Showing posts with label S.B. Gundy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label S.B. Gundy. Show all posts

26 December 2022

The Very Best Reads of 2022: Ladies First


Late last night, as Christmas festivities drew to a close, I pulled Victor Lauriston's The Twenty-first Burr (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922) from the shelves. It seemed appropriate way to end the holiday. One hundred years earlier, my copy was presented by the author to a woman named Olive Shanks.


I enjoyed the first four of its twenty-eight chapters, but know I won't be finishing the novel before year's end, meaning it's time for the annual Dusty Bookcase recap of best reads, books to be revived, etc.

This was a year unlike any other in Dusty Bookcase history. For the first time, women wrote a majority of the titles; twelve of the twenty-two reviewed here and in the pages of Canadian Notes and Queries.

Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of To-day and Joanna E. Wood's The Untempered Wind stand well above the other twenty. Both are available in Tecumseh's Early Canadian Women Writers Series, which goes some way in explaining how it is that only male authors feature in my annual selection of the three books most deserving of a return to print:

Philistia

Grant Allen
London: Chatto & Windus,
   1901

It was publisher Andrew Chatto who encouraged Allen to try his hand at fiction. This debut novel, first published in 1884, furthers the author's writing on philosophy,  naturalism, religion, and socialism. Ironically, its ending was spoiled by Chatto's intrusion. 

Whispering City

Horace Brown
Pickering, ON: Global
   Publishing, 1947

A noir thriller set in Quebec City, Whispering City pre-dates Hitchcock's I Confess by five years. Both have their weaknesses. Brown's adaptation of the former – likely the first novelization of a Canadian feature film – improves upon its source material.


Stephen Leacock
Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1915

Leacock's legacy suffered a blow this year when McGill announced that the building named in his honour, would be renamed after a venture capitalist who had pledged $13 million to the the university.

It's the stuff of a Leacock story.


As series editor of Véhicule Press's Ricochet imprint, I was involved in reviving Arthur Mayse's 1949 debut novel Perilous Passage. 'Telling the Story,' the introduction provided by the author's daughter, Susan Mayse, is one of my favourite in the series. Reprinted in Canadian Notes & Queries, it can be read through this link.

Recognition this year goes to England's Handheld Press for its reissue of Marjorie Grant's 1921 novel Latchkey Ladies.


I knew nothing of Marjorie Grant or Latchkey Ladies before reading this March 22 review in The Times

Finally, sadly, I report that the New Year's resolutions made last December didn't go far:

  • I resolved to focus more on francophone writers, yet read just one: Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé (and then only in translation).
  • I resolved to feature more non-fiction, and yet this writer of non-fiction reviewed nothing but fiction.
  • I resolved to keep kicking against the pricks. This was easily done. Witnessing the  miscreants of the Freedom Convoy roll past on its way to Ottawa gave extra incentive.
This December I make no resolutions.

Here's to the New Year!

Bonne année!



10 April 2022

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 4: 'You' by Ram Spudd Stephen Leacock


For the month, the fourth of ten poems
find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

Verse from Ram Spudd, "one of nature's gentlemen," as celebrated in Stephen Leacock's Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (Toronto: Gundy, 1915).

YOU

                                          You!
With your warm, full, rich, red, ripe lips,
And your beautifully manicured finger-tips!
                                          You!
With your heaving, panting, rapidly expanding and contracting chest,
Lying against my perfectly ordinary shirt-front and dinner-jacket vest.
                                 It is too much
                                 Your touch
                                 As such.
                                 It and
                                 Your hand,
                           Can you not understand?
Last night an ostrich feather from your fragrant hair
                                Unnoticed fell.
                                I guard it
                                Well.
                                Yestere’en
                           From your tiara I have slid,
                               Unseen,
                               A single diamond,
                               And I keep it
                               Hid.
Last night you left inside the vestibule upon the sill
                               A quarter dollar,
                               And I have it
                               Still.


