The Great Gatsby: 100 years

I was on my lunch break when I first read of Jay Gatsby's death. This was in the back room of the Rockland Centre Sam the Record Man. Twenty-one, I was in charge of the singles department.

The description, as imagined by Nick, is so subtle that the tragedy passed without me seeing it. In my old Bantam edition it begins and ends on a single page. I returned to the beginning because I couldn't quite believe it.

I write about Canadian literature. The Great Gatsby is not a Canadian novel, but it but it is my favourite novel. 

On this, the one hundredth anniversary of its publication, it is only right to recognize it.

CanCon I:

About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say.

   "Anything to say about what?" inquired Gatsby politely.

   "Why,—any statement to give out." It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see."

   It was a random shot, and yet the reporter's instinct was right. Gatsby's notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada" attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn't easy to say.

CanCon II:

His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn't been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two stale dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room we sat smoking out into the darkness.

   "You ought to go away," I said. "It's pretty certain they'll trace your car."

   "Go away now, old sport?"

   "Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal."

 

I didn't realise that you wrote poetry. I didn't realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry

Say what you will about Satan, he's no dummy.

I think I'm right about this, but am not sure.

He had no place in my family's place of worship. I never once heard mention of the Prince of Darkness in church school, confirmation class or even a sermon. This could have something to do with having been raised Anglican.

I am not sure.

My early reading on Satan was extremely limited. It began in October 1974 with 'The Ecchorcist,' MAD magazine's parody of The Exorcist, continued with Joy Carroll's horror romance Satan's Bell (1976), and more or less ended with novelizations of the films The Omen (1976) and Damien:The Omen II (1978).

Since beginning the exploration that is the Dusty Bookcase, I've learned a bit more about Beelzebub through American expat Jules-Paul Tardivel. He believed novels to be "weapons forged by Satan himself for the destruction of mankind," but seized one of "the enemy's war machines" in writing Pour la patrie (1895). Set in the far off future of 1945, the devil is very much present and very much focussed in destroying Quebec as the last bastion of Catholicism.

No one I've read thus far had more to say about Satan and what he's up to than the late televangelist John Wesley White – author of Re-entry (1970), The Man from Krypton (1978), Arming for Armageddon (1983), and Thinking the Unthinkable (1992) – though I'm not sure how much he can be believed. I very much doubt that this song is intended to bring the listener to love Satan, as Dr White claims:

I may be wrong.

From everything I've read, Satan is cunning, creative, devious, and extremely intelligent. What he isn't is a good poet.

I can say this with certainty having browsed Michelle Remembers, the 1980 bestseller credited with providing the spark for the Satanic Panic. I'm planning on writing about it later this year, but for now, this being the first day of National Poetry Month, I thought it might be appropriate to share one of the many samples of Satan's verse recorded in the book by authors Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder:

            If you say one word I say to you,
            You'll say it all until it's through.
            You'll run out of time, run out of space,
            Run at the mouth all over the place.
            You can only go inside your head,
            And if you go there, then you're dead.

            So you see, I've turned it inside out;

            I've turned you around, turned you about,

            You always come back to me,

            The only way out is to see through me.

            The more goes out, the more comes in,

            You'll start to end when you begin.

So begins a theological debate. Is there something lacking in the Prince of Darkness – a heart, perhaps – that prevents him from being anything other than a rotten poet or is his verse intentionally bad so as to bring hell on Earth?

Frankly, I'm beginning to have doubts that Satan composed any of the poems in Michelle Remembers.

My thanks to fellow CanLit scholar Brad Middleton, who generously donated two copies of Michelle Remembers to The Dusty Bookcase.

Related posts:

Ontario Gothic Romance (with a scent of Brut)
The Strange Satanic Canada of a Future Past

Come, Come, Come - Nuclear Bomb

Same Old Same Old about Armageddon
The Oxford PhD Rambles On
Man of Faith, Man of Steel

Songs for Sunday Suggested by John Wesley White
Immoral Music for a Monday Morning

Joyce Boyle: Early Research

An addendum to Saturday's post on The Stone Cottage Mystery.

Emily Joyce Boyle was born on April 6, 1901, missing that year's census by a matter of days. The 1911 census finds Joyce as a ten-year-old living at 227 Westminster Avenue in Toronto with her mother Charlotte and three surviving siblings (Gertrude, John, and Beatrice). Her father, William, recorded in previous censuses as lumber merchant and a crockery merchant, died when she was a four-year-old.

At the time of the 1921 census, Joyce was still living on Westminster Avenue with her mother, Gertrude, and Beatrice. Interestingly, all four Boyle women are reported as having no occupation. They were  certainly not members of the leisure class, yet the family appears to have had the means to send Beatrice and Joyce off to the University of Toronto.

The photo of Joyce Boyle featured above, the only one I've found, comes from the 1924 edition of Torontonesis, the university's student annual. These are the words that appear below:

In the 1931 census, thirty-year-old Joyce and forty-six-year-old sister Gertrude are listed as living at 307 Castlefield Avenue in Toronto. Joyce's occupation is school teacher, while Gertrude's is school librarian.

307 Castlefield Avenue in June 2021

The previous year, Joyce had published Mary, John and Peter, which is most likely her first book.

Toronto: T. Eaton, 1930

Intriguingly, Joyce Boyle's entry in the Database of Canada's Early Women Writers notes that McMaster University's Macmillan Company of Canada Archives contains correspondence regarding an earlier work, Spring Blew Around the Corner, of which there is no known copy. Was it ever published? Thus far, I've found no reviews, adverts or even passing mentions in newspapers and magazines.

She's credited with eleven other titles, most of which – Mary, John and Peter being one – are schoolbooks meant for young children. Of those that aren't, the one that garnered the greatest attention was Muskoka Holiday, a 1953 girls' adventure novel published by Macmillan in Canada, England, and the United States.

Muskoka Holiday has my favourite cover by far, though Bobby's Neighbors has a certain lazy charm.

Nashville: Abingdon, 1959 

Once Upon a Time, a textbook edited in 1966 for Macmillan, appears to have been her last work. She would've been in her mid-sixties at the time.

Joyce Boyle died at the age of seventy-four on June 7, 1975, at Women's College Hospital in Toronto. She was predeceased by all of her siblings (including previously unmentioned Ernest, who died on the date of his birth, and Edith, who died at eleven). The University of Toronto's Joyce Boyle Scholarship is awarded to "a student with overall A standing who is enrolled in the Specialist or Major program in English, with preference to a student whose courses have included romantic poetry or prose." It was established by brother-in-law Stephen James Mathers (1896-1985), who was married to Joyce's sister Beatrice (1899-1969). Mathers also established a scholarship in honour of his late wife.

A good man.

From all I've been able to glean from newspaper articles, Joyce Boyle was a woman who dedicated her life to children's education. She was particularly focussed in fostering early interest in literature and the cause of world peace.

A good woman.

Related post:

TumblingTowards Mystery