Elinor Glyn's Christmas Ghost Story (and others)

The Contrast and Other Stories
Elinor Glyn
London: Duckworth, 1913
312 pages

As is typical of short story collections, this book is overshadowed by the author's longer works. The Contrast and Other Stories was published in the very same year as Glyn's novels The Sequence and The Point of View. Of these, the former, a story of the romance between "tall, stern and cynical" Sir Hugh Dremont and "pale, sensitive and spiritual" Guinevere, is the more notable for having earned a spot sixty-five years later as volume 17 in Barbara Cartland's Library of Love.

Those character descriptions of Sir Hugh Dremont and Guinevere come from Dame Barbara herself. I must read it, if only to learn Guinevere's surname.

The Point of View failed to reach quite that height, but it has an equally interesting publishing history. The novel was first published from start to finish in the February 1913 number of Ainslee's Magazine. Later that same year, it appeared as a book in the United States, though not in the United Kingdom. My first American edition was purchased three years ago for fifty cents .

New York: Appleton, 1913

The Point of View is one of five "stories" in The Contrast and Other Stories. Spanning 184 of the collection's 312 pages, it cannot help but dominate.

Frontispiece to the Appleton edition.

The heroine of the novel – again, it is a novel – is  21-year-old Stella Rawson, a pretty brown-eyed orphan who was raised by her uncle and aunt, Canon and the Honourable Mrs Ebly. The spring of 1913 finds the three visiting Rome. While dining at the restaurant of the Grand Hotel they notice Count Roumovsky. He's hard to miss. The count dresses in such fine clothes and wears such a slim wristwatch that the Canon and the Honourable Mrs. Ebly take offense. And then there's his hair:

It seemed incredible that such an almost grotesque arrangement of coiffure should adorn the head of a man in modern evening dress. It should have been on some Byzantine saint. However, there he was, and entirely unconcerned at the effect he was producing.

By all appearances, Roumovsky is oblivious to the Eblys' attentions, Stella's included, but when alone with her the following morning he makes his move in arranging an afternoon tryst, which is followed by another, and an evening encounter in which he proposes marriage. Stella is hot for the Russian dandy, but is already betrothed to Reverend Eustace Medlicott, a High Church Anglican who is prepared to leave his life of celibacy. 

It pains me to write that 'The Point of View' is the best "story" in the collection, because I really wanted to focus on 'The Irtonwood Ghost;' Canadian Christmas ghost stories being so uncommon.

Can 'The Irtonwood Ghost' be considered in any way Canadian? I say yes. Elinor Glyn came to Canada at two months of age and left as a nine-year-old. Those are formative years, right?

First published in the 1911 Christmas Issue of Pearson's, 'The Irtonwood Ghost' is the second longest piece in The Contrast and Other Stories. It's on par with the four others in that it is neither more nor less memorable. I read it two weekends back and can't quite recall what it was all about. From what I do remember, it concerns graceful young widow Esther Charters who has been invited to spend Christmas at Irtonwood Manor, located somewhere in the English countryside. Its a good break from her worries, which centre on a century-old marriage certificate that needs be found to secure the property she has inherited from her late husband. Unbeknownst to her, there is an enemy, Ambrose Duval, amongst the other guests. Duval has been on the hunt for the very same certificate, but only so that he might destroy it. The supernatural comes into play in the form of haunting dreams in which premonition plays a part. Oh, and there is a ghost.

'The Contrast' is an odd choice for the title tale in that it is the weakest of the five stories. Irish songbird Pauline is being strung along by a ne'er-do-well while a devoted man, the better in every way, pines from the wings.

In 'Her Advice,' a young wife chooses to confront an older femme fatale whom she believes is threatening her marriage, and instead comes away with advice on how to tend the flames of desire.

The closer, 'Fragments,' concerns an unnamed woman married to Ernest, a man made invalid by war. It is either Glyn at her most experimental or nothing more than notes being passed off as a short story.

