Grant Allen: 125 Years

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen departed this mortal coil 125 year ago today, rising a metre then stepping aside at his home in Hindhead, Haslemere, Surrey. He wrote many of the very best novels in nineteenth-century Canadian literature. Were I to make a list of the top ten titles, Allen would dominate. That he also wrote some of the very worst is a mystery easily solved. Like fellow Ontarian Arthur Stringer, Allen looked to make a good living from his writing. For every British Barbarians (1895) there is A Splendid Sin (1899).

If you've not seen Allen's Hindhead, Haslemere home, here it is:

Allen's early writing dealt primarily with with science and nature Physiological Esthetics (1877) was his first book. The Colour-Sense: Its Origin and Development (1879), Evolutionist at Large (1881), Vignettes from Nature (1881), The Colours of Flowers (1882), Colin Clout's Calendar (1883), and Flowers and Their Pedigrees (1883) followed. Credit goes to publisher Andrew Chatto for suggesting the author try his hand at novel writing. Allen's first attempt, Philistia (1884), is well worth a read, but I recommend beginning with The Devil's Die (1888). After that, move on to The Woman Who Did (1895), his most notorious novel. Those drawn to black comedy will enjoy For Maimie's Sake (1886) and Michael's Crag (1893).

Allen died at age fifty-one. His thirty-three novels were written in his last fifteen years. Hilda Wade, novel number thirty-four, was being serialized in The Strand at the time of his death, It was completed by friend Arthur Conan Doyle, who followed Allen's outline of the final two chapters. The last is titled 'The Episode of the Dead Man Who Spoke' (February 1900).

Allen's death inspired tributes, Richard Le Gallienne's being the longest. It begins:

Our fears for Grant Allen were too true. He is dead. He died on Wednesday, the 24th, after a long and painful and obscure illness, to which the doctors are still unable to give a name, England thus loses a rarer sprit than she had yet realized the possession of.  

Le Gallienne is off by a day in that Allen died on the 25th. The "long and painful and obscure illness" was determined to have been liver cancer.

Le Gallienne continues:

England is apt to take some time in recognition of its rarer spirits, She throughly stones them first, to try their mettle, and then when they are happily beyond hearing of their funeral orations – usually spoken by respectable gentlemen fit to provoke the dead to disturb with kindly laughter their own obsequies – she grudgingly erects bad statues in their honour. It is comforting at least to think that it is a long while yet before a statue is erected to Grant Allen. It took nearly a hundred years for men to think of a statue to Shelley. 

Well over a century later, there is no statue to Allen, but there is something better. Erected in 2008, it takes the form of a metal arch designed by Lucy Quinnell spanning Allen Court in Dorking, the closest town to the author's Surrey home. Look closely at its base and you'll see the author in the midst of composition. 

I have fellow plaque enthusiast Nick Harrison to thank for these images:

England may be apt to take some time in recognition of its rarer sprits, but here in Canada they are seldom recognized at all. This country has no statue, no arch, no court to the memory of Grant Allen; there is not so much as a plaque. In this one way, Grant Allen, the most remarkable Canadian writer of the nineteenth century, is anything but unique.

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen

24 February 1848, Wolfe Island, Canada West - 

25 October 1899, Hindhead, Haslemere, Surrey

RIP

Related posts:

Grant Allen Tells It Like It Was
No Nature, Just Nurture
Spoiled by a Publisher
Victorian Psycho
Getting to Know the Woman Who Did
Grant Allen's Wicked Novel
Wings of Delusion
The Busiest Man in England Lays Down His Pen
Starting in on Grant Allen: A Top Ten

Darkness on the Edge of Town

Barnabas, Quentin and the Crystal Coffin
Marilyn Ross [W.E.D. Ross]
New York: Paperback Library, 1970
157 pages

The back cover poses a question: 

Knowing nothing about Betty Ward, I was stumped. What's more, I wasn't at all sure about Collinwood and its evil forces. Dark Shadows, the gothic soap that spawned this novel, was cancelled when I was eight. All I knew about the series came from a Gold Key comic bought when I was nine:

The featured story is titled "The Thirteenth Star." I remember it as my introduction to the Golem. After that, I thought no more about Dark Shadows for a half-century. My interest as an adult has to do with the discovery that Dan Ross, who penned Barnabas, Quentin and the Crystal Coffin and the thirty-one other Dark Shadows novels, was a son of St John, New Brunswick.

