Victorian Ladies in Day-Glo Green and Orange

Published thirty years ago by McGill-Queen's University Press, Silenced Sextet received laudatory reviews, but not its due. It is an essential work of Canadian literary history and criticism. The golden result of a collaboration between Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMullen, and Elizabeth Waterston, the volume features six essays on six Canadian women novelists, all of whom achieved popularity in the nineteenth century only to be more or less forgotten in the twentieth:

Rosanna Leprohon

May Agnes Fleming

Margaret Murray Robertson

S Frances Harrison

Marshall Saunders

Joanna E Wood

Silenced Sextet was added to my collection upon publication. I wonder how much I paid? It's currently listed at $125 on the MQUP website, so you can imagine my excitement in coming across a copy last week at a local thrift store. Set me back all of three dollars! 

Now, imagine my disappointment in getting it home to find this:

(cliquez pour agrandir)

And this:

Every page of the opening essay, 'Rosanna Mullins Leprohon: At Home in Many Worlds,' is underscored and highlighted.  The beginning of the second essay, 'May Agnes Fleming: "I did nothing but write" is simply underscored. I suggest that the green highlighter either gave out or rolled under a heavy bureau, forcing the scholar to do without. 

Evidence suggests that an orange highlighter was purchased midway through the Fleming essay.

Seems like a lot of work.

The near-absence of marginalia is curious. This rare instance marks the beginning of Carrie MacMillan's discussion of Joanna E Wood's The Untempered Wind:

Why is it that some passages are underlined but not highlighted? Why are some highlighted but not underlined? Why underline and highlight? Why are some dates, titles, and character names circled, but not others? Why is Elizabeth Waterston's 'Margaret Marshall Saunders: A Voice of the Silent' left untouched? Why is the purple pen all but absent in the final pages? Had it been misplaced? Had it rolled under a heavy bureau?

I haven't given these questions much thought. Frankly, I'm more irritated than puzzled. Besides, I'm still trying to wrap my head around that copy of Robert Kroetsch's Badlands I found eleven years years ago.
 

I purchased this thrift store Silenced Sextet thinking that I'd give it to a friend. As it turns out, she already had a copy. 

And so, I offer it to anyone who might be interested.

Postage is on me.

If interested, I can be contacted through the email link at my Blogger profile. Marshall Saunders fans may not find it so bad.

Related posts:

The Hidden Robert Kroetsch

A Woman Who Did
May Agnes Fleming: Lost Lady of CanLit

The Ten Best Book Buys of 2021... and much more!

A better year than last, right? I got out more, raised pints in pubs, saw my daughter, and spent seven days touring Quebec City and the Eastern Townships. Hell, I even saw a movie in a theatre.

I also visited more bookstores, though a depressingly small number were worth the effort. Six of this year's ten best buys were purchased online. Ted Allan's pseudonymously published Quest for Pajaro (London: Heinemann, 1957) is my favourite. I'd known about about this science fiction romance since 1983, but in all the years that passed had never come across a copy.

No surprise, I suppose.

Quest for Pajaro was published in 1957 by Heinemann. There was no Canadian edition. Was anyone distributing Heinemann in Canada back then? If so, were they aware that "Edward Maxwell" was in fact Montrealer Ted Allan?

Doubt it.

I purchased Quest for Pajaro after having been invited to comment on Allan's work at this year's Toronto Jewish Film Festival. While not his best book, it is his most intriguing. There hadn't been many many Canadian science fiction romances before 1957 – still aren't. What's more, the novel's linchpin is an experimental jet known as the "Arrow."

Bruce Petty's gorgeous jacket illustration puts it over the top.

What follows is the rest of the ten best:

Willie the Squowse

Ted Allan
Toronto: McClelland &

   Stewart, 1977

The author's only children's book, this tale of a talented squowse (offspring of a squirrel and a mouse) proved one of the most enjoyable and life-affirming reads of the year. The fifty – fifty! – Quentin Blake illustrations brought further joy.