I think 'Fragments' is the only one of the five to have a sad ending, though I may be wrong. In the course of its twenty pages, the wife falls in love with able-bodied landowner and dog breeder Sir John Harrington, and he with her. Neither act on that love out of deference to Ernest. The story ends with the wife arriving home one day to find her husband dead. Could it too be a happy ending? After all, Ernest is no longer suffering, and his wife is now free to be with Sir John.

That the ending is so very predictable reflects on Glyn's chief flaw as a storyteller. Once set in motion, her plots follow the simplest course toward a happy conclusion. There is conflict to be sure, as expected with matters of the heart, but there are no obstacles of any significance.

Each story ends with every character happy or at the very least satisfied, the exception being Ambrose Duval of 'The Irtonwood Ghost.' Esther Charters ends up with the lost marriage certificate, not him. On the other hand, Duval is allowed to escape, which must have made him happy.

Even Eustace Medlicott of The Point of View is happy, despite losing his charming fiancée to a Russian count. Bonus: Reverend Medlicott is free to maintain his life of celibacy.

The Point of View ends with the marriage of Stella and Count Roumovsky, but would they live happily ever after? After all, their whirlwind romance takes place in the spring of 1913, a mere fourteen months before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. I wonder how they fared once the Bolsheviks took power.

Soon to become ghosts themselves, perhaps.

Object: Once part of the Hammersmith Public Libraries, it isn't nearly so scarred as one might expect.

At some point it belonged to someone named O. Farnworth.

I purchased this copy, a first edition, earlier this year from an Edinburgh bookseller. Price: £15.

Access: A Quebec bookseller is offering a "Very Good" copy of the Duckworth edition for US$30.00, while another in New York State has listed the same in perhaps lesser condition at US$65.00. Both have blue boards, which I can only assume is a variant.

The only other edition of which I am aware is the Tauchnitz, published in Leipzig in 1913. Just one copy is listed for sale online; this by an Ottawa bookseller:

Half Bound. Condition: VG. 271 pages in very good, clean condition; edges a little yellowed. Marbled endpapers. Half bound with brown leather over marbled boards. Gilt titles and decoration on the spine. Light scuffing on the leather and boards. Edges rubbed. Corners not bumped. VG Size: 4 1/2 x 6 1/2.

Sounds intriguing. 

The Duckworth edition can. be read online here thanks to the Internet Archive.

The Point of View was published in 1913 by Applewood and Authors' Press, then never again. As I write, two online booksellers are offering jacketless copies of the latter online at US$4.50 and US$5.00, but at US$10.00, the copy to buy is this Appleton first:

Sure, that's more than 50¢, but it has a dust jacket. And doesn't it sound spicy?

Related posts:

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn
Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's
Guelph: City of Galt, Gay, Glyn, Graves, and Girdles
Three Weeks a Lady

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images

Handled by the Saturday Evening Post

'Woman-handled'
Arthur Stringer
The Saturday Evening Post, volume  197, issue 44

May 2, 1925

A critic writes: "In your New Year's Day post you urged readers to start off 2024 with Arthur Stringer. It's now fall and you haven't reviewed any book by Stringer. Have you even read one?"

I haven't, but smarting from the comment I've since tackled this short story. I'd always meant to read "Woman-handled" because of "Manhandled," a longer Stringer story that appeared in the Post the previous year (11 March - 29 March, 1924). It was brought to the screen by Paramount. Gloria Swanson played the lead.

The James H. Crank illustration the Saturday Evening Post chose to introduce "Woman-handled" is an odd in that it depicts the climax. 

The opening scene is urban. It's set in New York's Waldorf Astoria, where novelist Baran Bowerman, author of The Passionate Year, has just concluded the third of three talks to various ladies social groups. Amongst the rapt-eyed, fawning female readers he encounters sporty young horsewoman Glenna van Gelder, who ribs him for accepting these sorts of engagements with their pink carnations, hothouse violets, and macaroons.

"Why you're eating it up!" she says. "You love it! And if I don’t get out of the way of this adoring army they're going to trample me down.”

