Dorothy Dumbrille is Accepted By the Communists

All This Difference

Dorothy Dumbrille

Toronto: Progress, 1945

208 pages

Progress Books, publishing arm of the Communist Party of Canada, announced April 15, 1945 as the publication date of Dorothy Dumbrille’s All This Difference. I’ve found no evidence that the novel hit the shelves on that day, that month, or in the three months that followed. The earliest reviews — and there were many — are from early August of that year. I can’t help but wonder whether its delay had something to do with the publication of Two Solitudes, which occurred a few weeks before All This Difference was to have been released. 

MacLennan's novel was received not as a book of the season, but a book for all time. Globe and Mail literary editor William Arthur Deacon’s April 7 review begins: 

Spectacular as was Canadian achievement in the novel in 1944, Hugh MacLennan of Montreal has opened 1945 with greater power. In light of Two Solitudes, the excellence of Barometer Rising diminishes to the level of an apprentice piece. The promise of the first book is justified abundantly in the second. Considering style, theme, characters, craftsmanship, significance and integrity, Two Solitudes may well be considered the most important Canadian novel ever published. 

The English press praised the book, as did the French, and sales were strong. By that October, MacLennan’s novel had sold 45,000 copies and was in its sixth printing. I can’t say I’ve ever visited a used bookstore in this country that didn’t stock a copy. And yet, though I kept an eye out, it was years before I first saw a copy of All This Difference. The first was at the home of my Montreal friend Adrian King-Edwards, owner of The Word bookshop. A couple of years later, I spotted another on a dollar cart outside Attic Books in London, Ontario. I haven’t come across another since.

So begins my review of All This Difference, posted yesterday at Canadian Notes & Queries online. You can read the whole thing here:

Dorothy Dumbrille's Communist Manifestation

Her second novel, but first to be published in book form, it's a highly ambitious work, as reflected in this publisher's advert:

The Globe & Mail
4 August 1945

I stopped short of describing All This Difference as "great," but had so much to say that I never got around to discussing the book's appearance. The bland jacket does it a disservice, particularly in light of the illustrations within. Each of its twenty chapters opens with a line drawing by self-taught Glengarry artist Stuart McCormick. Montrealers will recognize the Museum of Fine Arts.

The only other edition of All This Difference followed eighteen years after the first. Lacking the McCormick illustrations, it came from a very different publisher.

Toronto: Harlequin 1963

As I point out in the review, All This Difference was the very last Harlequin published before committed itself to romance... which is not to say it didn't try to sell the novel as a romance.

It also holds the distinction of being the only "HARLEQUIN CANADIAN."*

Wish they'd kept that up. Would've made my work a whole lot easier.

* My friend bowler informs that one other title, Kate Aitken's Never a Day So Bright, also bears the "HARLEQUIN CANADIAN" label.

Related post:

Dorothy Dumbrille's Easter Prayer

Who Is Canada's Outstanding Novelist? (1945)

Critic William Arthur Deacon isn't much discussed these days – or even much recognized – but for a good part of the last century he was Canada's foremost literary champion. As book editor, he held sway for forty years in the pages of the Manitoba Free Press (1921), Saturday Night (1922-28), the Mail & Empire (1928-36), and the Globe & Mail (1936-61),

I've taken a few swipes at Deacon over the years, including this one in defence of Collins White Circle. His judgement was often questionable – Robert Norwood? Really? – but I do admire his enthusiasm and dedication. Looking through his correspondence, it sometimes seems he was in touch with anyone who ever penned a novel, poem or play in this Dominion. Dorothy Dumbrille was one such person. It was in researching her second novel All This Difference (the subject of a forthcoming review), that I came upon the following comments published on 3 February 1945 in "The Fly Leaf," Deacon's weekly Globe & Mail column. It's interesting not only a snapshot of a dire time in the country's literature, but as a reflection of Deacon's aforementioned questionable judgement.

I've added the covers of what were then the most recent books by the authors Deacon mentioned. My comments are in italics.

Most frequently asked and least answerable is the question. Who is Canada's Outstanding Novelist? This week it came in the form of a request to choose between Morley Callaghan, Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove and Hugh MacLennan. Fortunately, there is no towering genius in Canadian fiction to prevent others from receiving attention. In these early days, the notable acts are that Canadian authors display the most varied preferences for subject and style treatment and that readers also differ widely in their judgments.

