Looking Back on Looking Forward

The Daily Witness, 16 May 1913

An addendum to last week's post on Looking Forward by Hugh Pedley.

Looking Forward features cub reporter Billy Scooper. We also meet a disreputable promoter named Humphrey Hustleman. There aren't really any laughs, but there is fun to be had. 

A 1913 novel set in 1927, Looking Forward reminded me of nothing so much as Tim Ososko's 1979 book Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?

Oh, boy, was it!

I gobbled up every detail of Rev Pedley's future Canada no matter how small, as in this description of a Montreal streetcar:

This carriage of the common people was not without its touch of the beautiful. Instead of the long row of heterogeneous advertisements above the windows was a series of fine reproductions of great masters. The city authorities had evidently decided that a ride in a street-car might be a phase of the aesthetic education of the people. They had come to the conclusion that, the suggestion of beauty was better for the health of the people than the suggestion of disease as furnished by the advertisements of patent medicines.

Montreal plays a central role in Looking Forward. It is the city in which Fergus attends university, it is the city in which he befriends those of different faiths, it is the city in which he meets and falls in love with Florence Atherton, it is the city in which he solves the mysteries of hibernation, and it is the city in which he marries Florence Atherton's daughter.

Its best not to focus on that last bit.

Some of Rev Pedley's predictions, like the Mount Royal Tunnel, would've been safe bets. Work began in 1911, two years before Looking Forward was published.  

Construction of the Mount Royal Tunnel, c.1912.

He also anticipates the amalgamation Port Arthur and Fort William, a done deal by 1927, which in reality did not take place until 1970. Rev Pedley's unified city is called Portchester, not Thunder Bay.

Most remarkably, this 1913 novel describes "magnificent new government buildings, which a devastating fire had rendered necessary." It was not three years after publication that the seat of Canadian government went up in flames.

The Globe, 4 February 1916

Telephones, automobiles, paved streets, aeroplanes, and dirigibles, the author plays it safe with his predictions. The outlier is a mountain built in the heart of Winnipeg by wealthy bachelor Irish-Canadian Teddy Ryan. I get the feeling that its existence is meant to be a joke. 

Being a student of the Great War, and noting that this novel dates from 1913, I looked for recognition that  Armageddon might be in the offing. I found it when Billy Scooper tells Fergus that news of his quarter-century hibernation has broken in the eastern papers. “Is it likely to make a stir?” our hero asks:

“Stir! Stir!” said the man excitedly. “Stir! The biggest ship on the sea might go down with all on board, the navies of Britain and France might have a battle with those of the Triple Alliance, Teddy Ryan’s mountain might turn into a volcano, and there wouldn’t be a bigger stir than there’s going to be over this.”

Reference to the Triple Alliance sent a bit of a chill.

Looking Forward was published the year before the start of the Great War. On 30 May 1915, when the conflict was in full force, Rev Pedley preached a sermon titled 'War and the New Earth,' in which he said these words:

Forget not, O forget not, that which is perhaps the noblest sacrifice of all, the surrender by parents of their sons, by wives of their husbands, to the hardships and deadly perils of war by land and self.

Hugh Pedley and his wife Eliza (née Field) had three sons. The eldest, Norman Field Pedley (1884-1909), a civil engineer, died when he was struck by a train in Springfield, Illinois.

Old McGill, 1906

Once war was declared, youngest son, Frank Gordon Pedley (1892-1972), enlisted and served ten months before returning to McGill to continue his medical studies.

Old McGill, 1913

Born in 1888, middle brother Hugh Stowell Pedley, a lawyer, served twenty-nine months. He was killed on 31 January 1918. His body rests at Villers-au-Bois, Departement du Pas-de-Calais, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France.

Old McGill, 1912

Both men Frank and Hugh were recipients of the Military Cross.

Their father died on 26 July 1923, not two years before the realization of the union of of Canada's Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches.

  

The Gazette, 27 July 1923 

The United Church of Canada celebrates its centenary today.

 

Would that Rev Pedley had lived to see it. Would that son Hugh had lived nearly so long.

Reprise: In the epilogue, the reader is presented with this passage which takes place in a future 1927 on the lookout of the steel structure lookout atop Mount Royal:

A couple of German merchants who are in Canada with a view to trade extension stop for a moment, and one says to the other: “Ach Gott! gegen diese zu fechten ware eine schande” (Good heavens! To fight with such as these would be a shame.)

Related post:

Towards a Canada of Light

Towards a Canada of Light

Looking Forward: The Strange Experience of the Rev.