Related post:

02 March 2022

Lunar Attractions; or, The Leacock I Like



Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: Gundy, 1915
282 pages

My introduction to Stephen Leacock came through a copy of Laugh With Leacock belonging to my father. A squat mass market paperback, it sat on peach crate shelving in our basement. As a child, I was drawn to its cartoon cover.

 No pun intended.

Montreal: Pocket Books, 1946
First published by Dodd, Mead in 1930
The scene depicted comes from "The Hallucination of Mr. Butt," which in turn comes from "Afternoon Adventures in My Club," which first appeared in book form in Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy, which I read for the first time last week.

Made me laugh.

"The Hallucination of Mr. Butt" is one of seven tales the narrator tells of fellow club members. Butt (his first name is never disclosed) sees himself as a most generous and self-sacrificing person, ever ready to assist others. In the episode covered, he's setting out to help the Everleigh Joneses:
“Isn’t it rather late to go there?” I protested.
     “My dear fellow,” said Mr. Butt warmly, “I don’t mind that a bit. The way I look at it is, here are these two young people, only married a few weeks, just moving into their new house, everything probably upside down, no one there but themselves, no one to cheer them up,”—he was wriggling into his raincoat as he spoke and working himself into a frenzy of benevolence,—“good gracious, I only learned at dinner time that they had come to town, or I’d have been out there days ago,—days ago-”
The night is cold, and rainy, and dark, but after knocking on several doors – "‘Do you know where the Everleigh Joneses live?’ They didn’t. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘go back to bed. Don’t bother to come down.’" – Butt succeeds in finding the newlyweds' house. At the club the next day, Butt shares what followed:
"Hullo," I called out; "it’s Butt." "I’m awfully sorry," he said, "we’ve gone to bed." "My dear boy," I called back, "don’t apologize at all. Throw me down the key and I’ll wait while you dress. I don’t mind a bit."
     "Just think of it," continued Mr. Butt, “those two poor souls going to bed at half past ten, through sheer dullness! By George, I was glad I’d come." ‘Now then,’ I said to myself, ‘let’s cheer them up a little, let’s make things a little brighter here.’"
Butt visits the Everleigh Joneses on a near-daily basis, rolling up his sleeves to help them settle in – "got the pictures up first—they’d been trying to put them up by themselves in the morning. I had to take down every one of them—not a single one right." Ultimately dissatisfied, he has them move to a downtown flat – "I like an apartment far better than a house" – when tragedy strikes:
“'He’s ill—some sort of fever—poor chap— been ill three days, and they never told me or sent for me—just like their grit—meant to fight it out alone. I’m going out there at once.” From day to day I had reports from Mr. Butt of the progress of Jones’s illness. “I sit with him every day,” he said. “Poor chap,—he was very bad yesterday for a while, —mind wandered—quite delirious—I could hear him from the next room—seemed to think some one was hunting him—‘Is that damn old fool gone,’ I heard him say. “I went in and soothed him. ‘There is no one here, my dear boy,’ I said, ‘no one, only Butt.’ He turned over and groaned.
That's not the end of Everleigh Jones, nor is it the conclusion of the story. Much as I like "The Hallucination of Mr. Butt," it is far from the best in Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy; it isn't even the best of "Afternoon Adventures in My Club." That distinction belongs to "The Spiritual Outlook of Mr. Doomer," whose titular character is first depicted looking gloomily out the club library's windows. He is a man saddened by, as he puts it, "the sense of the irrevocability of death and the changes that must come after it.” “You think of these things a great deal, Mr. Doomer?” the narrator asks.
“I do,” he answered. “It may be that it is something in my temperament, I suppose one would call it a sort of spiritual mindedness. But I think of it all constantly. Often as I stand here beside the window and see these cars go by”— he indicated a passing street car —“I cannot but realise that the time will come when I am no longer a managing director and wonder whether they will keep on trying to hold the dividend down by improving the rolling stock or will declare profits to inflate the securities. These mysteries beyond the grave fascinate me, sir. Death is a mysterious thing.”
"The Hallucination of Mr. Butt" is the only story from Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy to feature in Laugh With Leacock, which according to the back cover of my father's copy is "the cream of Stephen Leacock's humor [sic]." It is also the only story to make it into The Leacock Roundabout, Laugh With Leacock's successor.  

