Robert Barr at his desk at The Idler McClure's Magazine, November 1894
If Canadian Grant Allen really was the "busiest man in England," as he claimed, might his contemporary Robert Barr have placed second? Allen produced fifty-two books in his fifty-one years, whereas Barr managed only forty-six in his sixty-three. On the other hand, Barr also worked with friend Jerome K. Jerome as editor of The Idler, easily one of the very finest magazines, literary or otherwise, in Victorian England. I spent a pleasant afternoon last weekend with its March 1894 issue.
The cover image is by English painter Hal Hurst, one of eight – eight! – he made for the second instalment of Vernon's Aunt, a new novel by daughter of Brantford Sara Jeanette Duncan. It's followed by an uncollected Robert Barr short story titled 'Two of a Kind.'
Grant Allen makes an unwitting appearance in illustrator Scott Rankin's series 'People I Have Never Met.'
Barr returns to make a brief, yet persuasive argument in the magazine's regular feature, 'The Idler's Club.'
'Twas an enjoyable reading afternoon.
I purchased my first Robert Barr book, a first American edition of his 1909 novel Cardillac, in 1991 while hunting through the basement of a Plattsburg, Vermont bookstore. Price: US$2.00.
My second, Barr's two-volume travelogue The Unchanging East (1899), came in the early days of eBay courtesy of another Yankee bookseller. Price: US$6.00.
Years of hunting at London, Ontario's Attic Books yielded an extremely fragile unbound copy of his 1899 novel Jenny Baxter Journalist published in Toronto by Copp Clark.
I don't know what to make of it. The paper is so cheap and fragile that it was all I could do to take the photo above; I dare not read it. Price: $5.00.
At Attic, I also found the 1973 University of Toronto Press edition of Barr's 1907 The Measure of the Rule, the one novel he set in Canada. Price: $2.00.
Strange to think – strange to me, anyway – that the most I've ever paid for a Robert Barr book went to print-on-demand vulture Dodo for its reprint of Revenge!At over one thousand dollars, the Chatto & Windus true first is well beyond my reach.
Chatto & Windus, 1896
The most expensive Barr currently listed online is From Whose Bourne, Etc, published in 1893 by Chatto & Windus. Price: $1454.00. Had I the money, the Barr I would buy is a copy of the 1908 Appleton American first of Young Lord Stranleigh once belonging to Edith Wharton (with her signature). Price: $1100.00.
Not all volumes are so expensive. An Isle of Wight bookseller has listed a copy of his 1905 novel The Speculations of John Steele at £2.50.
I've found the United Kingdom a rich hunting ground for inexpensive Canadian books. This year alone, I've purchased obscurities by Louis Arthur Cunningham, Doris Hedges, Isabelle Hughes, Edward McCourt, Margaret Murray Robertson, Arthur Stringer, and Alan Sullivan. No matter the quarry, I always make a point of searching the seller's listings for Barr before completing the order. There's often something to be had for under six quid, hence my scattershot collection.
Had it not been for The Untempered Wind, I might never have read Judith Moore. Had I read Judith Moore first, its unlikely that I would've read The Untempered Wind or anything else by Joanna E. Wood.
Judith Moore is the author's second novel. It shares something with The Untempered Wind in being set in rural Ontario, yet features little of the small town cruelty, hypocrisy, dogmatism, and pious conceit that makes the earlier work so involving and affecting.
The titular character, a literal prima donna, has completed her first European tour to great success and requires rest before taking on the United States. She finds room and board with Mr and Mrs Morris, whose homestead is nestled in a hollow outside fictional Ovid, Ontario.
Why Ovid? Why the Morrises? How had Judith Moore so much as heard of Ovid? These are questions left unanswered. Mrs Morris is of no help in solving the mystery:
"She and a little
black-a-vised chap came driving up the lane one day last week, and
before I just rightly could make out what they were, he was driving off
and she was there for keeps. Next day there came a whole waggon [sic] load
of trunks."
The need of such a respite – an entire summer – is concerning in one so young and at the very start of an exciting and promising career. Might it be because Judith Moore, petite, pale, delicate, and fragile, lacks the physique of the diva commonly associated with what Mrs Morris calls "the opry?"
