A Very Canadian Succès de scandale

The Parliamentary Librarian chased after "Gilbert Knox". Conservative MP Alfred Fripp joined in the hunt, intent on having the author deported to who knows where. The clergy condemned, Ottawa echoed with talk of lawsuits, an election was fought. and a government fell. In the midst of it all, the woman behind the pseudonym suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent away to a Toronto nursing home…

So begins my latest Canadian Notes & Queries Dusty Bookcase column. The rest is found in the new issue, number 92, sharing pages with writing by Michel Basilières, Laura Bast, Darryl Joel Berger, Kerry Clare, Michael Darling, Marc di Saverio, Jennifer A. Franssen, Kaper Hartman, Melanie Janisse, Lydia Kwa, Nick Maandag, David Mason, John McFetridge, Shane Neilson, Patricia Robertson, Rebecca Rosenblum, Mark Sampson, Russell Smith, JC Sutcliffe, Nicholas Zacharewicz and, of course, Seth.

Fellow contributors will understand my singling out Alex Good's "Shackled to a Corpse: The Long, Long Shadow" and Stephen Henighan's "Jimmy the Crossdresser, Mother of Mavis Gallant" as being particularly worthy of attention.

My own contribution, much more modest, concerns The Land of Afternoon, a very good, yet forgotten roman à clef published in 1925 under the name "Gilbert Knox". Madge Macbeth (right) was its true author, which is something not even her publisher knew. The author took the secret to her grave, leaving behind a bright white paper trail for all to follow.

Few have.

Go back ninety years and we'd all be talking about The Land of Afternoon. The first book to come out of Ottawa's Graphic Publishers, it landed in the midst of the federal election fought between Arthur Meighen's Conservatives and the Liberals of William Lyon Mackenzie King. The latter doesn't figure, but Meighen served as a model for protagonist Raymond Dillings, Member of Parliament for Pinto Plains. Wife Isabel inspired Marjorie Dillings… and on it goes.

Again, you'll find more in the new CNQ.

For now, a couple of pieces of trivia that didn't make it into the piece:

1. In February 1936, a scene from the novel was dramatized by Toronto's Canadian Literature Club.
2. Macbeth's good friend Lawrence Burpee once appeared in disguise at a Canadian Authors Association event as "Gilbert Knox".

Burpee, not Knox, May 1926

Subscriptions to CNQ are available through this link.

Portraits of a Marriage: James Montgomery Flagg and Arthur Stringer's Bittersweet Wine of Life

In the glow cast by Valentine's Day, no attention should be paid to Arthur Stringer's The Wine of Life, but I've been working on a piece about the novel for Canadian Notes & Queries.

Such a horribly depressing book!

Jobyna Howland, c.1908

The Wine of Life is a roman à clef born of the author's doomed first marriage to Jobyna Howland, the original Gibson Girl. So much has been made of his bride's beauty that Stringer himself is invariably given short shrift. Don't kid yourself, this son of Southern Ontario was one good looking fella. Madge Macbeth, no stranger to the roman à clef  herself, thought Stringer as "beautiful as Adonis, irresistible as Eros."

Bonus: At 6'2", he was even taller than Jobyna.

Just.

The Stringers met at a Manhattan party in 1900, married seven weeks later, and divorced in 1914. There's much more to their story than that, of course, but I'm saving this for CNQ. What I want to do here is share a discovery.

The Wine of Life was published in 1921 by Knopf; a cheap A.L. Burt reprint followed. Their dust jackets feature the same drawing by the great James Montgomery Flagg, though the books themselves contain no illustrations. What I've discovered is that Flagg sketched twenty-three others, printed in the last months of 1921 when the novel ran in  newspaper syndication. The sampling here come the Pittsburgh Press. The one at the top of this post, published 26 October, is my favourite. They may be muddied on microfilm, but I think you'll agree that each remains a visual treat.

10 October 1921

3 November 1921

5 November 1921

9 November 1921

10 November 1921

12 November 1921

16 November 1921

15 December 1921

Related posts:

The Sudden, Violent Death of Arthur Stringer and His Family

(and Their Respective Resurrections)

No he didn't.