New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956
What I've coming to realise is that my taste in Leacock is markedly different than those of the anthologists. As the covers of Laugh With Leacock and The Leacock Roundabout suggest, the stories contained provide good-natured laughs; black humour has no place.

I've worked as an anthologist myself, so understand the constraints, one of which is length. Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy begins with "Spoof."


At twenty-four pages, it's by far the longest piece. It appealed to me not only for the passages of Spoof Leacock provides, but as a satire of publisher marketing:
This novel represents the last word in up-to-date fiction. It is well known that the modern novel has got far beyond the point of mere story-telling. The childish attempt to interest the reader has long since been abandoned by all the best writers. They refuse to do it. The modern novel must convey a message, or else it must paint a picture, or remove a veil, or open a new chapter in human psychology. Otherwise it is no good. SPOOF does all of these things. The reader rises from its perusal perplexed, troubled, and yet so filled with information that rising itself is a difficulty.
Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy was a gathering of fairly recent magazine pieces and previously unpublished work intended to capitalise on the Christmas market. And, because it was the 1915 offering, the Great War intrudes for the first time: "The War Mania of Mr Jinks and Mr Blinks," "Last Man Out of Europe," "Sidelights on the Supermen," and "In the Good Time After the War." The last, which also happened to be the final piece in the collection, imagines the post-war as a time of great cooperation, in which political differences are non-existent. It is the weakest piece, while "Last Man Out of Europe," ranks amongst the very best. Here, Parkins, yet another member of the gentleman's club tells of the days of horror he and travelling companion Loo Jones suffered in trying to leave the continent. In Hungary when war was declared, the pair made for the nearest railway station:
“They said they’d sell us tickets. But they questioned us mighty closely; asked where we wanted to go to, what class we meant to travel by, how much luggage we had to register and so on.”
They reach Genoa only to find that it is three days until the next steamer to New York:
"Stuck it out as best we could: stayed right there in the hotel. Poor Jones was pretty well collapsed! Couldn't do anything but sleep, and eat, and sit in the piazza of the hotel."
Cutting, but not dark; it stands in such contrast with Leacock's later writing about the Great War. In our own darkening days, I recommend "The Boy Who Came Back" from The Hohenzollerns in America (Toronto: Gundy, 1919). 

An unfocussed post, I know, but then this book, like so many Leacocks is a bit of a grab bag. "Our Literary Bureau" made me laugh out loud; "Weejee the Pet Dog" is, I hope, the worst thing I'll read by the man.

My point is that there is so much more to Leacock than Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and anthology servings. Seek out the long out-of-print volumes. As with any writer, the most popular isn't necessarily the best.

Object: A nicely-proportioned hardcover, very typical of its time. My first Canadian edition was purchased three decades ago at the annual McGill Book Fair (held in Redpath Hall, mere metres away from the university's Leacock Building). Price: $1.00. At the end of the volume is found three pages of advertisements for the author's other books: Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, Behind the Beyond, Nonsense Novels, Literary Lapses, and Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. These are followed by an advert for The International Studio magazine.

Sadly, but unsurprisingly – it was published in 1915, after all – my copy lacks its dust jacket (above).

Should I have expected more for a dollar?

It once belonged to a G.R. England. Going through the 949 Englands in the 1921 census, I find Gordon England (age 19), Gaspard England (age 21), George England (age 51). Gosselin England (age 71)... and that's just Quebec.

Access: Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy enjoyed several Canadian, British, and American editions before going out of print in the 'twenties. It returned in 1964 as #46 in the New Canadian Library, and remained in print well into the 'eighties. I once purchased a copy with the third series design at Eaton's in downtown Montreal, not 100 meters from the university at which Leacock taught.