No, the cause of Judith's fatigue is something else entirely, and is worth quoting at length:
Blind
fools who could not see it was the passion of an empty heart, the
yearning of a solitary soul, the unutterable longing of a woman's
nature for love, that rendered her marvellous voice so passionately and
painfully sweet. She herself never suspected it; only she believed
what the doctors had told her manager and teacher, the good man who
wore such big diamonds and used such bad language, that she must have
rest, quiet, complete and absolute change. So she and this man had
come to Canada, and had driven on and on into the heart of the country
till they came to this village in the valley, and there she had elected
to stay – a caprice not nearly so extravagant, and certainly more sweet
and wholesome than the freaks indulged in by some others of her ilk.
So here she was, lying perdu, whilst her picture was in every paper
in the country, with marvellous tales of her triumphs abroad and
whispers of the wonderful treat in store for the music-lovers of
America. And her little, good-hearted manager flashed out his biggest
diamonds, swore his worst oaths, hoped the child was getting strong,
and never dreamed he was killing her.
Enter handsome Andrew Cutler. Healthy, wealthy, young, and of Loyalist stock, his land borders the Morris homestead. Andrew is literally sowing seeds when "assailed by a succession of the sweetest sounds he had ever heard – note
after note of purest melody, flung forth unsyllabled, full-throated to
the air, inarticulate but eloquent. Again and again it came, liquid,
rich, and with that pathos which perfection always touches."
Assailed again the following day, he follows the call:
"I have come," he said, half dreamily – stepping out from the shelter of
the trees.
The pale-faced singing siren changed to a startled, blushing girl, and
in swift sequence Andrew's rapt gaze altered to one not altogether
without daring.
"Oh, so I see," she half gasped, then laughed outright, looking at him
with shy eyes, but mutinously curving lips. The laugh robbed the scene
of its last illusion of mystery.
This fin de siecle meet cute begins well, but is spoiled by Judith's habiliment. Not being "up in chatelaines," the farmer's "masculine horse sense and the instinct of protection" gets the better of him:
"Why in the world do you wear shoes like these?" he asked. "And such stockings! and standing on that damp moss! You had better go right into the house and get on decently heavy shoes."
This was too much. Miss Judith Moore fancied her own feet, and fancied open-work silk hose, and high-heeled wisps of shoes. Most of all, she liked the combination. In fact, in a harmless little way, she rather liked people to have a chance to appreciate these beauties, and at the very moment Andrew spoke, she had noted his downward glance and felt a righteous peace settle upon her. To be well shod is such moral support, and, lo, this heathen, this wretch, this abominable, conceited, brazen young farmer, had actually dared to suggest a change; more than that, he had spoken of "stockings"—disgusting!
So, with a dignity that reduced Andrew to despair, even whilst it roused his ire (she was so slight to be such a "defiant little cat" he told himself), she drew herself up, in a manner to do the traditional Duchess credit, and left him, saying: "Since you don't approve of my feet I'll take them out of your way." "You mean they'll take you," said Andrew, wrathfully conscious that she was, to use a good old figure of speech, "turning up her nose at him." "You are extremely rude," she called back. "And you are a bad-tempered little thing," he answered.
Focus on footwear, flaunting of feet, and pride of pieds aside, Judith and Andrew's contentious early exchange is conventional, as recognized by Elvis Costello:
Chapter One, we didn't really get along
Chapter Two, I think I fell in love with you
Judith and Andrew's romance is a touch different in that their first encounter takes place in the second chapter. They have no contact in the third, but are very much in each other's thoughts. In Chapter Four, Andrew rescues Judith from an apple tree, setting their relationship on a firmer footing.
Pacing aside, what makes Judith Moore an unconventional romance novel is also what makes it so tedious. From the moment Andrew returns Judith's high-heeled wisps to terra firma, they walk a path free of obstruction, falling further in love with each meeting. It isn't until the ninth of the novel's eleven chapters – the last taking the form of a very brief epilogue – that anything occurs to threaten Judith's happiness.
She has only herself to blame.
Judith writes a letter to her manager asking to be released so that she may marry Andrew.
Released from what exactly? There is no contract, but innocent Judith feels an obligation towards this "little black-a-vised man with big diamonds [and] profane tongue" for recognizing her talent and taking her under his wing after her widowed father died . She writes that she will understand if he wishes her to return to the stage.
The manager shows up at the Morris homestead the very next week, accompanied by a French maid "of the real Parisian stripe," and Judith is whisked away without Andrew knowing.
There is no spoiler in sharing the conclusion; it's pretty much as one would expect. Judith is sent out on out on the American tour singing her little heart out. In New York, she surprises with a song, unaccompanied by orchestra, seemingly of her own composition:
For the peace which you crave;
For the end of your quest;
For the love which can save;
Come! Come to me!"