   Fergus McCheyne

Rev. Hugh Pedley, B.A., D.D.
Toronto: Briggs, 1913
294 pages

The cover has it that Looking Forward is "A NOVEL FOR THE TIMES," which it most certainly was, but only to those of certain Canadian Christian denominations. The proposed union of the country's Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches, then a matter of considerable debate, is its impetus. Discussions of sacerdotalism and the episcopate do feature.

Before the eyes glaze over, I rush to add that Looking Forward is also a work of science fiction, imaging a Canada in which hydroplane racing is a popular sport and airships like the Winnipeg Express whisk passengers from Montreal to the Manitoba capitol in under thirty-six hours.

The Winnipeg Express as I imagine it.
Apologies to Seth.

As the subtitle suggests, the novel's hero is Fergus McCheyne. The only son of Presbyterian pastor Rev Robert McCheyne, the young man was born and raised in Cairntable, his father's rural parish, located somewhere in easternmost Ontario (read: Glengarry County). There he was molded by his parents' faith and condemnation of everything not Presbyterian.

Old McGill, 1900

Just a small town boy, his own faith is shaken when, during his studies at McGill, he encounters students of other denominations and finds they aren't such bad fellows after all. He is shaken further when invited to attend the closing exercises of "a well-known Ladies' School" – I'm guessing Trafalgar School for Girls – where he is "confronted by the unforgettable face of Florence Atherton,"  daughter of the Methodist minister whose parish overlaps that of his father.

Fergus does his best to hide his interest in Florence, but a mother knows:

“The Methodist minister’s daughter! Oh, Fergie, what would you be doing with the likes of her? You know how your father feels, and how I feel, about these Methodists. What have we in common with them? They are all wrong in their doctrines, and what little religion they have is all sentiment and shouting.”

Frustrated, our hero finds release in attempting to solve the mystery of hibernation, a subject that has long fascinated. Evenings in which he might been courting Florence are instead spent in the spare room of his rented flat, leading to this rather chilling passage:

For his experiments he managed to smuggle in mice, kittens, and little dogs. He found it much easier to smuggle them out.

Fergus McCheyne is not the villain of this novel. Indeed, there is no villain, though things do get dark.

After many a dead dog, the experiments result in a breakthrough. Not only does Fergus find a way to induce hibernation, he creates a serum to revive the pups. It follows that the amateur scientist's next trial subject be human, but who? No monster, the young man chooses to experiment on himself. Fergus is well-aware that no one in their right mind would willingly take part and so devises a machine with battery and "automatic syringe" to inject the reviving fluid. All is to take place in a remote cavern of considerable size that our hero, a keen canoeist, had discovered on a solo expedition.

The experiment begins in late May 1902. It is meant to last no more than a week. Lest anything go amiss, Fergus has taken the precaution of leaving a letter with firm friend, Anglican clergyman Basil Manthorpe. Tragedy strikes when a squirrel disrupts Fergus's automatic syringe. An even greater tragedy has yet to occur. Rev Manthorpe is killed when the automobile in which he is riding suffers brake failure and is struck by an eastbound train in Montreal West.

The Gazette, 31 May 1913

Two old books by Montreal authors, 31 May 2025.

Fergus's letter remains unopened, hidden away in a secret compartment in Manthorpe's desk until discovered a quarter-century later by a young woman named who – wait for it – just happens to be the daughter of Florence Atherton! Now "a very sweet-faced matronly woman," Florence is married to Hugh Falconer, whom Fergus had mentored whilst the former was a senior student at McGill's Presbyterian College.   

Being a gentleman of propriety, Falconer hands the letter to Rev Manthorpe's surviving brother, who in turn shares its incredible contents. The very next morning, the two men set off for the cavern in the company of Mackenzie, a medical doctor who had been another of Fergus's friends. They expect the worst, of course, but are not so fatalistic that they don't carry a capsule containing the restorative mixture.

Frontispiece

The trio follow the letter's directions to the cavern and the hibernating man. “This is very strange,” says Dr Mackenzie, “ there are no signs of life, no pulsation, no respiration; and yet there is no sign of death. There is not the slightest evidence of decomposition. There is no odour of death. There is no shrinkage of the tissues. The skin has all the firmness and smoothness of health. I don’t know what to make of it.”

Out of caution, Fergus is brought back to the Falconer home before the restorative serum is administered. He opens his eyes to Florence's daughter, also named Florence, who has an equally unforgettable face.

In his preface, Rev Pedley acknowledges his indebtedness to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward:

Whatever opinion may be held of Bellamy’s views, no one can doubt the efficacy of his method in bringing these views to the notice of the world. To be sure, my dream is on a much narrower scale, and with a far less ambitious reach than his. That took in the entire sphere of human life; mine has to do with but a segment of that sphere. That contemplated a perfect social order; mine is content with an improved ecclesiastical situation. That beheld a new heaven and a new earth; mine looks for a Canada made better because a little more of heaven has entered into its life.