He Learned About Women
Ted Greenshade [?]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Tex had lived long enough to realize he had more than average appeal to women. All his life they had either wanted to clutch him to their bosoms and mother him or have him clutch their bosoms and make mothers of them.

Oh, brother.

I won't say that He Learned About Women was News Stand Library's worst book, only that it's the worst of those I've read.

The publisher positioned its author – Ted Greenshade or Ted Greenslade – as a "soldier of fortune who knows whereof he writes", encouraging us all to consider this a roman à clef.

Let's hope it isn't.

He Learned About Women opens on Tex Lane, a mercenary in the employ Israel's "Jewish Army", belly down on the desert sand, facing an unforgiving "arab horde". As he awaits certain death, thoughts drift back to the women of his past.

"A THOUSAND NIGHTS, A THOUSAND WOMEN and ONE LESSON"

A THOUSAND WOMEN? I count twelve, beginning the Methodist Sunday School superintendent's daughter, who let teenaged Tex touch her during a clubhouse initiation. Sexy, sporty Peggy McLean is next; she capped a day at the beach by taking his virginity. Third is the wanton wife of his instructor at Sandhurst.

Wait.

Tex starts out as a lower-middle class, middling schoolboy from Hamilton, Ontario. How did he come to be accepted at England's most prestigious military academy?

More than a soldier of fortune, Tex Lane is a man of mystery. He moves about the globe – London, Paris, Shanghai, Montreal – with impunity. Inexplicably wealthy, Tex can become the rattiest of church mice when plot requires. By turns a journalist, an ad man, an actor, a captain and a carny, he is everyone and no one. Meanwhile, women come and go, each more fully formed than the protagonist. The most interesting to these eyes is Helen Demoskoff, a sympathetic young Doukhobor who was once arrested for removing her clothes as a form of protest.

Helen is a woman of conviction and character. Tex, on the other hand, is the sort of man who will sleep with a woman, then accuse her of being a slut. He's the type who will pressure a woman to give up her child because he isn't the father. Tex is the kind of guy who will abandon a woman, return, then feel betrayed that she has married.

In short, he's not a man you'd want to know.
 
Best sentence:

Looking into her worried face Tex felt like someone who has been caught putting a feather up the nose of a child in an iron lung.

Epigraph:

Ibid?

It's from the Book of Ezra (1 Esdras 4:22).

Speculation: The idea of the trapped soldier revisiting his past may owe something to James Benson Nablo's 1946 novel The Long November, which News Stand Library reprinted in two editions prior to He Learned About Women.

Trivia: Back cover copy refers to a "girl who died in the Cathay Hotel because of a millionaire's lust and passion." No such character features in the novel.

Object and access: A 160-page mass market paperback with cover art by Syd Dyke.

He Learned About Women is nowhere to be found on WorldCat. As of this writing just four copies are being offered by online booksellers. The lone copy of the Canadian printing looks to be in about the same condition as mine, but is a bargain at five dollars. The three Americans range from  US$2 (Reading Copy) to US$14 (Very Good - Fine).

Related post:

The Mysterious Mister Nablo

The Great Canadian Great War Novel

Tomorrow marks the day that Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly officially returns to print. That more than eight decades have passed since the last edition defies explanation. This was a novel praised by Bertrand Russell, Frank Harris, Havelock Ellis, and prime ministers Robert Borden and Mackenzie King. So impressed was Ford Madox Ford that he penned a preface. In short, All Else is Folly is the very best Great War novel written by a Canadian combatant.

I had a time trying to interest publishers in reissuing the novel. It was my good fortune that in the midst of that effort I encountered James Calhoun, with whom I co-authored the Introduction to this new edition. No one knows more about Acland.

No one.

His writing at Field Punishment No. 1 is an invuluable contribution to our understanding of Canada's Great War literature. I've never met a more dogged researcher.

Not once.

Now Acland's novel finds a home with Dundurn's Voyageur Classics, where it joins The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Wyndham Lewis'Self Condemned and other unjustly neglected books from our past. Thanks go out to Series Editor Michael Gnarowski, who recognized the importance and terrible beauty of this, Acland's only novel.

