A Man Reaps What He Sows

The Homesteaders: A Novel of the Canadian West
Robert J.C. Stead
Toronto: Musson , 1916
347 pages

The first edition is bound in boards reading The Homesteader when it should be The Homesteaders. The distinction is important, particularly in the early chapters, though it becomes less so as the novel progresses.

The Homesteaders opens in Quebec's Eastern Townships as one-room schoolteacher John Harris watches students scatter at the end of the day. He's soon joined by his fiancée Mary. 

This being 1881, John is expected to support his betrothed, and so has made the decision to give up his paltry teacher's salary and try his hand at farming in Manitoba. The plan, which John has taken care to hide, involves traveling west the next spring, locating a homestead, constructing some sort of shelter, and breaking ground. If all goes well, he'll return for Mary. If not, well, there's aways the year after that.

There's something about Mary in these early pages. Lithe and beautiful, she is not "a daughter of the sturdy backwoods pioneers, bred to hard work in field and barnyard," rather "she was sprung from gentler stock." Mary is also the only character in this novel to demonstrate a sense of humour, as when she ribs John:

“Always at your studies,” she cried, as he sprang eagerly to his feet. “You must be seeking a professorship. But I suppose you have to be always brushing up,” she continued, banteringly. “Your oldest pupil must be—let me see—not less than eight?”

Clever and quick, Mary was onto her fiancé from the start. “I declare, if it isn’t Manitoba!" she says, snatching a map from his hands. "What next? Siberia or Patagonia? I thought you were still in the Eastern Townships.”

Mary insists on accompanying John west, moving up their wedding day in the process. What follows is not an account of their honeymoon, rather descriptions of lengthy train travel to Emerson and an oh-so-slow trek northward to tracts of land Ottawa is offering gratis to men who prove themselves able to establish working farms. The couple's first marital home is a windowless sod shack with a heavy blanket for a door.

These are the novel's most interesting pages, no doubt drawn from Stead's childhood memories and experiences. Born in Ontario's Lanark Highlands, as a toddler Robert, his father (Robert, Sr). and mother (tellingly, Mary) established a Manitoba homestead in the very same year as John and Mary Harris.

Robert J.C. Stead
Bookseller & Stationer, October 1916

The fictional couple's success in meeting the government's terms has to do with hard work, but not necessarily self-sufficiency. Friendships were formed as those cramped railcars made their way across Ontario. Though the homesteaders settle miles away from one another, their struggle is common. The men work together, loaning each other mowers, plows, and hayracks. As for the women:

Mrs. Grant was the proud possessor of a very modern labour- saver in the shape of a clothes-wringer, as a consequence of which wash-day was rotated throughout the community, and it was well known that Mrs. Riles and Mrs. Harris had to do their churning alternately.

Stead takes great care here. This is not drudgery, rather progress, with each couple striving for a better life. The most dramatic pages are set after the first harvest, reaching a climax in the fifth chapter when, during a winter storm, John abducts a drunken doctor to aid with the delivery of Allan, his first child.

cliquez pour agrandir

Moving between chapters five and six can be jarring. Twenty-five years have passed. The sod shack has been replaced by a brick house. Family and farm have expanded with the addition of a second child, Beulah, and many more acres of land. But all this is no way satisfies John:

He saw the light ahead, but it was now a phantom of the imagination. He said, “When I am worth ten thousand I will have reached it”; when he was worth ten thousand he found the faithless light had moved on to twenty-five thousand. He said, “When I am worth twenty-five thousand I will have reached it”; when he was worth twenty-five thousand he saw the glow still ahead, beckoning him on to fifty thousand. It never occurred to him to slacken his pace—to allow his mind a rest from its concentration; if he had paused and looked about he might, even yet, have recognized the distant lighthouse on the reef about the wreck of his ideals. But to stop now might mean losing sight of his goal, and John Harris held nothing in heaven or earth so great as its attainment.

The John of the early chapters has become crude; even his whole manner of speech has changed. Mary too is transformed, but only physically. The years have taken a toll, "the shoulders, in mute testimony to much hard labour of the hands, had drooped forward over the deepening chest; the hair was thinner, and farther back above the forehead, and streaked with grey at the temples; the mouth lacked the rosy sensuousness of youth, and sat now in a mould, half of resolution, half submission."

