Born Again Infidel

The Right of Way

Gilbert Parker

New York: Grosset & Dunlap, [c.1907]
419 pages

I don't like it when a novel opens with a line of dialogue; seems so lazy. The first sentence of the The Right of Way has got to be the worst:

"Not guilty, your honor!"

And yet, I really enjoyed The Right of Way. The story begins in a crowded Montreal courtroom on a sweltering August day. The acquitted is a mystery man. Charged with the brutal murder a timber baron, he'd offered nothing more than his name. Through much of the trial, Charley Steele, the prisoner's counsel, had appeared indifferent to his client's fate, only to rise, "quietly, unnoticeably drunk," and give a most brilliant defence... which, of course, leads back to the novel's first sentence.

After returning to his office, Charley considers his victory:

"I was dull, blank, all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen, against me; and then that bottle in there — and I saw things like crystal! I had a glow in my brain, I had a tinge in my fingers; and I had success, and” — his face clouded — “he was as guilty as hell!”

Charley drinks a great deal. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of this interesting novel, composed as the temperance movement was growing, is its depiction of alcohol as something that can both inspire and destroy. In Charley it does both. 

He marries the aforementioned Kathleen, though he does not love her. To Charley, she is "the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory of sensuous purity, no more capable of sentiment than himself."

In other words, Kathleen is a trophy wife.

It makes sense that of the sixteen illustrations that decorate this edition, only one features Kathleen. Even before the marriage, Charley had a reputation as the most brilliant lawyer in Montreal. As his practice flourishes, his marriage withers. Unbeknownst to his wife, Charley has taken to slumming it at Charlemagne's, a working man's tavern to the east of Montreal's east end. Here Parker's omniscient narrator turns discreet. Sure, Charlemagne's serves drinks, but for Charley barmaid Suzon is the greater draw. The regulars, primarily farmers and river-drivers, put up with Charley's presence until the night he decides to make a grand show of his intellect.

Badly beaten, he's thrown into the St Lawrence, only to be pulled onto a raft piloted by the very man who's acquittal features on the novel's first page. The two drift eastward toward the outskirts of the town of Chaudiere, at which the supposed murderer – “he was as guilty as hell!” – has a lonely cabin. Charley is nursed back to physical but not mental health. A head wound has left him as a child. He remembers nothing of his past and lives each day as something of an innocent, until operated on by a "great Parisian surgeon," who happens to be visiting his brother, the local curé.

Charley regains his memory, and with it his ability to read. And this is how he discovers, by way of a newspaper story, that seven months have passed, that he's been declared dead, and that his wife is now married to Captain Thomas Fairing, a former rival for Kathleen's hand.

Charley faces a dilemma:

What was there to do? Go back? Go back and knock at Kathleen’s door, another Enoch Arden, and say, "I have come to my own again”? Return and tell Tom Fairing to go his way and show his face no more? Break up this union, this marriage of love in which these two rejoiced? Summon Kathleen out of her illegal intercourse with the man who had been true to her all these years?

I believe that last sentence counts as a bloomer.

Charley chooses to stay in Chaudiere, where he finds work with the town's elderly tailor. The locals are suspicious if not hostile, particularly after the stranger lets slip that he is not a Catholic. His acceptance comes gradually, aided by his friendship with the curé and numerous good deeds. He gives to the Church, he gives to those in need, he provides free legal advice, and he saves a man's life by leaping on the back of a runaway horse (as soldiers look on). Oh, and he also translates Oberammergauer Passionsspiele to French, provides illustrations to go with the text, and designs and sews the costumes for Chaudiere's passion play.

What risks becoming a tiresome train of good deeds, is saved through the introduction of lovely Rosalie Evanturel, the postmaster's daughter. Charley is in love for the first time, but knows he cannot marry her. He also knows he cannot share his reason. And so their love is accompanied by tension and, on Rosalie's part, a measure of resentment. Though this illustration suggests otherwise,  their scenes together are oddly contemporary, rising well above Victorian melodrama.