The 1927 Canada encountered by Fergus is indeed better. Poverty has been eradicated and the roads are paved with pavement:

• By this time they had turned out of the main traffic thoroughfare into a smooth-paved and absolutely dustless road... (p 124)
• With amazement he looked upon miles of paved street... (p 126)
• The locality was not unknown to McCheyne, and he remembered what it used to be – the ill-paved streets... (p 138)
• On the outskirts of Montreal, but closely knitted to it by well-paved roads... (p 154)
• Park, and drive, and terrace, well-paved streets lined with trees... (p 156)
• And it looks as if there are well-paved streets. (p 190)

There are marvels of technology and engineering like the Winnipeg Express and the much-studied, never realized, Georgian Bay Ship Canal.

A steel structure somewhat resembling the Eiffel tower sits atop Mount Royal, while Winnipeg has a mountain of its own, built and paid for by an Irish-Canadian eccentric. Two hundred feet higher that Montreal's, its summit can be reached by something called the Spirodrome. 

These advances were brought on by Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists coming together in a United Church of Canada. They even get Anglicans and Baptists to pitch in. With the squabbling amongst Protestants over, all are now able to focus on the betterment of men, women, and children. Catholics serve a useful purpose in providing friendly competition.

Looking Forward is indeed less ambitious than Looking Backward. Rev Pedley's imagination, despite its focus, is not nearly so rich and his prose makes for painful reading. This passage takes place not on the Winnipeg Express but in the engine room of the Saskatchewan, another airship, where Fergus encounters a man named Dennis Mulcavey:

“I knew a man of that name. He was foreman for the Sands Company.”

   “Sure, sorr, it’s a foine mimory ye hev. That was my father, and he’s been did these twinty years.”

   “Yes,” said McCheyne, somewhat idiotically, "have a fine memory, for I do remember your father.”

   “It’s wonderful,” said the other, “but they tell me he was a foine man, and a smarrt wan, too.”

   “Yes, a very smart one.”

   The talk then turned upon the airship, the working of the engines, the liability to accident, and the time they were making on their trip, in all of which topics McCheyne took a deep interest, and won the respect of the men by the intelligent way in which he received their information.

I'm tempted to provide further examples, but won't. What I will provide is the ultimate spoiler in revealing that the novel ends with a declaration of love, followed by a marriage. The bride is Florence Falconer – not the Florence Falconer (née Atherton) who was the love of Fergus's life, rather her daughter, who we are told looks just like her matronly mother when a young woman:

“But I have heard that twenty-five years ago you felt like this towards my mother.”

   “Yes, exactly like this.”

   “So it is because you see my mother in me that you say you love me?”

   "Yes,” was the direct, honest reply.

   “Then,” said she, all lightness thrown aside and speaking in tones that trembled with emotion, “I am honoured beyond measure by such a love.”

The mother of the woman who accepts his marriage proposal will later be referred to as "the Florence of an earlier time."

I found this disturbing.

My wife is more dismissive: "It's written by a man."  

The McCheyne/Falconer wedding is well-attended. Saskatchewan engine man Dennis Mulcavey is in attendance, as is the local Catholic priest:

McCheyne stretches out his hand, which is at once enclosed in a firm and friendly clasp. Then the eyes of the two men meet... and Fergus is conscious of the only pang that has marred this crowning day. As he looks into the young priest’s eyes he feels as if gazing one moment upon a parterre of flowers, there has the next moment been the sudden opening of a cleft, and he is looking down into a profound abyss where ice and fire are strangely intermingled; and he knows that he has had a momentary glimpse of the age-long mystery of the ecclesiastically ordained celibate life.

A strange thing to include in an otherwise joyous and happy final scene, though it did serve to remind that Fergus's experiments and long hibernation would never have taken place had only his parents been willing to accept a Methodist as a daughter-in-law.

More on Looking Forward a week this Tuesday, the one hundredth anniversary of the United Church of Canada.

Trivia: Looking Forward follows The Street Called Straight as the second consecutive novel I've read to end in with a wedding. If You Want to See Your Wife Again..., the novel I tackled before these two, ends with a marriage proposal. 

Object and Access: An attractive hardcover with olive boards and full-colour frontispiece by G. Horne Russell, my copy was purchased online or US$15.00 this past February from a Manitoba bookseller. It once belonged to Lady Inez Peterson sponsor of the Lady Inez Peterson Trophy.

 

The Sherbrooke Daily Record, 4 September 1953

As far as I can tell, the novel enjoyed one printing, but with boards of different colours (green, red, and brown). As write this, four are listed for sale online, the least expensive being US$15.75.

Move quickly! The three others range in price between US$79.95 and US$150.00.