Hundreds of kilometres away, "in the silent spaces of a virgin forest," a heartbroken Andrew is thinking of Judith:
Where was she? It was not her wish that he should know. He hoped her little feet trod pleasant paths. Oh, Judith, Judith! Then, explain it as we may, or leave it still a mystery, there came to him, faint, aëry, bodilessly, the words of a song—a song that ended in a plea, "Come! Come to me," and when it died away, Andrew Cutler sprang to his feet with a cry that echoed far between the icy tree trunks of the forest, "I come, I come." And that same night, at the same hour, at the same pulse of the hour, Judith Moore, with a look of ineffable joy upon her face, fell fainting upon the stage.
Judith Moore has a remarkable, entirely avoidable flaw in that Andrew is portrayed as a reader. "He's got a crank on books–took that off his mother," Mrs Morris says to Judith after the meet cute gone bad. And yet Andrew has no idea what has become of his love, despite her tour being covered by the papers.
Andrew returns from the virgin forest to Ovid, where he learns, quite by chance, that the swarthy manager lives in New York. And so he purchases a train ticket:
As the Canadian trains reach New York, the morning papers come aboard. Andrew bought one of each, and sat down turning them over with tremulous hands to search for a sign. He had not far to seek—"JUDITH MOORE DYING, THE END APPROACHING." That was what he read in big "scare head" type; that, and its narrations in the other papers, with the usual platitudes telling of the "short but bright career," and so on. With the calm of despair he searched for definite information as to where she was. It seemed every one knew so well that definite detail was superfluous. But at last, in a different part of the paper, he found: "In the corridors of the Brittany Hotel last night, Miss Moore's manager, who had just left her bedside, said all hope was gone." The train was in New York, slowing up in the Grand Central station by the time he found this.
Andrew reaches Judith with hours to spare.
Marriage follows.
FIN
I laid down my cheap print on demand paperback with a sigh. The Untempered Wind, the author's first novel, is so very good, as is her third, A Daughter of Witches (1899). Judith Moore lands between the two with a dull thud. The disappointment is made all the worse with the knowledge that Wood produced just one more novel, Farden Ha' (1902). Apparently, it takes place in the Scottish mining town in which the author was born.
Types of Canadian Women Henry Morgan, ed Toronto: William Briggs, 1903
Perfectly put, I remembered those words from when I first read them. What I did not recall is Goddard's discovery of two Wood novellas published in the New York pulp magazine Tales from Town Topics. The earlier, A Martyr to Love (1897) "recounts the adventures of a femme fatale ironically wounded in her heartless conquests." The later, Where Waters Beckon (1902) "draws symbolically on Niagara’s whirlpools and local Indian legends as the setting for a dark tale of a woman married off to a madman by her father and later destroyed with her lover, an engineer developing hydroelectricity."
I'd purchase print on demand editions of either in a flash.
Farden Ha', too.
About the epigraph:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning never wrote a poem titled 'Fashioning a Pipe,' the words are taken from her poem 'A Musical Instrument' (1860) beginning with the first two lines of the second stanza. From there, we skip to the second word of third line of the third stanza, ignoring the opening "And."
The epigraph includes twenty of the poems forty-two lines (in whole or in part), ignoring structure, adding and deleting punctuation, touching down here and there. It reminded me of nothing so much as a K-tel album track.
Object and Access: A floppy paperback, so poorly designed that the spine is blank.
Judith Moore was first published in 1898 by the Ontario Publishing Company. It has been out of print ever since. The novel entered public domain in 1978. It is available for download here courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
I've never come upon a copy of the Ontario Publishing Company edition in the wild. As I write, two are listed for sale online at $160 and $250 respectively. Judging by the sellers' descriptions, the least expensive is the superior copy.
Charles G.D. Roberts New York: Wessels, 1906 276 pages
A bestseller in its day, a college text in mine, I read The Heart of the Ancient Wood for my very first CanLit course.
Last week I read it again.
Because I remembered liking the novel, I was really taken aback. The lengthy, gentle, gassy scenic opening is just the sort of thing that sets this sexagenarian's surprisingly healthy teeth on edge.
Your tastes may differ, but I think we can agree that "Not indolently soft, like that which sifts in green shadow through the leafage of a summer garden, but tense, alertly and mysteriously expectant, was the silence of the forest," is not a captivating first sentence.