I never imagined that my name would one day share a cover with that of Ford Madox Ford, but there it is. A better man than I, the last words on the novel should be his:

When I read of the marching and fighting towards the end of the book, I feel on my skin the keen air of the early mornings standing to, I have in my mouth the dusky tastes, in my eyes the dusky landscapes, in my ears the sounds that were silences interrupted by clicking of metal on metal that at any moment might rise to the infernal clamour of Armageddon… Yes, indeed,one lives it again with the fear and with the nausea… and the surprised relief to find oneself still alive. I wish I could have done it myself: envy, you see, will come creeping in. But since I couldn't, the next best thing seems to me to be to say that it will be little less than a scandal if the book is not read enormously widely. And that is the truth. 

Related posts:

Alec Falcon, c'est moi

Remembering Peregrine Acland

Canada's Great War Novelists: Peregrine Acland

A Neglected Novelist's Neglected Grave

Peregrine Acland: Fifty Years

A Neglected Novelist's Neglected Grave

Three photographs taken yesterday in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery at the gravesite of Peregrine Acland, author of All Else is Folly, and his wife Mary Louise Danforth.

Related post:
Peregrine Acland: Fifty Years
The Great Canadian Great War Novel

Of War and Methodism (but mostly Methodism)

Neville Trueman, the Pioneer Preacher:

     A Tale of the War of 1812

W.H. Withrow

Toronto: William Briggs, 1900

252 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.

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon and Her Critics

A fleeting follow-up to the previous post:

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon earned a English B.A. (Honours) at Queen's, though I don't see much evidence of this in Miriam of Queen's. What the university's website describes as a "critical success" received a mixed bag of reviews. The harshest appraisal comes from an anonymous critic in the December 1921 edition of Canadian Bookman:

The book gives one the idea that Mrs. MacKinnon enjoyed her student life under "Geordie" Grant to the full, and wants to enable others to see it as she did, but is handicapped in her effort by a desire to stick to literal facts. It is somewhat as if one were to attempt to describe  the life of a great university by reproducing a sophomore's diary.

There's more, of course, but I've chosen these words because they touch on the autobiographical nature of the novel. It's this reading of Miriam of Queen's – as a roman à clef – that brought the most positive reviews, like this one in The Ottawa Citizen:

Many of the characters in "Miriam of Queen's" will be recognized. There is for instance her father, a good civil servant. "Roderick Campbell had been in the government employ in increasingly responsible positions since he had moved to Ottawa from the Island of Cape Breton. Highly esteemed, reserved to the point of austerity, a scholarly man, books were his favorite pastime." The Campbell's lived "in a substantial brick house set among the trees" in the Capital.

Like Miriam, Lilian Vaux MacKinnon called Ottawa home, and like her heroine she travelled widely. The Citizen review describes Marion of Queen's as being "almost Dominion-wide in its scope, the scenes extending from the countryside to Cape Breton to the cities of eastern, middle and western Canada."

And so I'm left shaking my head over this:

Canadian Bookman, June 1922

Never assume that a reviewer has actually read the book in question.

Related post:

Back to School with Miriam of Queen's

Back to School with Miriam of Queen's

Miriam of Queen's

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1921

Imagine, a Canadian college novel published just one year after This Side of Paradise.

I expected nothing quite so impressive from Miriam of Queen's. That said, what I'd thought would be a light fin de l'été read turned out to be the year's toughest slog; it took three runs at the first chapter before I found my footing. The opening pages bring Elizabeth Danvers, Aunt Laura, Mrs Roderick Campbell, Pauline, Sedley, John Hielanman, Aunt Hannah, Cora Hotchkiss and, of course Miriam. Many more will follow. Most, though not all, are related in some way to one another – but how? It's much like being thrust into a wedding reception at which one knows no one. Indeed, a wedding is in the offing, as Mrs Roderick Campbell reveals:

"You're getting another son, Ellen. Isn't that the modern form of consolation? And a bookish sort like Sedley, too." She turned suddenly to listen. "That is not his voice now is it? Mr. Rutherford's, I mean. It sounds familiar, though."
     "And so it should be, my dear," Mrs. Danvers rejoined, rising and leading the way across the hall. "It should be familiar, since it is your own nephew's – Fyfe Boulding, you know. He is to have a little part in tomorrow's ceremony, just a bit of distraction because of his connection."