The community formed a quarter-century earlier in those railcars is already a thing of the past. Though one of the most prosperous homesteaders, John cannot help but compare himself to others. Wanting more, he teams up with neighbouring homesteader Hirim Riles. They plan to go out to Alberta, the new frontier, and procure four or five tracts of free land. John will set up a homestead on the first and Riles will establish another on the second. The third, four and possibly fifth would be worked by men who will be provided grub and a small wage during the three years required to secure titles which would subsequently be be transferred to Harris and Riles:

This was strictly against the law, but the two pioneers felt no sense of crime or shame for their plans, but rather congratulated themselves upon their cunning though by no means original scheme to evade the regulations.

Indeed, by no means an original scheme. There is no way the two men would've succeeded, though the scheme does serve to bring further notice to John's descent from the decent, dedicated Eastern Townships schoolteacher with whom Marys fell in love.

The last fifteen chapters are far less interesting than the first five, in part because there isn't nearly so much about the pioneer experience, and in part because too many of its pages focus on a crime that takes too long to unfold. I suppose there is a lesson to be learned about working with another when committing a crime, but only if one has never heard of the time-worn observation on honour amongst thieves.

What I liked most was Mary leaving John.

Beulah running away was second.

She is in every way her mother's daughter.

Censorship?: Riles reaches Alberta before partner-in-crime Harris. Though a miser, he enters a bar in order to get the lay of the land (no pun intended). What follows is a scene somewhat reminiscent of this 2016 Heritage Minute:

The American in Stead's novel threatens a lumberjack – yes, a lumberjack – for what he perceives as a personal slight.

By far the most superfluous scene in the novel, it is nevertheless interesting for these two instances of... what exactly? Is it censorship? An author well aware of the impermissible?  Or just Stead having some fun?

I leave it for you to judge.

Object: My first edition is printed on paper so acidic that it's a wonder I didn't burn my fingers. It was acquired in 2018 as part of a lot. A few years earlier, I'd purchased a copy of the 1973 University of Toronto Press reissue with introduction by Susan Wood Glicksohn.

Access: A Canadian bestseller, The Homesteaders went through five printings. It was also published in the UK by Unwin (1916) and Hodder & Stoughton (1923). Used copies aren't at all difficult to find online. 

 

The Dodo Press print on demand edition uses a detail of Abraham Louis Buvelot's 1873 painting Tubbutt Homestead in the Bombala district, in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. Two different countries, two different continents, the distance between the Tubbutt and Harris homesteads amounts to roughly 15,000 kilometres. 

The novel is available online here thanks to the Internet Archive.

Related post:

A Man of Peculiar Notions

A Man of Peculiar Notions

Dennison Grant: A Novel of To-Day
Robert Stead
Toronto: Musson, 1920
388 pages

Robert Stead's fourth novel, Dennison Grant follows The Bail Jumper, The Homesteaders, and The Cow Puncher. So, who is Dennison Grant? A cowboy? A cattle rustler? A hired hand? A rodeo clown?

This is not a novel for the impatient. The titular character doesn't appear until the fifty-fifth page. He sticks around for another two before literally riding away. Dennison Grant reappears fifty-four pages later – page 111, for those keeping track – at which point he begins to dominate the narrative.

Grant's first appearance has to do with his work as ranch foreman for a man named Landson. He's been tasked with overseeing the cutting of hay on a vast expanse of what may or may not be Crown land to the east of the Alberta foothills. Y.D., a neighbouring rancher, has had the very same idea, and so there is conflict. From the start, Grant comes off as a polite, level-headed gentleman. Frank Transley, Y.D.'s foreman, comes off nearly as well.

Standing in the wings is Zen, Y.D.'s twenty-year-old daughter. She is a minor character at first, but is soon elevated to the main stage through unwanted attention from George Dranzk, one of her father's hired hands. 

An impulsive idiot, Dranzk has the idea to set Landson's bails alight so as to win Y.D.'s favour... and with it Zen's hand. The fire spreads quickly, threatening both harvests as both Y.D.'s team and Landson's try to bring it under control.