The Heart of the Ancient Wood unfolds so very, very slowly with descriptions of the wood, its creatures, their sounds, their scents, their habits, their habitats, the trees, the sky, and the air until a "grey man figure" appears. The cock-partridge, the nuthatch, the bear, the wild-cat, and the weasel all react differently. The wood-mice quiver with fear, while the hare looks on with "aversion, not unmixed with scorn" while noting the man's lumbering gait:
“Never,” thought the hare,
disdainfully, "would he be able to escape
from his enemies!”
Eventually, the man figure reaches a clearing, pushes through blackberry and raspberry canes, then picks his way between the burned
stumps of a desolate pasture, before at long last reaching "the loneliest cabin
he had ever chanced to see."
The man figure's name is David "Old Dave" Titus. He has come to prepare the cabin. But for what purpose?
The answer comes in the third chapter, "The Exiles from the Settlement," with the arrival of Kirstie Craig (née MacAlister) and her young daughter Miranda, as announced by "the dull tanky tank, a-tonk, tank of cowbells." The pace picks up with Kirstie's backstory. A "tall, erect, strong-stepping,
long-limbed woman," she'd lived her entire life in a place identified only as "the Settlement." Some seven years earlier Kirstie had chanced to be in a store when in walked a man unlike any other she had ever seen. This was Frank Craig, dilettante, musician, poet, and artist ("when the mood seized him strongly
enough"). A prime specimen of a fish out of water, Frank had been advised to forgo city life for the restorative nature of country air.
Before he had breathed
it a month he had won Kirstie MacAlister,
to whom he seemed little less than a god.
To him, on her part, she was a splendid
mystery. Even her peculiarities of grammar and accent did no more than lend
a piquancy to her strangeness. They appealed as a rough, fresh flavour to his
wearied senses.
They soon married. Kirstie gave birth to a daughter, Miranda, within the year.
Theirs seemed an ideal marriage, and maybe it was, but there came a time when Frank became restless. He talked about business in "the city" (also unidentified) that needed attending to. Kirstie saw her husband off on a rattling mail-wagon. The next paragraph is my favourite in the entire novel:
But – he never came back. The months
rolled by, and no word came of him; and
Kirstie gnawed her heart out in proud
anguish. Inquiry throughout the cities of
the coast brought no hint of him. Then,
as the months climbed into years, that tender humanity which resents misfortune as
a crime started a rumour that Kirstie had
been fooled. Perhaps there had been
no marriage, went the whisper at first.
“Served her right, with her airs, thinkin’
she could ketch a gentleman!” – was the
next development of it. Kirstie, with her superior air, had never been popular at
best; and after her marriage the sufficiency
and exclusiveness of her joy, coupled with
the comparative fineness of speech which
she adopted, made her the object of jealous criticism through all the country-side.
When the temple of her soaring happiness
came down about her ears, then was the
time for her chastening, and the gossips
of the Settlement took a hand in it with
right good-will. Nothing else worth talking about happened in that neighbourhood
during the next few years, so the little
rumour was cherished and nourished.
Presently it grew to a great scandal, and
the gossips came to persuade themselves
that things had not been as they should
be. Kirstie, they said, was being very
properly punished by Providence, and it
was well to show that they, chaste souls,
stood on the side of Providence. If Providence threw a stone, it was surely their
place to throw three.
This, I thought, was the reason my younger self liked the novel. Stories of gossip, jealousy, and their consequences appealed to me back then, just as they do today. Here's another favourite passage:
Some one else had heard from some one else of some one having
seen Frank Craig in the city. There was
at first a difference of opinion as to what
city; but that little discrepancy was soon
smoothed out. Then a woman was suggested, and forthwith it appeared that he
had been seen driving with a handsome
woman, behind a spanking pair, with liveried coachman and footman on the box.
Sadly, these elements and all their intrigue vanish completely, leaving the reader with more purple prose and a near absence of plot.
So as to escape bitter tongues, Kirstie makes a home for herself and little Miranda in the cabin. It's a rather idyllic if modest existence with remarkably few challenges. Good ol' Old Dave, Kirstie's only friend, drops by on occasion; otherwise the only human contact mother and daughter have is with each other. Miranda becomes an object of curiosity to the woodland creatures and is curious in return. The girl's main focus is a female bear, "far the most human of all the furry woodfolk," that her young mind identifies as a "nice, big dog." There is a chance encounter early in the novel, after which Kirstie insists the girl stay within sight of the cabin.