Baran Bowerman is drawn to Glenna van Gelder. The attraction has nothing to do with alliteration, rather that she is so different than the delicate women who typically attend his talks. Later, whilst walking down Fifth Avenue, Glenna's ribbing turns to mockery:

"You’re smothered in women... You're drowned in them. You’re like that Duke of Clarence who tumbled right into his vat of wine. You're so tangled up with petticoats you can’t breathe.”
   The handsome young author laughed, but his laugh was a defensive one. “Oh, I can still breathe,’’ he protested, with barricading lightness. ‘‘And there’s always safety, remember, in numbers.”
   “Is there?” asked the solemn-eyed girl at his side. “Isn’t there danger of getting your soul clogged up with talcum powder?”
   “I can’t see that it’s left any knock in the engine,” averred the pink-cheeked author. "I still have my two- hour work-out with my trainer every day.”
   “I know stout ladies who do the same.”

She later warns Baran that he's being "effeminized without knowing it."

From this point on Stringer's story becomes rather silly. The next morning they meet in Central Park, where Baran seeks to demonstrate his non-existent equestrian skills. This in turn leads to fisticuffs – not with Glenna van Gelder, you understand, rather with her riding partner. The novelist next makes for the west in order to toughen himself up. Interestingly, it is the Canadian west, not the American. More interesting still, is the arrival of a "movin' picture outfit," making a western.

My critic, a friend, will be pleased to learn that I've invested a further fifty-five minutes of life viewing Womanhandled, the Hollywood adaptation of "Woman-handled."

It was worth it.

More in next week's post.

Related post:

Gloria Gets Groped 

Abraham's Bosom and the Great Change of Life

Abraham's Bosom
Basil King
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918
54 pages

A short story masquerading as a novella, Abraham's Bosom first appeared in the March 30, 1918 edition of The Saturday Evening Post. Its publication nearly coincided with Germany's devastating spring offensive, which resulted in more than 862,000 Allied dead and wounded. 

Abraham's Bosom begins in a doctor's office. Berkley Noone, first rector of St Thomas, is told that he is suffering from the very same rare disease that had afflicted organist Ned Angel. A "near-sighted fellow with a limp," Angel had trained the choir of St Thomas for forty years – "without salary" – only to be dismissed by Noone after sharing his diagnosis.

Abraham's Bosom frontispiece.

The organist died two months later.

After receiving his own diagnosis, Noone walks about the city a bit before taking to his death bed. As he lies dying, the reverend reflects upon on his marriage and children. Wife Emily hovers about, propping him up in what she insists are the most comfortable positions. Their five children, whom he considers disappointments, visit from time to time. All are present during his final moments as the reverend gazes somewhat vacantly at an engraving of his favourite painting, William Homan Hunt's The Light of the World. His eyes see the lantern glowing brighter and brighter until it outshines the afternoon sun.

It takes time for Noone to recognize his passing. He'd expected an instant in which his soul would "tear its way out of his body and he should be thrust, a naked, quivering bundle of spiritual nerves, before angels and archangels and principalities and powers, and a God whose first question would be that which was put to Cain: "What hast thou done?"

Instead, he's met by Ned Angel.

As a story, Abraham's Bosom is much shorter than it appears. The diagnosis, wandering, and death bed scenes are brief; the better part of the book involves theological discussion as Angel sets Noone straight on things theosophical and what the reverend may expect now that he has passed through the "great change." It was followed six months later by King's far superior Going West, which concerns a ghostly journey shared by German and American soldiers who have killed each another in battle. 

Both are products of the author's growing interest in spiritualism, sown in Flanders and other bloody fields. In this respect, he was far from alone amongst bestselling authors – Arthur Conan Doyle, for example – but he did stand out as a popular Anglican minister who challenged church doctrine. Reverend King did not believe in death, rather the continuance of life. In Reverend Noone's case, as with everyone, there is no sudden tearing of the soul from the body, rather a gentle imperceptible "great change."

