Showing posts with label Underwood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Underwood. Show all posts

29 August 2022

The Dustiest Bookcase: X is for X X X


The Dustiest Bookcase:
Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
This one's a cheat.
I reviewed The Whip Angels in this blog's earliest days, but have no other 'X' authors.

CanLit professors hold many, many secrets. Sitting through their lectures, I heard no mention of Grant Allen, Robert Barr, Margaret Millar, Ross Macdonald, Mavis Gallant, John Buell or Phyllis Brett Young. It wasn't until a course titled "American Writers of the Twenties," taught by an American, that I was introduced to John Glassco. Louis Dudek considered  Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse "the best book of prose written by a Canadian," but it wasn't on syllabi of we 'eighties CanLit students. Those looking to read the book today will find it available only through an American publisher. 

Why isn't Memoirs of Montparnasse taught in CanLit courses? Why isn't The English Governess?

Glassco's English Governess stands with his Squire Hardman as the greatest pastiches in Canadian literature. So great was his talent that academics have erred in describing the former as a work of Victorian erotica.

Edward VII was on the throne when Glassco was born. Elizabeth II had begun her long reign when Glassco wrote The English Governess. Victoria was more than a half-century dead.

Published under its Ophelia imprint, The English Governess was an Olympia Press bestseller. When seized by French authorities, publisher Maurice Girodias released a new edition with the title Under the Birch. It is the bestselling Olympia Press book by a Canadian author. The Whip Angels comes second.

The novel was first published in 1955 as by "X X X." Diane Bataille, the woman behind the novel, was born Princess Diane Kotchoubey de Beauharnais on 4 June 1918 in Victoria, British Columbia, She was the second wife of philosopher, librarian, pornographer Georges Bataille. He was her second husband. The Whip Angels may have been written in response to his claim that she'd never be able to write erotica that could stand up to his. Was "X X X" inspired by husband Georges' "Louis Trente" pseudonym? So little is known about Diane Bataille.

The Whip Angels is Diane Bataille's only known novel. It has been suggested that she wrote policiers for money, but evidence is lacking.

Like The English Governess, The Whip Angels is forever being ravaged by pirates. Separating the legitimate from the illegitimate is a challenge.

Diane Bataille is one of our bestselling authors. She is one of the very few Canadian Olympians.

Is it not time we recognize and celebrate Diane Bataille?

A Bonus: What my wife refers to as "Brian Busby music."


17 January 2022

The Dustiest Bookcase: U is for Underwood


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

The English Governess
Miles Underwood [John Glassco]
Paris: Ophelia Press, 1960 [sic]
290 pages (in two volumes)

Is The English Governess Canada's biggest selling work of erotica? If not, then the honour goes to Harriet Marwood, Governess, its non-identical twin. I don't suppose we'll ever know; they've both appeared under different titles and disguises, most often clothed and sold by pirates. The above was printed by Taiwanese freebooters. Glassco spent much of the 'sixties and 'seventies going after Collector's Publications of Covina, California for this unauthorised edition:


Publisher Marvin Miller may not have paid the author, but he at least gave credit; most pirated editions of The English Governess are attributed to Anonymous.

Miles Underwood was just one of Glassco's many noms de plume. The novel's original publisher, Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, claimed the pseudonym to be of his own making, when in fact it was Glassco’s creation alone. In a 1967 letter to his friend Milton Kastello (aka Milton Douglas) wrote that it was “dreamed up on an hour’s notice to meet a printer’s deadline in Paris in 1959 [sic]. It signifies a man who would be under by miles and miles."

It's entirely possible that the Underwood name inspired Under the Birch, the title Girodias slapped on the novel after French authorities seized and destroyed copies of The English Governess


The English Governess was the subject of the seventh Dusty Bookcase postnearly thirteen years ago! I covered the novel exhaustively in A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of Glassco, but have never written what might be termed a "review."

One day.

For now, I'll encourage you to hunt down the novel. There's a reason for the sales.

A bonus: An edition of The English Governess I'd not seen before today.