Used copies of are both plentiful and inexpensive. If you've got the cash, the one to buy is offered at US$150 by a Milton, Ontario bookseller. It has the dust jacket.

06 February 2017

Professor Leacock Sets the Stage



Behind the Beyond
     and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1913

Early Leacock is the best Leacock, and this one is very early indeed. His fourth book of humour in as many years, it falls between his finest, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich, and establishes a format repeated in many of the collections that followed: a relatively long opening piece, followed by gatherings of shorter writings.

The long piece here, "Behind the Beyond", takes the form of a running commentary on an evening at the theatre. The drama performed – untitled – is of Leacock's own imagination: Sir John Trevor, MP, is a man with much responsibility, troubled by serious matters in the House of Commons. A quarter-century his junior, his wife is never so concerned and, as soon becomes apparent, has found escape in the arms of Sir John's ineffectual secretary, young Jack Harding:
"Do you remember, Jack, when first you came, in Italy, that night, at Amalfi, when we sat on the piazza of the palazzo?"
     She is looking rapturously into his face.
     Mr. Harding says that he does.
     "And that day at Fiesole among the orange trees, and at Pisa and the Capello de Terisa and the Mona Lisa. Oh, Jack, take me away from all this; take me to the Riviera among the contadini, where we can stand together with my head on your shoulder just as we did in the Duomo at Milano, or on the piaggia at Verona. Take me to Corfu, to the Cappo Santo, to Civita Vecchia, to Para Noia, anywhere —"
     Mr. Harding, smothered with her kisses, says, "My dearest, I will, I will."
     Any man in the audience would do as much. They'd take her to Honolulu.
Leacock's is a "problem play". The term is no longer used, but the situation at the heart of it all will be familiar to today's reader. These eyes have seen something of it in Edith Wharton, Henry James and select episodes of The Edge of Night from my childhood.


The Edge of Night is no more, and humour ages poorly. Not everything in Behind the Beyond works today. "With the Photographer", is not so much funny as it is an interesting glimpse at a time gone by:
The photographer rolled a machine into the middle of the room and crawled into it from behind.
     He was only in a second – just time enough for one look at me – and then he was out again, tearing at the cotton sheet and the window panes with a hooked stick, apparently frantic for light and air.
     Then he crawled back into the machine again and drew a little black cloth over himself. This time he was very quiet in there. I knew that he was praying and I kept still.
     When the photographer came out at last, he looked very grave and shook his head.
     "The face is quite wrong," he said.
     "I know," I answered quietly, "I have always known it."
That said, the five pieces collected under the title "Parisian Pastimes" seem barely to have aged at all. Here's Leacock on the French child:
The child, I was saying, wears about two hundred dollars worth of visible clothing upon it; and I believe that if you were to take it up by its ten-dollar slipper and hold it upside down, you would see about fifty dollars more. The French child has been converted into an elaborately dressed doll. It is altogether a thing of show, an appendage of its fashionably dressed mother, with frock and parasol to match. It is no longer a child, but a living toy or plaything.
     Even on these terms the child is not a success. It has a rival who is rapidly beating it off the ground. This is the Parisian dog. As an implement of fashion, as a set-off to the fair sex, as the recipient of ecstatic kisses and ravishing hugs, the Parisian dog can give the child forty points in a hundred and win out. It can dress better, look more intelligent, behave better, bark better – in fact, the child is simply not in it.
The final piece, "Homer and Humbug – An Academic Suggestion", should be considered one of Leacock's greatest hits. I don't often laugh when reading – Fran Leibowitz, who I think is funnier than just about anyone, leaves me silent – but I did at this:
An ancient friend of mine, a clergyman, tells me that in Hesiod he finds a peculiar grace that he doesn't find elsewhere. He's a liar. That's all. Another man, in politics and in the legislature, tells me that every night before going to bed he reads over a page or two of Thucydides to keep his mind fresh. Either he never goes to bed or he's a liar. Doubly so: no one could read Greek at that frantic rate: and anyway his mind isn't fresh. How could it be? he's in the legislature. I don't object to this man talking freely of the classics, but he ought to keep it for the voters. My own opinion is that before he goes to bed he takes whisky: why call it Thucydides?
Why indeed?