That term – "great change" – features three times in the text, and on the first of three different dust jackets Harper used to sell book (above). I suspect King himself wrote its words. Note the second paragraph:

This story will bring Comfort and Consolation to many who are in trouble of mind about the Hereafter.

In the Hereafter, as King believes it to be, those who have passed through this great change see things with different eyes. Berkley Noone sees his wife and children as themselves but themselves glorified:

Emily was again the dryad of their youthful days; but a dryad with ways of light and tenderness he had never known her to possess. Each of the children was bathed in the same beautifying radiance. He knew them – and yet he didn't know them. All he could affirm of them exactly was that his doubts and worryings and disappointments on account of them were past. He felt what Angel had just been telling him, that he was waking from some troubled dream on their behalf.

Noone's familial relationships will continue. As with the soldiers in Going West, he will be able to visit and even communicate. 

If anything, Reverend King's The Abolishing of Death (1919), an account of his experiences communicating with nineteenth-century chemist Henry Talbot – but not really – would've brought further comfort and consolation to the greiving.

Knowing the date of composition, some nine months before the Armistice, what struck me most about Abraham's Bosom is its disconnect from the Great War.  The conflict, which plays such a part in his novels  The High Heart (1917), Going West (1918), The Thread of Flame (1920), The Empty Sack (1921) is not so much as mentioned. Or might it be that the allusion is subtle? Here's Ned Angel:

"How are the Children of Dust making use of the knowledge they've gained during the last fifty years of their counting? Is it to help one another? Is it to benefit themselves? Is it to make the world happier, or more peaceful, or more prosperous? Haven't they taken all their new resources, all their increased facilities, all their approximations to Truth, all their approaches to God – the things which belonged to their peace, as Jesus of Nazareth called them – and made them instruments of mutual destruction? Aren't they straining their ingenuity to devise undreamed-of methods for doing one another harm?''

I write this nine days short of the 105th anniversary of that Armistice. 

Object and Access: My copy, which is in pretty rotten shape, was purchased seven years ago as one title in a box containing twenty or thirty old Canadian books. Price: $20.

The frontispiece featuring afflicted organist Ned Angel is one of four Walter H. Everett illustrations commissioned for The Saturday Evening Post. Interestingly, no matter the placing, all depict scenes and from the first third of the story. This image, with caption from the opening pages of the story, appears at on the final page of its Post debut:

The "timid, wild-eyed nymph of a thing who had incarnated for him all that was poetry in the year when he was twenty-eight" is Reverend Noon's wife. She's a cutie!

Online booksellers list copies beginning at five American dollars, but they'll demand a further US$30 or US$35 for shipping. Some have dust jackets, some do not. The one you want to buy is offered by a Massachusetts bookseller who promises an inscribed copy at US$75.

All claim to be offering the first edition, but as I've discovered, there are at least three variants.

Related posts:

Reverend King's Great War Novelette
Basil King's Seen and Unseen World
The Mission of Sex: Canadians, Do Your Duty!
A Man Forgets His Identity (but not his manners)

The Great Canadian Great Post-War Novel?
The Retired Reverend King on Abolishing Death

One Non Blonde

Incendiary Blonde
Keith Edgar
Toronto: National Publishing, 1945
126 pages

When is a blonde not a blonde? When is a novel not a novel? Is a novel that is not a novel a series of novelettes? These questions weighed as I made my way through Keith Edgar's Incendiary Blonde, sure to be this year's most baffling read. Consider the title page:

'The Case of the Incendiary Blonde' has as its hero, lanky Star-Advertizer photographer George MacGregor. He's first seen leaning against a pillar in Grand Central Station, having fallen asleep whilst waiting to snap Hollywood heartthrob Yvonne La Flame. "We got to get some glammer shots of dis skoit," says a competing shutterbug. "She's got classy gams."

Indeed! Yvonne has legs and she knows how to use them, "perched on a baggage truck to coyly display the 'classy gams.'"

