Showing posts with label Trotter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trotter. Show all posts

17 December 2018

The Globe 100 179 of 1918



One month after the Armistice, the post-war world is in many ways unrecognizable. Consider this from the front page of the December 7, 1918, Globe:


The Austro-Hungarian Empire is gone... and so too is "The Season's Best Books in Review," the Globe's annual gathering of the year's finest titles. I was a fan of the latter (not the former), writing about it here, here, and here.


"Recent Books and the Outlook," the successor to "The Season's Best Books in Review," made its debut in that same December edition of the Globe. Though similar in appearance and length – five pages – there is a marked difference in tone, as evidenced in this early dig at our tardy allies to the south: "Of war books there is still a large output, but the situation has changed. Those dealing with actual fighting, on either great or small scale, have had their day in Canada, but they are still at high tide in the United States, which entered the war about three years later and consequently are so much behind in that respect."

A second dig follows from someone described only as a "competent critic," who notes that war verse hasn't nearly so plentiful as in previous years: "War became a mere business when the United States entered into the arena with their slogan, 'We've got four years to do this job.' No poet could become enthused over a job. This cessation of singing was inevitable, for the war had gone on long enough and had deteriorated into a debauch of mutual slaughter."

And yet, the war dominates Poetry, the first of the ten "Recent Books and the Outlook" sections:

The Volunteer and Other Poems - Herbert Asquith
Fighting Men of Canada - Douglas Leader Durkin
Canadian Poems of he Great War - John W. Garvin, ed.
Spun Yarn and Spindrift - Norah M. Holland
In the Day of Battle (revised) - Carrie Ellefscottn Holman, ed.
Poems and Plays, Volume 1 - John Masefield
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - John McCrae
War - Ronald Campbell Mcfie
The Little Marshal and Other Poems - Owen E. McGillicuddy
Gitanjali and Fruit Gathering - Rabindranath Tagore
Songs of an Airman and Other Poems - Hartley Munro Thomas
Canadian Twilight and Other Poems - Bernard Freeman Trotter
Rough Rhymes of a Padre - Woodbine Willie

"Special attention should be paid by all lovers of poetry to the work of the late Lieut. Bernard Trotter of Toronto," writes the competent critic. This may explain how it is that Trotter's book, published in in 1917 and praised in that year's "Season's Best Books in Review,"  holds a spot in this 1918 list.

Miss Holland's collection is described as "a distinct advance in Canadian literature, both in craftsmanship and haunting charm," but my eyes were drawn to this relatively lengthy review of Douglas Durkin's The Fighting Men of Canada:


To be perfectly fair to Durkin, "hell" appears eighteen times in The Fighting Men of Canada, but only once does it follow "yell":


Nevertheless, this review is something new. "The Season's Best Books in Review" was all about the Best Books, but here the Globe is including what its critic thinks is one of the worst. Of the 179 books cover in "Recent Books and the Outlook," not one is given nearly so savage a beating as The Fighting Men of Canada.

The anonymous critic does have his prejudices, as exposed in his praise of War by crazy* Scottish eugenicist Ronald Campbell Macfie, M.A., M.B., C.M., LL.D.:


We Canadians dominate the Poetry section – eight of the thirteen titles! – but falter horribly in other categories. Just two of the twenty Children's titles are Canadian, and we're completely shut out of Biography, Art, Travel and the newly-minted Reconstruction section. Our second best showing comes in Fiction, in which we manage just twelve of seventy-two titles:

The Unknown Wrestler - H.A. Cody
Battles Royal Down North - Norman Duncan
Harbor Tales Down North - Norman Duncan
The Three Sapphires - W.A. Fraser
The Fugitive Sleuth - Hulbert Footner
The Chivalry of Keith Leicester - Robert Allison Hood
The Romance of Western Canada - R.G. MacBeth
Three Times and Out - Nellie L. McClung
Willow, the Wisp - Archie P. McKishnie
The Islands of Adventure - Theodore G. Roberts
Beautiful Joe - Marshall Saunders
The Cow Puncher - Robert J.C. Stead

No word of explanation is given for the inclusion of Marshall Saunders' 1897 novel Beautiful Joe. You'll note that Norman Duncan weighs in with two titles, despite being two years dead.

RIP
Of the seventy-two  Fiction titles reviewed, the only one I've read is Robert Allison Hood's The Chivalry of Keith Leicester:


Not exactly a glowing recommendation.


Ah, hell, I didn't think all that much of it either.