I remember The Heart of the Ancient Wood being included in the syllabus as an introduction to the "realistic animal story." We students were told the genre was originated in Canada by Roberts and his rival Ernest Thompson Seton... or some such thing. As a proud Canadian, this too may have appealed. As a city boy, its likely that I found the depictions of the furry woodfolk interesting, even as I recognized the anthropomorphism. And so, I suppose my memory could be right about liking the novel at the time.
Now, I very much dislike it.
A brief summary of the major plot points, right to the end, follows.
Kirstie and Miranda survive their first winter at the cabin without difficulty, aided in part by an early spring. The bear emerges from hibernation and a few days later gives birth to a male cub. He's so very weak, but under his mother's care the cub becomes the most playful, curious, and cute of little guys before being crushed by a hunter's trap. That same awful day, the grieving she-bear comes upon Miranda as the girl is about to be set upon by a panther. The bear saves the girl and escorts her back to the cabin. Kirstie is rightfully wary, yet comes recognize the bear, Kroof, as a protector and companion. As Miranda grows into adulthood, she becomes at one with the creatures of the ancient wood, and they in turn grow to both trust her and accept her as their superior. This includes the panther.
One afternoon, Miranda comes upon a young man sleeping beneath a tree. In an echo of the scene years earlier involving Kroof, a panther is about to spring. As a student of Kroof, Miranda manages to order it away. The young man turns out to be Young Dave, son of Old Dave. The two haven't seen each other since the day Craig mother and daughter left the Settlement. Young Dave is immediately taken with the mature Miranda and soon becomes a frequent visitor. Kirstie likes Young Dave, but her daughter runs lukewarm and cold. Her reaction has something to do with the fact that the young man is a hunter, where she and her mother are vegetarians. I'd suggest it also has something to do with Miranda being unaccustomed to people, never mind a man who is more or less her own age.
Young Dave pitches woo, but to no avail. He goes so far as to take Miranda on an excursion away from the cabin, deftly navigating dangerous rapids in order to deliver much needed medicine to a young mother and her ailing son. If anything, the visit pushes Miranda farther away, though this has to do with the older woman's assumption that the girl is Dave's fiancée.
A fair percentage of the closing chapters involves play between the two with Young Dave doing his best to ingratiate himself and making a bit of progress only to be pushed away.
Will they or won't they?
As with sitcoms, the question is increasingly tiring with each passing year. The resolution was not one I saw coming. You'd think I would've remembered.
What happens is that Young Dave is walking through the ancient wood one day on yet another visit to the cabin when he chances upon a small male bear cub. He kills the cub with a shot to the head, skins it, cuts out the choicest portions, and continues on his merry way.
The reader already knows that the cub was Kroof's. Did Dave?
To this point, Young Dave has been portrayed as quick and intelligent. He's met Kroof many a time with Miranda over the years, is aware of the unusual relationship they share, and knows there are no other bears in the area. And yet, and yet, and yet, he kills without so much as a thought that the cub just might be the Kroof's.
Kroof finds what's left of her son, a red carcass "hideously affronting the sunlight, "walks around it twice, and then sets off on Dave's trail:
She was
not blinded by her fury. Rather was she
coolly and deliberately set upon a sufficing
vengeance. She moderated her pace, and
went softly; and soon she caught sight
of her quarry some way ahead, striding
swiftly down the brown-shadowed vistas.
There was no other bear in all the forests
so shrewd as Kroof.
She catches up with Dave as he's washing in a small steam so as to make himself presentable to Kirstie and Miranda. The hunter makes for a beech tree and begins climbing with the bear following. Miranda arrives on the scene and tries to call Kroof off. In desperation, she picks up Dave's rifle and fires:
The bear’s body heaved convulsively
for a moment, then seemed to fall together on the branch, clutching at it. A
second later and it rolled off, with a leisurely motion, and came plunging downward, soft, massive, enormous. It struck
the ground with a sobbing thud. Miranda gave a low cry at the sound, turned
away, and leaned against the trunk of the
hemlock. Her face was toward the tree, and hidden in the bend of her arm.
Have we had enough?
The very next sentence is the worst:
Dave knew now that all he had hoped for was his.
I will not be reading this novel a third time.
Personal note: In the midst of reading The Heart of the Ancient Wood, I stumbled upon this beautiful poster.
Good thing I put off the purchase for a couple of days. Knowing her fate, how could I put that image of Kroof on my wall.