Related posts:

Looking Back on Looking Forward

The Strange Satanic Canada of a Future Past
The Long and Winding Street

"A good kidnapping story always has wide appeal."

I didn't realise that you wrote poetry. I didn't realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry

Say what you will about Satan, he's no dummy.

I think I'm right about this, but am not sure.

He had no place in my family's place of worship. I never once heard mention of the Prince of Darkness in church school, confirmation class or even a sermon. This could have something to do with having been raised Anglican.

I am not sure.

My early reading on Satan was extremely limited. It began in October 1974 with 'The Ecchorcist,' MAD magazine's parody of The Exorcist, continued with Joy Carroll's horror romance Satan's Bell (1976), and more or less ended with novelizations of the films The Omen (1976) and Damien:The Omen II (1978).

Since beginning the exploration that is the Dusty Bookcase, I've learned a bit more about Beelzebub through American expat Jules-Paul Tardivel. He believed novels to be "weapons forged by Satan himself for the destruction of mankind," but seized one of "the enemy's war machines" in writing Pour la patrie (1895). Set in the far off future of 1945, the devil is very much present and very much focussed in destroying Quebec as the last bastion of Catholicism.

No one I've read thus far had more to say about Satan and what he's up to than the late televangelist John Wesley White – author of Re-entry (1970), The Man from Krypton (1978), Arming for Armageddon (1983), and Thinking the Unthinkable (1992) – though I'm not sure how much he can be believed. I very much doubt that this song is intended to bring the listener to love Satan, as Dr White claims:

I may be wrong.

From everything I've read, Satan is cunning, creative, devious, and extremely intelligent. What he isn't is a good poet.

I can say this with certainty having browsed Michelle Remembers, the 1980 bestseller credited with providing the spark for the Satanic Panic. I'm planning on writing about it later this year, but for now, this being the first day of National Poetry Month, I thought it might be appropriate to share one of the many samples of Satan's verse recorded in the book by authors Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder:

            If you say one word I say to you,
            You'll say it all until it's through.
            You'll run out of time, run out of space,
            Run at the mouth all over the place.
            You can only go inside your head,
            And if you go there, then you're dead.

            So you see, I've turned it inside out;

            I've turned you around, turned you about,

            You always come back to me,

            The only way out is to see through me.

            The more goes out, the more comes in,

            You'll start to end when you begin.

So begins a theological debate. Is there something lacking in the Prince of Darkness – a heart, perhaps – that prevents him from being anything other than a rotten poet or is his verse intentionally bad so as to bring hell on Earth?

Frankly, I'm beginning to have doubts that Satan composed any of the poems in Michelle Remembers.

My thanks to fellow CanLit scholar Brad Middleton, who generously donated two copies of Michelle Remembers to The Dusty Bookcase.

Related posts:

Ontario Gothic Romance (with a scent of Brut)
The Strange Satanic Canada of a Future Past

Come, Come, Come - Nuclear Bomb

Same Old Same Old about Armageddon
The Oxford PhD Rambles On
Man of Faith, Man of Steel

Songs for Sunday Suggested by John Wesley White
Immoral Music for a Monday Morning

Of Cannibals and Christians

The Great Taboo
Grant Allen
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891
271 pages

Reviewing Gilbert Parker's The Right of Way a while back, I expressed my opposition to the idea of starting a novel with dialogue. "'Not guilty, your Honor!'" –  italics and all – is its first line.

The first line in The Great Taboo is "'Man overboard!'"

Better than "Splash!" I suppose.

The man who has gone overboard is, in fact, a woman. No one knows this better than English civil servant Felix Thurston. An instant earlier he'd grasped Miss Muriel Ellis' slender waist as a wall of water struck the deck of the Austalasian:

The wave had knocked him down, and dashed him against the bulwark on the leeward side. As he picked himself up, wet, bruised, and shaken, he looked about for Muriel. A terrible dread seized upon his soul at once. Impossible! Impossible! she couldn't have been washed overboard!

Thurston dives into the "fierce black water" – I should've mentioned it is nighttime – intent on rescue. Lifebelts are flung in their general direction and a boat is lowered, its light playing upon the waves, but to no avail. After an exhaustive search, the crewmen return to the ship. Their captain is philosophical:

"I knew there wasn't a chance; but in common humanity one was bound to make some show of trying to save 'em. He was a brave fellow to go after her, though it was no good, of course. He couldn't even find her, at night, and with such a sea as that running."

In fact, Mr Thurston did find Miss Owen; Felix and Muriel cling to each other even as the captain speaks. Buoyed by lifebelts, the pair drifts toward a reef that bounds Boupari, "one of those rare remote islets where the very rumor of our European civilization has hardly yet penetrated." As the new day dawns, Felix begins to make out signs of habitation. He's well aware that the Polynesian islands are home to "the fiercest and most bloodthirsty cannibals known to travellers." And so, he is on his guard as smiling, friendly souls paddle to transport the two castaways from reef to islet.