And make no mistake, The Right of Way is a Victorian novel. What's more, it was a popular Victorian novel, bringing with it coincidence and contrivance. Sleepwalking does figure. It is a fever fantasy about a man who is given a second chance at life. For it to work, the reader must believe that Charley not only acknowledges his wrongs, but cares so much for Kathleen, a woman he never loved, that he cannot return to reclaim his wealth and his social standing. 

The Charley of Chaudiere is not the Charley of old. Might it be that his brain surgery wasn't wholly successful?

Trivia: The working title was Charley Bell.

Trivia II: In a candid introduction penned for the twenty-volume Works of Gilbert Parker, the author reveals that Charley Steele was based on someone – sadly unnamed – whom he'd known as a boy.

Trivia III: The Right of Way was adapted for the stage (1907) and twice to the silent screen (1915 and 1920). Both films are lost. In 1931, it returned to the screen as a talkie. In this clip Loretta Young (Rosalie) and Fred Kohler (Jo, the murderer) bravely attempt French Canadian accents.

  

Probably better as a silent film.

Object: One of the nicer Grosset & Dunlap's in my collection, this "SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION" uses the plates and A.I. Keller illustrations from the 1901 Harper first American edition. The novel proper is followed by twelve pages of ads for other Grosset & Dunlap titles. I purchased my copy earlier this year from a Las Vegas bookseller. Price: US$12.99.

Access: Anything but a rare book, in 1901 The Right of Way was the fourth biggest selling novel in the United States. The following year, it held the sixth spot. I'm betting it did even better in Canada

Online prices range from US$1.89 to US$185.01. As expected, there's nothing at all special about the most expensive, a Grosset & Dunlap reprint lacking jacket. A New York bookseller lists the 1931 Grosset & Dunlap photoplay edition for US$76.00. The most intriguing is a Nelson Library edition "in RARE Color DustJacket of Dead Man on Floor & Woman Kneeling with Apron, Holding Back a Large Brown Dog with Sharp Teeth," offered at US$60.00 by a California bookseller. Something similar does feature in the novel, but the scene is inconsequential (and the man involved isn't dead).

Several editions are available for download at the Internet Archive.

The Dustiest Bookcase: W is for Wiseman

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Testimonial Dinner
Adele Wiseman
Toronto: Prototype, 1978
58 pages

Adele Wiseman died thirty years ago today.

Still unread – by me, anyway – this copy of Testimonial Dinner was brought out of storage by a savvy bookseller the next day.

$15.00

Signed. 

I was an easy mark.

A play, Testimonial Dinner has the very look of a self-published book. Perhaps it was. In The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2006), Ruth Panofsky, writes that it was "printed privately for the author."

I may not have read Testimonial Dinner, but I have read and reread the back cover. In my twenties, it seemed unbelievable. Thirty years later, Wiseman's experience doesn't surprise me in the least.

I really should read this book.

The Dustiest Bookcase: J is for Jacob

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

They're in storage as we build our new home.

Patience, please.

One Third of a Bill: Five Short Canadian Plays

Fred Jacob

Toronto: Macmillan, 1925

140 pages

The tenth anniversary of this blog is less than four months away, so how is it that I haven't reviewed a single play? I was, after all, a child star. My involvement in the theatre stretches back to the second grade,when I played Big Billy Goat in a touring production (we once performed at a neighbouring elementary school) of Three Billy Goat's Gruff. In all modesty, I think I earned the role because I had the deepest voice of all the boys.

It hasn't changed since.

Had I not spotted its subtitle, Five Canadian Short Plays, I wouldn't have bought One Third of a Bill. Fred Jacob's name meant nothing to me. Though he once served as dramatic and literary editor of the Mail & Empire, he doesn't feature in The Canadian Encylopedia or W.H. New's Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature demonstrates its superiority in devoting a portion of a sentence to the man under the entry "Novels in English: 1920 to 1940":

There were also Victor Lauriston's Inglorious Milton (1934), a mock epic of small-town literati, and the first two novels by Fred Jacob (1882-1926) [sic] of a planned (but never completed) four-part satire of Canadian life in the first quarter of the twentieth-century: Day Before Yesterday (1925) about the decline of upper-class domination in a small Ontario town, and Peevee (1928), about the posturing and affectations of a rising middle class.