The novel's most dramatic scene unfolds away from the inferno. Zen rides into the hills so as to warn a local farming family. On her return, she has the misfortune of encountering Dranzk. He tries to force himself upon Zen, and both end up in a river, struggling until the former can struggle no more:

Her hand reached the lash. With a quick motion of the arm, such as is given in throwing a rope, she had looped it once around his neck. Then, pulling the lash violently, she fought herself out of his grip. He clutched at her wildly, but could reach only some stray locks of her brown hair which had broken loose and were floating on the water.
   She saw his eyes grow round and big and horrified; saw his mouth open and refuse to close; heard strange little gurgles and chokings. But she did not let go.
   "When you insulted me this morning I promised to settle with you; I did not expect to have the chance so soon."

   His head had gone under water.... Suddenly she realized that he was drowning. She let go of the thong, clutched her horse's tail, and was pulled quickly ashore.

Here Stead touches the cape of Alberta Gothic, yet Dennison Grant is not a gothic tale; it is a message novel, a story of ideas and ideals embodied in the titular character. In his second coming, Grant happens upon Zen as fire threatens. The pair find refuge on a stoney hilltop overlooking threads of golden flame under the night sky.

The Bookman, Spring 1921

Here Grant reveals himself to both Zen and the reader as an Easterner, the eldest of two sons born to a man with a rough parcel of land made valuable by the growth of a city and ravenous developers. Papa Grant used his windfall to found a brokerage firm, thus turning the money into even more money. This was not for Dennison, which is why the name of the family firm is Grant and Son, not Grant and Sons.  

Dennison Grant came west where the work is physical, yet at the core of his being he's a thinking man of "peculiar notions." Grant shares these with Zen as a full moon arcs slowly overhead:

"I have observed," he said, "that poor people worry over what they haven't got, and rich people worry over what they have. It is my disposition not to worry over anything. You said that money is power. That is one of its deceits. It offers a man power, but in reality it makes him its slave. It enchains him for life; I have seen it in too many cases — I am not mistaken. As for opening up a wider life, what wider life could there be than this which I — which you and I — are living."

Listening in, it sounds like the worst of first dates with Grant talking only about himself. This is Stead's failing; the author doesn't recognize that his audience knows Zen's backstory while Grant does not. And yet, it somehow works. This reader came away fully convinced that the two were taken with one another. 

Blame it on the moon.

As depicted on the Hodder & Stoughton jacket, Zen does fall asleep, but this is the result of exhaustion. It's not every day a young woman escapes a prairie fire and kills a man. 

My copy of Dennison Grant has no dust jacket, but I don't think I'm missing much. The best image I've found comes from an advert in the 18 November 1920 edition of the Calgary Herald-Journal:

Dennison Grant is indeed an "intensely human, interesting, worth-while story of men and women as big of spirit as the big out-of-doors in which they live."

Zen is no anomaly. The women in Denison Grant are invariably intelligent and independent. Y.D.'s right cheek bears a scar from a branding iron wielded by a young woman in defence of her father. He later married that same young woman, who in turn bore and raised Zen. Another strong woman, a city girl named Phyllis Bruce, is in Grant's future.

"It's [sic] action centres largely in the West, in Calgary and the Foothills" is amusing. No scenes are set in Calgary or any other western city for that matter. In fact, Calgary is not mentioned at all, except as "the principal cow-town of the foothill country."

A good eighty pages take place in an unnamed eastern city on a lake (read: Toronto), to which Grant returns after his father and brother are killed in an automobile accident. Of a sudden, a man who rejects accepted notions of unearned wealth, finds himself with something between six or eight million dollars.

What is he to do? 

I will not spoil things.

Dennison Grant is not for everyone. I recommend it to those interested in post-Great War Canada. This Montrealer, the son of a Calgarian, was fascinated by the preconceptions expressed by Westerners toward Easterners and vice versa. I had no idea they stretched back so far. 

Grant expresses his ideas, even though he knows they are not fully formed. He's thinking aloud... after saving Zen, before Y.D., when hiring a lawyer, and during what I'd taken to be a date at a fancy restaurant with Phyllis Bruce. Forget my disappointment, just imagine hers! 