Felix and Muriel are not eaten, rather they're made the King of Rain and Queen of Clouds. The two are considered gods, subservient only to the high god Tu-Kila-Kila. They are also deemed "Korong," a word the civil servant, who is otherwise conversant in Polynesian languages, knows not.

Here the reader has an advantage in that the word was chanted repeatedly during the roasting of two Boupari inhabitants mere hours before Felix and Muriel's arrival. Still, it is surprising that the King of Rain and Queen of Clouds, who seem fairly sharp, need be told its meaning... and by a parrot, no less!

Grant Allen was all too dismissive of his novels, but I'm not. The best part of worthwhile nineteenth-century Canadian fiction was written by Allen. That said, I have been dismissive of his adventure novels, Wednesday the Tenth (aka The Cruise of the Albatross) included. Published the same year The Great Taboo, it too features cannibals.*

But I wonder, could it be that The Great Taboo is something more than an adventure novel? Allen's preface is by turns intriguing and amusing:

This reviewer is aware of Frazier's The Golden Bough (1890-1915), but has not read it. I'm familiar with Andrew Lang, but not his Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887). Henry Ogg Forbes's A Naturalist's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago (1885) and Julian Thomas's Cannibals and Convicts (1886) are both new to me, as they would have been to Allen in the years preceding The Great Taboo.

I haven't had time to read those books, but have read Mary Beard's review of Robert Fraser's 1990 The Making of ‘The Golden Bough’: The Origin and Growth of an Argument (London Review of Books, 26 June 1990), in which she writes that The Great Taboo "turned Frazer’s metaphorical journey into a literal tale of travel and adventure." It is, in her words, "a crude and simplified retelling of The Golden Bough," and "important for our understanding of the immediate popular reception of Frazer’s work."

In the end, Felix and Muriel are not consumed by cannibals. As the genre dictates, they escape Boupari, marry, and return to England. The final scene is also the best. It takes place in the London drawing room of the Mrs Ellis, Muriel's aunt by marriage, in which the newlyweds are confronted with the taboos of their own island.

The last sentence is much better than the first.

* Five years ago, I posted a Grant Allen top ten in which The Cruise of the Albatross takes the final spot. At the time, I'd read all of twelve Allen novels. I've now read eighteen. The Cruise of the Albatross has fallen to fourteenth position.

Trivia: Being of a certain age, I couldn't read the title without thinking of the Great Gazoo. The name Felix Thurston reminded me of this more famous fictional castaway:

Object and Access: My first American edition was purchased four or five years ago. I cannot remember how much I paid, but it couldn't have been fifty dollars. The true first is the British first. Published in 1890 by Chatto & Windus, I see evidence of a second printing the following year.

No copies of either is listed for sale online today. It would appear that there have been no other editions.

The Harper & Bros edition can be read online here courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Related posts:

Born Again Infidel
Grant Allen's Wicked Novel

Cruising Toward Cannibals with Grant Allen

Starting in on Grant Allen: A Top Ten

Abraham's Bosom and the Great Change of Life

Abraham's Bosom
Basil King
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918
54 pages

A short story masquerading as a novella, Abraham's Bosom first appeared in the March 30, 1918 edition of The Saturday Evening Post. Its publication nearly coincided with Germany's devastating spring offensive, which resulted in more than 862,000 Allied dead and wounded. 

Abraham's Bosom begins in a doctor's office. Berkley Noone, first rector of St Thomas, is told that he is suffering from the very same rare disease that had afflicted organist Ned Angel. A "near-sighted fellow with a limp," Angel had trained the choir of St Thomas for forty years – "without salary" – only to be dismissed by Noone after sharing his diagnosis.

Abraham's Bosom frontispiece.

The organist died two months later.

After receiving his own diagnosis, Noone walks about the city a bit before taking to his death bed. As he lies dying, the reverend reflects upon on his marriage and children. Wife Emily hovers about, propping him up in what she insists are the most comfortable positions. Their five children, whom he considers disappointments, visit from time to time. All are present during his final moments as the reverend gazes somewhat vacantly at an engraving of his favourite painting, William Homan Hunt's The Light of the World. His eyes see the lantern glowing brighter and brighter until it outshines the afternoon sun.

It takes time for Noone to recognize his passing. He'd expected an instant in which his soul would "tear its way out of his body and he should be thrust, a naked, quivering bundle of spiritual nerves, before angels and archangels and principalities and powers, and a God whose first question would be that which was put to Cain: "What hast thou done?"

