Still Strange (if a little less so)

The Gynecologist

Sol Allen [pseud. Barney Allen]

New York: Pyramid, 1969

I imagine publication of The Gynecologist provided considerable relief to Sol Allen enthusiasts. Sixteen years earlier, Toronto Doctor, his previous novel, had ended abruptly. Just as handsome gynaecologist Guy Fowley and winsome patient Eleanor Hollis started in on what had all the makings of a revelatory scene, the reader was met with a note:

There was no Toronto Surgeon, but I'm certain that much of what the author intended for that unrealized book appears in The Gynecologist. For one, the novel "picks up the thread of the story in Guy's office" – albeit fourteen chapters in.

The first seventy pages of The Gynecologist are little more than rewrites and revisions of bits and pieces from Toronto Doctor, including the very passages that so disturbed fourteen months ago. The reader new to Allen will find the sudden swarm of characters and relationships without benefit of backstory confusing. The enthusiast, I am one, will be confused by threads cut, rearranged and brought forward ten or more years. Episodes that had taken place in the months following the Second World War now happen in the dying days of the Diefenbaker government. The effect is disorienting, much like the peculiar advertisement Allen placed in the 11 March 1949 edition of The Canadian Jewish Review.

Readers new and old benefit from a gentle narrative arch, though it achieves no real height. The most important event, the appointment of a new Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at fictitious Metropolitan Hospital, much anticipated in Toronto Doctor, is first mentioned here on the day the announcement is to take place.

Guy gets the post, though this isn't to say that he's the main character. Just as Toronto Doctor isn't about any one Toronto doctor, no single practitioner dominates. The spotlight darts between each man – and they are all men – resting occasionally on a wife, daughter, son or secretary. Things are very much as they were in the previous novel, switching between the tension of the operating theatre and dramas played out in drawing rooms. Dinner parties continue to be held, only now wives begin to cheat on husbands, and husbands begin cheating on wives. Unhappy marriages become more so. One character's death proves beneficial to another, while another achieves sudden wealth. But throughout it all, babies are born. Babies are born.

Such is life.

Favourite passage: 

She was a big woman, but well proportioned; and he could see the pangs of life swelling in her axilla, which was shaven but not very clean, in the veins of her strong neck, in the flux of her bosom. With a soundless cry, he moved toward her.

Trivia: Where I'm not sure I've so much as met a gynaecologist, Allen counted several amongst his friends, including Benjamin Cohen, Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, who is thanked for "placing the inmost details of his vast clinical and personal experience at my disposal." Contributions by the living are also recognized, though only through initials: "J.G., S.S., S.C. and Wm. A. C."

How hard could it have been in 1965 to identity Toronto gynaecologist "Wm. A. C."?

Object: A 318-page mass market paperback consisting of very small, dense type. My copy, the second Pyramid edition, includes this:

Having died the previous year, Allen was not a resident of Toronto. He wrote four novels, though not one was titled The Black Sheep. It would appear that Sex and the H Bomb was never published. Pity.

Access: I first spotted The Gynecologist on a shelf at the Central branch of the Vancouver Public Library. The Toronto Public Library also has a copy, as do seven of our universities.

The first Pyramid edition can be had for as little as one American dollar. The less common second edition, featuring hot cover by Frank Kalan, will set you back at least US$4.95.

Allen put out two editions of The Gynecologist – both in 1965 – through his own Rock Publishing. Copies in dust jacket are scarce, with only one currently listed for sale online. A Very Good copy of the second edition, at $50 it's a bargain.

Related posts:

Our Strangest Novel?

Our Strangest Novelist?

Our Strangest Book Advertisement?

L’enfer c’est les autres: Crad Kilodney, 1948–2014

It's my honour to present this guest post, a tribute to the late Crad Kilodney by his friend Ruth Bradley-St-Cyr. The photo of Crad comes courtesy of Lorette C. Luzajic.

Crad Kilodney and I became friends about 1980, the day he walked into the Kentucky Fried Chicken takeout where I worked, looked me square in the eye, and asked, “Do your chickens die in a state of grace?” To a geeky teenager with a quirky sense of humour, this was irresistible. “I certainly hope so,” I replied.