It can be tiresome, but no more so than any message novel. Dennison Grant is to Stead what John Galt is to Ayn Rand.

The Russian émigré and Social Security recipient would've hated Dennison Grant, which makes me like it all the more.

Object and Access: A bulky hardcover, typical of its time, I can't for the life of me remember just when or where it was purchased. I have no idea how much I paid, but it could not have been more than two dollars. Evidence suggests that it once belonged to one James Rutherford, whose signature graces the front free paper. Over fifty James Rutherfords are listed in the 1921 census.

I see no evidence that the Musson and Hodder & Stoughton editions enjoyed more than one printing. That said, H&S did reissue the book in 1924 as Zen of the Y.D.: A Tale of the Foothills. That same year, it was serialized under the same title in the Ottawa Citizen.

At the time of this writing, one copy of the Musson edition (sans jacket) listed for sale at US$17.00. Neither H&S edition is in sight.

Thankfully, it can be read online here at the Internet Archive. 

The Globe's Best Books of 1923: 'Canadian Authors Can Be Read With Pleasure, Profit and Pride'

The Globe, 10 December 1923

Three men feature on the first page of the 1923 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' the 'Globe 100' of its day. The first, Paul A.W. Wallace, is recognized for his debut, Baptiste Larocque: Legends of French Canada. The second man, W.J. Healy, wrote Women of Red River, which was "arranged and published under the Women's Canadian Club of Winnipeg by Russell, Land, and Company." Norris Hodgins, the third, was recognized for Why Don't You Get Married.

All three are Canadian and all three are new to me.

I've been following the Globe's century-old lists of best books for nearly a decade now, and so think I know what to expect. There will be a dour pronouncement – in this case, "there is a dearth of outstanding books, especially novels, at the present time" – which will, in turn, be counterbalanced by something of a positive nature:

Under the 'More Canadiana' banner are books by Americans LeRoy Jeffers, Charles Towne, John M. Clarke, Charles W. Stokes, Paul Leland Haworth, and Briton Wilfred Grenfell. The final ingredient in this messy mix is George King's self-published Hockey Year Book. Its inclusion marks the first ever mention of the sport in 'Recent Books and the Outlook.'

I can't imagine how much it would fetch today. 84 Victoria Street itself is worth a bloody fortune.

Despite the flag waving, Canadian writers don't fair all that well in the Globe's 1923 list, accounting for just 46 of the 196 titles featured. As in 1922, poets dominate: 

Ballads and Lyrics - Bliss Carman

Selected Poems - W.H. Davies*

Morning in the West - Katherine Hale

Flint and Feather - E. Pauline Johnson

The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman

Shepard's Purse - Florence Randal Livesay 

 The Miracle Songs of Jesus - Wilson MacDonald

The Complete Poems of Tom MacInnes

The Songs of Israfel and Other Poems - Marion Osborne

The Garden of the Sun - A.E.S. Smythe

The Empire Builders - Robert Stead

Woman - Albert Durrant Watson

That's twelve titles! From a nation of nine million! The Globe informs that the rest of the world produced just five collections of note!

For the second year running, we have the inclusion of The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman, of which there is no record. And so, for the second year, I'll suggest that what is being referred to is The Poems of Archibald Lampman, first published in 1900 by George N. Morang. As Ryan Porter notes, the collection enjoyed several reprints. Still, I see no evidence of a new edition in 1923, never mind 1922. I'll say the same of E. Pauline Johnson's 1912 Flint and Feather. There was a new edition of Robert Stead's The Empire Builders, which just happens to be the only poetry title I own.

Curiously, Wilson MacDonald's The Song of Prairie Land is singled out for mention in the introduction to the poetry list, yet only his The Miracle Songs of Jesus makes the cut.

Our non-fiction writers fare the worst with just four of the fifty titles listed. I don't have a copy of even one, though I am interested in the Marjorie Pickthall, "a memorial volume edited by Helena Coleman," which does not seem to exist.  

