Author and Publisher as Forgotten Men

Forgotten Men

Claudius Gregory

Hamilton: Davis-Lisson, 1933

For Labour Day, a Depression-era story of strife, struggle and messianic fantasy. Christopher Ward is a young man of wealth and privilege. The son of a steel mill owner, he lives life adrift until happening upon an impromptu meeting of unemployed men in a public park. Wonderment is reawakened. He devotes his life to some hazy idea called 'the Cause', becomes close friends with the unemployed Peter Bronte, is mentored by holy man Reverend John, and meets a prostitute named Mary. 'Mary. That is my mother's name, too', Christopher says when introduced. Well before he amasses his group of twelve, known as the Society of Forgotten Men, the reader senses that things will end quite badly. It comes as no surprise when he's betrayed by Society member Jude Braithwaite and is arrested while having that one last supper in a modest eatery.

That said, the reader is left wondering at the charge: sedition. Christopher is long on describing the suffering of the working man, short on its causes and silent as to the solution. This is not to say that the messianic figure hasn't been proposing something, but that Gregory, for all his verbiage, chooses not to reveal the goal of the Society of Forgotten Men. Christopher's thoughts only hint at the answer:

Beginning. 'In the beginning.' But, of course, everything must have a beginning. It was plain now, quite plain, the task he must undertake, the part he must play. Millions of forgotten men were depending upon them, men whose very souls had ben exploited because they did not understand what was theirs by right. Yes, there was a thought in that. One should say, by birthright. There it was again. A man's birthright: something which came to him in the beginning. There were millions of men who would be powerful enough, once they understood, to select leaders among themselves to govern, to select men incapable of being influenced by the taint of party politics. He had no socialistic ideas; that was not the thought.

No, but if that is not the thought, what is? The answer is invariably cloaked. In this passage, for example, we see it in the next to last sentence with Christopher's dreams of leaders untainted by party politics. To put it more plainly, the publisher's next book was Is Fascism the Answer?, a work praising Benito Mussolini, penned by Brampton police magistrate and corporal punishment advocate S. Alfred Jones.

Gregory dedicated Forgotten Men to its publisher, Thomas Dyson Lisson, adding a dense three-page Acknowlegement devoted to 'the man whose collaboration gave the story.' Here Gregory tells us something of the novel's failure by revealing that the plot was woven around Lisson's 'outstanding thoughts', as expressed in self-published brochures, such as 'Did You Ever Look at it This Way?' (1931) and the more ominous 'Eventually You Will Look at it This Way' (1933).

Forgotten Men was the first book for both Gregory, a transplanted Brit, and Lisson, co-owner of a successful Hamilton printing business. Despite their friendship, the author's next two novels, Valerie Hathaway (1933) and Solomon Levi (1935), were published by other houses. All were reviewed in the pages of the the New York Times, yet Gregory's life, literary career and death (1944) were ignored by the dailies in his adopted city of Toronto. Lisson, on the other hand, received some notice. During the Great War, it was reported that he may have thwarted a dastardly German plot to poison the good citizens of Hamilton.

The Globe, 13 September 1918

Then, in 1932, Lisson's printing plant was damaged in a fire so spectacular that it was front page news in Toronto – 'Exploding Celluloid Showers Hot Glass Upon Firefighters', reads the headline. Three year later, he returned to the front page as co-founder of the short-lived Reconstruction Party, lead by difficult once and future Tory H. H. Stevens.

The Globe, 12 July 1935

Lisson, seated across from the other leaders of the fledgling Reconstruction Party, Thomas M. Bell, H.H. Stevens and Warren K. Cook.

Lisson's own writing attracted little attention, though the arguments set forth in his 1937 pamphlet, 'Gold', were considered and dismissed by the mining editor of the Globe. Sadly, my search for his self-published titles hasn't borne fruit. Just as well – having read the ideas put forth in Forgotten Men, I can't imagine 'Birth Control and Scrap Labor-Saving Devices' is nearly as interesting as the title suggests.

Object and Access: A heavy, well-bound book, it's found in academic libraries across the country, but only two of our public libraries (predictably, Hamilton and Toronto) have copies. Library and Archives Canada fails us, yet again. Online booksellers describe the book as 'scarce', 'uncommon' and a 'hard find'. Don't you believe it. Very Good copies go for as little as US$15, while signed copies can be found in the US$20 range. I purchased mine – with damaged dust jacket – a couple of weeks ago from my local used bookstore for C$15.

It's Tutis Time!

Three weeks have passed since I was introduced to the POD house known as Titus Digital, yet I've made little progress in solving its mysteries. Not to say that there haven't been minor victories. One case in point is the above, which is not a previously unknown title by historian N.-E. Dionne, but Champlain, first published in the early years of the last century as part of Morang's 21-volume Makers of Canada series. Students of history may take issue with the implication that the Father of New France built the colony using the currency of the Cinquième République... as seen in a mirror.

Again, a minor victory. Far greater mysteries are being solved by JRSM and the readers of his Caustic Cover Critic.

I present four more Tutis titles, accompanied by their respective first editions, as proof that technological advancement does not equal progress.