I'm of the opinion that there's much to be learned from bad writing. In Miriam of Queen's lessons come  on every page, and are of such clarity that I feel no need to do anything but present. This paragraph comes at the end of Miriam's first year:

And at last came the days of the trial, when Convocation Hall was turned into a vast arena, where the competitors gathered in mortal combat and the witnesses were those bygone seers on the wall who, unmoved, had witnessed many a struggle, from their eventual element of calm, and whose lofty gaze inspired the frantic souls below to fight on. Elbowed by a science man on one hand, by a theologian on the other, Miriam wrote away. All her store of hardy-won knowledge was registered once and for all on paper, before the cares of this work-a-day world should have blotted it out. There was something fitting in the act, and a feeling of triumph visited those well-doers who were enabled to give an account at last of the laborious days they had lived.

Prose such as this leaves little room for plot. Miriam, our heroine, attends Queen's and looks on as dramatic events envelope others. Kind-hearted Cousin Sedley makes the mistake of marrying a vicious and vacuous flirt. Cousin Fyfe, a ne'er do well, is arrested, tried, and sent to Kingston Penitentiary. But before this takes place, in the most dramatic scene, both fall in the drink whilst playing hockey:

They are coming from all quarters. The ice is blackening with fleet figures. Will it be too late? The girls are lying flat and Elizabeth has caught Sedley's foot and Miriam, Elizabeth's, and the living chain moves nearer. Slowly, slowly, and oh, how carefully! Up, up and cautiously, cautiously! Out of the deathly waters, over the treacherous edge, Fyfe Boulding is drawn to safety. Then, just as the cry of thanskgiving rises to their lips, the ice gives way under double strain. there is an ominous crack, the sound of heavy body splashing down, and as Boulding creeps to safety Sedley Danvers goes down, down, into the icy waters of Lake Ontario.
     Stretch out your stick to save him now! If he can come up! Will he strike under the ice? Will the current bear him away? Or is there a chance, one chance in a thousand, that he may be seen again? The crowd presses nearer, strong arms stretch out to aid. Yes, there it is, that dark, struggling, helpless object at the edge of the break. Too late! Down, down it goes, while a cry of anguish breaks from the lips of the onlookers. Once more, once it comes. Now, men, now! They reached him , they drag him out, white and sodden and spent. Miriam, turning in horror from that death-like form, looks into Hugh Stewart's face.
     "Oh, Hugh,!" she screams. "Take me home! Take me home! Sedley is drowned! Don't you see? Sedley is drowned!"
    But no! It is a collapse, consequent on shock and exhaustion.

As I say, there's much to be learned from prose such as this.

The Regina Leader-Post, 17 December 1921

Any value in Miriam of Queen's lies in what it captures of student life at Queen's University during the earliest years of the last century. Though their debut novels were published so close together, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Lilian Vaux MacKinnon were of different generations. Mrs MacKinnon graduated from Queen's in 1902, a decade before the petting parties of Princeton. Her university experience – and Miriam's – consisted of muscular Christianity, college songs and fleeting glimpses of the Very Reverend George Monro Grant.

Modest mention in the 12 September 1942 Regina Leader-Post has Mrs MacKinnon as the author of two novels: Miriam of Queen's and The Guinea Stamp. I can find no record of the latter. The Queen's University Archives holds the manuscript of an unpublished romance "set near Brockville"  with the rather ribald title Hard by St. Lawrence.

Unpublished?

I'm not at all surprised.

Object: An attractive hardcover in mustard cloth. I found my copy nine years ago in a Vancouver Salvation Army Thrift Store. Price: $2.

Access: A very scarce title, it appears that the only public library carrying the book serves the good folks of Toronto; Kingston's has no copy.