Our writers of fiction don't fare much better, contributing just eight titles to the list: 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft - Ralph Connor

Lantern Marsh - Beaumont S. Cornell

Why Don't You Get Married? - Norris Hodgins

The Happy Isles - Basil King

When Christmas Crossed the Peace - Nellie L. McClung

Emily of New Moon - L.M. Montgomery

The Viking Heart - Laura Goodman Salverson

Spirit of Iron - Harwood Steele

There were twenty-one Canadian works of fiction on the 1922 list.

Here are some that made it:

And here are some that did not:

Frank L. Packard's The Four Stragglers is at the bottom of the pile, Stephen Leacock's Over the Footlights is at the top. Between the two is Winnifred Eaton's "Cattle" – or is it Cattle? – which may just be the best Canadian novel of 1923. 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft, which I've not read, is one of my $2 Connors.  

I've long been on the lookout for Beaumont S. Cornell's second and final novel Lantern Marsh because it's set in a thinly disguised Brockville, Ontario, which is where I do my weekly grocery shopping.  

Basil King's novel The Happy Isles is praised as the best since his 1909 breakthrough The Inner Shrine. I do like it, but nowhere near as much as The Empty Sack (1921).

I was once engaged to a woman who knew a woman who had been engaged to Harwood Steele. 

And so it goes.

* Correction: Roger Allen writes, "Are you sure the dozen poets are Canadian? The W.H. Davies nearly everyone thinks of - still in print - is the author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. He only became a poet because he lost a leg jumping on a train in Canada and had to go back to Britain, but that doesn't make him Canadian."

He's correct, of course. I can't explain the error, though it might have something to do with a bottle of Canadian Club sent by an aunt as an early Christmas gift. 

Related posts:

Best Books of 1922: Amidst a Flood of Mediocrity

The 1921 Globe 100 206: Don't Mention the War 

Best Books of 1920: Beware the Bolshevik Poets

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

Not Very Occult

Cousin Basil's Dickensian Christmas Gift

The Great Canadian Post-War Great War Novel

Entering the Unknown With Frank L. Packard

Alberta Gothic

$2 Connors

Go West, Young Woman

The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d]
251 pages

In the summer of 1985, I bought a copy of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and read it from cover to cover. This is nowhere near as impressive as it might seem; what I read was the original two-column 843-page edition (1983), not the two-column 1099-page second edition (2001). Nevertheless, it was through the Companion that I first learned of Arthur Stringer. The author's entry, penned by Dick Harrison, amounts to little more than a half-page. Here are some of the things I learned:

• born 1874 in Chatham, Ontario;
• studied at the University of Toronto and Oxford;
• wrote for the Montreal Herald;
• established his literary career in New York;
• "made an enduring contribution to Canadian literature with his prairie trilogy: Prairie Wife (1915), Prairie Mother (1920), and Prairie Child (1921)."

Harrison gets the titles of the trilogy wrong – The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, and The Prairie Child are correct – but never mind, what stuck with me was Prairie. As decades passed, I forgot all about Chatham, Toronto, Oxford, Montreal, and New York, and came to think of Stringer as a Western Canadian. It wasn't until 2009, when I read The Woman Who Could Not Die (1929), my first Stringer, that I was reminded he was an Ontario boy. A Lost World novel set in the Canadian Arctic, I liked it well enough to keep reading and begin collecting his work.

My Arthur Stringer collection (most of it, anyway).
Cliquez pour agrandir.

Admittedly, much of my interest has to do with his enviable popularity, the deals he cut with Hollywood, and his marriage to Jobyna Howland. This is not to suggest that I didn't like the books themselves. My favourite Canadian novel of the early twentieth-century is Stringer's The Wine of Life (1921), which... um, was inspired by his marriage to Jobyna Howland.

A second admission: I put off reading The Prairie Wife, the first volume in Stringer's "enduring contribution to Canadian literature," for no other reason that it is set in rural Canada. Before you judge, I rush to add that this Montrealer has lived in rural Canada these past two decades. Country living attracts, but not novels set in the country. This may explain how it is that I was swept up by its early pages.