My childhood memories of Collinwood being in Collinsport Bay, Maine proved correct. It's the family home of the Collins family, Barnabas Collins being the oldest member. As a vampire, I suppose he might be considered one of the house's "EVIL FORCES," though he proves every bit the gentleman when accompanying pretty blonde Carolyn Stoddard. One of Barnabas's youngest relatives, Carolyn is keen on visiting the ruins of Frene Castle, located on the vast Collinwood estate bordering the town of Collinsport Bay.

Carolyn Stoddard (Nancy Barrett) and Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) in Dark Shadows episode #351, broadcast 30 October 1967.

"Tell me about Frene Castle and the Frenes," says Carolyn. Barnabas begins, is interrupted by six asterisks, and then an omniscient narrator takes over.
      

Aptly named London orphan Betty Ward is at the centre of the story. She and twin sister Georgette have been under the care of Reverend Prit since their parents died. Bumbling and ineffective, he hasn't been the best of guardians. Prit's opposition to Georgette's desire to study art in Paris was easily overcome and he's heard little from the girl since. Betty, who is more on the ball than the clergyman, gleams through letters home that her sister is falling in love with American sculptor Jeremy Frene; still, their elopement takes her by surprise.

Georgette and Jeremy set sail for his home at Frene Castle. Meanwhile, Betty makes for Paris because she wants to investigate whatever went on before the newlyweds departed. The fact-finding mission doesn't make much sense, though it does bring the very best scenes of the novel. My favourite has to do with an artistic dwarf named Dulez who has been commissioned to create a wax sculpture of Georgette for wealthy French Count Lissay, whom she had rebuffed.

Dulez imprisons Betty because a warm, living, flesh and blood likeness of Georgette is much better than a waxwork, right? Won't the Count Lissay be pleased!

Betty is rescued by Quentin Collins of the Collinsport Bay Collinses. He's the novel's most physically attractive male, though as anyone familiar with the television series will tell you, Quentin is both a bad boy and a werewolf.

For reasons unknown, Quentin does his best to dissuade Betty from setting out for the New World and Collinsport Bay. Failing this, he books a passage on the very same ship, then begins terrorizing his fellow passengers.  

Writing propels the plot with sentence structures that would have not passed muster in my high school English classes:

She didn't refer to it again. But when she was back in her own cabin doing the last of her packing she did think of that bandaged hand. And an odd thought flashed through her mind. The sailor on deck claimed he had shot the werewolf in the front right paw. She stood frowning into space for a moment. And this morning Quentin appeared with a bandaged right hand? Could there be any connection between the two things?

     She at once decided there couldn't.

Barnabas, Quentin and the Crystal Coffin is one of thirteen – thirteen! – "Marilyn Ross" Dark Shadows novels published in 1970. That not one is based on the soap's storylines makes the accomplishment all the more impressive.

Betty Ward wasn't a character in the television series. She exists only in this novel, making the question posed on as the back cover a bit unfair.

Carolyn Stoddard, of course, was a character in the television series. She was born and raised raised at Collinwood, yet in this novel had not so much as seen the ruin of Frene Castle. And so, I have a question of my own:

JUST HOW LARGE IS THE COLLINWOOD ESTATE?

Object: A mass market paperback. The novel itself is followed by three pages of adverts for "Other Great Gothics By Marilyn Ross," along with My Life With Jacqueline Kennedy by Mary Barelli Gallagher. My signed copy was purchased last year as part of a lot of twelve Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows paperbacks.

Access: The Popular Library edition enjoyed a single printing. As of this writing, fifteen copies are listed for sale online ranging in price from US$5.00 to US$24.50.

Condition is not a factor.

This collector, who suffered gouging in the purchase of the aforementioned lot of Dark Shadows paperbacks, notes:

• A California bookseller is charging US$50.00 to ship his US$13.41 copy to Canada. 
• A Texas bookseller is charging US$13.01, then asks US$100.00 for shipping.