Miriam of Queen's enjoyed a single run, split by McClelland & Stewart and George H. Doran. All of two editions, the latter is by far the least common. One copy of each is listed for sale online. At US$75, the less expensive is a "Fair to Good, Reading Copy" McClelland & Stewart edition. The other is the one to buy: a Near Fine copy of the American first in "Very Good plus dustjacket" for US$175.

Great price! Take note, Kingston Frontenac Public Library.

The Mystery Writer Mystery Unravels

'Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry' pays off:

A writer friend informs that Pamela Fry, author of Harsh Evidence and The Watching Cat, is the very same Pamela Fry who once worked as an editor at McClelland & Stewart. Though Miss Fry's years with the publisher were not many – 1965 to 1971 – she did work with several canonical favourites, including Sinclair Ross, Ernest Buckler and Farley Mowat. I imagine she'll be best remembered not for her mysteries, but as the editor of The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood's debut novel. A high point to be sure.

The low? Look no further than Eric Koch's ill-fated satire The French Kiss (1969), which I mention here only because the book just might lay claim to the worst launch in Canadian publishing history. In Jack, McClelland biographer James King tells us that The French Kiss was on bookstore shelves when legal advice came down that members of Quebec's Johnson family might have been slandered in its pages:

The three thousand books were recalled, small slips pasted over the offending passages and the copies then returned to retailers. Jack only learned of the potentially disastrous situation at the book's launch at the home of the book's editor Pamela Fry. He called her aside, told her the book would have to be recalled and acted quickly and decisively to prevent a lawsuit.

According to King, Pamela Fry left M&S in for a position on a federal government task force. In his autobiography, Drawing on Type, designer Frank Newfeld places her c.1980 at the National Gallery of Canada. From there the trail grows cold.

Thanks go out to my "writer friend" and to fellow sleuth Richard Blanchard.

Related post: Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry

Burpee's Bad 'St. John the Baptist': Truly Criminal

François-Réal Angers was a truly remarkable man. A lawyer, a gentleman of letters and a strong, articulate voice against slavery in the Republic to the south, he gave light to pre-Confederation Canada. Angers' Les révélations du crime ou Cambray et ses complices; chroniques canadiennes de 1834 (Fréchette, 1837), a fictional account of an outfit known as the Cambers Gang, might just be the first French Canadian novel. Or is it the country's first true crime book? Perhaps it's a nineteenth-century In Cold Blood. I don't know. I've never seen a copy, nor have I looked over the 1867 translation, The Canadian Brigands; an Intensely Exciting Story of Crime in Quebec, Thirty Years Ago!, which is held only by McGill and the Toronto Public Library. Apparently, it more than lives up to its title.

Something for la fête de la St-Jean, "À Saint Jean-Baptiste" is one of Angers' few poems. The above, attributed incorrectly to"F. S. Angers", is drawn from Nouvelle lyre canadienne, published in 1895 by Beauchemin. Respectable verse of devotion, it becomes entirely offensive in Lawrence J. Burpee's incredibly inept 1909 translation.

Songs of French Canada

Lawrence J. Burpee, ed.

Toronto: Musson, 1909

Bonne fête à tout le monde!

John Glassco, Ghostwriter

Relations and Complications
H.H. The Dayang Muda of Sarawak
London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1929

Bibliographer M. Clark Chambers lists Relations and Complications as Kay Boyle's first book. Although I take exception, we would at the very least agree that it is not the work of the Dayang Muda of Sarawak.

Née Gladys Milton Palmer, of the Huntley & Palmer biscuit empire, Her Highness led the most extraordinary life. Oscar Wilde, Alphonse Daudet and John Ruskin dined at her family's table, as did her godfather George Meredith.

George Meredith with the Dayang Muda's mother, undated.

A woman of amazonian beauty, in 1904 she married Bertram Brooke, whose grandfather, having wrestled approximately 125,000 square kilometres of Borneo from the Sultan of Brunei, was the first White Rajah of Sarawak.