Crad lived in my North Toronto neighbourhood around Avenue Road and Wilson. After I moved to Hamilton, I had a dream about him and wrote to tell him about it. I dreamt that he had moved to a new basement apartment on the south side of Old Orchard Grove, about six houses down from Avenue Road. He wrote back and asked me to pick his lottery numbers for him, because he had just moved, exactly where I had said.

But Crad didn’t need the lottery. Lotteries are for poor people. Smart people invest in the stock market. So when Crad’s Long Island grandparents died and left him money, he invested in gold stocks and told me to do the same. Excellent advice. I wish I had had the money to invest, though I was leery of the social benefits of mining companies.

With his stock market dividends, he moved downtown to a rooming house, retired from standing on street corners, and divested himself of the tools of his trade. One souvenir is an original cardboard sign, complete with the shoelace he hung around his neck, which hangs now on my bookshelf. One side says, “CHANEL DOG ENEMAS $5-$12,” the other, “BOOKS FOR U. OF T. DUMMIES $5-$10.” When he asked me which sign I would like, this one particularly spoke to me, since I went to Glendon and York.

I have all of his books, mostly signed, up until 1992’s The Second Charnel House Anthology of Bad Poetry. A copy of his Worst Canadian Stories (volume 2, I think) was stolen in Nicaragua in 1988 and presumably is still in circulation there. His titles were always provocative, my favourites being Blood-Sucking Monkeys from North Tonawanda and Suburban Chicken-Strangling Stories. My favourite inscriptions are on The Green Book – “To Ruth, Avoid inhaling. Discontinue use if rash develops” – and on Human Secrets: Book Two – “To Ruth, Last copy of this book I will ever sell. Glad you got it.”

Yes, he was cranky. How could he not be? He sold his books not at fancy author signings with self-selected literary groupies, but on the streets of downtown Toronto, exposing himself day after day to the inanity of people who couldn’t even read his signs, never mind his books. “SLIMY DEGENERATE LITERATURE,” read one sign, and some illiterate soul asked if he was selling detergent. But Margaret Atwood talked to him whenever she saw him, and that was something of a balm to his wounded genius.

His best pokes at the literary establishment were two pranks, one of which I helped with. In the first prank, he took selected poems of Irving Layton, put a pseudonym on them, and submitted them to publishers. Nobody, except Layton’s own publisher, picked up on this; the other publishers rejected the work. The second prank, requiring the assistance of his friends, was to submit rather bad stories from great writers to the CBC literary competition. I got to be Maxim Gorky. All the stories were rejected but, again, without anyone identifying any of the real authors.

Kilodney’s style was brooding, raw, and spare. He always struck me as a man already in purgatory. But he was always happy to meet a kindred spirit, and he was not entirely solitary in his publishing endeavours. Besides his own Charnel House imprint, he also published with Black Moss Press, Coach House Press, The Canadian Fiction Magazine, The Carolina Quarterly, Descant, Lowlands Review, and others. Some of his correspondence can be found in The Canadian Fiction Magazine fonds (Box 16, file 131) at the McMaster University archives. But his own extensive papers (26 archival boxes/5 linear metres) he donated to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

Some of his letters – along with his “street tapes,” noir films on VHS, and a couple of vanity press books he had worked on, including one about a barber – is no doubt buried in one of my own bankers boxes of CanLit archives. Crad and I were always happy to run into each other – he kept box 281 at the Avenue Road post office – but I moved away from Toronto a dozen years ago and left him to his gold stocks. His real name wasn’t Crad. I think it was Lou, but I’m not sure now. He had beautiful hands. He claimed not to be a draft dodger. He has a sister somewhere who he never contacted. I’m sure she doesn’t acknowledge him either, but he was a wonderful, unforgettable, eccentric character and Toronto is poorer without him.

Ruth Bradley-St-Cyr
Embrun, Ontario

Christmas Comes Early

My newest acquisition:

Maria Monk's Daughter: An Autobiography

Mrs. L. St. John Eckel

New York:

Published for the Author by the United States Publishing Company

1874

God bless us, every one!