USPS First-Class International Package Service from their addresses to mine is US$17.00.

Caveat emptor!

Read for Kaggsy and Simon's 1970 Club.

Other titles from 1970 I've reviewed here over the years:

Cry Hallelujah! - Kenneth Orvis

Re-entry - John Wesley White

The Sin Sniper - Hugh Garner

The Sleeping Bomb - James Moffatt

Stephen Leacock - Robertson Davies

Strength Down Centre - Hugh Hood

The Temple of Pederasty - John Glassco

Related posts:

The Ten Best Book Buys of 2023!

Nurse Grant's Heart Probems
Not to Be Confused with Bust Planet

Pearl White is The White Moll!

The Moving Picture World
2 October 1920

A follow-up to last week's post on Frank L. Packard's The White Moll.

TheWhite Moll was the fifth Frank L. Packard book to be adapted by Hollywood. It followed Tinseltown's take on his 1914 novel The Miracle Man by a matter of months. The Miracle Man is considered one of the great lost silent films. I first wrote about it thirteen years ago, sharing the two minutes and twenty seconds of known footage. Since then a further thirty-nine seconds has been found.

Huzzah!

Here's what we now have:

 

Of the eight Packard novels I've read, The Miracle Man is the best by far. It concerns a faith healer in Maine whose activities attract the attention of a criminal gang. Wanting in on what the grift, they leave the Big Apple for the Pine Tree State, only to find that there is no grift. The White Moll is something altogether different. It was published in 1920, when Packard was all in on thrillers; The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917) and The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1919) had been his two biggest sellers.

As a novel, The White Moll has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, but the film was steeped in a baptismal font. I write with confidence, though I haven't seen Hollywood's adaptation. Like The Miracle Man, it's a lost silent. If anything, The White Moll is even more lost in that not so much as a frame has been found. Everything I know of the movie comes through reviews and descriptions found in one-hundred-and-four-year-old newspapers and magazines. 

The screenplay is credited to E. Lloyd Sheldon (1886-1957), who is best remembered for Tess of the Storm County (1922). It starred Toronto girl Mary Pickford; The White Moll starred Pearl White. She'd made a name for herself as "Queen of the Serials," the 20-chapter Perils of Pauline (1914) being the most popular. The White Moll was intended as White's first step toward becoming the Queen of the Features. 

Exhibitors Herald
4 August 1920

The best review I've read is also the worst. Published on in the Chicago Daily Tribune on August 16, 1920, it pulls no punches:

And thats just the start!

Critic Mae Tinée – real name: Frances Peck Grover – isn't completely down on the film. She praises the camera work and sets as "good," and describes Richard Travers, who played the Adventurer, as the only punk actor. It's the religious elements that offend:

Some things transpire in a church at the start of the picture that quite seriously offend one's good taste. The production will go better when the scenes utilizing the image of Christ crucified are omitted.

Christ crucified!

Reading through the reviews, I've managed to cobble together a plot that owes little to Packard's novel. William M Drew appears to have walked a wider trail, so I quote from his recent biography of Pearl White, The Woman Who Dared (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2023):

The White Moll cast Pearl as Rhoda, a thief from the underworld slums. Her life is transformed when she has a vision of Christ during a church robbery in which her father is killed. Becoming known as the "White Moll," she dedicates her life to reforming criminals. One of them, the "Sparrow," is a burglar who catches her fancy. Her activities as a settlement worker arouse the antagonism of the the "Dangler" (played by John Thornton  Baston), the leader of a criminal band, who clashes with her throughout the film. Her idealism wins out as she succeeds in bringing the "Dangler" to justice and finds love with the "Pug" (Richard C Travers), another reformed crook. In the course of these adventures, Pearl disguises herself as Gypsy Nan, a toothless hag who not "one fan in a million could guess" was the beautiful actress.

The Rhoda of the novel is a young woman who has been raised in comfort by a loving father, a well-positioned, well-respected mining engineer. She dedicates herself to caring for the poor after witnessing their squalid living conditions. The "Sparrow" appears late in the novel in her time of need. He is not someone who has captured her fancy. In the novel the "Dangler" is gang leader Pierre Dangler. He has no idea Rhoda is working against him. The "Pug" is not a reformed crook, rather an upstanding young man who has infiltrated Dangler's gang so as to bring them to justice.