Of all our authors, Tutis appears to have a particular problem with Ralph Connor. Their cover for The Man from Glengarry (1901), the story of a lumberman working the Ottawa River, features a futuristic warrior floating above an arid landscape. Here they move Connor's novel of the Great War, The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land (1919), from the battlefields of France to the waters off 21st century Manhattan.

In Tutis Universe, the soldiers of The Bastonnais (1877), John Lesperance's 'Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76', are deprived of their firearms and must fight with swords and daggers. On the other hand, one side – the Americans, I'm guessing – has been given lovely lavender blouses as part of its uniform.

The first edition of Charles Mair's Through the Mackenzie Basin: A Narrative of the Athabaska and Peace River Expedition of 1899 (1908) may not feature a distinctive cover, but it does reflect the time. Mair isn't much read these days. Will the image of a large truck travelling through a landscape that is clearly not the Athabaska spur sales? I have my doubts.

What POD publisher wouldn't be exploiting our own public domain darling Lucy Maud Montgomery. Curiously, Tutis offers only one title, Kilmeny of the Orchard, the 1910 romance about a troubled young lass who has been abandonned by her Scottish father. I don't see much of Kilmeny Gordon in the cover – and that can't be her dog, because she doesn't have one. Though an inapropriate image, were it any other publisher, I'd at the very least pass on grudging credit for recognizing Montgomery's popularity in Japan. However, this being Tutis, I'm certain the use of this particular picture is nothing but a coincidence.

Related post:

A POD Publisher's Alternate Universe

Dedicated to the One I Love

Fetish Girl

Sylvia Bayer [pseud. John Glassco]

New York: Venus Library, 1972

I usually don't pay much attention to dedications, but the one in Up the Hill and Over has got me thinking. Isabel Ecclestone Mackay dedicated the novel to her mother Priscilla, adding, 'who might have liked the book had she lived to read it'. A bit odd, it becomes stranger still when one reads the novel and discovers that a mother and a step-mother serve as the two villains. I'm probably making too much of this, but in my defence, I point out that dedications are usually such bland things – any small display of eccentricity or emotion stays in the mind. Here, for example, is the dedication in The Woman Who Did (1895) by our forgotten countryman Grant Allen:

Allen's once controversial 'New Woman' novel seems fairly tame today; not so John 'Buffy' Glassco's pseudonymous Fetish Girl, the story of Ursula, a 'pretty long-legged bitch of wide and varied experience'. A sympathetic figure, the poor girl lives in frustration, due entirely to her inability to find a man who shares her fixation on things rubber. This, the reader is reminded, is in the days before the World Wide Web. Fortune changes, as it often does, when on vacation. Lounging beside a motel swimming pool, Ursula spots Adrian, an effeminate man sporting black latex trunks. The die is cast when he dons a tight fitting rubber bathing cap. Let the fun begin!

Glassco placed Fetish Girl with Harriet Marwood, Governess as his favourite piece of writing, in part, due to ease of composition. However, as publication approached, he struggled with the dedication. Glassco's desire was to pay tribute to Marion McCormick, who would become his second wife, but he knew that she would not appreciate having her name associated with a work of pornography. He ended up dedicating the book to himself, because, as he wrote friend Leon Edel, 'I am getting on in years and no one ever dedicated a book to me.'

Object: Paper and binding are typical of 'seventies mass market paperbacks; were it not for the contents and cover image it might well have been published by Bantam. And about that cover, Glassco hated the thing before he ever set eyes on it, complaining to a confidant: 'A friend in New York tells me it has a rather stupid illustrated cover of a girl in wet clothes coming out of the ocean – which is not what the book is about at all!'

Access: The novel was reissued – sadly, sans dedication – by Blue Moon in 2001, but is again out of print. That said, it can be bought 'as new' for under US$3. Queen's University holds Glassco's personal copies, one of which is inscribed in his hand: 'And once again to Buffy from Sylvia'. Really, libraries aren't much help – just two others, Library and Archives Canada and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have copies of the first edition, while the reissue is held only by the Library of Congress. My hunt for the first edition lasted several years, reaching a successful conclusion last December. The bookseller, who asked US$25, appeared to have no idea as to the true identity of the author.

Further Fetish Girl: Fraser Sutherland's highly entertaining and informative 'Sylvia Bayer and the Search for Rubber' looks not only at the novel, but the debt owed by Margaret Laurence, Marion Engel and, above all, Margaret Atwood. Also recommended is Stephen J. Gertz's history of the Venus Library imprint.

Ontario, Opium and Cocaine

Up the Hill and Over

Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1917

363 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Going to Bat for Lady Chatte

Six months ago, I criticized the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee for, amongst other things, its failure to recognize F.R. Scott's defence of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Today, a friend forwards an email, issued on behalf of the Committee last Friday. "Fifty years ago," it begins, "the distinguished lawyer F.R. Scott successfully defended Lady Chatterley's Lover (a novel by D.H. Lawrence) in a Canadian court against a charge of sexual obscenity. Thanks to Scott, Canadians may read this classic of modern literature without suffering any interference from the Canadian state."