MacGregor wakes up in time to get the pics, but as he makes to return to the Star-Advertizer darkroom he's canoodled and smooched by a "red-haired girl" with "auburn curls." She whisks our hero into a cab, tells him she is a German spy on the run from G-men, and makes him take her to his uptown apartment. Once there, our hero gives her a good sound spanking.

Classic Edgar, it continues apace, adding a Nazi cabbie, an ineffective butler, a sinister trading company, and a Lone Ranger Cap Pistol into the mix. My only complaint is that it's all over too fast. At under seventeen thousand words, 'The Case of the Incendiary Blonde' is not a novel – not even a 20th-century novel. The publisher's note fails to clarify: 

MacGregor's adventure is the first and longest of what the cover sells as "STORIES OF MYSTERY & CRIME." Most of the remaining seven are bland retellings of true crime cases.

How bland? Here's a paragraph from 'Murder on the Steamer "Okanagan",' which begins with the 1912 manhunt for Walter Boyd James, a North Dakotan who'd held up a Kelowna general store:

At Penticton, 40 miles away, Provincial Const. Geoffrey H. Aston was stationed. Aston, a soldierly figure who had served in the 17th Lancers and the North West Mounted Police, had received a description of the bandit from Tooth, and immediately acquainted Penticton's Chief of Police, Michael Roche, with details of the Kelowna crime.

'Who Murdered Laura Kruse?' focusses on the still unsolved 1937 killing of a Minneapolis beauty school student. It features this passage:

Witnesses were called to review the case from all angles. They included Claussen, the milkman, Hanson, the motorman, F,W. Perlich, who found the body, M.T. Silvertsen, who found the personal effects, Mrs. Christ Larson [sic], near whose home the murder was believed to have been committed, Mrs. Carl Lind, who saw the flash of light as a car was leaving the alley, Arthur Kruse, brother of the girl, Sheriff Hannes Rykema of Pine County, Irene Chimelski, a friend of Miss Kruse, Ray Harrington, police identification officer, Dr. McCartney, Dr. Seashore, Detective Adam Smith, Arthur Olyson, Walter Hansford, John Anderson, morgue keeper, and Capt. Arnold Neitzel of the 6th precinct police station. 

Still awake?

When it comes to non-fiction, Edgar isn't much of a storyteller. To his credit, he does stick to facts, and makes only the occasional error. For example, in 'Drink, the Devil, and the Third Degree,' concerning the 1882 murder of Louis Hanier, the victim is a "French wine merchant" when in reality he was a Hell's Kitchen saloonkeeper. The case is broken by Thomas Byrnes, whom Edgar describes, unimaginatively, as "a real-life Sherlock Holmes."

Incendiary Blonde follows I Hate You to Death (1944) and Arctic Rendez-vous (1949) as my third Edgar. Both are quirky, fanciful, strange, perverse, titillating, and never dull.

"Do you expect me to believe this absurd story?" the main baddy asks MacGregor at the climax of 'The Case of the Incendiary Blonde.' Absurdity is at the heart of Edgar's writing (see: 'The Wonderful World of Mortimer Tombs'). Sadly, it comes and goes with the first "novelette."

At 126 pages, Incendiary Blonde should've been a quick read, but wasn't. It took a long time to tackle; much more than it was worth. 

It's all a damn shame. I was really looking forward to it. The cover art promised the craziest Edgar book yet! The blonde! The devil! The four floating heads! Sadly, none of these feature in the book. I guess I'll never know the significance of the aqua blotch on the lower right-hand corner.

You can't judge a book by its cover, but you sure can sell it. That said, I think Incendiary Redhead is a much more exciting title.

Trivia: Incendiary Blonde was published the same year as a Hollywood film with the same title. It stars Betty Hutton as Texas Guinan, "Queen of the Night Clubs." I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest this is coincidence.

Object and Access: A cheap digest-sized paperback with thin glossy covers, it bears the swan logo of F.E. Howard, the publisher of Edgar's previous books. My copy appears to have been distributed in the U.K. by the now-defunct Rolls House Publishing Company.