Whispering City
Horace Brown
Pickering, ON: Global

   Publishing, 1947

Horace Brown's adaptation of this film noir shot in Quebec City, for years I'd hoped to find a reasonably-priced copy. This year I did (US$89.95).

Can it be as good as The Penthouse Killings? Please tell me it's better than Murder in the Rough.

Blood on My Rug
E. Louise Cushing
New York: Arcadia, 1956

A mystery novel that begins with the discovery of a body in a Montreal bookstore, since I'd long been searching for this novel. Might it be a candidate for reissue as a Ricochet Book?

Nope.

Still, I'm still happy to have it in my collection.

Let Not Man Put Asunder
Basil King

New York: Grosset & Dunlap,

   [n.d]

Though it's been two years since I bought, never mind reviewed, a Basil King novel, I leapt at this one. Let Not Man Put Asunder is either the seventh or eighth King novel to be adapted by Hollywood. IMDb does not recognize, but I have this photoplay edition as evidence.

 

Toute la Vie
Claire Martin

Quebec: Éditions de L'instant

   même, 1999

I've admired Claire Martin since reading Dans un gant de fer in CEGEP. David Lobdell's translation of her Doux-Amer deserves a return to print. Imagine the thrill in finding three signed Martins during my recent visit to Quebec City. This is one.

In Spite of Myself: A Memoir
Christopher Plummer
Toronto: Random House,

   2009

I regret many things in leaving our St Marys home, not the least of which involves selling thirteen-hundred books, In Spite of Myself amongst them.

I'm slowly been buying them back. This signed copy was found at the Kemptville Youth Centre Book Fair.

Beautiful Joe

Marshall Saunders
Toronto: Standard

   Publishing, 1897

I own many copies of Beautiful Joe, but this is by far the most... um, beautiful. At one dollar, it was the least expensive book I purchased this year.

The Countess of Aberdeen provides an introduction!

Menaud, maître-draveur

Félix-Antoine Savard
Ottawa: Éditions Fides, 1967

Another Quebec City find, I came upon this inscribed, slip-cased edition on the very same day I made my pilgrimage to the author's home.

I vow to read it in the New Year.

Poldrate Street
Garnett Weston
New York: Messner, 1944

This old novel proved to be 2021's most unpleasant, stomach-turning read. Voyeurism, adultery, greed, murder, and something approaching necrophilia figure.

Good fun from a Toronto boy who made a killing in Hollywood before retiring to Vancouver island.

Two generous souls donated books to the Dusty Bookcase this year.

Lee Goldberg noted my interest in the novels of former Vancouver newspaperman Tom Ardies (Their Man in the White House, Kosygan is Coming) and was kind enough to send me newly published copies of This Briefcase is Going to Explode, Pandemic, Balboa Firefly, and Manila Time (the latter two written under Ardies' Jack Trolley nom de plume). 

Lee is in the process of reissuing Ardies' entire bibliography through Brash Books.

More power to him! 

Fraser Sutherland died this earlier this year. I was honoured to have been asked to provide an obituary for the Globe & Mail. One of the greatest challenges in its writing concerned family, specifically the name of a sibling, an older brother, who had died at a young age. Our newspaper of record is insistent on such things. It seemed not one of Fraser's friends could quite remember... and then one came through, which led me to this uncommon chapbook:

Published in 1976 by Northern Journey Press, Within the Wound is dedicated to that brother, Hugh Sutherland (1941-1965). I shared this discovery with Fraser's good friend, Adrian King-Edwards of Montreal's Word Bookstore, who in turn presented me with this copy.

RIP, Fraser. You are much missed.