I've since learned that the small town in Day Before Yesterday was modelled on Elora, Ontario, in which Jacob was born and raised. A roman à clef, it didn't go down well with the locals, as reflected in this online listing from Thunder Bay's Letters Bookshop:

Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, 1925. Hardcover. Condition: Very good plus. 1st Edition. 320pp; gilt black filled cloth, lacking jacket; 197 x 131 x 41 mm. The author's controversial second book, the introductory novel in a projected series of four studies of 19th-century rural Ontario communities; preceded the same year, by a collection of plays. A native of Elora, Fred Jacob (1882-1928), lacrosse afficianado, was employed as a Toronto Mail & Empire sports writer at the time of publication. Perceiving the story to be uncomplimentary to their forefathers, residents back home erupted in a torrent of condemnation for book & author alike, which inevitably led to less than favourable reviews. The author had nearly completed the somewhat redeeming second volume, PeeVee (1928), at the time of his untimely demise. Ink inscription on ffe, dated Jan 31st, 1926. Light wear to boards; with a touch of waterstain to a portion of the book-block at upper tip. Exceedingly scarce.

Exceeding scarce is right!

The copy described above is one of only two listed for sale online. Unsurprisingly, the Wellington County Library, which serves Elora, doesn't have a copy (or any other Jacob title). Seems a candidate for acquisition. Here's the link to the Letters Bookshop listing:

Day Before Yesterday

Incidentally, Letters gets right what The Oxford Companion gets wrong: the year of Jacob's death. Here's how the sad event was reported in the Mail & Empire:

The Mail & Empire
7 June 1928

Professor Leacock Sets the Stage

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

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

The long piece here, "Behind the Beyond", takes the form of a running commentary on an evening at the theatre. The drama performed – untitled – is of Leacock's own imagination: Sir John Trevor, MP, is a man with much responsibility, troubled by serious matters in the House of Commons. A quarter-century his junior, his wife is never so concerned and, as soon becomes apparent, has found escape in the arms of Sir John's ineffectual secretary, young Jack Harding:

"Do you remember, Jack, when first you came, in Italy, that night, at Amalfi, when we sat on the piazza of the palazzo?"
     She is looking rapturously into his face.
     Mr. Harding says that he does.
     "And that day at Fiesole among the orange trees, and at Pisa and the Capello de Terisa and the Mona Lisa. Oh, Jack, take me away from all this; take me to the Riviera among the contadini, where we can stand together with my head on your shoulder just as we did in the Duomo at Milano, or on the piaggia at Verona. Take me to Corfu, to the Cappo Santo, to Civita Vecchia, to Para Noia, anywhere —"
     Mr. Harding, smothered with her kisses, says, "My dearest, I will, I will."
     Any man in the audience would do as much. They'd take her to Honolulu.

Leacock's is a "problem play". The term is no longer used, but the situation at the heart of it all will be familiar to today's reader. These eyes have seen something of it in Edith Wharton, Henry James and select episodes of The Edge of Night from my childhood.

The Edge of Night is no more, and humour ages poorly. Not everything in Behind the Beyond works today. "With the Photographer", is not so much funny as it is an interesting glimpse at a time gone by:

The photographer rolled a machine into the middle of the room and crawled into it from behind.
     He was only in a second – just time enough for one look at me – and then he was out again, tearing at the cotton sheet and the window panes with a hooked stick, apparently frantic for light and air.
     Then he crawled back into the machine again and drew a little black cloth over himself. This time he was very quiet in there. I knew that he was praying and I kept still.
     When the photographer came out at last, he looked very grave and shook his head.
     "The face is quite wrong," he said.
     "I know," I answered quietly, "I have always known it."