Nineteen-eighteen wasn't exactly a banner year for Canadian books. No wonder our competent critic was so grumpy:
The problem of Vers Libre has fallen into neglect of late, but this mongrel form of expression has left its mark upon even some of our most orthodox poets. It is to be hoped that with the cessation of German atrocities, the atrocities committed on the fair muses by the super-vers-librists will go to the junk-heap of junkerdom.
He'd have been grumpier still had he known what the post-war would bring.

* An excerpt from Macfie's 1917 essay "Some of the Evolutionary Consequences of War":
(cliquez pour agrandir)
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08 December 2017

The Season's Best Books in Review – A.D. 1917: The String of Canadian Patriotism is Fingered



The "Globe 100" of its time, I've long been interested in the Globe & Mail's "Season's Best Books in Review," which ran annually in the early part of last century. Regulars may remember me writing about it here and here. After all these years, I thought I knew the feature, and so was taken aback by the opening paragraphs of the 1917 edition, published one hundred years ago today. Unlike others, it begins with a focus on children's books, as recommended by Miss Lillian Smith of Toronto's Reference Library. E. Boyd Smith's The Story of Noah's Ark tops the librarian's list, followed by new illustrated editions of Uncle Remus, The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, and The Prince and the Pauper.

The Great War, the subject of the three previous introductions, intrudes only briefly – "There are war books for boys, though Miss Smith declares that girls, too, read them constantly. One of the best of these is 'The Post of Honor' by Richard Wilson" – and then it's back to Pinocchio, The Real Mother Goose, and the "Mary Frances" books by Jane Sayre Fryer.

Lest anyone think Canadians were beginning to tire reading of the war, I point out that the most prominent element of the feature's first page is "The Dead," by early casualty Rupert Brooke.


Brooke was himself over two years dead by then. A more recent loss – May 7, 1917 – was Bernard Freeman Trotter, whom McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart positioned as "the Canadian Rupert Brooke." He wasn't, of course, which is not to say that his poems do not affect. Consider "A Kiss":


Several column inches are devoted to Trotter's lone book, Canadian Twilight and Other Poems of War and of Peace, which was published just in time for Christmas gift giving. It came in its own box.


Of the seventy-six books listed in the 1917 "Season's Best," twenty were about or directly inspired by the war... and of those, the one I'd most like to add to my collection is Crumps: The Plain Tale of a Canadian Who Went. A book I've put off buying for far too long, it was written and illustrated by editorial cartoonist turned soldier Louis Keene. He seems to have been a lucky man, but not lucky enough, returning from the war with a mangled right hand. Here's hoping he was a lefty.


Keene is one of ten Canadians whose books made the thirty-one title non-fiction list. An impressive showing, but it pales when compared to our poets:
The year 1917 has been fruitful of good verse. Poetry was given a marked impetus at the beginning of the year by the publication a few weeks before of John W. Garvin's "Canadian Poets" (McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart). This notable work, which as steadily made its way in Canada, the United States and Great Britain, was recently referred to by the editor of The Poetry Review, London England, as a "monumental collection," and as "the one permanent celebration of the jubilee of the British North American Provinces."
Such was the force unleashed by Garvin's "permanent celebration" (last printed in 1917) that Canadian poets took up all twelve spots, pushing aside Eliot's Prufrock, and other observations, Gurney's Severn and Somme, Sassoon's The Old Huntsman, and Other Poems, Yeats' The Wild Swan's at Coole, and posthumous collections by Alan Seeger and Edward Thomas. Lt Trotter's Canadian Twilight and Other Poems of War and of Peace is joined by:
In a Belgian Garden - F.O. Call
Marching Men - Helena Coleman
Irish Lyrics and Ballads by Rev James B. Dollard
The New Joan - Katherine Hale
Songs of Ukrania by Florence Randall Livesay
Idylls of the Dane - Irene Elder Morton
The Piper and the Reed - Robert Norwood
Songs from a Young Man's Land by Clive Phillips-Wolley
Carry On - Virna Sheard
The Shell - A.C. Stewart
Heart of the Hills - Albert Durrant Watson
The 1916 "Season's Best" had wonderful things to say about new talent Robert Norwood, and his praises continued to be sung in 1917, but it seems much of the love had moved on:
Of recent years no Canadian poet has made more solid progress than Albert D. Watson of Toronto. His 'Love and the Universe' (1913) established him among the leaders of the new school of Canadian verse; and 'Heart of the Hills', recently published, contains several poems of great originality and power. Of these, the most outstanding is 'To Worlds More Wide.' It is aglow with a divine spirit and message.