Of interest is this notice on the interior cover:

I don't buy it. Is this the look of a layout resulting from space constraints?

Pages 86 and 87.

My copy of Incendiary Blonde was purchased earlier this year from a Lincolnshire bookseller. Price: £20.00. The very same bookseller is right now offering another copy, in similar condition to mine, at the very same price! 

There is only one other copy listed online. Also in similar condition, it's offered by another UK bookseller at £15.00. Seems a bargain until one reads the shipping cost: C$60.25.

You know which copy to purchase.

Incendiary Blonde can be found at the British Library.

That's it.

Not even Library and Archives Canada has a copy.

Related posts:

A Publisher's Worst Book?

'Publisher Dies in Orgy of Hate'

The Wonderful World of Mortimer Tombs
Of Whips, Veins, and a Bottomless Pool of Warmth
A Femme Fatale in the Frozen North
Harlequin Blondes: Terror Struck Them Dumb

That Only a Mother: The Best of the Best

'That Only a Mother'
The Best of Judith Merril
Judith Merril
New York: Warner, 1976

254 pages

The Best of Judith Merril sees an anthologist anthologized. Consisting of nine short stories and two poems, the cover suggests that the selection was made by Merril herself; friend Virginia Kidd provides the introduction and notes.

The first story is "That Only a Mother." Judith Merril's greatest hit. By my count, it has appeared in more than three dozen anthologies. Curiously, its status is downplayed in Kidd's short introductory note:  

A buried newspaper item on Army denial and post-Hiroshima rumors engendered Merril's first sf story. ("Even in those days some of us automatically read certain kinds of official U.S. releases backwards.") John Campbell bought it for Astounding — October, 1948.

In fact, the story first appeared in the magazine's June issue.

In 1948, Merril herself was like something out of science fiction. She was the only woman included in the the June issue. I've gone through dozens of previous issues without finding another female contributor. Here's how Astounding – more accurately,  Astounding Science Fiction - presented Merril's story:

From start to finish, 'That Only a Mother' is an uncomfortable read. It begins with main character Margaret reaching across her bed to "where Hank should have been." Husband Hank has been absent many months. There's a war going on. Hank's not cannon fodder; he's a cog in the military industrial complex. 

Margaret is pregnant. Her mother sends letters via "facsimile machine" expressing concern: "I'm thrilled, of course, but, well, one hates to mention theses things, but are you certain the doctor was right? Hank's been around all that uranium or whatever it is all these years..."

Margaret's mother's worries are understandable. The year is 1953 and malformed infants are an issue. Infanticide is common. Margaret and Hank's baby arrives early. The hospital assures that all is well, though staff won't let the mother or father see their child. Margaret and Hank name her Harriette.

Margaret's mother never visits; she makes no effort to see her grandchild. Hank isn't granted leave until ten months after the baby's birth, by which time she speaks fluently and has begun questioning her mother.

Margaret, Hank, and Harriett form a nuclear family, but not as Bronisław Malinowski imagined.

I read the other stories and poems in The Best of Judith Merril, but not one was nearly so good as this. 

If you have nothing more than a half-hour to spare, 'That Only a Mother' is the story for you.

If you have a few hours, the best of Judith Merril is Shadow on the Hearth, her first novel. 

It too is about a mother.

Object: A mass market paperback original. The text is followed by a two-page advert for twenty-four other Warner science fiction, including The Frankenstein Factory, The Dracula Tape, When Worlds Collide, and After Worlds Collide (each twice mentioned).

American illustrator Gray Morrow, whom I remember as a co-creator of Man-Thing, provided the cover art. Much as I admire the artist's technique, I can't help but note that it in no way reflects the contents.

Access: The Toronto Public Library, which houses the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, has a copy. The book can also be found at Library and Archives Canada and in nine of our academic libraries. 

I count two printings, which is not to suggest that it can be found on the cheap. A Michigan bookseller offers a copy online at US$6.00, but wants US$25.00 for postage and handling. Prices really take off after that. In the stratosphere, you'll find a US$107.50 copy requiring US$33.00 shipping.

