10 Canadian Books for International Women's Day

One Canadian man recommends ten unjustly neglected novels by ten Canadian women:

The Midnight Queen
May Agnes Fleming
1863

A gothic tour de force by the country's first bestselling author, The Midnight Queen has it all: the Black Plague, the Fire of London, a killer dwarf, prostitutes playing at being aristocrats, and a clairvoyant who has nothing more than a skull for a head.

Marion: An Artist's Model
Winnifred Eaton
1916

I was torn between recommending this and the author's later novel "Cattle" (1924). Marion won out as a roman à clef that reveals much about her family – surely the most remarkable in Victorian Montreal.

Up the Hill and Over
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
1917

A story of cocaine addiction, opium addiction, love and loss in small town Ontario. Social historians may find Mackay's Blencarrow (1926), in which domestic abuse figures, more interesting, but this novel has the better plot.

John
Irene Baird
1937

A quiet, understated, pastoral novel, this wasn't quite my thing. I include John because it was so well received in its day, and in recognition of those drawn to quiet, understated, pastoral novels. By the author of Waste Heritage.

Do Evil in Return
Margaret Millar
1950

Margaret Millar ranks with husband Kenneth as being amongst the greatest Canadian writers of her generation. The plot is driven by a woman doctor's refusal to perform an illegal abortion. Do Evil in Return is remarkable for its time.

Shadow on the Hearth
Judith Merril
1950

A Cold War nightmare, Merril's debut novel centres on what happens to a nuclear family when the bombs begin to fall. The novel is not so much about war as it is the way governments use crisis to control their citizens.

The Cashier [Alexandre Chenevert]
Gabrielle Roy
1954

Another novel written under the influence of the Cold War, Alexandre Chenevert was to have been the follow-up to Bonheur d'occasion, but ended up as Roy's third novel. A story filled with angst and fear, it almost seems more suited to today.

M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty
Frances Shelley Wees
1954

A novel of domestic suspense centred on a woman's attempt to clear herself of her husband's murder. Set in post-war suburban Toronto, cocktails and adultery figure.

Best Man [Doux-amer]
Claire Martin
1960

A tale of obsessive love set within the publishing world, Martin's protagonist is an editor who falls hard for aspiring novelist Gabrielle Lubin. As a writer, she's not much good, but his work transforms her into a critical darling.

A Stranger and Afraid
Marika Robert
1964

The author's only novel, on the surface it concerns a woman who finds refuge in Canada after the horrors of the Second World War. Below the surface, it's about sexual expression and the protagonist's attraction to sado-masochism.

Related posts:

Falling Hard for May Agnes Fleming

Glassco's $9500 Library and the Montreal Eatons

Alberta Gothic

Ontario, Opium, and Cocaine

The Promise of a Man, a Woman in So Much Pain
A Quiet, Mildly Depressing Depression-Era Debut
Desperately Seeking Violet
A Nuclear Family Nightmare

Bad News for Modern Man
Domestic Suspense in Small Town Ontario
Claire Martin at the Start of a Quiet Revolution
A 49-Year-Old Fifty Shades? S&M from M&S?

The Dusty Bookcase in the Toronto Star

Not my pool, sadly, but that belonging to a friend and old work colleague. Today's Saturday Star features a piece by Nick Patch on the forthcoming Dusty Bookcase book. Although the article itself isn't available online – not to non-subscribers – my picks of five books worthy of attention is open to all:

Rare Reading List: Four Essential Obscure Canadian Reads

(And One Non-Essential)

Because I've received requests for links to my writing on the titles mentioned in the list and article:

The Last Canadian - William C. Heine

Toronto Doctor - Sol Allen

Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk - Maria Monk

The Plouffe Family - Roger Lemelin

A Stranger and Afraid - Marika Robert

The Midnight Queen - May Agnes Fleming

Orphan Street - André Langevin

Michael's Crag - Grant Allen

Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow - J.V. Andrew

The publication date for The Dusty Bookcase is 15 August. It is available for pre-order at Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally Robinson.

Toronto, Life, the Subliminal Seduction of the Innocent and a Morley Callaghan Mystery

Toronto Life, vol. 4, no. 7 (7 June 1970)

There are jokes to be made about Toronto Life having to travel two hours outside the city for a cover story, but this Montrealer is above all that. What's more, this Montrealer deserves credit for saving this magazine from the pulper.

Just look at that cover!