Object and Access: A later edition, my copy was purchased for $2.50 sometime in the early 'eighties at Montreal's Russell Books. It's title page makes a big deal of it being illustrated, but the only illustration appears on the frontispiece. The first edition, published in 1900 by Silver, Burdett & Co, features a total of six, including the one found in my Wessels edition. All are by English-born James Weston (1841-1922), a man remembered more for his landscapes than his book illustrations. Looking at those he provided for this novel, I can see why, though I am partial to this:
The Heart of the Ancient Wood first appeared – in its entirety – in the April 1900 issue of Lippincott's Magazine. The novel has enjoyed numerous editions through the decades and as number 110 was once a New Canadian Library staple. It's currently available only as part of the Formac Fiction Treasures series.
The novel has enjoyed a Polish translation (Vsrdci pralesa,1925).
Black panthers are not native to Canada.
As always, print on demand vultures are to be avoided. That said, I was tempted to purchase this, if only because the cover features a detail Gustav Kimt's 'Church in Unterach on Lake Attersee.'
The Homesteaders: A Novel of the Canadian West Robert J.C. Stead Toronto: Musson , 1916 347 pages
The first edition is bound in boards reading The Homesteader when it should be The Homesteaders. The distinction is important, particularly in the early chapters, though it becomes less so as the novel progresses.
The Homesteaders opens in Quebec's Eastern Townships as one-room schoolteacher John Harris watches students scatter at the end of the day. He's soon joined by his fiancée Mary.
This being 1881, John is expected to support his betrothed, and so has made the decision to give up his paltry teacher's salary and try his hand at farming in Manitoba. The plan, which John has taken care to hide, involves traveling west the next spring, locating a homestead, constructing some sort of shelter, and breaking ground. If all goes well, he'll return for Mary. If not, well, there's aways the year after that.
There's something about Mary in these early pages. Lithe and beautiful, she is not "a
daughter of the sturdy backwoods pioneers,
bred to hard work in field and barnyard," rather "she was sprung
from gentler stock." Mary is also the only character in this novel to demonstrate a sense of humour, as when she ribs John:
“Always at your studies,” she cried, as he
sprang eagerly to his feet. “You must be seeking a professorship. But I suppose you have
to be always brushing up,” she continued,
banteringly. “Your oldest pupil must be—let
me see—not less than eight?”
Clever and quick, Mary was onto her fiancé from the start. “I declare, if it isn’t Manitoba!" she says, snatching a map from his hands. "What next?
Siberia or Patagonia? I thought you were still
in the Eastern Townships.”
Mary insists on accompanying John west, moving up their wedding day in the process. What follows is not an account of their honeymoon, rather descriptions of lengthy train travel to Emerson and an oh-so-slow trek northward to tracts of land Ottawa is offering gratis to men who prove themselves able to establish working farms. The couple's first marital home is a windowless sod shack with a heavy blanket for a door.
These are the novel's most interesting pages, no doubt drawn from Stead's childhood memories and experiences. Born in Ontario's Lanark Highlands, as a toddler Robert, his father (Robert, Sr). and mother (tellingly, Mary) established a Manitoba homestead in the very same year as John and Mary Harris.
Robert J.C. Stead Bookseller & Stationer, October 1916
The fictional couple's success in meeting the government's terms has to do with hard work, but not necessarily self-sufficiency. Friendships were formed as those cramped railcars made their way across Ontario. Though the homesteaders settle miles away from one another, their struggle is common. The men work together, loaning each other mowers, plows, and hayracks. As for the women:
Mrs. Grant was
the proud possessor of a very modern labour-
saver in the shape of a clothes-wringer, as a
consequence of which wash-day was rotated
throughout the community, and it was well
known that Mrs. Riles and Mrs. Harris had to
do their churning alternately.
Stead takes great care here. This is not drudgery, rather progress, with each couple striving for a better life. The most dramatic pages are set after the first harvest, reaching a climax in the fifth chapter when, during a winter storm, John abducts a drunken doctor to aid with the delivery of Allan, his first child.
cliquez pour agrandir
Moving between chapters five and six can be jarring. Twenty-five years have passed. The sod shack has been replaced by a brick house. Family and farm have expanded with the addition of a second child, Beulah, and many more acres of land. But all this is no way satisfies John:
He saw the light ahead, but it was now a phantom of the imagination. He said, “When I
am worth ten thousand I will have reached
it”; when he was worth ten thousand he found
the faithless light had moved on to twenty-five thousand. He said, “When I am worth twenty-five thousand I will have reached it”;
when he was worth twenty-five thousand he
saw the glow still ahead, beckoning him on
to fifty thousand. It never occurred to him to
slacken his pace—to allow his mind a rest
from its concentration; if he had paused and
looked about he might, even yet, have recognized the distant lighthouse on the reef about
the wreck of his ideals. But to stop now
might mean losing sight of his goal, and John
Harris held nothing in heaven or earth so
great as its attainment.