The Building of Jalna
Mazo de la Roche
New York: Little, Brown, 1944

Certainly the works of Miss Mazo de la Roche have attained a world-wide popularity far beyond those of any other Canadian writer in any field. Her Jalna fixation is the result of stupendous demand. Millions of people in many countries are familiar with the Whiteoaks family.

Miss de la Roche's Jalna fixation was then nine novels into its sixteen novel run.

More Joy in Heaven
Morley Callaghan
New York: Random House, 1937

The Master of the Mill
Frederick Philip Grove [pseud. Felix Paul Greve]
Toronto: Macmillan, 1944

Mr. Callaghan showed exceptional talent as a member of the Hemingway school and seems to be going into partial eclipse with it. It is some years since he published a new book. Very different in type, Frederick Philip Grove, a somewhat heavy writers merits too solid to be ignored. He brought into Canadian fiction an intellectual and artistic integrity that was and is important. Neither the novels of Mr. Grove nor those of Mr. Callaghan have been specially popular.

It had been seven years since Callaghan had published a novel. Four more years would pass before the next, Luke Baldwin's Vow. It's considered a children's book.

Barometer Rising
Hugh MacLennan
Toronto: Collins, 1941

It is comment enough on the impression of Barometer Rising that my correspondent should include Hugh MacLennan in the quartet. Two Solitudes, when it is in circulation, will do much to reinforce Mr. MacLennan's position as a potential best Canadian novelist. He will be watched to the last comma.

Two months later, when it was "in circulation," Deacon wrote, "Two Solitudes may well be considered the most important Canadian novel ever published." It remains MacLennan's best-known novel (though The Watch That Ends the Night is much better).

Earth and High Heaven
Gwethalyn Graham
Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944

But there are plenty of others. Gwethalyn Graham's Swiss Sonata placed her among the leading Canadian novels [sic], as Earth and High Heaven has now elevated her to a similar prominence among American novelists.

Earth and High Heaven was Graham's second novel. It followed Swiss Sonata, her first, by six years. She never wrote another. I speculate as to the reason here.

The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek
Thomas H. Raddall
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1943

Forges of Freedom
Franklin Davey McDowell
Toronto: Macmillan, 1943

The Higher Hill
Grace Campbell
Toronto: Collins, 1943

Thomas M.H. Raddall, author of Roger Sudden, His Majesty's Yankees and Pied Piper of Dipper Creek, may well wind up as the Canadian novelist whom everyone reads. Franklin Davey McDowell has already, in The Champlain Road, given Canada one novel of permanent worth and his far-finer Forges of Freedom deserves a much wider public than it has reached. Grace Campbell has a very large and ever-growing audience for her two books.

I studied Raddall in university, but not The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek. Decades passed before I so much as heard of The Champlain Road, despite the fact that it won the 1939 Governor General's Award for Fiction (The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek won in 1943). Another decade passed before I learned of Franklin Davey McDowell's "far-finer" Forges of Freedom. I've never so much as seen a copy, and could find no better image of the book than the screen grab presented above. Grace Campbell was much easier.

Carrying Place
Angus Mowat
Toronto: Saunders, 1944

Among the new writers of higher promise is Angus Mowat, who is sure to be a writer intensely admired by other writers. I think his books will endure as long as any written in our generation.

Father of Farley, Angus Mowat wrote just two novels: Then I'll Look Up (1938) and Carrying Place (1944). His enduring books have been out-of-print for over seven decades. 

Thirty Acres [Trente arpents]
Ringuet [pseud. Philippe Panneton; trans. Felix & Dorothy Walter]
Toronto: Macmillan, 1940

But there are now so many dozens of these Canadian novelists. Ringuet's Thirty Acres, for instance, comes pretty near to  being a perfect performance. Alan Roy Evans [sic] is another up near the top in merit. I have faith in the sensitive abilities of Jessie L. Beattie and wish she would publish more. Alexander Knox, playwright and actor, did one exquisite novel of the Ottawa Valley, called Bride of Quietness, before turning to better-paid work. He should be induced to continue with fiction. And so on... and so on.