Related posts:
Maria Monk's Immortal Book
Pornography of the Puritan
Maria Monk and the Kennedy Campaign
Words of Hate for Maria Monk

Tan Ming's Disappointing Post-Apocalyptic World

The new Canadian Notes & Queries has landed, bringing with it another Dusty Bookcase column. The eighth to date, it's a review of Tan Ming, a fantastic, post-apocalyptic, pseudonymously self-published novel by electric organ pioneer Morse Robb.

So dull.

Oh, but doesn't Tan Ming look good? How about that cover!

It sounded good, too. In Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895-1984, Washington State University professor Paul Brians begins his description thusly: "An amusing fantasy in which a department store window dresser falls in love with a robot mannequin and manages to conjure into its body the soul of a princess named Tan Ming from a postholocaust future." The ever-reliable Wikipedia once claimed that the novel inspired Mannequin, the romantic comedy starring Kim Cattrell and Andrew McCarthy.

 

You'll remember Mannequin for "Nothing's Going to Stop Us Now", which topped the American charts back in 1987. The new CNQ comes with music – much better music – in the form of a flexidisc by Al Tuck.

When was the last time you bought a magazine with a flexidisc?

The last I picked up was the April 1981 issue of Smash Hits. It came with a live recording of "Pretending to See the Future" by Orchestral Maneoeuvres in the Dark and "Swing Shift" by our own Nash the Slash.

Not to slight Hazel O'Connor  – or Messrs Lydon, Levine, Wobble and Weller  – but don't you prefer this?

The cover, as always, is by Seth. Inside you'll find Mike Barnes, Michel Basilières, Devon Code, Michael Deforge, Emily Donaldson, Jennifer A. Franssen, Lorna Jackson, Mark Anthony Jarman, Evan Jones, Adrian Michael Kelly, Mark Kingwell, Lewis MacLeod, Marion MacLeod, David Mason, Ross McKie, Robert Melançon, Shame Nielson, Patricia Robertson, Ray Robertson, Sean Rogers, Mark Sampson, Michael Schmidt, Norm Sibum, Dan Wells, Paul Wells, Bruce Whiteman and Robert Wiersema.

At $20 per annum, subscriptions are a great deal. You can get one here.

Our Strangest Novelist?

The follow-up to my review of Sol Allen's Toronto Doctor, this 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.

This review, revisited and revised, now appears in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:
Our Strangest Novel?
Our Strangest Book Advertisement?
Still Strange (if a little less so)

Our Strangest Novel?

Toronto Doctor

Sol Allen

Toronto: Rock, 1949

390 pages

This review, revisited and revised, now appears in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related post:

Our Strangest Novelist?

Our Strangest Book Advertisement?
Still Strange (if a little less so)

Cheery Victoria Day Verse from the Cheese Poet

Cheese Poet James McIntyre's celebration of the naming of Victoria Park in his adopted hometown of Ingersoll, Ontario, from his Musings on the Banks of the Canadian Thames (Ingersoll: Tribune, 1884):

 VICTORIA PARK AND CALEDONIAN GAMES

Lines on the naming of Victoria Park, on Queen's Birthday, 1881. The ceremony was performed by Thomas Brown, Esq., Mayor of the town. 

Come one, come all, to Scottish games
On the banks of Canadian Thames;
You'll find that 'tis most pleasant way
You can enjoy the Queen's Birthday.

In future years it will be famed
The day whereon the park was named,
With its boundry great extended
And nature's charms sweetly blended.

Full worthy of the poet's theme
Is hill and dale, and wood and stream,
And glittering spires, and busy town.
Where mansions' do each mount top crown.

Come, witness the great tug-of-war,
And the great hammer thrown afar,
See running, jumping, highland fling,
At concert hear the sky lark sing.

And the bagpipes will send thrills
Like echoes from the distant hills,
And the bold sound of the pibroch
Which does resound o'er Scottish loch. 

Young men and maids, and fine old dames
Will gather on the banks of Thames,
And though we have a tug-of-war
'Twill leave no wound or deadly scar.