The 7 August 1920 Moving Picture World reports:

The story is considered by Frank L. Packard, its author, to be the most powerful novel he has ever written, truly reflecting underworld existence.

What, one wonders, did the author make of such a radical departure from his story? As I've not had a chance to comb through the Frank L. Packard fonds at Library and Archives Canada, all I have to go on are these two paragraphs from a letter he wrote producer William Fox, as quoted in the 21 August 1920 edition of Moving Picture World: 

Note that praise does not extend E. Lloyd Sheldon.

I wonder whether Packard, a devout Anglican and congregant of Montreal's St James the Apostle, would have objected to the depiction of the crucified Christ (uncredited), or whether he would've embraced the religious elements, particularly after the success of The Miracle Man.

Le Canada
11 September 1920

On the other hand, The Miracle Man is so much better.

Right?

I suppose we'll never know.

Related post:  

A Feminine Jimmie Dale

Images of a Lost Film of a Forgotten Novel

A Feminine Jimmie Dale?

The White Moll
Frank L. Packard
New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1931
306 pages

Walt Disney failed to interest NBC in Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal. His biographers haven't made much of this, but evidence suggests it irked. He'd first read Jimmie Dale's adventures in adolescence, and would act them out with childhood chum Walt Pieffer. What roles they'd played are unknown. I like to think one of the Walts played Marie Lasalle, the Tocsin, but that's just me.

In 1952, fifty-one-year-old Disney purchased the rights to Jimmie Dale – “motion picture, photoplay, television, radio and/or any other adaptations of every kind and character” – and held onto them, even after NBC declined.

In an alternate universe, Disney managed to convince the network and Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal became a cathode-ray tube hit. The adventures of a millionaire masked crimefighter, it would've pre-dated and perhaps even inspired ABC's Batman and The Green Hornet. A Gold Key comic was pretty much guaranteed. In this alternate universe, it might've spawned spin-offs, some featuring the White Moll, which publisher George H. Doran positioned as "a Feminine Jimmie Dale."     

The White Moll
Frank L. Packard
New York: Doran, 1920

The White Moll is not Jimmy Dale en femme, though the two share the talent of impersonation. Both move though a grotty New York beset by poverty, drug addiction, alcoholism, and crime. The Gray Seal, Jimmy Dale is heir to a great fortune, while the White Moll, Rhoda Gray – note the surname – is of the lowly upper middle class. Her mining engineer father had worked for an English concern in South America until ill-health forced him to New York for medical consultation. Papa required an operation, but before it could take place petty thief  Pete "the Bussard" McGee broke into the Grays' flat. He was caught by father and daughter, spilled some sob story starring a sickly wife and hungry, unclothed kiddies, and was let go. The following morning, a curious Rhonda investigates to find Pete was telling the truth about his godawful life.

Sadly, Rhoda's father does not survive his operation. Left an orphan of modest means, she dedicates her young self to saving people like Pete from a life of poverty and crime. Rhoda comes to be known amongst the down and out as "The White Moll," the name coming from the Bussard, who'd introduced her to his invalid wife with these words:

“Meet de moll I was tellin’ youse about, Mag. She’s white – all de way up. She’s white, Mag; she’s a white moll – take it from me!”

Rhonda is about three years into her do-gooding when she visits a dying old hag known as Gypsy Nan. She soon learns that Nan is not the woman's true name, nor is she an old hag... but she is dying. In her final hours, the unnamed woman removes her disguise. As life slips away, the woman known as Gypsy Nan seeks salvation by telling the White Moll of a heist that will go down that very night. Rhonda tries to thwart the crooks, but is nabbed by Rough Rorke of the NYPD. She's saved by a seemingly drunken passerby who wrenches Rhonda from Rorke. Fleeing, she ends up in Gypsy Nan's hovel and adopts the role of the old hag.