I first read Behind the Beyond on the plane that carried me from my Montreal home to a new one in Vancouver. This was in the mid-nineties. I didn't read Leacock again until late last spring, when I picked up The Hohenzollerns in America. I resolved then and there to never let another year go by without Leacock. I'm sure I'll read him again before the year is up. These dark, dark days I appreciate him more than ever.

Fran Leibowitz, too.

Preferred over Hesiod and Thucydides.

Note: After writing this piece, I read Silver Donald Cameron's Introduction to my old New Canadian Library edition only to find that he'd made a couple of the very same observations.

What can I say?

Great minds think alike.

Fools seldom differ.

Trivia: In 1932, Gowans and Gray published a stage adaptation of "Behind the Beyond" by V.C. Clinton-Braddeley. I include an image of same, along this link to the booksellers, in the hope that some librarian somewhere will consider purchase. As it stands, just three Canadian libraries hold copies; Library and Archives Canada does not.


Leacock biographer Ralph L. Currie informs that the BBC broadcast a televised performance in 1937!

Object: A very attractive hardcover with crimson boards and gold embossing. The print is large. Though the text doesn't amount to 200 pages, thick paper provides bulk, as do the decorations and sixteen plates featuring illustrations by A.H. Fish. My jacketless copy, a first Canadian edition, was purchased in 1989 at the annual McGill Book Fair, a hop, skip and a jump away from the university's Leacock Building. Price: $2.00.


It looks to have once been a gift purchased from Quebec City bookseller H.F. Kimball.

Access: Our public libraries fail entirely. How can that be? As might be expected, the academic libraries come through... but not that of McGill University. How can that be?

Behind the Beyond did well in its day with editions in England and the United States enjoying several printings. In Canada, S.B. Gundy took over after Bell & Cockburn went bankrupt. The book joined the New Canadian Library in 1969, only to fall in the post-Ross purge of the 'eighties. It has been out of print ever since. Happily, it can be read here - gratis - courtesy of the Internet archive.

People preferring paper – I'm one – will be happy to learn that the used copies listed online are cheap.  Prices range from US$2.00 (a fourth printing of the NCL edition) to US$350 (a 1917 American reprint inscribed by the author). The latter is preferred, of course, but who has that kind of money?


Related post:

07 June 2016

Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?



The Hohenzollerns in America; 
     With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and Other Impossibilities
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1919

Robertson Davies hated this book. "Leacock at his worst," he wrote in his ill-fated tribute to the man, adding: "Nevertheless, we may not dismiss it; he wrote it, and if we accept the sunshine, we must not shrink from a peep into the dank chill of his shade."

Centring on the lengthy title story, Davies' disgust is anything but unique. Biographers David M. Legate, Albert Moritz and Theresa Moritz express similar opinions, while Ralph L. Currie, the first to pen a life of Leacock, chooses to simply ignore it. In her Leacock book, Margaret MacMillan complains that the story is "too broad and too crude." Writes the author of Paris 1919:
The title piece of his 1919 book, The Hohenzollerns in America, starts from the amusing conceit that the German royal family takes refuge in the United States as penniless refugees after Germany's defeat in the First World War but goes downhill because Leacock cannot keep his light touch. "The proper punishment," says Leacock in his preface, "for the Hohenzollerns, and the Hapsburgs, and the Mecklenburgs, and the Muckendorfs, and all such puppets and princelings, is that they should be made to work."
I'm breaking in here with a couple of comments, the first being that the title piece does not begin with a "light touch," but is heavy from the start. Note that MacMillan contradicts herself by quoting the story's preface.* And while it's true that Leacock can be relied upon for a goodnatured, inoffensive chuckle, his touch was not always light. Teetotals will confirm.