The John of the early chapters has become crude; even his whole manner of speech has changed. Mary too is transformed, but only physically. The years have taken a toll, "the shoulders,
in mute testimony to much hard labour of the
hands, had drooped forward over the deepening chest; the hair was thinner, and farther
back above the forehead, and streaked with
grey at the temples; the mouth lacked the rosy
sensuousness of youth, and sat now in a mould,
half of resolution, half submission."
The community formed a quarter-century earlier in those railcars is already a thing of the past. Though one of the most prosperous homesteaders, John cannot help but compare himself to others. Wanting more, he teams up with neighbouring homesteader Hirim Riles. They plan to go out to Alberta, the new frontier, and procure four or five tracts of free land. John will set up a homestead on the first and Riles will establish another on the second. The third, four and possibly fifth would be worked by men who will be provided grub and a small wage during the three
years required to secure titles which would subsequently be be transferred to Harris and Riles:
This was strictly against
the law, but the two pioneers felt no sense of
crime or shame for their plans, but rather congratulated themselves upon their cunning
though by no means original scheme to evade
the regulations.
Indeed, by no means an original scheme. There is no way the two men would've succeeded, though the scheme does serve to bring further notice to John's descent from the decent, dedicated Eastern Townships schoolteacher with whom Marys fell in love.
The last fifteen chapters are far less interesting than the first five, in part because there isn't nearly so much about the pioneer experience, and in part because too many of its pages focus on a crime that takes too long to unfold. I suppose there is a lesson to be learned about working with another when committing a crime, but only if one has never heard of the time-worn observation on honour amongst thieves.
What I liked most was Mary leaving John.
Beulah running away was second.
She is in every way her mother's daughter.
Censorship?: Riles reaches Alberta before partner-in-crime Harris. Though a miser, he enters a bar in order to get the lay of the land (no pun intended). What follows is a scene somewhat reminiscent of this 2016 Heritage Minute:
The American in Stead's novel threatens a lumberjack – yes, a lumberjack – for what he perceives as a personal slight.
By far the most superfluous scene in the novel, it is nevertheless interesting for these two instances of... what exactly? Is it censorship? An author well aware of the impermissible? Or just Stead having some fun?
I leave it for you to judge.
Object: My first edition is printed on paper so acidic that it's a wonder I didn't burn my fingers. It was acquired in 2018 as part of a lot. A few years earlier, I'd purchased a copy of the 1973 University of Toronto Press reissue with introduction by Susan Wood Glicksohn.
Access: A Canadian bestseller, The Homesteaders went through five printings. It was also published in the UK by Unwin (1916) and Hodder & Stoughton (1923). Used copies aren't at all difficult to find online.
The Money Master; Being the Curious History of Jean Jacques Barbille,
His Labours, His Loves and His Ladies Gilbert Parker
Toronto: Copp Clark, 1915 360 pages
I bought my first Gilbert Parker book at a library sale in the mid-eighties. By 1990, it was gone, though I have no idea where. My fault, of course. I'd paid it little attention because Parker himself wasn't paid much attention. His name had never once come up in university courses. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, then my bible, doesn't accord the man so much as one of its 1199 pages, despite popularity and critical acclaim (both now a century past).
I couldn't even remember which Parker I'd owned back then. What I did remember was an illustration and caption depicting a miserable man traveling to Quebec in the company of a beautiful woman who seemed intent on marriage. Imagine my surprise when in researching this recent read I came upon:
The image of the reluctant groom threw me because Parker depicts him as being extremely keen on marrying the woman in the funnel.
The fiancé, Jean Jacques Barbille, is heir to a fortune built over four generations. Having transformed these inherited riches into slightly greater riches, the Canadien has an idea to visit the land of his ancestors, where he expects to be recognized as a man of great importance. Paris disappoints, but folks in the nether regions appreciate his money and so accord deference. Satisfied, Jean Jacques sets off for home with purse depleted, comforted by the knowledge that his various endeavors, save one or two, are moderately successful.