The set-up, the only thing to add is that the seemingly drunken passerby was more than likely sober. The man who rescued Rhonda, referred to as "the Adventurer," weaves in and out of the novel, much like the Tocsin does in the adventures of Jimmie Dale.

I expect you know where that relationship will lead. Packard was a commercial writer and knew how to please his audience. 

Disney take note.

Trivia (or not): In 1920, the Fox Film Corporation released a film adaptation that that owed very little to the novel. The subject of next week's post.

Access: First published in the pages of The Blue Book Magazine (August 1919 - January 1920), the novel's first  edition is either the Copp, Clark (Canada) and Doran (United States). Both can be read online through the Internet Archive. My copy is one volume in the 1931 Gray Seal Edition set of Packard's works.

Two copies of Copp, Clark's Canadian first edition are currently listed for sale online, but no copies of the Doran.

Related post:

Whatever Happened to Jimmie Dale?

Of Poets, Poetry, Politicians, and Parliament Hill

Yet another gloriously sunny September weekend, I spent most of it stacking firewood in preparation for winter. The high point came early Saturday morning when I found myself in Ottawa's ByWard Market with an hour to kill. It was so early, that Patrick McGahern Books hadn't yet opened, and so I made for Parliament Hill to see how the restoration of the Centre Block is progressing.

Quite well, it seems.

Despite the early hour, there were swarms of tourists from the United Kingdom and China... but then it was noon in London and early evening in Shanghai.

It had been nearly twenty-four years since I'd walked around the building. The last time was on Sunday, October 1, 2000, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau's body lay in state in the Centre Block's Hall of Honour. I was there with my birth parents, both staunch Liberals. Here I am waiting in the eight-hour line with my birth mother; I have no idea as to the identity of the man in the turquoise cap:

The pins we are wearing were distributed on the evening PET made his farewell speech. I'm no Grit, but the conclusion of that speech has always inspired.

Enough nostalgia.

What I most wanted to see was the Library of Parliament. Its restoration took four years, beginning in  2002. From the outside, the library looks better than I remember. Money well spent, I say!

Several statues have had to be relocated during the restoration, but not the one honouring D'Arcy McGee. His still stands in place, though you really have to look.

See it?

It's not a good photo, but I remind that Saturday was gloriously sunny. I took a better snap of this plaque, which I'd never seen before:

cliquez pour agandir

As you can see, it lies just outside the construction zone. I really like the design and text. Sadly, "the female figure, representing Memory" is currently hidden by the fence. McGee, something of a hero to me,  made his greatest impact as a politician and journalist, of course, but I like that his work as a poet and historian is also recognized. The reference to McGee's verse sent me off walking toward what I think is the most interesting statue on Parliament Hill.

I knew just where to find it.

'A Canadian Galahad' memorializes the heroism of Henry Albert Harper, who on 6 December 1901 died attempting to save Bessie Blair, a young woman who had fallen though the ice while skating on the Ottawa River. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography features a brief entry on Harper by H. Blair Neatby. William Lyon Mackenzie King provides a more thorough biography in The Secret of Heroism: A Memoir of Henry Albert Harper (New York: Revell, 1906). The future prime minister's book, his first, was published the year after 'A Canadian Galahad' was unveiled by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. Three thousand people were in attendance.

The deaths of Henry Harper and Bessie Blair shook the national's capital, in part because the young lady's father, Andrew George Blair, was the Minister of Railways and Canals. The statue was funded by public donations. Inspiration was drawn from a reproduction of George Frederic Watts' 'Sir Galahad,' which Harper had placed above his desk.

To this Canadian, 'A Canadian Galahad,' a statue inspired by a painting, is forever linked with verse. Within days of the tragedy, William Wilfred Campbell, who had a mutual friend in King, wrote a tribute to the doomed hero. This version comes from The Collected Poems of Wilfred Campbell (Toronto: Briggs, 1905):

HENRY A. HARPER

(Drowned in the Ottawa River while trying to save Miss Blair)

               We crown the splendours of immortal peace,

               And laud the heroes of ensanguined war.

               Rearing in granite memory of men

               Who build the future, recreate the past.

               Or animate the present dull world's pulse

               With loftier riches of the human mind.