It would've been displayed at United Cigar Stores four years before I made the leap from Allancroft Elementary to Beaconsfield High. A to B, it was at the latter that I encountered Wilson Bryan Key's Subliminal Seduction, the closest thing the school library had to a dirty book.

Key, who taught briefly at the University of Western Ontario, saw sex everywhere. In fact, he claimed the very word – SEX – was written in caps on images of ice cubes used in ads for hard liquor.

SEX on ice? I couldn't see it – and as a twelve year-old I was really looking. That said, my fifty-two year-old self did notice something about the cover of this old Toronto Life.

Do you?

Different times, right? This is the issue's subscription card:

Forty-five years have passed. "Stratford As You'll Like It", the promised "Fun guide to Stratford the turned-on town", is now as dated as author David Smith's wardrobe.

Smith's hook, dull and lacking a lure, is all about how much the town has changed since the Stratford Festival's 1953 beginning:

Boutiques now line Ontario Street where the dry goods shops used to be. The "hippies" on the street are probably townspeople. Stratford even has its own topless dancer, at 56" more for your money than anywhere else I know.

It doesn't say much that Smith failed to interest the local historian in me, though I did enjoy the photos, like this one of nearby St Marys, where I now live.

Like something from another century… which, of course, it is. And look, here's the author in Olin Brown's, "where confectionary is still made by hand – and tastes delicious."

Toronto Life informs that David Smith is a "Toronto couturier".

Odd how few recognizable names feature in the bylines. This Toronto Life is no Montrealer: no short stories, no poetry, no book reviews; though you will find an automotive column, a cooking column and a column concerning interior decoration.

Not to say that literary types didn't contribute. Our very own E.L. James, Marika Robert, whose lone novel A Stranger and Afraid I read last year, has a travel piece on Rome. Eric LeBourdais, nephew of Gwethalyn Graham, provides a very long article: "Why We Need the Spadina and How It Can Lead Toronto into the 21st Century", in which he draws on a study by automotive industry front General Research Corporation of Burbank, California.

Heather Cooper's illustrations did not convince, though I did marvel at those demonstrating how the proposed expressway "would skirt Casa Loma and provide a partial interchange at Davenport":

"READ ON FOR FACTS ABOUT THE SPADINA AND THE FUTURE" encourages the magazine, between ads for General Motors, Shell, Chrysler, Chevrolet, Maserati and a Lincoln Mercury dealership.

To be perfectly fair, the same  issue features a snap of novelist David Lewis Stein making the rounds in his fight against the very same project.

I'm afraid that the only other sign of Toronto's literary scene comes through a recycled press release:

Thumbs Down on Julien Jones – note correct title – "his first book in seven years", was never published; I've been keeping an eye out for decades. Callaghan began the novel in 1942 as his follow-up to More Joy in Heaven. Twenty-one years later, he told the New York Times that it was a month from completion. And here it is again in 1970, presented as something on the cusp of publication.

Callaghan read four excerpts on CBL. Some of it was adapted and published in 1973 as a short story, "The Meterman, Caliban, and Then Mr. Jones", in son Barry's Exile. The following year, the same was dramatized in an episode of the CBC's The Play's the Thing.

I keep expecting Thumbs Down on Julien Jones to be published; Library and Archives Canada holds several drafts. Of And Then It All Came Together, described in Toronto Life as a novel in progress, there is no trace; nothing with that title is found amongst his papers. Throughout the latter half of 1970, Callaghan talked about the work as something he wouldn't talk about.

Maybe not talking about it was enough.

Could be I've said too much.

I'll shut up.

RIP

I would be remiss not to recognize that Morley Callaghan died twenty-five years ago today. His was the last death of which I learned by way of a newspaper. I was walking across Square St-Henri when I read the news on the front page of the Gazette.

Different times, right?

Related posts:

The Greatest Magazine Cover of All Time

The Second Greatest Magazine Cover of All Time

Harlequin's Filthiest Title

Checking Out an Attractive 56-Year-Old Montrealer

A Last-Minute Slogan, "Give Books"

Coaching courtesy of an old Eaton's ad published in the 23 December 1933 Globe & Mail. The venerable department store recommended forty-two books, though only five are Canadian: Cannibal Quest by Gordon Sinclair, My Vision for Canada by William Arthur Deacon, The Girl from Glengarry by Ralph Connor, The Master of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche, and for the kiddies, Picture History of Canada by Jessie McEwan and Kathleen Moore.