The English translation of Ringuet's Trente arpents was a staple of the New Canadian Library and is still published in the original French. Allen Roy Evans is one of those odd Canadian writers who achieved far greater sales in a language other than their own. Der Zug der Rentiere, the German translation of his 1935 fictionalized memoir Reindeer Trek, has enjoyed at least six different editions. When Deacon wrote his column, Evans' newest work was All in a Twilight (1944). I've never seen a copy, and can find no image online. Ditto Jessie L. Beattie's Three Measures (1938) and Alexander Knox's Bride of Quietness (1933). That said, I have seen Knox in film adaptations of Nicolas and Alexandra, Joshua Then and Now, Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy, and Gorky Park. More than anything, I remember him acting opposite Edward G. Robinson in The Sea Wolf.

It may be of great ultimate advantage in our literature that the variety of cultural backgrounds among Canadians precludes any uniformity in our fiction and in the tastes of Canadian readers. But we waste talent shockingly. I think of a woman like Irene Baird writing two novels like John and Waste Heritage and then being allowed to sit back and write no more. Darkly the River Flows will be along shortly to launch a new novelist, John MacDonald, and the manuscripts of other men in the armed services will presently be in print. Florence Randal Livesay, also, might do another novel to the advantage of all and sundry.

Darkly the River Flows
John MacDonald
New York: Coward-McCann, 1945

Deacon seems unaware that Irene Baird followed up John (1937) and Waste Heritage (1939) with He Rides the Sky (1941)... another book I've never seen. I've had better luck with John MacDonald's Darkly the River Flows. Sadly, the novel-writing days of Florence Randal Livesay, Dorothy's mother, were in the past. Her last novel, Savour of Salt, was published in 1927 by Dent.

We have not had time yet to acquire perspective, but I have no doubt that the fiction of this era will finally be judged to be relatively as fine as the Canadian poetry produced between 1880 and 1920.

W.A.D.

Deacon lived another three decades after writing those words. Did they offer enough perspective to make him realize he'd been wrong? Most of the fiction of that era pales beside Carman and Lampman. You may take issue, but can we at least agree that the absence of a towering genius is not "fortunate"?

Related posts:

Canada's Best 100 Books? 102? 111?
First Ignored, Then Slighted
The Paralysing Success of Gwethalyn Graham

Thomas D'Arcy McGee: 150 Years

He has gone from us, and it will be long ere we find such a happy mixture of eloquence and wisdom, wit and earnestness. His was no artificial or meretricious eloquence, every word of his was as he believed, and every belief, every thought of his, was in the direction of what was good and true.

— Sir John A. Macdonald, 7 April 1868

The great Thomas D'Arcy McGee was murdered 150 years ago today, nine months after Confederation. His remains the only assassination of a federal politician in our history. Is it unseemly that I take some pride in this?

McGee became my hero at Allancroft Elementary School. He was never mentioned in class; I first learned about him through a book, Pierre Berton's Historic Headlines (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967), borrowed from the school library.

These past nine years I've marked the anniversary of McGee's death with verse written as news of the tragedy swept across the Dominion he'd brought into being. This year, a unfinished poem composed by McGee himself. Appropriate, I think.

The Poems of Thomas D'Arcy McGee
New York: Sadlier, 1869

Related posts:

'O Martyr'd McGee!'

D'Arcy McGee's Query (with a response)

D'Arcy McGee, All Compliment to Thee

'Death of D'Arcy McGee'

'IN MEMORIAM! The Hon. T.D. McGee'

Remembering Edith Eaton and D'Arcy McGee

'Erin's Address to the Hon. Thomas D'Arcy McGee'

A Poet's Angry Words for the Fenian Brotherhood

'Mort de Thomas D'Arcy McGee'

From Harlequin Romance to Canada Post

Thursday will see Canada Post release "Great Canadian Illustrators," five stamps celebrating the work of Will Davies, Blair Drawson, Gérard DuBois, James Hill, and Anita Kunz.

Though all five supplied art for books and magazines, the Will Davies stamp will be of particular interest to bibliophiles in that it features one of the more than 500 cover illustrations he did for Harlequin.