Related posts:

Love is a Long Shot on the Nose

He and His Arrow

Little Willie, Willie Won't Go Home
Horace Brown: From Penthouse to Pavement
Horace  Brown: Saturday Matinee
No Whack on the Side of the Head
Montreal Most Strange (w/ mysterious directions)

Claire Martin at the Beginning of the Quiet Revolution

Packing Up the Dusty Bookcases

Blue Plaque Special: Quebec City Edition

The Dead of a Dead End Street

A Russian is Coming! A Russian is Coming!
Have Bomb - Will Travel

Best Books of 1920: Beware the Bolshevik Poets

The Globe, 4 December 1920

The 1920 Globe round-up of the year's best books was published on the first Saturday of that December. Twenty-four months had passed since the Armistice, and the introduction takes pains to position the conflict in the past:

This bold pronouncement follows:

The war has passed into history and even the "aftermath" is over.

   

Sure, but a good many titles concerning the Great War feature, and a new category makes its debut:

No, the conflict is still very much felt. Loss and sacrifice continue to inspire poetry, such as Our Absent Hero by Mrs Durie, the widow of Capt William Arthur Peel Durie.

Captain Durie died at Passchendaele on 29 December 1917 in an effort rescue wounded comrades in No Man's Land. 

Capt William Arthur Peel Durie
1881 - 1917
RIP

Another of the newspaper's poetry selections, J. Lewis Mulligan's The Beckoning Skyline and Other Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1920), includes fifteen pieces of verse inspired by the war.

The 1920 Globe list recognizes a total of seven Canadian books of poetry, the others being:

               Acanthus and Wild Grape - F.O. Call

               Leaves on the Wind - Rev D.A. Casey

               Apple Blossoms - Carrie Wetmore McColl

               Lady Latour - Rev W.I. Morse

               Rhymes of a Northland - Hugh L. Warren

This is something of a return to form. Where in 1918, the paper gave notice to eight Canadian volumes of verse, the 1919 list featured all of two (one of which, Pauline Johnson's Flint and Feather, had been published seven years earlier).

As is so often the case in the paper's annual book list, the "Poetry" section brings columns of comment, much if it designed to distance we Canadians from our American cousins:

We usually write in metre and dislike poetical as well as other kinds of Bolshevism. It is merely the affectation of free verse that makes American 'poetry' more distinctive – or notorious – than Canadian. It is a cheap substitute for originality.

   There has been a great deal more verse published this year than appears in the publishers' lists. Nearly all of it has been printed at the authors' expense, and it has been circulated largely 'among friends.' This practice is not to be despised or discouraged, unless it raises false hopes in authors who have merely the faculty of rhyming without possessing poetical talent or literary judgement.

There are 264 titles in the 1920 Globe list, fifty-three of which are Canadian. Just six of the fifty-three – all novels, no poetry – feature in my library:

Going by the Globe, 1920 was as good year for the country's novelists and short story writers; twenty of the 114 fiction titles are Canadian:

          Aleta Dey - Francis M Beynon

          The La Chance Mine Mystery - S. Carleton

          Glen of the High North - H.A. Cody
          Sheila and Others - Winifred Cotter

          The Conquering Hero - Murray Gibbon

          Eyes of the Law - Ethel Penman Hope

          Daisy Herself - Will E. Ingersoll

          The Luck of the Mounted - Sgt Ralph Kendall

          The Thread of Flame - Basil King

          A Son of Courage - Archie P. McKishale

          Graydon of the Windermere - Evan McKowan

          Every Man for Himself - Hopkins Moorhouse

          The Forging of the Pikes - Anson North
          No Defence - Gilbert Parker

          Poor Man's Rock - Bertrand W. Sinclair

          Dennison Grant - Robert Stead

          The Prairie Mother - Arthur Stringer

          The Rapids - Alan Sullivan

          The Viking Blood - Frederick William Wallace

          Stronger Than His Sea - Robert Watson

For the first time, the newspaper lumps together Canadian fiction, though it errs in failing to recognize Basil King, Prince Edward Island's second bestselling author, as a fellow countryman. The Thread of Flame, Rev King's sixteenth novel, is listed with This Side of Paradise under the heading "By Other Authors."