The young lady gracing the cover of that month's Maclean's appears unfazed by the slim pickings.

You just know that first gift is a book. I'm betting the second is an album of Duke Ellington 78s. The third is, of course, a box of Laura Secord chocolates.

Fast-forward eight decades to this, my annual year-end summary. There will be gift suggestions.

This got off to a good start in January with Philip Child's Mr. Ames Against Time, then hit its stride in the first two chapters of Ronald Cocking's Die with Me Lady, before stumbling badly in the third. "Never have I seen a book fall apart quite so dramatically and melodramatically", I wrote in reviewing Cocking's novel. There was no recovery, which is not to say that the marathon didn't have its moments.

I've fallen into the habit of the listing the three books that are most deserving of reissue. In 2012, Margaret Millar, the pride of Kitchener, swept all spots. I read only one of her novels in 2013, yet here she is again:

For Maimie's Sake – Grant Allen
Vanish in an Instant – Margaret Millar
A Stranger and Afraid – Marika Robert

Of the twenty-four titles reviewed here this past year, only one, Ross Macdonald's The Dark Tunnel (a/k/a I Die Slowly), is currently in print. I saw a copy in the London Indigo just last week. Imagine!

Mention must also be made of Toronto Doctor by Sol Allen, which vies with Neil Perrin's The Door Between as the strangest Canadian novel I've ever read. This brings me to the good people of the Editing Modernism in Canada Project and Ottawa University Press, who are the recipients of this year's praise.

For six years now, project and press have been bringing new and reissued works by our most significant modernist authors. They're attractive and inexpensive to boot!

If all goes well, next year will see a return to print of Sol Allen's 1928 debut novel They Have Bodies, edited by Brock University's Gregory Betts. For this gift-giving season, I ignore Sinclair, Deacon, Connor, de la Roche and McEwan in recommending the following:

Waste Heritage
Irene Baird

Edited by Colin Hill

The Wrong World
Bertram Brooker

Edited by Gregory Betts

Swinging the Maelstrom
Malcolm Lowry

Edited by Vik Doyen
Introduction by Miguel Mota
Notes by Chris Ackerley

Eight Men Speak
Oscar Ryan et al.

Edited by Alan Filewood

Dry Water
Robert J.C. Stead

Edited by Neil Querengesser
     and Jean Horton





And, if I may, I'd like to suggest The Heart Accepts it All, the recently published collection of letters by John Glassco edited by yours truly.

Happy Holidays!

Critic Spoils Christmas (but not Christmas sales)

Snow arrived this past weekend, bringing visions of sugar plums and reminding me of a stern, schoolmarmish rebuke uncovered in researching Marika Robert's A Stranger and Afraid (subject of Thursday's post). Published in the 25 December 1964 edition of the Globe & Mail, it came as part of an "end-of-year summary" of books. The author was Joan Walker – that's her above – winner of the 1954 Stephen Leacock Medal for Pardon My Parka.

Mrs Walker covers eight books, lauding all but one:

I was disappointed in Marika Robert's first novel, A Stranger and Afraid, because here is a talented writer who has wasted a clean, perceptive narrative on a grubby little plot obviously contrived to attract the prurient. The book could have been a disconcertingly vivid examination of the integration of a certain type of sophisticated and irresponsible European immigrant into the democratic way of life of a country chosen, not for any specific reason, but simply because of expediency. Instead it read like a half-heard lewd joke whispered by a schoolgirl.

As a war bride, European immigrant Joan Walker had a specific reason.

The reviewer fairly races through the other three Canadian books in her round-up, beginning with Sheila Burnford's The Fields of Noon – praised for its "bubbling sense of vitality" – before declaring 1964 "a vintage year in Canadian humour [sic]".

I had no idea.

Mrs Walker singles out two humour titles, neither of which I've read: Norman Ward's The Fully Processed Cheese and The Great Canadian Lover by "newcomer to the world of wit" Mervyn J. Huston.

"Both books were a collection of brisk essays on a number of subjects," writes the critic, "all humorous, some in the rolling-in-the-aisles category."

Each to his own, I suppose. Had I read Mrs Walker's column that Christmas Day, I'd have been much more interested in the whispered lewd joke.

Related post:

A 49-Year-Old Fifty Shades? S&M from M&S?

A 49-Year-Old Fifty Shades? S&M from M&S?

A Stranger and Afraid

Marika Robert

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964

320 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.

Related post:

Critic Spoils Christmas (but not Christmas sales)