Whilst crossing the Atlantic aboard the good ship Antoine, Jean Jacques encounters Spanish Amazon Carmen Delores – she of the funnel – and Sebastian Delores, her father. They are on the run because papa – the sinister figure at the funnel's base – had been on the losing side of Spain's most recent power struggle. If anything, young Carmen suffered a far greater loss in that her lover Carvillho Gonzales was executed for his efforts:
Carmen had made up her mind from the first to
marry Jean Jacques, and she deported herself accordingly – with modesty, circumspection and skill.
It would be the easiest way out of all their difficulties. Since her heart, such as it was, fluttered,
a mournful ghost, over the Place d’Armes, where her
Gonzales was shot, it might better go to Jean Jacques
than anyone else; for he was a man of parts, of
money, and of looks, and she loved these all; and
to her credit she loved his looks better than all the
rest.
In short, Jean Jacques looks a lot like Carvillho Gonzales.
The Money Master is the twentieth book I've reviewed here this year. It follows James De Mille's The Cross and the Lily (1874) and Grant Allen's The Great Taboo (1890) in being the third to feature a shipwreck. Parker's takes place when the Antoine strikes an iceberg off the shore of Gaspé. Jean Jacques sees Carmen safely bestowed on a lifeboat, before giving up his spot to a crying fifteen-year-old boy. This he does, despite being not that strong a swimmer.
Fortunately, the Spanish Amazon is a strong swimmer. When her lifeboat overturns, she makes for a floating chair, and then uses that chair to save Jean Jacques from drowning.
James Cameron take note.
Jean Jacques and Carmen marry in the Gaspé, much to the disapproval of the gentle townspeople of St Saviour:
It was bad enough to marry the Spanische, but to
marry outside one’s own parish, and so deprive that
parish and its young people of the week’s gaiety,
which a wedding and the consequent procession and
tour through the parish brings, was little less than
treason.
But what a story! The romance of it all is so great as to encourage the curious to travel as much as forty miles to catch a glimpse of the couple during Sunday mass. Carmen never corrects the presumption that she was saved by Jean Jacques and not the reverse.
Jean Jacques Barbille is a man with "a good many irons in the fire." Given the opportunity, he'll sell you insurance and lightning rods. His inherited riches grow not by leaps and bounds, rather by unsteady steps as taken by a toddler.
He fancies himself first and foremost a philosophe. Though he never quite articulates his philosophy, Jean Jacques is quick to share that he spent a year at Université Laval. He carries with him a small volume titled Mediations on Philosophy, which he bought in Quebec before sailing for France.
Jean Jacques is an egotist and something of a dandy, all the while being a good man. He is kind, treats his workers well, forgives debts, and is generous toward the less fortunate. The man's greatest fault relates to the home. He is so taken with his reputation and many business concerns that Carmen feels neglected; this in turn results in the most interesting scenes I've read in an old novel this year...
And, you know, I've read twenty.
Carmen does not feature in the scene, though she does in the next, which is easily the second most interesting scene.
Reading The Money Master forty or so years after having first purchased a copy, I'm at a loss to explain how it is Gilbert Parker is so ignored.
Trivia: Adapted to the Hollywood screen in 1921 as A Wise Fool, the subject of the next week's post.
Object: The first Canadian edition, it features seven illustrations by French artist André Castaigne, best known for having illustrated the first edition of Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. 'Tis a thing of beauty, purchased ten or so years ago in London, Ontario. Price: $2.50.
I'm also the proud owner of the Hutchinson's UK first edition, which I picked up in fin du millénaire Montreal for 30¢.
Sadly, it lacks its dust jacket (see below).
Access: The novel first appeared serialized in Hearst's Magazine (Aug 1913 - April 1914) and Nash's Magazine (Nov 1913 - Jul 1914).
As I write this, a Riverview, New Brunswick bookseller is offering a Very Good copy of the Copp Clark first edition at two dollars. There's no mention of a dust jacket, so I'm assuming that the bookseller believed it had none. Further west, a bookseller in Whitby, Ontario has a Canadian first with dust jacket!
The asking price is $100.
If you don't have the cash, consider the two dollar copy. It's a steal, particularly if you live nearby and can avoid shipping charges.
Before making your decision, consider Harper's American first with its unusual wrap-around jacket illustration, drawn from one of Castaigne's interior illustrations.
A bookseller in Portland, Oregon is offering this copy at US$35:
At the high end – US$350 – we have the Hutchinson UK first on offer from Babylon Revisited, a favourite bookseller. Must say that the cover illustration pales somewhat when compared to the work of Monsieur Castaigne.
Buyer beware, none of Castaigne's illustrations feature in the Hutchinson.
As always, print on demand copies are not to be considered.
A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's UP, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