MacMillan continues:
The resulting sketch is nasty and not at all funny. At its end, the former Kaiser, now a ragged street peddler in the Bowery, dies of his injuries after a traffic accident.
I myself found "The Hohenzollerns in America" nasty, funny and fun. Anticipating Sue Townsend's The Queen and I, it imagines the German
royal family stripped of wealth and trappings, and forced to work "as millions of poor emigrants out of Germany have worked for generations past." The piece is presented in the form of a diary – Townsend would approve – kept by Princess Frederica, niece to the deposed emperor, beginning with her first day in steerage on a ship bound for New York. Once in America, the Hohens, as they are now known, do their best to reinvent themselves. A couple become waiters. Uncle Henry, once a Grand Admiral, finds a job as a stevedore while studying to become a Barge Master. Meanwhile, untrustworthy Cousin Ferdinand makes a killing in the schmatta trade, as reflected in the vaguely anti-semitic dust jacket of the first British edition. One of their number, Cousin Willie, becomes an out and out thief.

The deposed Kaiser loses his mind and ends up hawking pins, ribbons and bobbles to amused folk who see him as a something of a character. In the princess's account, he doesn't die after a traffic accident, as MacMillan claims, but of injuries sustained by running into a line of cavalry horses at the unveiling of a monument "put up in memory of the people who were lost when one of our war boats fought the English cruiser Lusitania." Princess Frederica finds true love with Mr Peters, a very nice iceman.

"What makes us cringe as we read it is that Leacock has plainly aimed it at minds inferior to his own to feed a nasty kind of patriotism and mean triumph," writes Davies. Come now, most readers of Leacock can't quite match the man's intellect. This dimwit detected not so much as a dash of nasty patriotism, but savoured the stewing of the aristocracy. Such is my taste. Any country's aristocracy will do. I'm also happy to eat the rich, though Davies doesn't share my appetite:
Even when we try to consider it ["The Hohenzollerns in America"] as a part of an hysterical post-war relief, it is still bad Leacock, and the other things in the book, including the satire on plutocrats who profited from the war but sent their chauffeurs to fight, is no better.
No better? The piece to which Davies refers, "The War Sacrifices of Mr. Spugg," is just about the best thing Leacock ever published. This is fine satire:
Although we had been members of the same club for years, I only knew Mr. Spugg by sight until one afternoon when I heard him saying that he intended to send his chauffeur to the war.
     It was said quite quietly, no bombast or boasting about it. Mr. Spugg was standing among a little group of listening members of the club and when he said that he had decided to send his chauffeur, he spoke with a kind of simple earnestness, a determination that marks the character of the man.
     "Yes," he said, "we need all the man power we can command. This thing has come to a showdown and we've got to recognise it. I told Henry that it's a showdown and that he's to get ready and start right away."
     "Well, Spugg," said one of the members, "you're certainly setting us a fine example."
You won't find "The War Sacrifices of Mr. Spugg" in any Leacock anthology, nor "War and Peace in the Galaxy Club" in which a series of
ill-conceived fundraising events meant to aid the Red Cross only bring increasing debt. By the Armistice, the Club faces insolvency:
Peace has ruined us. Not a single member, so far as I am aware, is prepared to protest against the peace, or is anything but delighted to think that the war is over. At the same time we do feel that if we could have had a longer notice, six months for instance, we could have braced ourselves better to stand up against it and meet the blow when it fell.
Both pieces come from the middle section of the book: "Echoes of the War". Given the title, should we really be expecting a light touch? It leads with "The Boy Who Came Back," an account of young nephew Tom's first dinner party as a returning war hero. The host is at concerned that Tom will disturb the other guests with gruesome accounts of the war, and is then disappointed when he doesn't.
Tom had nothing to say about the Hindenburg line. In fact, for the first half of the dinner he hardly spoke. I think he was worried about his left hand. There is a deep furrow across the back of it where a piece of shrapnel went through and there are two fingers that will hardly move at all. I could see that he was ashamed of its clumsiness and afraid that someone might notice it. So he kept silent. Professor Razzler did indeed ask him straight across the table what he thought about the final breaking of the Hindenburg line. But he asked it with that same fierce look from under his bushy eyebrows with which he used to ask Tom to define the path of a tangent, and Tom was rattled at once. He answered something about being afraid that he was not well posted, owing to there being so little chance over there to read the papers.
When Tom finally breaks his silence it is to talk about how his French comrades had really taken to baseball, his great passion in life.
It grieved me to note that as the men sat smoking their cigars and drinking liqueur whiskey (we have cut out port at our house till the final peace is signed) Tom seemed to have subsided into being only a boy again, a first-year college boy among his seniors. They spoke to him in quite a patronising way, and even asked him two or three direct questions about fighting in the trenches, and wounds and the dead men in No Man's Land and the other horrors that the civilian mind hankers to hear about. Perhaps they thought, from the boy's talk, that he had seen nothing. If so, they were mistaken. For about three minutes, not more, Tom gave them what was coming to them. He told them, for example, why he trained his 'fellows' to drive the bayonet through the stomach and not through the head, that the bayonet driven through the face or skull sticks and, but there is no need to recite it here. Any of the boys like Tom can tell it all to you, only they don't want to and don't care to.
Dismiss The Hozenhollers in America? Never. I've enjoyed the sunshine, but within the dank chill of his shade exists a depth that makes me appreciate the man all the more. It's Leacock at his best.