THE QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY DISASTER IN LONDON, ONT. - THE COLLAPSE OF THE PLEASURE STEAMER 'VICTORIA'
The Canadian Illustrated News, 4 June 1881

"In future years it will be famed/The day whereon this park was named", the poet predicts. The day is indeed remembered, but not for the reason described. That very same Victoria Day, not thirty kilometres to the west, along that very same "Canadian Thames", the country suffered one of its worst maritime disasters with the collapse and capsizing of the pleasure steamer Victoria. One-hundred-and-eighty-two souls, most women and children, lost their lives in its sparkling waters.

THE LONDON DISASTER - SENDING OUT COFFINS THE MORNING AFTER THE WRECK
The Canadian Illustrated News, 11 June 1881

The poet would later memorialize the disaster in his somber, much more modest 'Disaster to Steamer Victoria in London'.

Related posts:

A Civil Servant's Awful Victoria Day Poem

Queen Victoria and He

Victoria Day Poetry Disaster

Verse for Victoria Day by the Master of All Poets

'Away to Canada' – A Song for Victoria Day

The Great Fire of Ingersoll Remembered

One hundred and forty years ago today – May 7, 1872 – the small Ontario town of Ingersoll lost Oxford Street, then its main commercial thoroughfare, to fire. Newspaper reports of the day record that flames were first spotted just before eight in the evening in the stables of the Royal Exchange Hotel.

The disaster inspired verse by townsmen James McIntyre, Cheese Poet and undertaker. He included "Great Fire in Ingersoll, May, 1872" in his 299-page Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889).

Though a nobler town did indeed rise, today the corner upon which the Royal Exchange Hotel once stood now serves as a parking lot used by folks visiting the Dollarama across the street.

Mean Mister MacDonald Attacks a Prime Minister

Day seventeen of National Poetry Month and there's been nary a mention here. Today, the 120th anniversary of the passing of Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie, will be different. He's remembered as a humble man who took pride in his working class origins, though you'd never know it from this verse by J. J. MacDonald, the "James MacRae" of The Four Jameses.

I'm not so unfair as the poet in describing the verse below as bad. The misspelling of Mackenzie's name is minor; sin comes with the claim that in 1875 the politician travelled overseas with the sole goal of obtaining a knighthood. In fact. Mackenzie thrice declined the honour.

The poet pretends otherwise, adopting the prime minister's voice in addressing "dear generous Brown" – George Brown – whom Mackenzie had succeeded as leader of the Liberal Party (and who had also declined the title):

A. McKENZIE AT QUEBEC IN HIS RETURN FROM GREAT BRITAIN IN 1875, WHICH IT WAS SAID HE VISITED IN ORDER TO GET THE TITLE OF “SIR” 

My sight you would pity, dear generous Brown,
On nearing a city or reaching a town;
For charity hide me from scornful disgrace,
Or crows will deride me and laugh in my face. 

They know when we parted I travelled for fame;
To find as I started my title’s the same,
To party relations returning, I swear
Is more than my patience is able to bear. 

How gladly I’d wander, how swiftly I’d stride
Where back streams meander, and wild beasts abide!
The Ottawa Valley unseen would I roam,
To reach and to rally my dear friends at home! 

In rural seclusion to live as before,
I find ’tis delusion to seek any more;
My standing much lower than ever I see;
The honors of power are useless to me. 

To want them’s unpleasant, to have them no gain;
They prove evanescent, delusive and vain;
They give us more trouble than ease or delight,
And, fleet as a bubble, they’re out of our sight. 

An humble mechanic, oh! did I remain,
And titles Britannic not seek to obtain,
And prosper as Alick with friends as before,
When fables in Gaelic alone was my lore. 

My curses with Britain forever abide–
Her children have smitten by glory and pride.
Though aristocratic, I think they are fools,
They speak so dogmatic on etiquette rules. 

When my predecessor went over before,
They thought no aggressor invaded their shore;
Their nobles held meetings to honor him there,
Nor jovial greetings to him did they spare. 

Though fate made me humble, yet chance made me great,
No mortal should grumble at doings of fate;
Through folly and error from greatness I fell,
My anguish and terror no creature can tell. 