I've read all of two of the twenty. The Thread of Flame ranks as my favourite King novel after The Empty Sack. The other, Hopkins Moorhouse's Every Man for Himself didn't make so much of an impression. I found it even less interesting than described: 

Of the remaining novels, The Prairie Mother was reprinted for a decade or so. In 1972, Alan Sullivan's The Rapids enjoyed a brief second life with the University of Toronto Press. It can' be argued that the most enduring Canadian novel of 1920 is Aleta Dey, which was revived in 1988 as a Virago Modern Classic. It remains in print to this day in a Broadview Press edition.

This country fares much worse in other categories. Where in 1919, Canadian authors took six of the coveted "Economics" titles, the 1920 showing amounts to A Study of Canadian Immigration by Prof W.G. Smith and Occupations for Trained Women in Canada by Mrs Vincent Massey. If forced to choose, I guess I'd read the latter. It might be interesting to see what advice Mrs Massey, daughter of Sir George Robert Parkin, wife of one of Canada's most privileged men — a future Governor General, no less — might have for the working woman.

The Canadian titles in the "Historical" category are a touch more tempting:

Hydro-Electric Development in Ontario - E.B. Biggar
The Cross-Bearers of the Sanguenay - Very Rev W.R. Harris

The Evolution of the Oil Industry - Victor Ross
The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt - O. D. Skelton
The Life and Work of Sir William Van Horne - W. Vaughan

A new edition of Katherine Hale's biography of Father Lacombe and a revised edition of George H. Locke's When Canada was New France. also feature, but the real standout is George T. Denison's Recollections of a Police Magistrate, which is deemed "our outstanding Canadian book of the year."

This is something new; the Globe had never before made such a pronouncement. Here's its description:

I haven't yet cracked open Recollections of a Police Magistrate — copies begin at $245 — but it can be read for free here thanks to the Internet Archive,

I prefer paper, myself.

Consider me old fashioned.

Tempted as I am to leave it there, this being 2020, I can't help but note that the 1920 Globe list — like those of 1918 and 1919 — features not so much a passing reference to the Spanish Flu.

Not one mention,

Not one book.

Related post:

The Globe 100 One Hundred Years Ago: Poets are Struck Dumb

and Capitalism Proves Embarrassing (1919)

The Globe 100 178 of 2018

The Season's Best Books in Review - A.D. 1917:

The String of Canadian Patriotism is Fingered

The Season's Best Books in Review ‐ A.D. 1916

The Season's Best Books in Review – A.D. 1915;

Featuring the Best Canadian Book Ever Published

A Man Forgets His Identity
(but not his manners)

A Foggy Night in Hogtown

The Most Contentious Title in Canadian Literature

Pussy Black-Face
Marshall Saunders
Boston: Page, 1913

Related posts:

Pierre Berton as Casey's Scary Uncle

The Ugliest Canadian Book Cover of All Time

The Greatest Canadian Magazine Cover of All Time

The Second Greatest Canadian Magazine Cover of All Time

Harlequin's Filthiest Title

The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year

It's been a disorienting and disruptive year. The home we'd expected to build on the banks of the Rideau became entangled in red tape, an inept survey, and a tardy Official Plan. In our impatience, we left our rental and bought an existing house a ten-minute drive south. We may just stay. If we do, an extension is in order. I'm writing this on a desk at the dead end of a cramped second storey hallway.

All this is shared by way of explanation. I reviewed only twenty books here and in my Canadian Notes & Queries 'Dusty Bookcase' column. Should that number be boosted to twenty-three? Three of the books were reread and reviewed in translated, abridged, and dumbed down editions.