A favourite light passage to cleanse the palate:
Mr. Peters came over to my chair and took hold of the arm of it and told me not to cry. Somehow his touch on the arm of the chair thrilled all through me and though I knew that it was wrong I let him keep it there and even let him stroke the upholstery and I don't know just what would have happened but at that very minute Uncle William came in.
Object: A dull-looking 222-page book with olive green boards, lacking dust jacket. I bought my first Canadian edition twenty-six years ago in Montreal. Price: $6.00. I probably could've got it cheaper.

Access: The Hohenzollerns in America is one of the few early Leacocks to have been excluded from the New Canadian Library. The collection has been out of print over nine decades, which isn't to say that it is at all difficult to find. Dozens of copies are being offered online at prices ranging from one American dollar to US$521. At the low and high end are jacketless copies of the John Lane British first, the difference being that the latter is being sold by crooks. The one to own comes courtesy of bookseller Ian Thompson, who offers an inscribed and dated copy of the John Lane first in uncommon dust jacket. Price: US$400.

Leacock being Leacock, the book is available at our big city libraries and nearly every university in the land.

A German translation, Die Hohenzollern in Amerika und andere Satiren, was published in 1989 by Fackelträger-Verlag!

* MacMillan limits herself to the beginning of what just might be Leacock's longest published sentence. It is worth quoted in full:
The proper punishment for the Hohenzollerns, and the Hapsburgs, and the Mecklenburgs, and the Muckendorfs, and all such puppets and princelings, is that they should be made to work; and not made to work in the glittering and glorious sense, as generals and chiefs of staff and legislators, and land-barons, but in the plain and humble part of laborers looking for a job; that they should carry a hod and wield a trowel and swing a pick and, at the day's end, be glad of a humble supper and a night's rest; that they should work, in short, as millions of poor emigrants out of Germany have worked for generations past; that there should be about them none of the prestige of fallen grandeur; that, if it were possible, by some trick of magic, or change of circumstance, the world should know them only as laboring men, with the dignity and divinity of kingship departed out of them; that, as such, they should stand or fall, live or starve, as best they might by the work of their own hands and brains.
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28 October 2009

Politician Picks Playwright!