"A. McKenzie at Quebec..." joins the similarly mean-spirited "A. McKenzie's Reflections While About to Address His Constituents at Sarnia in 1875" in leading off the poet's self-published debut, Poems Written by J.J. MacDonald, a Native of Glengarry, Ont. (c. 1877). It precedes further attacks on an unnamed Grit politician, drinkers, bachelors, Protestant converts, Charles Chiniquy, Maria Monk, one Miss A— and pretty much anyone who was not an immediate member of the poet's family.

"In submitting the following poems to your judgment, the author does so in a truly Christian spirit", MacDonald writes in presenting his verse.

Were he alive, I'd call him out on this.

'Burns' by James McIntyre, the Cheese Poet

The Robert Burns Memorial

Square Dorchester (né Dominion), Montreal

Photograph by Wally Gobetz

BURNS 

The following ode was read by the author at the Centennial Anniversary of Burns in the year 1859.

This night shall never be forgot
   For humble life none now despise,
Since Burns was born in lowly cot
   Whose muses wing soars to the skies. 

'Round Scotia's brow he wove a wreath
   And raised her name in classic story
A deathless fame he did bequeath,
   His country's pride, his country's glory. 

He sang her hills, he sang her dales,
   Of Bonnie Doon and Banks of Ayr,
Of death and Hornbook and such tales
   As Tam O'Shanter and his mare. 

He bravely taught that manly worth
   More precious is than finest gold,
He reckoned not on noble birth,
   But noble deeds alone extolled. 

Where will we find behind the plow
   Or in the harvest field at toil
Another youth, sweet bard, like thou,
   Could draw the tear or raise the smile. 

We do not think 'twas Burns' fault,
   For there were no teetotalers then,
That Willie brewed a peck of malt
   And Robin preed like other men. 

'Tis true he loved the lasses dear,
   But who for this would loudly blame,
For Scotia's maids his heart did cheer
   And love is a true heavenly flame. 

So here we've met in distant land
   Poor honest Robin to extol,
Though oft we differ let us stand
   United now in Ingersoll.

From Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889) 

A Quiet Revolution and Still Cowards Complain

The Squeaking Wheel

John Mercer [pseud. Eric Cecil Morris]

n.p.: Rubicon, 1966

103 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related post:

Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow and the Bigots of Yesteryear

The Bank Swindler's Signature

A brief addendum to Wednesday's post, in which I happened to mention that my copy of Lucius A. Parmelee's The Confessions of a Bank Swindler is signed. One correspondent asks me to post the signature. I'm happy to do so.

Must say that for a man who made his money in large measure through forgery, it does seem rather awkward.

Related post: A Bank Swindler Tries to Cash In

A Bank Swindler Tries to Cash In

The Confessions of a Bank Swindler

Lucius A. Parmelee

Waterloo, QC: Duval, 1968

The author begins by boasting that a member of the Canadian Banking Assocation once suggested he be offered a pension as an inducement to retire, adding: "I achieved fame of a sort and did very well." These more modest words set the tone.

Born in 1889, Lucius Parmelee was blessed in being a member of family of affluence and influence. Newspaper editor and three-term Liberal member of parliament Charles Henry Parmelee – that's him on the right – was an uncle. Another uncle once served as Quebec's Minister of Protestant Education. The latter's good work is reflected in this, nephew Lucius' only book; until Conrad Black, The Confessions of a Bank Swindler was likely the best written work by a Canadian criminal. I provide as evidence this passage in which the author looks back to his earliest years in Waterloo, Quebec:

One must remember that in this day there was no auto, radio, TV, and the thousand and one distractions, which are today offered to gratify our jaded appetites. Nor were they distracted by the innumerable incidents of a bizarre, and even sinister nature, which is the record of our daily lives. I do not agree with the French philosopher Rousseau, that the solution to the world's ills consist of a return to a state of nature. I do feel that there have been times in the past history of mankind, when the clock of destiny could well have been arrested, for a temporary breathing space, at least. Our characteristically North American attitude of service to the Gods of progress, may well mean serving an illusion.

No common criminal.