Yes, a strange year... made doubly so by the fact that so very many of the books reviewed are currently available. Selecting the three most deserving of a return to print – an annual tradition – should've been challenging, but was in fact quite easy:

The Arch-Satirist
Frances de Wolfe
   Fenwick
Boston: Lothrop, Lee &
   Shepard, 1910

This story of a spinster and her young, beautiful, gifted, bohemian, drug-addled half-brother poet is the most intriguing novel read this year. Set in Montreal's Square Mile, is it a roman à clef? I'm of that city, but not that society, so cannot say with any certainty.

M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty
Frances Shelley Wees
New York: Doubleday,
   1954

A wealthy young widow moves to a bedroom community hoping to solve the murder of her cheating husband. This is post-war domestic suspense of the highest order. I'd long put off reading M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty because of its title, despite strong reviews from 65 years ago. My mistake.

The Ravine
Kendal Young
     [Phyllis Brett Young]
London: W.H. Allen, 1962

The lone thriller by the author of The Torontonians and Psyche, The Ravine disturbed more than any other novel. Two  girls are assaulted – one dies – in a mid-sized New England town. Their art teacher, a woman struggling with her younger sister's disappearance, sets out to entrap the monster. 


The keen-eyed will have noted that The Ravine does not feature in the stack of books at the top of this post. My copy is currently in Montreal, where it's being used to reset a new edition as the fifteenth Ricochet Book.

Amy Lavender Harris will be writing a foreword. Look for it this coming May.

Of the books reviewed, those in print are:

A succès de scandal when first published in 1895, The Woman Who Did is Grant Allen's most famous book. It doesn't rank amongst the best of the fifteen Allen novels I've read to date, but I found it quite moving. Recommended. It's currently available in a Broadview Press edition.

The Black Donnellys is pulpmaster Thomas P. Kelley's most enduring book; as such, it seems the natural place to start. Originally published in 1954 by Harlequin, this semi-fictional true crime title been in and out of print with all sorts of other publishers. The most recent edition, published by Darling Terrace, appeared last year.

Experiment in Springtime (1947) is the first Margaret Millar novel to be considered outside the mystery genre. Still, you'd almost think a body will appear. See if you don't agree. The novel can be found in Dawn of Domestic Suspense, the second volume in Syndicate Books' Collected Millar. 

The Listening Walls (1952) ranks amongst the weakest of the Millars I've read to date, which is not to say it isn't recommended. The 1975 bastardization by George McMillin is not. It's the last novel featured in The Master at Her Zenith, the third volume in The Collected Millar.

I read two versions of Margaret Saunders' Beautiful Joe in this year. The first, the "New and Revised Edition," was published during the author's lifetime; the second, Whitman's "Modern Abridged Edition," was not. The original 1894 edition is one of the best selling Canadian novels of all time. One hundred and fifteen year later, it's available in print from Broadview and Formac.

Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal by American Michael Howard proved a worthy prequel to Frank L. Packard's Gray Seal adventures. Published by the author, it's available through Amazon.

This year, as series editor for Ricochet Books, I was involved in reviving The Damned and the Destroyed, Kenneth Orvis's 1962 novel set in Montreal's illicit drug trade. My efforts in uncovering the author's true identity and history form the introduction.

Praise this year goes to House of Anansi's 'A List' for keeping alive important Canadian books that have escaped Bertelsmann's claws. It is the true inheritor of Malcolm Ross's vision.

And now, as tradition dictates, resolutions for the new year:

• My 2018 resolution to read more books by women has proven a success in that exactly fifty percent of books read and reviewed here and at CNQ were penned by female authors. I resolve to stay the course.
• My 2018 resolution to read more French-language books might seem a failure; the only one discussed here was Le dernier voyage, a translation of Eric Cecil Morris's A Voice is Calling. I don't feel at all bad because I've been reading a good number of French-language texts in researching my next book. Still, I'm hoping to read and review more here in the New Year.
• At the end of last year's survey, I resolved to complete one of the two books I'm currently writing. I did not. For shame! How about 2020?
• Finally, I plan on doing something different with the blog next year by focusing exclusively on authors whose books have never before featured. What? No Grant  Allen? No Margaret Millar? No Basil King? As if 2019 wasn't strange enough.