Curiously, Canada Post doesn't identify the book in question, but seconds of sleuthing reveals it to be Neptune's Daughter, a 1987 novel by British reporter and romance writer Jay Blakeney (published under her "Anne Weale" nom de plume).

I think Canada Post chose well. Of the Davies covers I've seen – admittedly, nowhere near 500 – it's by far my favourite. Viewed one after another, there's a sameness to his Harlequin work.

That Dear Perfection
Alison York
Toronto: Harlequin, 1988

Fortunes of Love
Jessica Steele
Toronto: Harlequin, 1988

No Angel
Jeanne Allan
Toronto: Harlequin, 1991

Anything for You
Rosemary Hammond
Toronto: Harlequin, 1992

This is no criticism of Davies; Harlequin is famous for placing limitations on authors and illustrators. Of all Davies' Harlequin covers, the one I most want to read is the one I find most disturbing:

Unfriendly Proposition
Jessica Steele
Toronto: Harlequin, 1990

Here one month, gone the next, Harlequin covers barely have time to lodge in the brain. Unsurprisingly, the one Davies cover that has remained in mine came from an entirely different Toronto publisher. A fixture of my teenage years, I saw it everywhere:

The Canadian Caper
Jean Pelletier and Claude Adams
Toronto: PaperJacks, 1982

Recommended, The Canadian Caper is an account of the 1980 smuggling of American embassy staff through Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor's Tehran residence. Argo, Ben Affleck's Academy Award-winning film based on the same events is a piece of revisionist, jingoistic garbage.

I'm getting sidetracked.

Davies died two years ago. Everything I've read has it that he was a kind man with a passion for cars. I don't much care about automobiles myself, and yet can't help but be drawn to illustrations like this:

No pun intended.

Canadians, shall we celebrate the day by writing a love letter? What better way to send it than with a stamp born of a Harlequin Romance.

Related posts:

The Brilliance of Frank Newfeld
McClelland's Experiment, Newfeld's Art
In Appreciation of Syd Dyke, Illustrator

The Curious and Unknown Leo Orenstein

Mr. Steven Against Company Policy

Dorothy Dumbrille's Easter Prayer

Verse for Easter Sunday by Anglican clergyman's daughter Dorothy Dumbrille, whose novel All This Difference I'm currently reading. Of her verse, S. Morgan-Powell, Editor-in-chief of the Montreal Star, wrote:

I do not think any of our contemporary writers can excel her in this sort of verse, It is because it is simple and goes straight to the heart, and yet is devoid of mere sentimentality that it possesses such appeal.

From Stairway to the Stars (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1946):

Related posts:

Easter Verse by Ethel Ursula Foran
'Easter Dawn' by Jean Blewett
'The Easter Parade, 1915' by Robert Stanley Weir

Uncollected Easter Verse by Arthur Stringer

'Communion Pascale' de Émile Nelligan

An Absentminded Amazon Customer is Confused; Timothy Findley Pays the Price

cliquez pour agrandir

Related posts:

Homophobes and Book Burners Weigh In

The Return of the Amazon Customer Review

Much Ado About Anne
Donald Jack Tackles Timothy Findley

Mary Astor, Margaret Millar, and Celuloid Hell

At the end of my review of Margaret Millar's Rose's Last Summer, I put it that the title character, Rose French, had seen her Hollywood career done in by age. It's wrong to blame her downfall on drink, though I do understand the presumption. "Rose was on the skids again," begins the novel. "Everyone in the boarding house knew it." The 1960 Thriller adaptation opens with a drunken Rose being thrown out of a bar.

But to suggest that Rose's career was ruined by alcohol is to ignore the fact that she always drank, and likely drank even more when her star was high. I'll add that her social worker, psychologist Frank Clyde, doesn't consider Rose an alcoholic. Who am I to disagree? Frank is the most sober, level-headed character in the novel, and I'm no social worker. I'm no psychologist either, though I do see something in this early passage:

She changed into her best silk print, combed her short hair carefully, and put on some makeup. Surveying the results of this effort in the mirror, she decided that she looked pretty good considering that she had fifty-two years of assorted living behind her.

Fifty-two. She decided that she looked pretty good considering. In fact, Rose French is sixty-five years old.