Related posts:

A Nuclear Family Nightmare

A Motorola TV Hour Nightmare

Ten Kicks at the Can for A.E. van Vogt

Destination: Universe
A.E. van Vogt
New York: Signet, 1958

160 pages

I began this book wondering if I hadn't been too hard on A.E. van Vogt. Science fiction was an adolescent passion, and like so many abandoned in adulthood – superhero comics being the prime example – I can be overly critical.

I didn't read van Vogt as a kid; had I known he was Canadian I would've. In middle age, his novel The House That Stood Still (1950) served as my introduction. It begins well, reading like a decent pulp thriller, but things take an abrupt turn, the writing changes, and then comes a second turn, more changes, and near complete disintegration. I agree with Fletcher Pratt, who wrote in the 17 December 1950 New York Times that "it is frequently impossible to understand precisely what is going on."

And Pratt liked the novel.

I was similarly baffled, was less impressed, and even more confused by his other 1950 "novel" Masters of Time, my second van Vogt. 

A decade passed. I felt no urge to give van Vogt another try, which is not to say that I wasn't curious. Surely he couldn't be so bad a writer as all that; after all, the man was a graduate of the Palmer Institute of Authorship.

Popular Mechanics, June 1949

And so in March, I made a commitment to read van Vogt's short story collection Destination: Universe before year's end.

A master of time myself, I finished with three weeks to spare.

Destination: Universe proved to be one of 2022's weakest books, but was not nearly so difficult to get through as Jeann Beattie's Blaze of Noon or Mrs Savigny's A Romance of Toronto. Most of its ten stories get off to a running start, propelling the reader for at least a couple of pages. But they soon become bogged down in a problem faced by the protagonist and his various attempts to find a solution. There's a good amount of repetition, explanation, and description of some future technology or other.

'Enchanted Village' concerns the first landing on Mars – a crash, really – which leaves one lone survivor who stumbles upon an uninhabited village that attempts to reconfigures itself to his needs. The visitor is repeatedly frustrated by his inability to communicate with his new home. I found the story memorable for the unnecessary twist in the penultimate paragraph.

'A Can of Paint,' provided a welcome touch of humour. In this story, space explorer Kilgour defies Earth's laws in voyaging to Venus, thus becoming the first human to visit the planet. He emerges from his cigar-shaped spaceship into a field of long green grass,  breathing in the air, "tinglingly sweet and fresh and warm." and almost immediately spies a cube – note: not "can" – containing paint. It spreads over his body, endangering his life as he races against time to find a means of removing it.

The 1953 first Signet edition.

Of the ten, the stand out story is the first, 'Far Centaurus.' Its plot centres on a five hundred year voyage to Alpha Centauri undertaken by acquaintances and friends Pelham, Blake, Renfrew, and narrator Bill. Pelham, has invented a drug, Eternity, which enables humans to live in non-degenerative hibernation for decades on end. Throughout the centuries, the four return to consciousness, but only briefly and never at the same time. Bill, the first to emerge, finds Pelham's decomposing corpse. On his second awakening, 150 years later, he finds a note from Blake expressing concern about Renfrew's mental health. Bill is awoken a third time by an alarm. Through viewers, he sees another spaceship on fire, but can do nothing to help, and so takes another hit of Eternity. Bill awakens for the fifth time as the spaceship is reaching its destination, only to discover that the planet they'd thought might be habitable had been settled centuries earlier. Travel between Earth an Alpha Centauri now takes three hours.

Renfrew loses his mind and van Vogt loses his way.

Of the ending, Colin Wilson wrote that van Vogt had "no idea of how to finish his story." 

I suggest that van Vogt had no idea of how to finish any story. The main thing I've learned in reading the man is that he could have a good idea for a beginning, and might even craft a pretty good middle, but that is it.  Am I wrong? I ask because I have only twelve examples to go on.