Instead, he's met by Ned Angel.

As a story, Abraham's Bosom is much shorter than it appears. The diagnosis, wandering, and death bed scenes are brief; the better part of the book involves theological discussion as Angel sets Noone straight on things theosophical and what the reverend may expect now that he has passed through the "great change." It was followed six months later by King's far superior Going West, which concerns a ghostly journey shared by German and American soldiers who have killed each another in battle. 

Both are products of the author's growing interest in spiritualism, sown in Flanders and other bloody fields. In this respect, he was far from alone amongst bestselling authors – Arthur Conan Doyle, for example – but he did stand out as a popular Anglican minister who challenged church doctrine. Reverend King did not believe in death, rather the continuance of life. In Reverend Noone's case, as with everyone, there is no sudden tearing of the soul from the body, rather a gentle imperceptible "great change."

That term – "great change" – features three times in the text, and on the first of three different dust jackets Harper used to sell book (above). I suspect King himself wrote its words. Note the second paragraph:

This story will bring Comfort and Consolation to many who are in trouble of mind about the Hereafter.

In the Hereafter, as King believes it to be, those who have passed through this great change see things with different eyes. Berkley Noone sees his wife and children as themselves but themselves glorified:

Emily was again the dryad of their youthful days; but a dryad with ways of light and tenderness he had never known her to possess. Each of the children was bathed in the same beautifying radiance. He knew them – and yet he didn't know them. All he could affirm of them exactly was that his doubts and worryings and disappointments on account of them were past. He felt what Angel had just been telling him, that he was waking from some troubled dream on their behalf.

Noone's familial relationships will continue. As with the soldiers in Going West, he will be able to visit and even communicate. 

If anything, Reverend King's The Abolishing of Death (1919), an account of his experiences communicating with nineteenth-century chemist Henry Talbot – but not really – would've brought further comfort and consolation to the greiving.

Knowing the date of composition, some nine months before the Armistice, what struck me most about Abraham's Bosom is its disconnect from the Great War.  The conflict, which plays such a part in his novels  The High Heart (1917), Going West (1918), The Thread of Flame (1920), The Empty Sack (1921) is not so much as mentioned. Or might it be that the allusion is subtle? Here's Ned Angel:

"How are the Children of Dust making use of the knowledge they've gained during the last fifty years of their counting? Is it to help one another? Is it to benefit themselves? Is it to make the world happier, or more peaceful, or more prosperous? Haven't they taken all their new resources, all their increased facilities, all their approximations to Truth, all their approaches to God – the things which belonged to their peace, as Jesus of Nazareth called them – and made them instruments of mutual destruction? Aren't they straining their ingenuity to devise undreamed-of methods for doing one another harm?''

I write this nine days short of the 105th anniversary of that Armistice. 

Object and Access: My copy, which is in pretty rotten shape, was purchased seven years ago as one title in a box containing twenty or thirty old Canadian books. Price: $20.

The frontispiece featuring afflicted organist Ned Angel is one of four Walter H. Everett illustrations commissioned for The Saturday Evening Post. Interestingly, no matter the placing, all depict scenes and from the first third of the story. This image, with caption from the opening pages of the story, appears at on the final page of its Post debut:

The "timid, wild-eyed nymph of a thing who had incarnated for him all that was poetry in the year when he was twenty-eight" is Reverend Noon's wife. She's a cutie!

Online booksellers list copies beginning at five American dollars, but they'll demand a further US$30 or US$35 for shipping. Some have dust jackets, some do not. The one you want to buy is offered by a Massachusetts bookseller who promises an inscribed copy at US$75.

All claim to be offering the first edition, but as I've discovered, there are at least three variants.

Related posts:

Reverend King's Great War Novelette
Basil King's Seen and Unseen World
The Mission of Sex: Canadians, Do Your Duty!
A Man Forgets His Identity (but not his manners)

The Great Canadian Great Post-War Novel?
The Retired Reverend King on Abolishing Death

Man of Faith, Man of Steel

,

The Man from Krypton: The Gospel According to Superman
John Wesley White
Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1978
175 pages

John Wesley White died on September 4, 2016, the very same day Mother Teresa was canonized by Pope Francis; White being a Billy Graham Evangelistic Associate, I consider this a coincidence.

Rev Dr White was no stranger to the Dusty Bookcase, yet his passing was not noted here. The Dusty Bookcase has to do with the forgotten, the neglected, and the suppressed. In the days following his death, John Wesley White was remembered as never before.  

Looking through his obituaries, I find it curious that few mention the preacher's written work. The Toronto Star obit informs that White wrote "over twenty books," singling out Re-entry (which I've read) and The Prodigal Son (which does not exist). My introduction to White, the man, and his prophesies didn't come through Agape (his TV show) or 100 Huntley Street (not his TV show), rather Arming for Armageddon, which I found fourteen years ago in the Stratford, Ontario Salvation Army Thrift Store.