The Greatest Englishman of History
Arthur Meighen
Toronto: S.B. Gundy/Oxford University Press, 1936

It's been eighteen months since we traded our swanky Vancouver condo for a Victorian Italianate in St Marys, Ontario. Our first experience with small town living, I think we're taking to it. Besides, we're not all that far from Toronto, London is close by and Stratford, with its famous festival, is only fifteen minutes down the road. This is not to say that St Marys doesn't have its own attractions. The town has produced more than its fair share of professional hockey players and was home to poets James MacRae and David Donnell

Being a political beast, in my mind the one name that rises above all others is that of Arthur Meighen, our ninth prime minister. Meighen wasn't born in St Marys, but he spent much of his youth here, considered it home, and was buried in the cemetery on the edge of town.

I doubt I'd have voted for the man, but I certainly would've made an effort to see him speak. Meighen was known as a great orator; while he couldn't best rival Mackenzie King in political manoeuvring  he was most certainly the tubby bachelor's better on the floor of the House of Commons.

Meighen published three volumes of speeches. The first, Oversea Addresses (Musson, 1921), collected those made during his summer 1921 visit to Europe, while the second, Unrevised and Unrepented (Clarke, Irwin, 1949), relies almost entirely on hansard. Sandwiched in-between is this curious little book.

Meighen wrote The Greatest Englishman of History in 1934, while en route to Australia. His subject was Shakespeare, whom he'd read and reread since that St Marys childhood. "In literature I am only a layman", he acknowledges at the beginning, "and it is to laymen alone that I have a right to speak."


Meighen's problem, as he discovered upon arrival at Melbourne, was that laymen didn't much want to listen. True, there was interest at first. Just who was this "Greatest Englishman of History"? Nelson? Wellington? Pitt the Younger? But when Meighen revealed his subject, he met indifference and incredulity. Brass at the Millions Club of New South Wales, for example, passed up the chance to hear the Canadian's thoughts on the Immortal Bard, preferring a talk on the 1932 Ottawa Economic Conference and the international trade agreements it produced.


The Canberra Times, 16 November 1934

Meighen returned to Canada a wiser man. Aboard ship he accepted an invitation to speak to the Vancouver Canadian Club, wiring back that his subject would be the "Greatest Englishman of History". This time, Meighen chose not to disclose the identity beforehand. Biographer Roger Graham tells us that when it was revealed "the audience drooped visibly, slumping in their seats to endure an hour's boredom. What could be worse than a politician on Shakespeare? Before long, however, they were aroused, sitting up straight and listening intently. When he had finished they stood and gave him a resounding ovation, shouting, cheering and throwing their table napkins in the air."

Addresses in Ottawa, Montreal and – oddly – Pittsburgh followed. The delivery before the Toronto Canadian Club was recorded and found its way into college and university libraries. And, of course, we have this little book, which went through a number of printings.

Seven decades later, it's difficult to see what all the fuss was about. Meighen's is a work of admiration, appreciation and love – all of which are very much on display – but there's not anything particularly insightful or novel about his words. I suspect the reaction had much to do with the statesman's delivery, executed without speech in hand. This, and the fact that, as a subject, Shakespeare was a darn sight more interesting than the 1932 Ottawa Economic Conference; no matter what those in charge of the Millions Club might have thought.

Object: A slim hardcover with paper label, the entire first edition appears to suffer from an unsightly skin affliction.

Access: A few public libraries, including St Marys' own, have copies, but universities are the best bet. The news that Library and Archives doesn't have this book – by a former prime minister will come as small surprise to regular readers of this blog. There are plenty of Very Good copies of the first edition going for under C$20. That Vermont bookstore with the absurd prices shows up yet again, asking C$110 – over ninety dollars more than anyone else – for a copy described as being faded, soiled and yellowed, with a previous owner's signature on the front endpaper. Unless that previous owner was Mackenzie King, I advise all to pass.