That said, the five pieces collected under the title "Parisian Pastimes" seem barely to have aged at all. Here's Leacock on the French child:

The child, I was saying, wears about two hundred dollars worth of visible clothing upon it; and I believe that if you were to take it up by its ten-dollar slipper and hold it upside down, you would see about fifty dollars more. The French child has been converted into an elaborately dressed doll. It is altogether a thing of show, an appendage of its fashionably dressed mother, with frock and parasol to match. It is no longer a child, but a living toy or plaything.
     Even on these terms the child is not a success. It has a rival who is rapidly beating it off the ground. This is the Parisian dog. As an implement of fashion, as a set-off to the fair sex, as the recipient of ecstatic kisses and ravishing hugs, the Parisian dog can give the child forty points in a hundred and win out. It can dress better, look more intelligent, behave better, bark better – in fact, the child is simply not in it.

The final piece, "Homer and Humbug – An Academic Suggestion", should be considered one of Leacock's greatest hits. I don't often laugh when reading – Fran Leibowitz, who I think is funnier than just about anyone, leaves me silent – but I did at this:

An ancient friend of mine, a clergyman, tells me that in Hesiod he finds a peculiar grace that he doesn't find elsewhere. He's a liar. That's all. Another man, in politics and in the legislature, tells me that every night before going to bed he reads over a page or two of Thucydides to keep his mind fresh. Either he never goes to bed or he's a liar. Doubly so: no one could read Greek at that frantic rate: and anyway his mind isn't fresh. How could it be? he's in the legislature. I don't object to this man talking freely of the classics, but he ought to keep it for the voters. My own opinion is that before he goes to bed he takes whisky: why call it Thucydides?

Why indeed?

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

Fran Leibowitz, too.

Preferred over Hesiod and Thucydides.

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

What can I say?

Great minds think alike.

Fools seldom differ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related post:

Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?

Freedom to Read Week: Eight Men Speak

Freedom to Read Week Hump Day. Have you bought your banned book yet? If not, may I suggest Eight Men Speak? Written in 1933, reissued just last year by University of Ottawa Press, it's not so much a banned book as a banned play once – only once – staged as part of an effort to free Communist Party of Canada leader Tim Buck from Kingston Penitentiary. The Toronto Police didn't approve, nor did their Winnipeg brothers.

The Globe & Mail, May Day, 1934

The Ottawa Citizen, 2 May 1934

Where mail carriers once worked to prevent its spread, today's will happily deliver Eight Men Speak to your door… er, post box.

U is for Unproduced

Canadian artistic directors!

A half-century ago, your predecessors received the above. I've taken the liberty of transcribing the text:

BYRON'S GOOSE
(Synopsis)

       Comedy in 3 Acts. 2 sets. Cast of 12 (4 principals). Standard playing time. Scene: Vienna and Ravenna in 1822.

       Byron's final tragicomic relationship with his last mistress 19-year-old Teresa Guiccioli, her eccentric 70-year-old husband, her father and brother (amateur revolutionaries), and his friend Trelawny. His ambitions as lover of Teresa, as would-be liberator of Italy; his involvement in revolutionary, family and social intrigue, climaxed by his cutting himself free of the entanglements of his background and leaving for Greece.

       The play is tightly knit, with rapid action and with dialogue sparkling with Byron's own special brand of wit, overall tone is one of sophisticated comedy relieved by sentiment and action. Gives a new and sympathetic view of Byron as an aging but far from superannuated figure of romance; of Terasa as a blend of charm, devotion and duplicity; of Count Guiccioli as a fantastic and disreputable old man selling his polite consent to adultery; of Trelawny as an ultra-Byronic hero, adventurous, gloomy, dauntless, a little absurd.

       Has great possibilities for eventual adaptation as a musical in the same style as 'Camelot'.

       Complete script will be mailed on request.