As a young man , Parmelee set off down the straight and narrow as a bank clerk, only to develop a rooted resentment toward the very industry in which he was employed. The low pay, which our grand banks expected to be supplemented by clerks' families, led to his resignation. Parmelee tried his hand at a number of occupations, including farmhand and barkeep, but returned to the banks as an unwelcomed visitor during the Great War:

From a moral point of view I had no scruples whatever. They paid their employees atrocious wages. They offered very little in the way of a life career. They obtained subsidy from the general public, due to the fact that their employees must have help from their parents for a few years, and in the case of the institution in which I served they had no pension plan. All in all I considered them bigger, and more cowardly robbers than myself.

Make no mistake, Parmelee's crimes were not robberies; they were swindles carried out though study, impersonation and forgery. The author's criminal activity spanned three decades, interrupted by an ill-considered investment in a chicken ranch, work at a wartime munitions plant and time spent in San Quentin. His final foray into financial fraud, in 1947 Ottawa, was in his own words a "disaster". He hit the Royal Bank, the Bank of Toronto, the Bank of Montreal and the Dominion Bank, walking away with some $17,000... only to be arrested a few hours later at a railway station in Vars, Ontario. Contemporary crooks will learn no tips from The Confessions of a Bank Swindler; Parmelee's scams and schemes were dated well before his book was published. The world into which he was ultimately released, on 15 June 1955, was foreign. "Montreal proved a revelation to me", he writes, unable to reconcile the metropolis with the tranquil city of his youth. The Confessions of a Bank Swindler owes its existence to the late Weekend Magazine, which in 1956 published a rudimentary version of the memoir. I expect the reception wasn't quite what editorial director Craig Ballantyne had anticipated. Readers took considerable offence to Parmelee's unrepentant nature; the banks, it would seem, were unassailable. The swindler's memoir attracted no interest from McClelland and Stewart, Macmillan or Ryerson; it ended up being self-published through a little printer in the author's birthplace.* No fame followed. Having gone straight, the man was accorded no obituary. Crime pays.

Object: A trade-size paperback, my copy is signed and includes a Weekend Magazine clipping that appears to have been used for promotional purposes. The first edition, I think, the only other I've seen – also signed – was published in mass market by a short-lived Montreal house called Bodero.

Access: There are no copies of either edition listed for sale online; look instead to the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and the Toronto Public Library. Seven of our university libraries hold the book. Library and Archives Canada? Don't ask.

* This was the very same printer that two years earlier produced John Glassco's self-published Squire Hardman.

Related post:

The Bank Swindler's Signature

Ronald J. Cooke, No Blockhead

A final follow-up to last week's post on The Mayor of Côte St. Paul. Promise.

Cover copy describes Ronald J. Cooke as "one of Canada's most popular writers of realistic fiction". Don't you believe it. The man never wrote anything that could be considered "realistic fiction". And, let's be honest, he was never popular. Like The House on Craig Street, his first novel, The Mayor of Côte St. Paul was a paperback original – and, like his first novel, it was printed only once in this country. Readers were left hanging nearly three decades before they saw The House on Dorchester Street, the third (and final) Ronald J. Cooke novel. Who published this much-anticipated work? A vanity press located in Cornwall, Ontario.

While I expect that Cooke sold at least a few short stories in his time, I've come across only one: "Beginner's Luck", which was appeared in the August 1950 edition of Atlantic Guardian:

The wordsmith wrote several pieces for this self-described "Magazine of Newfoundland", most having to do with those who'd achieved success far from its shores. Makes sense – owned by a Montreal company, Atlantic Guardian was run out of offices on Toronto's Bay Street. The July 1950 issue, which would have hit news stands at about the same time as The Mayor of Côte St. Paul, contains an all too clever little piece on Cooke by Associate Editor Brian Cahill.*

That lady with the gams and the megaphone is Canada's Sweetheart Barbara Ann Scott, by the way.