               But his was greatness not of common mould,

               And yet so human in its simple worth,

               That any spirit plodding its slow round

               Of social commonplace and daily moil.

               Might blunder on such greatness, did he hold

               In him the kernel sap from which it sprung.

               Men in rare hours great actions may perform,

               Heroic, lofty, whereof earth will ring,

               A world onlooking, and the spirit strung

               To high achievement, at the cannon's mouth.

               Or where fierce ranks of maddened men go down.

               But this was godlier. In the common round

               Of life's slow action, stumbling on the brink

               Of sudden opportunity, he chose

               The only noble, godlike, splendid way.

               And made his exit, as earth's great have gone,

               By that vast doorway looking out on death.

               No poet this of winged, immortal pen;

               No hero of an hundred victories;

               Nor iron moulder of unwieldy states.

               Grave counsellor of parliaments, gold-tongued.

               Standing in shadow of a centuried fame.

               Drinking the splendid plaudits of a world.

               But simple, unrecorded in his days,

               Unostentatious, like the average man

               Of average duty, walked the common earth.

               And when fate flung her challenge in his face.

               Took all his spirit in his blinded eyes.

               And showed in action why God made the world.

               He passes as all pass, both small and great,

               Oblivion-clouded, to the common goal; —

               And all unmindful moves the dull world round.

               With baser dreams of this material day.

               And all that makes man petty, the slow pace

               Of small accomplishment that mocks the soul.

               But he hath taught us by this splendid deed,

               That under all the brutish mask of life
               And dulled intention of ignoble ends,
               Man's soul is not all sordid; that behind

               This tragedy of ills and hates that seem,

               There lurks a godlike impulse in the world,

               And men are greater than they idly dream.

Henry Albert Harper
1873-1901

Elizabeth "Bessie" Blair
1879-1901

RIP

Related post:

A Dedication Born of Tragedy

As He Lay Dying

The Jameson Girls
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
Toronto: Nelson, Foster & Scott, 1956
240 pages

King Jameson is dying and his daughters have gathered for the occasion. Isobel has flown in from New York, where she lives with third husband Eric. Mildred too lives in New York, but with her first husband. She arrived by train.

Isobel and Mildred don't talk.

Fanny, the eldest sister, didn't have travel at all; she lives at the family home with Lily, the fourth and youngest Jameson girl. Meanwhile, King lies semi-coherent in an upstairs bedroom facing framed photographs of his two dead wives.

Hawkrest is a grand house located on a wooded crag overlooking the Niagara River. King bought it not long after the Great War, then moved his family from New York. Before the war, the Jamesons had lived in Chicago, in which King's British immigrant parents had settled.

Hawkrest was ideal for King's burgeoning business as a rumrunner. As the years passed, he began pretending that the house had been in the family for generations. King would point to its antique furnishings, collected by the former owner, describing them as objects ancestral.

The true Jameson family history is slowly revealed. The most solacious details belong to King and his second wife, though Isabel and her many marriages provide competition. In stark contrast, Fanny, the eldest Jameson girl, settled into contented spinsterhood as a child. Mildred, the third Jameson girl, obsesses over marital fidelity, while Lily...

Well, what of Lily? The baby of the family, she's the daughter of King's sexy second wife Hazel, who died behind the wheel. Lily was in the passenger seat. She barely survived and hasn't been "right" since.

The Jameson Girls is backward looking, with the real drama existing only in memory. The reader has arrived too late, and so relies on fleeting references to past events. The present, lighter and more comical, takes place under a gathering cloud. It has two stars, the most recent being American Theodore Fairfield, who is summering in the mansion-cum-B&B across the road. A bigamist gold digger who presents himself as a son of Boston's well-to-do, he sets his sites first on Fanny, then quickly shifts to Lily. She's so pretty, so doll like, so innocent, so malleable, he's afraid he's falling in love.

The second star is  Mrs Pringle, who has taken offense in being referenced as "the maid" by King Jameson's night nurse. She is not "the maid," rather "a family friend" who just happens to have taken care of the house daily, for pay, these past thirty or so years. Fanny is so fearful the insulted, indignant Mrs Pringle will leave that she has taken over most housekeeping duties.