The Prairie Wife takes the form of a series of entries, written over the course of more than a year to someone named Matilda Anne. Its writer, Chaddie, begins by describing a voyage from Corfu to Palermo and then on to the Riviera. She is of the moneyed class – that is until Monte Carlo, where Chaddie receives a cable informing that the "Chilean revolution" has wiped out her nitrate mine concessions. Made a pauper, Chaddie's first action is to dismiss her maid; the second is to send word to her German aristocrat fiancé:

I sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all the while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxes duly piled up in tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav — which made me quite calmly and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!

After a respectable period of mourning lost wealth, Theobald Gustav throws her over. Just as well, really, because the Paris Herald had reported on of a traffic accident that had occurred when he'd been in the company of a "spidery Russian stage-dancer." On the rebound, Chaddie proposes to Scots-Canadian Duncan Argyll McKail, whom she'd met in Banff the previous October. He is too much in love and far too practical to turn her down.

And so, this is how Chaddie, an American socialite who'd shared the company of Meredith and Stevenson, and had sat through many an opera at La Scala, ends up in a one-room shack with flattened tin can siding on the remote Canadian prairie.

Duncan – annoyingly, his bride refers to him as "Dinky-Dunk" – is a civil engineer from the east. He's got it in his mind to make a fortune through farming, and has purchased a 1700-acre parcel of land one hundred or so kilometres northwest of, I'm guessing, Swift Current.

"He kept saying it would be hard, for the first year or two, and there would be a terrible number of things I'd be sure to miss," Chaddie writes Matilda Anne. 

No doubt!

Harrison doesn't use the term "Prairie Realism" in his Stringer entry, but I will; The Prairie Wife is a good fit with later novels by Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, and Robert Stead. Can we agree that Prairie Realism was never terribly realistic? Though pre-Jazz Age, Stringer's story begins as a crazy Jazz Age adventure in which a carefree debutante marries a man she may or may not love. In her earliest pages to Matilda Anne, she writes:

O God, O God, if it should turn out that I don't, that I can't? But I'm going to!  I know I'm going to! And there's one other thing that I know, and when I remember it, It sends a comfy warm wave through all my body: Dinky-Dunk loves me. He's as mad as a hatter about me. He deserves to be loved back. And I'm going to love him back. That is a vow I herewith duly register. I'm going to love my Dinky-Dunk.

Chaddie continues:

But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a strong man? To be able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that leaves him rather white and shaky in the voice and trembly in the fingers, and seems to light a little luminous fire at the back of his eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow, the same as an animal's when your motor head-lights hit them!

There's a clear separation between the opening pages and the rest of the novel. Whimsy gives way to practicality, as Duncan chases his fortune. Remarkably, Chaddie settles on the prairie, and into matrimony, rather nicely. Harrison writes of "disillusionment as the marriage deteriorates," but this reader saw nothing of the kind. True, there are moments of discord, as in the strongest of marriages, but Dinky-Dunk and Chaddie – he calls her "Gee-Gee" – are soon in one another's arms. She does come to love her Dinky-Dunk.

The frontispiece of the A.L. Burt photoplay edition, c.1925.

I don't know what Harrison means when he writes of Chaddie's "mature resolve as she begins an independent life on the Prairies." The married couple only become closer as the novel progresses, and the two are increasingly reliant on a slowly growing cast of characters. The earliest, hired man Olie, is a silent Swede who at first can't keep his eyes off Chaddie. This male gaze has nothing to do with objectification, rather her ridiculously impractical city dress. Pale Percival Benson Wodehouse, whom this reader suspects to be a remittance man, is next to appear. He was sold the neighbouring ranch from "land chaps" in London. Nineteen-year-old Finnish Canadian Olga Sarristo enters driving a yoke of oxen. Two weeks earlier, what remained of her family had burned to death in their own shack one hundred or so miles to the north. To Chaddie, stoic and stunning Olga is like something out of Norse mythology, "a big blonde Valkyr suddenly introducing herself into your little earthly affairs." Olga is a welcome addition to the farm; every bit as capable physically as Olie and Duncan. Last to arrive is Terry Dillion, a fastidious young Irishman who had once served in far off lands with the British Army.

