't until 1962, six years after leaving university, that we got married.

Gail will be mentioned later, fleetingly, as a travelling companion. The lone image Al provides of the woman with whom he has shared the past two decades places her at a sewing machine in the family's guest bedroom. "We're very close, in that offhand, wholly Canadian way which avoids putting feelings into words," Al tells us.

The most complex character in McDonald's novella is Lester B. Pearson, but this is largely because Al is inconsistent in his portrayal. The hardware store heir first paints the former prime minister as a jovial incompetent, a man suited for nothing more than a life of drudgery within the civil service. Pay no mind to the opinion of the Nobel Committee, the man was a diplomat, and we all know that diplomats are nothing but parrots who repeat whatever governments tell them. Still, Al blames Pearson for setting Canada on the road to socialism. Could it be that Pearson was hiding his true persona and abilities? Might it be that he was in reality a clever, devious, evil man? Al can't be sure.

Trudeau is more of a cardboard cut-out. A man of immense ego who cares not for country but power, this unholy spawn of Quebec is part of a trinity that includes lifelong socialists Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier. Al considers Red Tories, men like Robert Stanfield and Bill Davis, to be "fellow travellers". Look not to Peter Lougheed as a saviour, he revealed himself as a socialist through the purchase of Pacific Western Airlines and in leveling "crushing royalties on Alberta's resource companies."

For the most part, the truly productive members of society, by which Al means businessmen, are too busy supporting their families to counter the growing threat. Besides, speaking out only draws further attention from increasingly hostile government agencies. True heroes are hard to find in this novella; I counted six, including John Bulloch (who wrote the Foreword to Red Maple) and Winnett Boyd (who joined the author in founding BMG, publisher of Red Maple). Gail should be jealous of the amount of space Boyd takes up in her husband's story.

Those who have read Red Maple – publishing history suggests there are many – may quibble with my description of the book as a novella. In response, I point out the obvious: Claude Wagner did not win the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership race, Bell Canada was not nationalized, the country has never funded guerrillas to fight South Africa's Apartheid regime and our press is not controlled by a government body known as the Ministry of Information. The perceptive reader will note that fabrication is not limited to what at time of publication was the future. McDonald takes liberties with past events and one of the two – and only two – references is simply false. The most succinct example of Al as unreliable narrator might be this: "Canada itself had been at one time a haven of relative labor [sic] peace, particularly in the Quebec of Duplessis."

When reading any work of political fiction it s particularly important to keep in mind that the narrator is not necessarily the mouthpiece of the author. When Al expresses resentment towards those who would apply the word "racist" to Apartheid South Africa, we must remember that he and Kenneth McDonald are not one and the same. Not really. Likewise, Al's description of pre-colonial Canada as "an empty land" should not be taken as the author's. McDonald's BMG Publishing gave us Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow (1977) and Immigration: The Destruction of English Canada (1979), but that is not to say that he agrees with the views of bigoted authors J.V. Andrew and Doug Christie.

Remember, this is a work of fiction.

Best passage:

Object: My copy was a gift from Wollamshram of Wollanshram's Blog. A slim trade-size paperback. Nine of its 117 pages are taken up by an edited list of undergraduate courses offered students at York University in the 1974-75 academic year. "I don't think that I'm oversimplifying to read into the content of these courses an undue emphasis on negative factors," says Al. "There was certainly a shocking absence of constructive approaches."

Here's an example of the type of course that so disturbs our narrator:

 

Access: Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Toronto Public Library and most university libraries have a copy or two.

About a dozen copies are currently listed for sale online, most going for under ten bucks. One hopeful American bookseller is offering an ex-library copy for US$193.70.

Related posts:

Bilingualism Today, French Tomorrow and the Bigots of Yesteryear