The Dusty Bookcase:A Journey Through Canada'sForgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
 |
| Toronto: Salvation Army, 1949 |
 |
| Boston: Little Brown, 1952 |
 |
| Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1956 |
 |
| Toronto: Ryerson, 1965 |
 |
| Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1982 |
 |
| Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984 |
In spite of his obvious weirdness I found myself liking him. When he launched into a diatribe, which he did often, he would become intoxicated by his own rhetoric, then leap up bellowing and, like an actor, pace the store as though it were the stage of a theatre. He was, perhaps, the first person I ever met whose voice merited the word stentorian.
– David Mason, The Pope's BookbinderHow did I come to have this? A response to an advert in Books in Canada, perhaps. When it landed at my Montreal flat, sometime around the death of Doug Harvey, this catalogue was like nothing I'd ever seen. The bookseller seemed to be daring customers to purchase.
There isn't very much Canadian literature, and most of it is garbage. It is the junk literature of a junk age. It is beneath those who care about anything.The attacks begin with item #6, Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Anansi, 1982):
Having spent considerable time wandering 2nd hand bookshops, it recently occurred to me that the only people ever overheard congratulating or recommending this author are teen-aged girls of the least promising variety. Our animosity is, in this case, genuine. The more quickly this author is forgotten the better it will be for Canada. In the meantime we are optimistic in regard to selling our stock of copies to unpromising customers, Any regular customer who orders it may expect to be dropped from the mailing list.I was not a regular customer; in fact, I never bought a book from William Hoffer. Spoiled terribly by Montreal's low book prices and the indifference paid things Canadian in New York, I found his prices high. Here Hoffer asks $75 for the Canadian first of Brian Moore's The Emperor of Ice-Cream (McClelland & Stewart, 1965), a book I'd bought for $2 in a Sherbrooke Street bookstore not three years earlier. I was lucky; another store had it for six.
The Dusty Bookcase:A Journey Through Canada'sForgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Most dust jackets add to the confusion in trumpeting "The All-Canada Fiction Award".THE RYERSON FICTION AWARDThe All-Canada Prize Novels
If this is the "All-Canada Fiction Award" as the dust cover asserts, it has been a slim year for the novel, or at least for the publisher who has the presumption to imply that this is the best work of fiction published in Canada in the past year.Edward McCourt's Music at the Close is the only title to have been included in the New Canadian Library. Tellingly, I think, the author used the opportunity to revise the text. NCL has since dropped the novel.
A novel covering four decades of Canadian life, set in Canada, France and Britain. "The author is merciless in his handling of shoddy Top Hats, fake Utopia Builders, spurious Abundant Lifers and Crack Pots of all sorts." – jacket."I remember when this was a very common book that no one wanted," continues Mr Temple. "It is surprisingly scarce, and saleable, in the market today. But it ain't no four figure book, not even close."
 |
| Here Stays Good Yorkshire Will R. Bird 1945 |
 |
| Day of Wrath Philip Child 1945 |
 | ||||||
| Music at the Close Edward McCourt 1947
|
 |
| Desired Haven Evelyn M. Richardson 1953 |
 | ||
| Immortal Rock Laura Goodman Salverson 1954
|
 |
| Repent at Leisure Joan Walker 1957 |
 | ||||
| The King Tree Gladys Taylor 1958
|
The court-house clock boomed five times and Mr. Ames performed the rite of taking out his watch. It never failed to give him a small satisfaction to find that his watch was exactly on time, for he was a man who liked things in order: watch in order, clothes however shabby in order, conscience neatly in order.At the right, we can see the Urania Burlesque Theatre, at which Mr. Ames serves as doorman.
A dog chased a cat across Mr. Ames' path...
In opposition to company policy during these early years, Steven was able to discreetly insert his name or an initial on the occasional dust jacket or illustration, something that appears to have been easier in the early 1950s. The jackets for Philip Child's Mr. Ames against Time [sic] (1949), J.V. McAree's Cabbagetown Store (1953), and William Arthur Deacon's The 4 Jameses (1953), among others, are signed "Steven" in very small letters; Isabelle Hughes' The Wise Brother (1954) and the map endpapers of Marjorie Freeman Campbell's Niagara: Hinge of the Golden Arc (1958) are signed with a very small 'S' in the lower right corner. These "signatures" are the first indicators of a consistent design presence at Ryerson in the post-Thoreau MacDonald years.This, of course, has sent me running to the bookcase. Sure enough, I found "STEVEN" by the side of the road on the cover of Cabbagetown Store.
The Dusty Bookcase:A Journey Through Canada'sForgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
 |
|
Arthur Stringer House, London, Ontario
17 March 2012
|
The records of the Middlesex Teachers' Association show that he was awarded the Diploma of Honour as the pupil obtaining the highest standing in the High School Entrance examination in the year 1886. At the London Collegiate Institute he established his dislike and likewise revealed his leaning toward letters by founding and editing a school magazine, Chips, copy of which are still treasured by L.C.I. Old Boys.
This is not a war novel, but a post-war novel; for its tortured hero, the conflict changed everything. Born raised and educated in Eastern Canada Robert Hollister, was once a man of more than modest means. Before the war, he shared his life with wife Myra, whom he "loved with a lover's passion." But war creates the very worst of long distance relationships. Two years into the fighting, Robert receives a "Dear John letter". Days later, he becomes one of the 24,029 Canadian casualties at the Battle of the Somme, "lying just outside the lip of a shell-crater, blind, helpless, his face a shredded smear". He's saved by German surgeons, and spends the remainder of the war in a prison camp. Upon his release Robert learns that he'd been reported killed in action; Myra, meanwhile, has remarried, taking his money with her.
Coincidence features big in pulp fiction, but I found it difficult to pass this off as mere chance: Myra and her new husband, an Englishman, live on the neighbouring land. Certainly, I thought, something sinister is afoot; after all, Myra is supposed to have known nothing of the Toba Inlet property. But no, it all ends up as a great coincidence. Much more believable is Robert's chance meeting with Doris, a pretty woman who had years earlier lost her sight after being struck by a falling tree on, yes, his Toba Inlet property. Following a whirlwind courtship, the disfigured man and blind woman marry and move into a new house overlooking Myra's modest cabin.A great many men had been killed. A great number had lost their legs, their arms, their sight. They had suffered indescribable mutilations and disabilities in the national defense. These people were the nation. Those who passed him with a shocked glance at his face must be aware that fighting involves suffering and scars. It appeared as if they wished to ignore that. The inevitable consequences of war annoyed them, disturbed them, when they came face to face with those consequences.