It's not at all difficult to see what encouraged publisher John Lane to draw up a contract for the Dayang Muda's biography. Unforeseen was the sad fact the lady was anything but a memoirist. As Boyle describes it, “her valiant attempts to relive the memories of all she had been, or had not been, served no purpose except to stun her into silence.” And so, the Dayang Muda hired Boyle as a ghostwriter.

Just how many of these words rightfully belong to the American author is a matter to be debated. In her revised – bastardized, really – edition of Robert McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together, Boyle writes that the then-18-year-old Glassco, hired to type the manuscript, "inserted in the mouths of the long-dead great additional flights of repartee and far more brilliant bon mots than I had managed to invent alone.”

Robert McAlmon tells all through his roman à clef The Nightinghouls of Paris, in which Sudge Galbraith (Buffy Glassco) works with Dale Burke (Kay Boyle) on the final draft of the Princess of Faraway's story:

The new script of the memoirs was beautiful, for Sudge typed well and got the manuscript up with professional competence. Later, when the book appeared it had a slight success, but anybody knowing the Princess knew that all the dainty wit and bright malice in the book were Sudge’s. Dale had furnished Irish gaiety and wit here and there, but she admitted that Sudge slipped in the best cracks. He had a talent for drawing old dames and gents with cruel caricature, and while his contributions to the book were trivial, the memoirs were so trivial that Sudge’s contribution took on profundity.

Late in life, Boyle wrote Chambers that of the seventeen chapters, she had had nothing to do with the final two, believing that these had been written by Glassco and forgotten poet Archibald Craig, the Dayang Muda's cousin.

In his own Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco claims to have been nothing more than the typist. Typical of a man given to humility and self-abasement; typical also of one who took delight in literary subterfuge.

Object: A fairly thick book consisting of 271 pages and 29 plates, ending anti-climactically with a further six pages of advertisements for other John Lane titles. My copy seems to have suffered from a horrible skin condition (now in abeyance).



Access: Uncommon. Worldcat lists only seven libraries that hold copies – all in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Canadians and Malaysians are out of luck. Only two copies are currently listed for sale online. Though damaged, the cheaper is priced fairly at €275. Those with even deeper pockets will want to consider the more expensive volume. Offered by a Maryland bookseller at US$750, it features Boyle's signature and telling comment: "This was the hardest writing I have ever done." A man with pockets full of lint, for years I kept an eye out for an affordable copy. In all that time, I spotted not one in a dust jacket (which I'm beginning to believe did not exist). I bought my copy for US$85 from a California bookseller in the long, hot summer of 2004.

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired

Published in 1935 by les Éditions du Quotidien, a first edition by one of the most important Canadian writers of the twentieth century. I bought Sébastien Pierre this year for ten dollars. A full 75 years after publication, its pages remained uncut. Three of the 23 illustrations featured are revealed here for the first time.

Such a sad commentary on the country's literature, and yet... and yet this same sorry situation enables souls like myself to amass a fairly nice collection of interesting and unusual Canadiana.

Case in point: Thomas P. Kelley's pseudonymous No Tears for Goldie (1950), which was purchased in February for a mere five dollars. No hits on Worldcat, absent from Abe, nothing at all at AddAll.

Rare, bizarre, but not really worth a read.

Of the obscurities reviewed here these past twelve months, the three I most recommend:

The Long November by James Benson Nablo

The Door Between by Neil H. Perrin

Gambling with Fire by David Montrose

These are not great works of literature, but they are engaging and very interesting. Each depicts a dark, disturbing and gritty Canada found in very few novels of their time.

Financially speaking, my best buy was a very nice first edition (my second) of Tender is the Night (sans dust jacket), which I found just last month for $9.50 in a Montreal bookstore. The year's favourite purchase, however, is of negligible commercial value: a 1926 edition of Anatole France's Under the Rose. I came across this at a library sale, flipped through a few pages, and happened to spot the name Peregrine Acland, a subject of ongoing research, stamped ever so discretely in the front free endpaper.

What luck!

Still no luck, I'm afraid, in tracking down Sexpo '69, that elusive novel of lesbian erotica set at Expo 67. Will I never find a copy?

Of course, I will.

A Happy New Year to all!