Rose's self-examination comes after finding "reassurance" on the walls of her boarding house room:

They were covered, from floor to ceiling, with photographs of herself, smiling, sultry, coy, gay; in period costumes and bathing suits; stills and action shots; Rose being kissed, strangled, rescued, fed to the lions, lighting a cigarette, toasting a lover, dancing a polka.

In the television adaptation, the camera gives a glimpse of one of those walls, as Thriller host Boris Karloff narrates:

Rose French. In the blur of memory the face grows dim, but do you remember the name? Twenty years ago... Rose French, the remarkable Rose French, as a servant girl or as a princess she was a quicksilver star in a celluloid heaven.

Cut to an old issue True Confessions, atop a pile of magazines.

Fans of old films – I'm one – will recognized that all those stills feature Mary Astor. That old issue of True Confessions (April 1932), has the actress on its cover. Mary Astor plays Rose French in Rose's Last Summer, and makes her co-stars look weak. Lin McCarthy, who plays Frank Clyde, comes off like a slow-moving automaton.

Reviewing Rose's Last Summer I cut off discussion of the plot so as to avoid spoilers. I'll be going a bit further here.

The forty-nine minute Thriller episode is nowhere near as nuanced as Miller's 245-page novel (Random House first edition), but the basic story is the same: Rose French is an unstable faded film star who lives in a boarding house north of Hollywood. Frank Clyde is a social worker who goes above and beyond in trying to help. Unexpectedly, and improbably, Rose announces that she's taken a job somewhere. The following day, her death makes the front pages.

Bette Davis turned down Millar's The Iron Gates because her character, Lucille Morrow, would've died just past the half-way mark. Reports of Rose's death come nine minutes into this drama... but she isn't really dead. Karloff does his best to deceive by introducing "our principal players" as "Miss Mary Astor, Mr Lin McCarthy, and Miss Helen Quintal."

"Miss Helen Quintal" is actually Mary Astor. Rose has been hired by to pass herself off as the matriarch of the wealthy Goodfield family in the event that Mrs Goodfield dies before her childrens' inheritances are secure. In the novel, avoiding estate tax is the issue. In the Thriller adaptation, the crisis is caused by a will left by eccentric patriarch Horace G. Goodfield.

Mrs Goodfield dies too early. The novel sees son Willett and daughter-in-law Ethel look to transport her body far from the house. It proves too stiff and unwieldily, so they end up dumping it, face down, beside their lily pond. Rose's purse is placed beneath the dead woman. In the Thriller adaptation, the dead body is found slumped over on a stone bench in the Goodfield's garden.

And so, Astor plays a former film star who takes on the role of a dead woman because Hollywood has nothing for her.

Rose's Last Summer isn't the best television, and doesn't seem much when compared to films like Convention City (1933), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), The Great Lie (1941) and The Maltese Falcon (1941), but I can't help but think that Astor saw Rose French as something more than just another role. Astor herself wrote that she began abusing alcohol in the 'thirties. In 1951, following a suicide attempt, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous, converted to Roman Catholicism, and by all accounts turned her life around. And yet, despite her newfound stability, her career declined with age. She became frustrated by the bland roles –  more often than not mothers – offered her.

Where Rose turned to the Goodfields, Astor turned to television. From 1954 through 1963, she took on in forty-seven roles for the small screen, but appeared in only seven movies. Her last performance was as Jewel Mayhew in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), a role she described as "a little old lady, waiting to die."

Mary Astor was fifty-eight when she shot those scenes. She was fifty-four when she did Rose's Last Summer... in which she played a woman of sixty-five.

The hell that is Hollywood.

I wonder who supplied Thriller with all that Mary Astor memorabilia.

Related posts:

A Margaret Millar Mystery Spoiled
Margaret Millar's Great Toronto Murder Mystery

A Margaret Millar Mystery Spoiled

The Lively Corpse [Rose's Last Summer]
Margaret Millar
New York: Dell, [1956]
224 pages

Margaret Millar's The Iron Gates was sold to Warner Brothers. Barbara Stanwyck was signed to play the lead. The film never happened, but I haven't give up hope. David Cronenberg, if you're reading this, The Iron Gates is for you.