It's not all light, of course. Let's remember there is a man dying upstairs. Of this, Mrs Pringle is well aware:

In a burst of optimism on Saturday she had bought a black hat for the funeral: I hope I haven’t gone and wasted my good money, she thought as she ran water into the sink.

Like most Kirkus reviews, its take on The Jameson Girls (1 September 1956) is very short, yet somehow manages to give away too much. I'll share only the final sentence: "For women only, a more credible than charitable chronicle - and this prying, gossipping [sic], niggling world has its authenticity as well as human curiosity."

My interest in this quote relates to an ongoing discussion with friends regarding the "target audience," and how zeroing in on a specific reader, invariably the one most likely to purchase, can alienate others.

Canadian Forum, December 1956

Nelson, Foster and Scott's promotion was gender neutral. Would the Kirkus "For women only" have brought more sales?

Who knows?

What I can say for certain is that this man is all in on a prying, gossiping, niggling world that has authenticity and human curiosity.

You will be, too.

Not quite a bloomer: This passage, in which Fanny reacts to the revelation that sister Isobel, twice divorced, is having an affair, gives some idea of Jan Hilliard's talent:

The critics rave: For all my searching, I've yet to find an unfavourable review of any Jan Hilliard novel. Vancouver Sun critic Elmore Philpott champions The Jameson Girls in his 4 January 1954 review: "It is a witty, genial, sparking satire about the three daughters of the ex-king of the Niagara river rum runners [emphasis mine]."

Did he read it?

Object and Access: One of just two Nelson, Foster & Scott titles in my collection, the other being Jan Hilliard's A View of the Town (1954), The Jameson Girls is a solid hardcover with brown boards and uncredited jacket illustration. All evidence suggests that it was a split-run with Abelard-Schulman, printed and bound in England. Neither edition was reprinted.

There has never been another.

As I write, one copy of the Nelson, Foster & Scott edition is listed online at US$19.00.

In very good condition with dust jacket, it's a steal at twice the price.

Related posts:

A Crooked Cousin in a Country Cottage

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Growing Up With Mother
Susanna Moodie's Bloomers

Gilbert Parker's Hollywood Ending

Being an addendum to last week's post on Gilbert Parker's The Money Master. 

Of the eighteen Gilbert Parker screen adaptations, The Money Master is the only one to be undertaken by the author himself. In his filmography, it follows closely behind Behold My Wife! (1920), a George Melford production based on the author's 1893 bestseller The Translation of a Savage.

That Behold My Wife! was Hollywood's second adaptation of the novel in seven years speaks to the author's popularity. A third adaptation followed.

But this post is about The Money Master... or not. The advertisement at the top of this post comes from an advert Paramount placed in the March 1921 edition of Motion Picture News.

Look for the asterisk.

cliquez pour agrandir

This was three months from release and still there'd been no decision as to the title. The film premiered on 26 June 1921 as A Wise Fool. Though it is preserved in the Library of Congress, I see no evidence that there has been a screening within living memory. What little I know of A Wise Fool comes through publicity shots and reviews, the former being surprisingly uncommon.

The image above, from the August 1921 edition of Exhibitors Herald, features Carmen Barbille (Alice Hollister) serenading her daughter Zoé (Ann Forrest), suggests one difference between A Wise Fool and its source; in the novel, Carmine last sees Zoé as a young girl.

Apologies for the the spoiler.

Anyone considering The Money Master as an autumn read is advised to skip the rest of this post as I'll be comparing the plots of novel and film.

The Money Maker concerns Jean Jacques Barbille, the fortunate heir to generations of wealth grown in rural Quebec. He takes some of those riches to Paris, where he is not recognized as the man of importance he believes himself to be. As noted in last week's review, his reception outside the French capitol meets expectations, though this is to do with capital (apologies, again). On his return voyage aboard the Antoine, Jean Jacques meets the beautiful Carmen Delores and her ne'er-do-well father. The two are fleeing Spain on account of papa Sebastian backing the losing side in Spain's recent civil conflict. The Antoine strikes a submerged iceberg off the shore of Gaspé. Jean Jacques is rescued by Carmen and the two marry.