Never mind, here's Cahill:

An inside joke certain to send subscribers scratching their heads, it's based on the idea that Cooke was well on his way in book-writin'. And why not? The House on Craig Street was published in 1949, The Mayor of Côte St. Paul followed in 1950. However, eight years passed before the next Cooke book – a tale for children titled Algonquin Adventure (Ryerson, 1958). An even larger gap followed, only to be broken in 1979 by How to Write & Sell Travel Articles. A self-published guide, at 29 pages it's not quite right to describe it as a book... more a booklet. Others came in rapid succession, all emerging from Cooke's basement in suburban Montreal. My favourite is the suggestively titled 20 Ways to Make Big Money with Your Camera, but most deal with making big bucks through writing: Tips for the Beginner in Self-Publishing & Mail Order! (1980), How to Write & Sell Short Articles (1981), Tips on Writing and Selling Romance Novels (1985), How to Publish & Promote Your Own Writing (1986), Here's How to Write and Sell Features & Fillers to Newspapers and Syndicate Your Own Work, Too (1986), and Self-Publishing and Mail Order Made Easy (1988).

Dave Manley would approve.

* A subject of personal interest, Brian Cahill may or may not have been married to journalist Marion McCormick (even her children aren't sure) the second wife of John Glassco.

Related posts:

A Blockhead Tries Writing for Money

Write Short Stories the Dave Manley Way!

Words of Hate for Maria Monk

Maria Monk was born 195 years ago today in Dorchester, Lower Canada (now Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec). The "Awful Disclosures" published under her name were just one awful part of an awful life that ended tragically in a New York City prison thirty-two years later. Neither the date of her death, nor her place of burial were recorded, but this didn't stop poet John J. MacDonald (a/k/a James MacRae) from putting poison pen to paper. From his self-published Poems of J. J. MacDonald, a Native of County Glengarry (c. 1877):

EPITAPH FOR MARIA MONK

Whoever ye are by this tomb that shall go,
Beware lest ye tread on the filth that’s below,
For under this monument lowly are laid
The mortal remains of a comical jade.

Ye swine that by accident hither come round,
Refrain from disturbing or turning the ground,
Or else you will die from inhaling the air;
Ye feathering songsters, be cautious, take care.

The only exception 'tis proper to make:
That Methodist preachers full freedom may take,
For they loved and accompanied her while she lived,
And from them she special attention received.

In actuality, it wasn't "Methodist preachers", but Presbyterian clergymen who used poor Maria in creating the hoax. There is a difference.

An early, hand-tinted photograph of St Marys, Ontario showing MacDonald's church, Holy Name of Mary (right) and one of the town's two Presbyterian churches (left).

Related posts:

Maria Monk's Immortal Book

Pornography of the Puritan

Maria Monk and the Kennedy Campaign

The Squire Hardman Hoax: Naughtiness Abounds

Squire Hardman

George Colman [pseud. John Glassco]

[Foster, QC]: Pastime Press, 1966

Squire Hardman ranks as John Glassco's most accomplished, audacious and outrageous hoax. It's also by far the least common of his books – fifty copies – which pretty much explains why it has received so little attention. Infamous, yet unknown, like the very best literary hoaxes the work's history is as complex as it is entertaining.

At 1320-lines, Squire Hardman is one of the very few poems that Glassco wrote with any ease – but then, he rarely struggled when writing pornography. His inspiration was The Rodiad, a flagellantine fantasy in verse that is ascribed erroneously to the nearly-forgotten English playwright George Coleman the Younger. Glassco's Squire Hardman is similar in style and theme, though it does depart in one important manner; where in The Rodiad the flagellator is a man, the hand wielding the whip in Squire Hardman belongs to a woman. Here Glassco's own fantasies and desires hold sway.

Squire Hardman would be Glassco's only self-published book. In 1966, fourteen years after composition, he hired a printer in Waterloo, Quebec to produce the fifty, along with a handbill offering the book at ten dollars, postage-paid. This advertisement, describing Squire Hardman as “unquestionably the most brilliant flagellantine poem ever written", was subsequently mailed to academic institutions in Canada and the United States.

As he had in composing the poem, Glassco went to great lengths to mimic the early nineteenth-century style that had been employed in The Rodiad, right down to the title page. He was justifiably proud, writing poet Daryl Hine: “The introduction is in my best dated and documented style of Hoaxery; the nice title-page, decorations, layout are all mine too; I even stuck the labels on the covers."