John Glassco,
FOSTER,
Que., CANADA

John Glassco considered Byron's Goose his "one great play". Daytime soaps and radio drama aside, I've had no experience writing scripts, so won't presume to judge. That said, I am confident in deeming it superior to The Augean Stable, a loose adaptation of Harriet Marwood, Governess, the only other work Glassco composed for the stage.

Mr Glassco having passed from this sphere in 1981, requests to Foster will be met with frustration. Interested parties are advised to contact Library and Archives Canada, which holds the script in its John Glassco fonds.

Antoni Cimolino, do not repeat Michael Langham's error!

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure 

Thirty Years After Thirty Years at Stratford

Thirty Years at Stratford
Robertson Davies
Stratford, ON: Stratford Festival, 1982

Christopher Plummer left town a few days ago, signalling the coming end of Stratford's sixtieth season. Oh, the shows will go on – some for two more months – but the crowds will thin, temperatures will fall, and the ladies will begin wearing shawls and wraps. It's my favourite part of the season.

Delivered thirty years ago yesterday, the day after the great man's 69th birthday, this lecture is a souvenir of a familiar time – one in which the festival was fighting for funds, and against declining ticket sales. Be not deceived by its title, this not a history – "Shakespeare has reminded us in many passages of the tediousness of the oft-told tale", Davies tells us – rather it's an attempt to properly place the festival within the history of Canadian theatre.

Dry stuff?

Not at all.

I ramble a bit, but then so does Davies. The Festival Theatre crowd that night was treated to the raising of the ghost of Sarah Bernhardt, a tender tickling and ribbing of puritans, and the drawing of parallels between Beautiful Joe, Little Lord Fauntleroy and E.T. I'd have fallen off my seat.

At its heart Davies' lecture is a celebration of Stratford, a lively schooling of those who attack the festival as being something somehow not Canadian. But at the end I found my mind returning to Davies' opening remarks about the "oft-told tale":

Of course, the story of the very long chance that at last romps home with the prize is one of the best stories in the world, but insofar as it applies to Stratford, you have heard it.

Yes. Yes, I have. As those ladies in shawls age, and I find my middle-aged self counted amongst the youngest patrons, I wonder if it isn't time to let the younger generation in on it.

A personal note: "Canada has had a theatre ever since it had good-sized towns," writes Davies, "and it says something about our ancestors – something we often forget – that they regarded a theatre as a necessary part of a good-sized town."

Sure enough, at the centre of my adopted town of St Marys, seventeen kilometres south of Stratford, rests this magnificent opera house:

It's a mere fine-minute stroll from the inn at which Plummer stays when he plays Stratford.

Object: Sixteen glossy staple-bound pages with card covers. I purchased my sun-bleached copy for $1.50 last year in Montreal. A festival price sticker indicates that it originally sold for $2.50.

Access: A rare item, only three copies are currently listed by online booksellers. The cheapest, in Fine condition, is going for US$25. At US$30, the most expensive is offered by a confused bookseller who pitches "signed at back", then adds "hard to tell if it is printed or signed." Hard to tell? How absurd. Here's my "signed" copy:

Believe me, you can tell.

The Stylish, Sophisticated Théâtre Canadien

Zone

Marcel Dubé

Hier, les enfants dansaient

Gratien Gélinas

Les Beaux Dimanches

Marcel Dubé

The first three volumes in the Collection Théâtre Canadien, all published in 1968 by Montreal's Éditions Leméac.

Q: Has there ever been a better looking series in this country?

A: Nope.

More Marwood

Like the Oscar Peterson Trio, I get requests. Many come from those seeking information on the great Brian Moore or the tragic Maria Monk, but most concern Harriet Marwood, a woman who never existed. Was the English governess modelled on a real person? When, if ever, did she use a birch? How might I meet such a woman?