Bonne année! 

Addendum: As if the year wasn't strange enough, I've come to the conclusion that Arthur Stringer's debut novel, The Silver Poppy, should be one of the three books most deserving a return to print.

But which one should it replace?

Related posts:

Best Books of 2018 (none of which are from 2018)

The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2017
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2016
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2015
The Christmas Offering of Books - 1914 and 2014
A Last Minute Gift Slogan, "Give Books" (2013)
Grumbles About Gumble & Praise for Stark House (2012)
The Highest Compliments of the Season (2011)
A 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired (2010)
Books are Best (2009)

Bach to the Future: A Voice is Calling
Bach to the Future, Part II: Le Dernier Voyage
A Dogs Life and then Some

Beautiful Joe: Now with 30% Less Violence! 

Margaret Millar Simplified and Spoiled

Miss Fenwick's Good Old Hockey Match

Canadian Notes & Queries in Springtime

Domestic Suspense in Small Town Ontario

Nature as the Devil's Playground
Getting to Know the Woman Who Did
The True Crime Book That Spawned an Industry 

Millar's Experiment in Springtime in Springtime

Where to Begin with Margaret Millar: A Top Ten
The Return of Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal
'A Relentless Story of Drug Addiction'
Reviving a Searching Novel about Drug Addiction

Beautiful Joe: Now with 30% Less Violence!

Beautiful Joe
     (Modern Abridged Edition)
Marshall Saunders
Racine, WI: Whitman, [c. 1965]
254 pages

Whitman is the first publisher I knew by name. Its books were the stuff of childhood birthday parties, given to friends who'd really wanted a Hot Wheels Super-Charger. I was never so unfortunate as to receive a Whitman book myself; until this month, the only one I ever owned was Who's Got the Button?, a Monkees tie-in that I bought sometime in the early 'eighties.

Who's Got the Button? was written by William Johnston, author of other Whitman titles like Gilligan's Island, The Munsters and the Great Camera Caper, and Ironside: The Picture Frame Frame-Up. None were considered part of the publisher's Classics Library.

I bought Whitman's Beautiful Joe after reading the 1927 "New and Revised Edition." Writing in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Elizabeth Waterston informs that the violence of the 1894 original was "softened" for that latter edition." I found the violence hard and hard to take, and was certain that Whitman had softened it even further for we children of the 'sixties.

And I was right.

The greatest distinction is found early, in the novel's most violent scene. I've struck out the sentences that are absent in the Whitman edition:

Those familiar with Beautiful Joe know further violence follows when Jenkins mutilates Joe by cutting off his ears and tail with an axe. The pivotal scene, it's just as it is in the 1894 first edition.

By my calculation, the word count of Whitman's "abridged" Beautiful Joe is just over 64,000; roughly 30,000 less than the original. Of the numerous deletions, this is the longest:

Saunders' second novel, Beautiful Joe was written with an eye on a prize offered by the American Humane Education Society (hence the reference). That the novel won is surely owes something to its incorporation of the Society's positions, including "the proper way to kill animals." Saunders was also smart in taking the sad story of a Canadian dog and transplanting it to Maine. To these northern eyes, the most interesting passages are those in which Americans express concern for the future of their nation:

The comments about immigration, Spaniards, and Italians, do not appear in the Whitman edition.

Less violence. Less bigotry, too.

But I wouldn't give it as a birthday present.
.

Object and Access: A hardcover issued without dust jacket. The cover, endpapers, and interior illustrations are all by Robert MacLean.

I purchased my copy for $US9.38 from an Ohio bookseller.

There are plenty of copies listed online at similar prices.

Related posts:

A Dog's Life and Then Some

Condensed CanLit