I'm not interested in reading a thirteenth.

Bloomer:

"He turned. His horny body towered above the man."

Trivia: In 2004, sixty years after it was first published in the pages of Astounding Stories, 'A Can of Paint' was adapted to the screen in a 24-minute short. 

 

Object and Access: The third Signet printing, my copy, a gift from a friend, is a bit worse for wear. The Stanley Meltzoff cover illustration imagines a scene not found in the book. 

Within the pages of my copy I found this bookmark for Canadian Children's Literature. It appears to date from 1997.

A receipt suggests that it was once purchased for $3.50 at Ottawa's Book Bazaar.

The collection was first published by Pellegrini & Cudahy in 1952 as Destination: Universe! Signet dropped the exclamation mark for this printing. There have been many other editions from many other publishers over the years, but as far as I can determine the collection is currently out of print.

Used copies are numerous and cheap.

Destination: Universe! has been translated into French (Destination univers), Italian (Destinazione universo), Romanian (Destinat̨ia univers), and Swedish (Destination universum).

Related posts:

The Dustiest Bookcase: V is for van Vogt
SF, not S/M

Wasting Time With A.E. van Vogt

The Dominatrix of Time (and other fantasies)

The Homoerotic A.E. van Vogt

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.

Related post:

Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?

Professor Leacock Sets the Stage

Shorter Moore

Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories
Brian Moore
[Belfast]: Turnpike, 2020
102 pages

Brian Moore was first and foremost a novelist. He received Governor General's Awards for The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Great Victorian Collection, and was thrice nominated for the Booker. Dear Departed is the first collection of his short stories. Its appearance last year was so late in coming as to be unexpected. The publisher added to the surprise; there was a time in this country when a collection of Moore stories would have been published by McClelland & Stewart or Knopf Canada.

"Grieve for the Dear Departed," lends the collection its name. It was first published alongside Hemingway, Wilder, Frost, Thurber, and Dinesen in the November 1957 centenary edition of The Atlantic. In the story, a recently widowed woman grieves, but the dear departed of the title isn't so much the husband as the son who had left Ireland for a new life in the New World.

The longest and best of these short stories, "Uncle T," is one Moore salvaged and reworked from the aborted novel that was to have followed Judith Hearne. Vincent Bishop, newly married to Barbara, gazes out of their hotel room overlooking Times Square. The two met in Canada, to which he had fled from a future teaching secondary school in an Ulster town, "forty lumps of boys waiting at forty desks, rain on the windowpanes, two local cinemas, a dance on Saturday nights."

As a refuge, Canada was as good as anywhere. Vincent had applied for work as a clerk in the Shan State, a shipping aide in Takoradi, a plantation overseer in British Guiana, ending up teaching secondary school in Toronto. There's unstated irony in this.

Vincent is convinced Toronto is but a stop on the way to much greater things, and has convinced his bride as much. Uncle Turlough, whom he has yet to meet, has offered him a senior position with his New York publishing house.

There are elements of autobiography in these stories, particularly in the troubled relationships between fathers and sons. Moore described "A Vocation," the first story in the collection, as "about the only thing I can consciously remember writing about my early childhood.

Its first two sentences.

 In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was "No."

Biographer Denis Sampson tells us that "Off the Track," easily the darkest of these stories, reflects a holiday Moore and his first wife took to Haiti. "Hearts and Flowers," easily the lightest, was surely inspired by Moore's time at the Montreal Gazette. A Christmas story set in the "Old Bowerie Mission" (read: Old Brewery Mission), it's a mystery that it hasn't appeared in any collection of Canadian Yuletide stories.

Moore published only fourteen short stories during his lifetime, eight of which are collected here. Added to the remaining six are unpublished stories found amongst his papers. 

One hopes Turnpike is considering a second volume. The press is doing God's work.

Object and Access: A slim trade-size paperback. This collector placed an overseas order, hoping for a first edition. Instead, I received his:

Still, I was pleased to see it had done so well in such a short time.

McGill University has a copy.