The most common query comes from folks hoping for more Harriet Marwood stories. For those with the hunger, I have very good news: the beautiful, brunette disciplinarian exists outside the pages of The English Governess and Harriet Marwood, Governess. We find her first in The Augean Stable, a 124-page, three-act play that Glassco composed in 1954. Unproduced and unpublished, you'll have to consult his papers at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa to read this alternate, rather polite version of Harriet's romance with Richard Lovel.

Much more accessible is "The Black Helmet". Published in The Fatal Woman (Anansi, 1974) as one of "Three Tales by John Glassco", this is the novella that Glassco struggled with – forever revisiting and revising – for most of his 71 years. Here Harriet is mentioned frequently, if fleetingly, by her former charge, Philip Mairobert. In this passage, our hero recalls the the arrival of the governess at his family's estate in rural Quebec:

Today I will think of her as the person to whom I owed everything, not as a woman I loved – and think of my life here before she came, with no one but those two old servants in the twilight of dotage who were so terrified of me. I must have been like a wild animal then, with those fits of rage – screaming, biting, breaking things, rolling on the floor. I remember almost nothing of that time: it seemed to be mostly walking through these ruined gardens and in the woods where I set my ineffectual little traps for birds and rabbits, hoping to catch them alive. How desolate and wild a life! Yet when mother left to live in Paris for good, and Miss Marwood came, I was furious. I thought I would lose me freedom. Freedom! As if it ever mattered to me.

Well I lost it certainly – the child's freedom to be lonely, bored, idle, frightened. And I found, quite simply, happiness. A week after she arrived I could sleep without nightmares; and I had stopped stammering: I simply hadn't time! As for my rages, I really think she enjoyed them. as if they offered a challenge to her methods and muscles, to the very strength of her arm.

Though The Fatal Woman enjoyed just a single printing – likely 3000 copies – for a good many years it seemed quite common. No more. I note that only five, one a crummy library discard, are currently being offered by online booksellers.

Fans of the governess are advised not to hesitate. Strike now!

Trivial: The author's biography on The Fatal Woman errs in stating that Glassco won "the Governor-General's award [sic] for both poetry and non-fiction." In fact, he received only the former.

I'll step out on a limb here and say that Anansi's mistake is borne of a common misconception that Glassco won a Governor General's award for Memoirs of Montparnasse (his only "non-fiction" book). No Governor General's Award for Non-fiction was awarded for 1970, the year in which it was published.

Incredible, but true... and oddly appropriate.

Not trivial:

Cross-posted in a slightly altered form at A Gentleman of Pleasure – less flippant, more images.

Amazon Customer on Michel Tremblay's Possible Potential

The Globe & Mail, 15 May 1974

Related posts:

Homophobes and Book Burners Weigh In

Amazon Customer Review: 'undescribable and obscene'

Amazon Customer Review: 'Reading Munroe'

Gratien Gélinas: 100 ans

Actor and playwright Gratien Gélinas was born 100 years ago today in the small town of St-Tite-de-Champlain, some fifty kilometres north of Trois-Rivières. I suppose to Canadians of a certain generation – by which I mean mine – he's remembered mainly as Mitsou's grandfather. Seems so unfair considering his numerous roles at Stratford, dedicated work as chairman of the Canadian Film Development Corporation, and the popularity, both inside and outside Quebec, of plays like Tit-Coq, Bousille et les justes and La Passion de Narcisse Mondoux. But then, Gélinas was first and foremost a man of the theatre, meaning, of course, that ten years after his death there's now a significant percent of the population that never had the opportunity to see him on stage.

It's interesting to note that in a career lasting well over half a century, he acted in only six films, including the screen adaptation of Tit-Coq, which he also produced and directed. At the 1953 Canadian Film Awards, it was recognized as Film of the Year... but, this being Canada, it has pretty much disappeared. Of his film roles, only that of Father Martineau in Norman Jewison's Agnes of God is in any way accessible. And I do mean accessible – someone's posted the entire film on YouTube, beginning right here. Longer than a Mitsou video... more rewarding, too.

And I do like Mitsou.