Very good.

If only it were true.

Fifty years ago, the event that sparked the court case – the 5 November 1959 police seizure of the novel from Montreal newsstands – had not yet taken place. What's more, the resulting trial, held at the Quebec Superior Court on 12 April 1960, resulted in defeat. Scott's successful appeal "in a Canadian court" – known as the Supreme Court of Canada – took place two years later.

The email's author, a researcher for the Freedom of Expression Committee, ends with these words: "this important legal victory is poorly documented by the historians of literary freedom in Canada. I can't find a decent book about it anywhere. And, to the best of my knowledge, no one has noticed the fiftieth anniversary either."

I share in the frustration. The case demands a good book, perhaps something along the lines of C.H. Rolph's The Trial of Lady Chatterley, which documented Britain's battle over the novel. As for recognizing the fiftieth, I'll open a bottle and toast Scott and his good work on 15 March 2012.

The Committee's email is obviously the result of a botched job, and would hardly be worth mention were it not typical of the inaccurate and incomplete information the body distributes each year in its "Challenged Books and Magazines List". Here's hoping it does further research into Scott and Lady Chatte before next Freedom to Read Week.

McClelland's Experiment, Newfeld's Art

Mad Shadows [La Belle Bête]

Marie-Claire Blais [Merloyd Lawrence, trans.]

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1960

An antidote to Friday's post.

Isabelle Hughes' review of The Double Hook has had me revisiting McClelland & Stewart's 'unusual experiment' of the late 'fifties and early 'sixties. Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature (note: not The Encyclopedia...) devotes a surprising amount of space to the venture in its entry on Sheila Watson:

In 1959 and 1960 the Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart published its first two paperback originals, choosing two newcomers to advance the guard: the second book was Mad Shadows, the translation of Marie-Claire Blais's first novel, published a year earlier when she was 20 years old. The first, by a few months, was The Double Hook. Both books were designed by Frank Newfeld, who would become the first notable postwar book designer in Toronto, and they would openly declare the primacy of innovative book design.

These words, penned by George Bowering, aren't quite right. For one, they fail to mention that these titles appeared in simultaneous cloth and paper editions. I might also point out that Irving Layton's M&S debut, Red Carpet for the Sun (1959), hit the stores in both cloth and paper during the nine or so months that separated The Double Hook and Blais' Mad Shadows. Still, Bowering does recognize an important element ignored by Hughes – that being the creative contributions by Newfeld. The entry continues: 'Adepts might have thought about Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan. The proper text of The Double Hook begins after 12 pages of highly noticeable front matter.'

While there was nothing at all standard in Newfeld's designs – Red Carpet for the Sun began with six pages of colour illustrations – I find his approach unwaveringly reminiscent of being eased into a movie through the opening credits. Here, for example, are the first thirteen pages of Mad Shadows. It isn't until part way down the fifteenth page that the novel's first sentence – 'The train was leaving town.' – appears.

(My copy was signed by the gracious Ms Blais one fine chilly Vancouver evening in the autumn of 2001.)

Gustafson's Good or Bad Novel

Ralph Barker Gustafson

16 August 1909 - 29 May 1995

In recent months, I've come to realize the importance of nineteen-aught-nine to the poetry of Anglo-Quebec. A.M. Klein was born that year, as were Ralph Gustafson and John Glassco. Three very different poets and, I dare say, three very different men.

Today belongs to Gustafson. I'm sometimes hesitant when acknowledging anniversaries here – it may be argued that the poet didn't always receive the recognition he deserved, but his writing wasn't exactly suppressed or ignored. That said, there is one work, No Music in the Nightingale, that could be considered forgotten. Much of what I know of this unpublished novel comes from Jack, A Life in Letters, James King's 1999 biography of Jack McClelland. Its history is curious, one where publication, which at first seems certain, becomes less likely with each new draft. We're told that in 1953 the publisher approached Gustafson, then under contract with Viking in New York, hoping to win Canadian rights. Three years later, the manuscript arrived at McClelland and Stewart's offices, generating an 'enthusiastic letter' with detailed comments from fiction editor Conway Turton.

Then... silence.

Three more years passed, during which M&S published Gustafson's well-received collection of verse, Rivers Among Rocks. The poet wrote McClelland asking him to reconsider the novel. This time, however, the reception was muted. 'We have read it here and are reserving judgement', he wrote. 'It's either very, very good or very, very bad. I'm damned if I know which.' These words, to Little, Brown editor Alan D. Williams, were part of an ill-fated effort to find an American co-publisher. What happened to the early contract with Viking, King doesn't say.

Gustafson tried again in 1965, sending a McClelland a revised version of the novel. This time, John Robert Colombo weighed in with a reader's report that featured a fatal line: 'As a poet he is a consummate craftsman – but as a novelist: ugh!' In response, Gustafson wrote McClelland: 'I was deflated by the readers' reports and haven't got up enough courage to read through the novel again – I know I should, in fairness to you, and I know it needs one revision. I suppose, on the whole, after the reader's "ugh," you better ship the thing home to me, alas.'

The unpublished novel is held at the Queen's University Archives.