One of the odd things about Millar's career is that she was courted by Hollywood, and worked for Hollywood, yet nothing came of it. The only adaptations of her twenty-five novels appeared on the small screen. Beast in View, which was moulded into a 1964 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, is the best. A later adaptation of the same novel, shot as part of the series' 1980s reboot, can't be considered an adaptation at all.

Anyone who has read the novel will agree.

I wrote here about Beast in View on television six years ago. Right after I did, I made the mistake of watching the 1960 Thriller broadcast of Rose's Last Summer, the only other Millar novel to have been adapted. It's not so memorable as either Alfred Hitchcock Presents Beast in View, but it did stay with me... and, as a result, it ruined my enjoyment in reading the book. I place Rose's Last Summer near the bottom of the Millars I've read, but can't say whether I'm being fair. That this mystery held no mystery is probably explained by the fact I'd watched that old Thriller adaptation.

Random House sold the 1952 first edition as "A MYSTERY TOLD WITH MURDEROUS WIT." It's an accurate description, though I would argue that "MURDEROUS" is intended to deceive. Rose's Last Summer is lighter than than Do Evil in Return (1950) and Vanish in an Instant (1952), the two novels that come before and after.

Much of the wit is supplied by its main character, Rose French, a once wealthy former film star, who now lives in a rooming house many miles north of Hollywood.

Rose is given to drink, though Frank Clyde, her greatest champion doesn't think she's "true alcoholic," nor does he consider her a "mental case." A social worker, Frank has all sorts of time for Rose, and is in every way her greatest defender and champion. He knows the actress better than anyone – all five ex-husband's included – and so is surprised when Rose calls him to say that she's taken a job as a housekeeper in San Francisco.

The next day, news of Rose's death makes the afternoon papers.

Reports have it that she was found face down beside a lily pond on the grounds of a large house rented by Willett and Ethel Goodfield. Their gardener, Ortega, made the discovery. Willett dealt with it in an practical manner:

"A dead woman you say? Well." Willett cleared his throat. "Well, I'll tend to the matter immediately."

One of three heirs to the Horace M. Goldfield Doll Corporation, makers of the Sweetheart doll,  Willett Goodfield appears to have more pressing concerns, one of which is the health of his ailing mother, who rests in a bedroom overlooking the lily pond.

The Thriller adaptation spoiled things for me. I'm assuming you haven't seen it. Even if you have, I recommend the novel. See if you don't agree with me on this point: Rose's Hollywood career wasn't destroyed by drink, but by age.

Margaret Millar knew Hollywood.

Dedication:

"TO THE MEMORY OF M.M. MUSSELMAN"

A humorist and minor Hollywood screenwriter, Morris McNeil Musselman (1899-1952) is best remembered for the 1939 version of The Three Musketeers, starring the Ritz Brothers. A friend of Margaret and Kenneth Millar, he was the author of a half-dozen  of books, including Wheels in His Head (1945), a biography his inventor father. M.M. Musselman died of pancreatic cancer seven months before Rose's Last Summer was published.

Object: A squat mass market paperback, this edition marks the only time the novel appeared under the title The Lively Corpse. The cover painting is by the brilliant  Victor Kalin, a man who I most associate with John Coltrane. I purchased my copy three years ago from a New York bookseller. Price: US$4.50.

Access: Held in one edition or another by Kitchener Public Library, four academic libraries, and Library and Archives Canada.

Rose's Last Summer returned to print last year as one of the six novels included in Volume Two of the Collected Millar. It was last published on its own in 1993 by Allison & Busby (again, no relation). As far as I've been able to determine that edition marked the first and only UK edition.

Lancer published the novel 1965, followed by International Polygonics Ltd in 1985. Unlike most IPL Millars, the cover (left), ain't half bad (though, like the Random House first, the cover caption misleads).

Used copies of the novel are easily found online with prices ranging from US$3.15 (a Very Good IPL) to US$250 (a Near Fine first edition).

A French translation, Son dernier rôle, was published in 1961 and 1986 by Librairie des Champs-Elysées.

Related posts:

Telephone Always Rings
Desperately Seeking Violet
Margaret Millar Saturday Matinée Spoilers
Margaret Millar's Great Toronto Murder Mystery
Margaret Millar's Michigan Murder Mystery