Central to the hoax was a five-page Introduction, written by Glassco, in which he discusses Colman while comparing and contrasting The Rodiad and Squire Hardman:

The truth is that the two poems can be ascribed to Colman on the basis of internal evidence alone; and strong as this is, it is not really conclusive. All that can be affirmed with certainty is that both poems are by the same hand, and that their brilliance cannot lower the reputation of a writer who usually compounded coarseness with the graver faults of hypocrisy and dullness – from both of which these two poems are at any rate free.

In this mischievous bit of prose, Glassco feigns wonder that The Rodiad has been "reprinted many times”, while its "companion piece", Squire Hardman has been all but ignored. The hoaxter himself considered reprinting, even going so far as to commission illustrations from Philip Core (then a 15-year-old schoolboy). However, the idea was abandoned and the artwork was relegated to a brown paper envelope. A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of Glassco, features one of Core's previously unpublished illustrations.

Object: A well-constructed 68-page book with grey card stock cover. Issued in an edition of fifty copies, each is numbered in Glassco's hand.

Access: Fifteen copies are held by libraries in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. The remaining 35 are, presumably, in private hands. My copy was purchased twenty-two years ago for US$100 from a New York bookseller – I've not seen a single copy for sale since.

Though Squire Hardman has never been reprinted on its own, the poem is currently available alongside The Rodiad, "Punishment Day", "I Never Saw Her Coming" and "The Nursery Tea" in an anthology titled Punitive Poetry. The publisher, AKS Books of Bexhill-on-Sea, Essex, also sells Glassco's other flagellantine classic The English Governess. Both are published without the permission of the author's estate. Very naughty.

Cross-posted – with minor variations – at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

Global Warming as Nationalist Dream

Erres boréales

Florent Laurin [pseud. Armand Grenier]

[Montreal]: [Ducharme], 1944

221 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.

Horace Brown: Saturday Matinee

The first book to appear under his own name, Horace Brown's Whispering City is the rarest of things: a novelization of a Canadian feature film. The movie itself has shriveled to a footnote today, but in 1947, the year of its release, it was a very big deal. Shot twice – once in French, once in English – for a few months it looked to be the first fruit of a vibrant post-war Canadian film industry. Of course, all died on the vine. I expect the reason had much to do with money, though I blame Jack Valenti.

Whispering City is a pretty good little movie, a fine example film noir. Set in Quebec City, predating Hitchcock's I Confess by some seven years, it tells the story of pretty Mary Roberts, an intrepid lady reporter who gets caught up in a decades-old murder. Corruption, madness, suicide... it's all good fun, though the ending is so rushed that you'd almost think director Fyodor Otsep was counting each frame before he ran out of film.

Globe and Mail film critic Roly Young was amongst the greatest champions of Whispering City, giving the movie four stars (just half a star less than La Forteresse, the French-language version). It was, he wrote, "first-rate motion picture fare, and a pleasant augury for the future of Canadian-made films."

Over six decades later, it's easy enough to judge for ourselves; the entire film has been posted on YouTube:

Just how closely Horace Brown sticks to the screenplay, how adept an adaptor he was, I cannot say. I've not read his Whispering City, and know of only two extant copies: one held by the University of Calgary's Special Collections, the other belonging to bowdler of Fly-by-night (who kindly provided the image above).

Whispering City was the only original title produced Brown's own Global Publishing Company, a short-lived venture that produced a handful of movie tie-in editions (like Great Expectations and Henry V) and the two-issue Original Detective Stories.

Horace Brown died in 1996 at the grand old age of 88. The Globe and Mail provided no obituary, which doesn't seem at all right when one considers his twelve years of service as a Toronto city alderman. In this role, he provided a great deal of copy for the newspaper, including this front page story from 14 March 1972:

I don't see that the Globe and Mail or anyone else paid much attention to Brown's novels. I'm inclined to believe that more has been written this past week here and at Fly-by-night – and, by remarkable coincidence, at Mystery File – than has appeared in the last sixty-five years.

Is it time more attention was paid? Don't think so, but I will raise my glass to a hardworking man, a writer who left behind a number of CanLit curiosities.

Related posts:

Quebec City Noir

Horace Brown: From Penthouse to Pavement

Horace Brown: Fritzi in Flight or a Coincidence