In best "Season's Best" tradition, Canadian fiction is given short shrift. The most that can be said is that the fiction list leads with an enthusiastic review of Ralph Connor's The Major:
There is in it every element required: noble men, lovely women, a villain or two; also the string of Canadian patriotism is fingered, not tone harped upon; and there is an attempt to show the influence on a man of his early training and environment.
Discussion of The Major is several paragraphs longer than any other novel. And why not? After all, Connor was then our biggest author, outselling even Gilbert Parker and L.M. Montgomery (whose Anne's House of Dreams failed to make the list).* Other novels considered to be of note include works by foreigners H.G. Wells, Mary Robert Rinehart, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Phyllis Bottome, J.C. Snaith, Stephen McKenna, William MacHarg and Edwin Balmer. I'm sorry to report that only one other Canadian novelist, Basil King, is so much as mentioned. The description of his latest, The High Heart, is brief: "A love story of a Canadian governess with the war as a background."


I'm not quite sold on The Major or The High Heart. This may have something to do with the 1916 "Season's Best" dismissal of Canadian fiction as stagnant and undeveloped. But then, under "Books for Juveniles," the feature's final section. I came upon a novel that sounds as exciting as anything by J.C. Snaith. I refer here to Frank Lillie Pollock's Northern Diamonds, described as "an exciting and realistic story of three Canadian boys – one a young medical student, a big Scotch-Canadian – who comes with a wondrous tale told him by a sick Indian of the discovery of diamonds found in the country north of the Abitibi River, a packet of which had been left in a certain cabin; the Indian leaving hurriedly on an alarm of smallpox, deserting the prospectors a like strait. The boys are, of course, fired with the idea of of resuming the precious stones. The account of the start with steel-shod toboggan, piled high with 'grub,' and on skates to fly the frozen waters; and carrying snowshoes for their many portages; the making of camps, the game shot, the perils of land and water; the fight with the ruffians who come to the cabin; an especially exciting chase after a deer by 'Jack Light'; the trapping of some black foxes; the fearful cold; all go to make up a capital boy's book for a holiday gift."

Indeed! This boy would like to receive a copy as a holiday gift.

But, I wonder, would Miss Smith approve?

Lillian Smith
1887-1983
RIP
* Other Canadian novels that did not make the list include Frank L. Packard's The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (not surprising) and Up the Hill and Over by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay (somewhat surprising), both of which are reviewed in my new book.

Related posts:



11 November 2017

A Poet Remembers Fallen Great War Poets: McCrae, Langstaff, Trotter, Seeger and Kilmer


John Douglas Logan
1869 - 1929
RIP
On Remembrance Day, verse from one who survived in memory of those who did not.

The New Apocalypse and Other Poems of Days and Deeds in France
T.C. Logan
Halifax: T.C. Allen, 1917

01 April 2017

Verse from an April a Century Past



Likely the penultimate poem by Toronto's Bernard Freeman Trotter – killed by a German shell the following month – from his posthumous A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems of War and Peace (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1917).


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19 June 2016

'My Dad an' I': Into the future none may look...


Bernard Freeman Trotter
16 June 1890 - 7 May 1917
RIP
MY DAD AN’ I 
                    My dad an’ I we’re splendid chums,
                    We’ll stick thro’ every ill that comes
                    Together like two sugar-plums,
                         My dad an’ I. 
                    We go afishin’ in the spring,
                    An’ tho’ we oft get nary thing,
                    We’re each as happy as a king,
                         My dad an’ I. 
                    We go agunnin’, too, for game,
                    An’ tho’ we don’t attain to fame,
                    We like it first rate just the same.
                         My dad an’ I. 
                    I find, when I the past review,
                    He’s given me lickin’s very few:
                    We know each other through an’ through,
                         My dad an’ I. 
                    Besides the cane he’s given me pills
                    An’ other things to cure my ills,
                    An’ all along he’s paid the bills;
                         I thank him for ’t. 
                    Thus through the past, until this time,
                    When I do pen this little rhyme,
                    We have worked out a fair regime,
                         My dad an’ I. 
                    Into the future none may look,
                    Fast is it shut, like a brass-bound book;
                    But we’ll pull through by hook or crook,
                         My dad an’ I.  
                                                                     Wolfville, 1905.

A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems of War and Peace
Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1920

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11 November 2012

Remembrance Day



A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems of War and Peace
Bernard Freeman Trotter
Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1917