Together they support Duncan's big gamble, which involves putting all he has on a sea of wheat covering his 1700 acres. Threatened by draught, fire, and hail, the crop survives, making him a wealthy man. His riches are further increased by a new rail line to be built across his land. The final pages have Duncan and Chaddie poring over house-plans mailed from Philadelphia. "We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through," she writes Matilda Anne. 

The Prairie Wife is the first Stringer novel I've read with a woman narrator. Early pages aside, I found Chaddie's voice oddly convincing. This audio recording by Jennifer Perree, stumbled upon in researching this novel, reinforced my conviction. An enjoyable story, an entertainment, it left me wanting to hear more from Chaddie.

And there is more!

Stringer wrote more than forty novels, but The Prairie Mother is the only one to spawn a sequel, The Prairie Mother (1920)  – and then another in The Prairie Child (1922).

Like Dinky-Dunk, Stringer really knew how to make a buck.  

Favourite sentence:

The trouble with Platonic love is that it's always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.

Bloomer: 

I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't actively dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie does. I've been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such physical grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves.

Trivia: In 1925, The Prairie Mother was adapted to the silver screen. A lost film, the trade reviews I've read are lukewarm, mainly because there is no gunplay. Chaddie is played by comedic actress Dorothy Devore, one of many who fell in making the transition to talkies. New to me is Herbert Rawlinson, who played Duncan. Olga is played by Canadian Frances Primm, about whom little is known, A pre-Frankenstein Boris Karloff plays Diego, a character that does not feature in the novel. Most interetsing to the silent film buff is Gibson Gowland (Olie), the man who played McTeague in Erich von Stroheim's Greed.

Motion Picture Magazine, December 1924 

Object: My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller located in Winterton, Lincolnshire. Price: £9.00. Sadly, the jacket illustration is uncredited.

The rear pushes all three books in Stringer's trilogy, The Prairie Child not yet available in a bargain edition. The flaps feature a list of other Hodder & Stoughton titles, including works by Canadians Ralph Connor (The Sky Pilot of No Man's Land [sic]), Hulbert Footner (The Fugitive Sleuth, Two on the Trail), Frank L. Packard (The Night Operator, The Wire Devils, Pawned), Robert J.C. Stead (The Homesteaders), and Bertrand W. Sinclair (Poor Man's Rock).

Access: The Prairie Wife first appeared in 1915, published serially over four issues of the Saturday Evening Post (16 January - 6 February). That same year, it appeared in book form in Canada (McLeod & Allen) and the United States (Bobbs-Merril). Both publishers used the same jacket design:

Evidence suggests that The Prairie Wife is Stringer's biggest seller. A.L. Burt published at photoplay edition tied into the 1925 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer adaptation. Is that Boris Karloff as Diego on the right?

At some point, Burt went back to the well to draw Prairie Stories, which included all three novels in Stringer's prairie trilogy. As far as I've been able to determine, The Prairie Wife last saw print in The Prairie Omnibus (Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), in which it is paired with The Prairie Mother. 

Used copies of The Prairie Wife can be purchased online for as little as US$8.95.

Related post:

That's Entertainment

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

Remembrance Day

Verse from the 1923 edition of Robert Stead's The Empire Builders.

HE SLEEPS IN FLANDERS 

                      He sleeps in Flanders. Well he sleeps,

                           For Flanders' sleep is deep indeed;

                      About his bed the trench-rat creeps;

                      In some far home a woman weeps;

                      And the lone moon its vigil keeps

                           Above his sleep in Flanders. 

                      No note shall break the silent sleep

                           That found him when his day was done;

                      No note is blown so loud and deep

                      That it can pierce the gates of sleep—

                      The earthen gates full damp and deep —

                            That guard his sleep in Flanders. 

                      He saw not where his path should lead,

                            Nor sought a path to suit his will;

                      He saw a nation in her need;

                      He heard the cause of Honor plead;

                      He heard the call, he gave it heed,

                           And now he sleeps in Flanders. 

                      Yet let this ray of light remain,

                           Though darkness cut him from our view;

                      We know the sacrifice, the pain

                      We cannot feel our faith is vain

                      We know the loss, but not the gain

                           Of those who sleep in Flanders.