John Wesley White on 100 Huntley Street, January 1988.

Arming for Armageddon espouses an all too common, all too unappealing brand of born again Christianity, but White's writing, particular and peculiar, had me yearning for more. Over the next few years, that same Thrift Store yielded a second White title, Thinking the Unthinkable, and a third, the aforementioned Re-entry, but then my family moved eastward. Since then, I've had to rely on online booksellers, The Man from Krypton being my most recent. I'd long wanted this book because of something I'd read in my first White book.

In Arming for Armageddon, Rev Dr White condemns Christopher Reeve's Superman for "preparing the human psyche for an Antichrist."

The Man from Krypton isn't quite so damning. Published to coincide with the release of Superman: The Movie, its first chapter cribs liberally from issues of Time. This quote from creative consultant Tom Mankiewicz sets the tone: "Whatever Jimmy Carter is asking us to be, Superman is already. What we are really giving people is the Christian message: that we should all be honest, love each other and be for the underdog."

Being familiar with White's writing, I questioned the veracity of the Mankiewicz quote, only to find it in the August 1, 1977 edition. Further surprises followed: Rev Dr White praises Jimmy Carter, happily notes increasing church attendance, and remarks on young people's attraction to things spiritual, as reflected in the popularity of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Hallelujah!

So positive, so uplifting, the first chapter of The Man from Krypton is unlike anything found in the Rev Dr's other books. The remaining nine chapters are classic White: disinformation ("Murder in Canada has doubled in a dacade [sic]") and misinformation ("There are some current movies entitled Fantom From Space and Tony and Tia, Two Cosmic Beings — From Outer Space."), accompanied by the usual muddled rambling:

"Sorry seems to be the hardest word," sings Elton John. Eric Segal, the Yale professor who became famous as the author of Love Story, defines love as never having to say you're sorry. Coming to Christ, as Billy Graham has demonstrated in his prayer with millions of repenting sinners, must begin with: "I am sorry for my sins," or words to that effect.

According to White, Carrie is the sequel to The Omen and Shakespeare wrote The Little Prince. An Oxford graduate, he attributes these words to the Bard:

Le petit prédicateur writes of men named Timothy O'Leary, Gue Grevara, Freddie Printz, and Terry Keith. On his planet, Hollywood produces "Satan thrillers" titled Satan's Men, The Devil's Widow, Mistress of the Devil (starring Liv Ullman), and The Devil's Mistress (starring Andy Warhol), none of which are recognized by IMDb.

Preacher White was always quick to judge; anything might be condemned as a Satan thriller. Consider Shout at the Devil, the 1976 action-adventure inspired by the 1905 sinking of SMS Königsberg. White is wrong in describing it as a Satan thriller, just as he's wrong that it stars "Marvin Moore."

After all these years, after all his books, I feel I've come to understand White's confusion. Until 1996, the year he was pretty much silenced by a stroke, the Rev Dr was extremely busy, flying around the world, spreading his interpretation of the Bible. I believe his habit of referencing billboards and newspaper headlines is a reflection of the fast-paced, jet-setting evangelical lifestyle. The preacher had little time for contemplation, never mind investigation. Writing of Tony and Tia, Two Cosmic Beings — From Outer Space, White is almost certainly referencing Disney's 1975 Escape to Witch Mountain, a film he almost certainly never saw.

As a White scholar, there was no challenge in linking Tony and Tia, Two Cosmic Beings — From Outer Space and Escape to Witch Mountain, but I am stumped by his description of a non-existent Blood, Sweat and Tears album. What inspired this?

The rock group "Blood, Sweat and Tears" combined Mick Jagger's "Sympathy for the Devil" and Moussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" in an album entitled "Sympathy to the Devil — Symphony for the Devil." Tragically and quickly Eve's sympathy for the devil had turned the human race into rendering a "symphony to the devil" which is playing and slaying at a higher decibel level today than the devil has directed in the long history of man.

One might ask what any of this has to do with Superman.

The answer is not much.

The Man of Steel is the focus of the first five pages – "Joe Schuster," "George Reeves," and "Lennone Lemmon" figure – after which he is relegated to the introductory paragraph of each chapter; these being typical:

In the film, Superman has X-ray eyes that can see through virtually anything. He knows everything about anybody with whom he has to so. This, of course points us back to Jesus Christ.

Superbaby grows into Superman and seems to be able to do anything. He can leap over skyscrapers in one gargantuan bound. He tames bursting floodwaters from a collapsing dam. He catches a crashing helicopter in midair. The people are left asking: "Is there anything too hard for Superman?" Which of course takes us straight to the Bible. 