Flash forward thirteen years. Jean Jacques lives at the family home, Manor Cartier in the parish of St. Saviour's, with Carmen and their little girl Zoé. A happy soul, his passion for business has come to consume and he is taking family life for granted.

No, that's unfair. Jean Jacques dotes on Zoé, who loves him so much.

But what of Carmen?

Mme Barbille has been sneaking around with master carpenter George Masson, whom M Barbille had hired to construct a flume. Once the project is completed, the lovers plan to flee the parish.

George and Carmen as imagined by illustrator André Castaigne.

Jean Jacques discovers his wife's infidelity and confronts George. He has the perfect opportunity to murder his wife's lover, but does not. 

I won't go into their exchange except to say that it is the very best part of the novel.

George jilts Carmen. Though Jean Jacques forgives his wife, she disappears, leaving her daughter behind.

We flash forward again, this time to Jean Jacques' fiftieth birthday, where he realizes that Zoé has fallen in love with Gerard Fynes:

He was English – that was a misfortune; he was an actor – that was a greater misfortune, for it suggested vagabondage of morals as well as of profession; and he was a Protestant, which was the greatest misfortune of all.

Faced with Jean Jacques' disproval, the two elope. It's now Zoé's turn to disappear. 

Jean Jacques goes into a complete tailspin. The modest growth of his inherited wealth is reversed. The decline is hastened by his thieving father-in-law, a dishonest cousin, and a fire that destroys his flour mill. Rather than declare bankruptcy or accept financial aid from the widowed Virginie Poucette, he allows creditors to move in. All Jean Jacques manages to save for himself is a bird cage that had belonged to Carmen and Zoé's pet canary. With nothing to anchor him to St Saviour's, Jean Jacques leaves for Montreal where – quite by chance – he encounters Carmen on her deathbed. In her last moments, they reconcile. Our hero then sets out for the Canadian west, where there had once been a sighting of Zoé and her husband.

Because this synopsis is taking far too long, I won't go into Jean Jacques' attempted murder of Carmen's last lover, and will instead cut to the discovery that he has a granddaughter. The Protestant actor father is dead, Zoé died shortly after childbirth, and the baby is now with a wealthy woman who'd been unable to conceive.

I won't go into their exchange except to say that it is the very worst part of the novel.

For reasons both unclear and unconvincing, Jean Jacques leaves his granddaughter, never to see her again. He marries Virginie Poucette and lives his remaining years on three hundred and twenty acres of land "near the Rockies" he'd bought for Zoé decades earlier. 

I realize that was long. In rushing through the ending I kept pace with the novel.

The comparison with A Wise Fool will be much shorter because I haven't seen it – who has? – and so rely on century-old reviews. The most detailed, found in the 3 June 1921 edition of Variety, suggests that the film followed the plot of the novel quite closely up to the point at which Jean Jacques loses his fortune. This includes a scene in which he destroys the guitar left behind by the absent Carmen.

 

James Kirkwood as Jean Jacques Barbille.

As in the novel, after losing his wife, his daughter, his livelihood, and his possessions, Jean Jacques becomes something of a wanderer, his only companion being the caged canary. 

Had Parker read McTeague?

The Variety reviewer was none too impressed, summing up all that follows in just two sentences:

 

In The Money Master, Jean Jacques comes upon Carmen in a hovel, not a nunnery. She dies within the hour. For all his years of searching, the desperate father never sees his daughter again. Zoé cannot return to him because she is dead. Her husband Gerald died a pauper. Their child is raised by a wealthy woman who refuses to let Jean Jacques so much as touch his granddaughter.

For the film, Parker cut the three deaths and the very existence of Zoé and Gerald's daughter. 

Would that we could see that film! I'm curious as to its depiction of life in rural Quebec, much praised in by American critics, and the character Virginie Poucette. Played by Californian Truly Shattuck, the Canadien isn't mentioned in so much as one review I've found.

Should be be concerned about Virginie?

Gilbert Parker knew what he was doing. As early as 1921, he recognized the Hollywood Ending.

I expect Virginie did just fine.

Related posts:

The Rise and Fall of a Peacock Philosopher
Behold the Translation of a Savage on Film!