There is one brief mention of Superman outside these introductory paragraphs, but it comes with a degree of resentment: 

Jesus could walk over hills or mountains at will, calm stormy waters, and save a sinking ship in mid-sea. Superman's feats of leaping over a skyscraper, calming a bursting dam, and catching a crashing helicopter were topped by Jesus years ago!

White knew little about Superman other than what he'd read in Time. The Gospel According to Superman was nothing more than a subtitle used to sell books.

John Wesley White's world isn't Earth One or Earth Two. Bizarro World comes closest; ugly, disturbing, nonsensical, and usually good for a laugh.

Favourite short passage:

There's a book title Drop Into Hell. Christians are to urge people not to drop into hell.

Favourite short passage (runner-up):

"If I were God, this world of sin and suffering world break my heart!" Goethe, the German, reckoned. Mr. Goethe, that's precisely what it did when Jesus hung on the center cross!

Favourite feature length passage:

Saved! That word conjures up a lot of impressions in our minds. A hockey goalie makes about thirty saves per game. A baseball relief pitcher might manage twenty or so saves in a season. A crop is saved by good rain. A surgeon saves a patient's life by the educated skill of his hand on the scalpel. A policeman saves a child from drowning. Churchill saved England from Hitler. Erica Jong writes her best seller, How to Save Your Own Life, which the way it defies morality and defies immortality, might better be entitled How to Ruin Your Own Life. Whole pages in magazines and papers are sold to bank advertisements which invite: "SAVINGS –That's What It Is All About." "SAVE NOW – During our Annual Sale" publicizes every store worth its salt, sooner or later. A headliner during the Rumanian earthquake disaster reads: "Buried for 62 Hours, Waitress Saved in Bucharest." Yet when the word is used spiritually, it is nearly unknown.

Object and Access: An unexceptional mass market paperback. The cover illustrator, who seems to be channelling 1966 Batman, is not credited. 

Eighteen copies are listed for sale online, the least expensive priced at US$5.23. One Maryland bookseller offers a signed copy at US$5.29. I'd say it's worth the additional six cents.

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Come, Come, Come - Nuclear Bomb

Same Old Same Old about Armageddon
The Oxford PhD Rambles On

Songs for Sunday Suggested by John Wesley White
Immoral Music for a Monday Morning

Hey Kids! Comix!

Remembering Calvin Dale Williamson

A sixty-page booklet published by William Southam, father of the Southam newspaper empire, Regimental Songs was distributed to members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The first song is "Alexander's Ragtime Band;" the second, "Alouette," is followed by "Annie Laurie." My favourite is the fourth: "Any Little Girl That's a Nice Little Girl is the Right Little Girl for Me." Regimental Songs provides only the chorus:

The song in full is quite ribald.

Southam's booklet contains 168 songs – some bowdlerized, some not. "God Save the King" is sandwiched between the chorus of "Every Little Bit Added to What You've Got Makes Just a Little Bit More" and select lines from "Good-Night, Ladies."

Regimental Songs isn't all King, Country, and girls. 

I purchased the booklet ten years ago at a library book sale. It once belonged to Calvin Dale Williamson of St Marys, Ontario, who at nineteen enlisted to serve as a private in the 55th Overseas Battery, Canadian Field Artillery.

Après la guerre, Cal Williamson worked as a plumber. A life-long bachelor, he lived in a modest house on Jones Street East (likely the same house in which he was born). A friend who hired him in his later years remembers Mr Williamson as a hoarder and something of an eccentric. Calvin Dale Williamson died in 1983, at the age of eighty-seven. "When he died, the contents of his house were cleared out and dispersed," writes my friend. "The house was demolished and there is no trace of this interesting man left in St. Marys – except, perhaps, at some drilled wells."

Calvin Dale Williamson lies next to his parents, Thomas and Cordelia, in the St Marys Cemetery.

RIP

Related posts:

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"He Sleeps in Flanders"

Remembrance Day 1019

"In Flanders Now"

Remembrance Day 2018

Edward Maurice Busby and William Horace Humphreys

Remembrance Day 2017

A Poet Remembers Remembers Fallen Great War Poets

Remembrance Day 2016

A Man With No Face

Remembrance Day 2015

William Horace Humphreys

Remembrance Day 2014

Maurice John Busby

Remembrance Day 2013

Reverend Canon Frederick George Scott

Remembrance Day 2012

'A Kiss' - Bernard Freeman Trotter

Remembrance Day 2011

Edward Maurice Busby

Remembrance Day 2010

'A Gun Pit' - Wyndham Lewis

Remembrance Day 2009

Canadian Twilight - Bernard Freeman Trotter