Dusty CanLit Spring Reviews

Here comes summer. School is out. Oh, happy day.

So, here we are with the spring blog reviews of old CanLit. As expected, most came from Canadian bloggers, but the Brits are well represented. Americans, où es-tu?

Looking over the list, I'm left wondering whether we are on the cusp of a Ross Macdonald revival. The winter harvest included Blue City, The Goodbye Look, and Sleeping Beauty. Spring brought reviews of The Ivory Grin, The Underground Man, and The Goodbye Look.

Please do let me me know if I've missed anything or anyone.

The Mountain and the Valley - Ernest Buckler

The Ivory Grin - John Ross Macdonald [Kenneth Millar]

Le grand Khan - Jean Basile

Les voyages d’Irkoutsk - Jean Basile

Lan ga ge - Michel Garneau

Langage 1 - Michel Garneau

Langage 2 - Michel Garneau

Langage 3 - Michel Garneau

Langage 4 - Michel Garneau

Langage 5 - Michel Garneau

Moments - Michel Garneau

La plus belle île - Michel Garneau

Les petits chevals amoureux - Michel Garneau

Élégie au génocide des nasopodes - Michel Garneau 

Eukuan nin matshimanitu Innu-iskueu - An Antane Kapesh

La rivière sans repos - Gabrielle Roy

Bear - Marian Engel

The Goodbye Look - Ross Macdonald [Kennneth Millar]

'Fang Law' - Harold F. Cruickshank

The Equations of Love - Ethel Wilson

The Underground Man - Ross Macdonald [Kenneth Millar]

I read and reviewed seven old CanLit titles this past season: 

The Stone House Mystery - Joyce Boyle

The Eyes of the Gypsy - John Murray Gibbon

Sword of Desire - Robert W. Tracy [Alvin Schwartz]

If You Want to See Your Wife Again... - John Craig

The Street Called Straight - Basil King

Looking Forward - Hugh Pedney

The Homesteaders - Robert J.S. Stead

Of these, Rev King's The Street Called Straight was the best, though Montrealers and readers of science fiction may find Looking Forward to be of more interest. The Homesteaders is recommended for readers in Manitoba and Alberta,

I'm beginning to think that 2025 will be another year in which male authors dominate my reading.

Let's see what the summer brings! Enjoy the sun!

Related post:

Dusty CanLit Winter Reviews

A Man Reaps What He Sows

The Homesteaders: A Novel of the Canadian West
Robert J.C. Stead
Toronto: Musson , 1916
347 pages

The first edition is bound in boards reading The Homesteader when it should be The Homesteaders. The distinction is important, particularly in the early chapters, though it becomes less so as the novel progresses.

The Homesteaders opens in Quebec's Eastern Townships as one-room schoolteacher John Harris watches students scatter at the end of the day. He's soon joined by his fiancée Mary. 

This being 1881, John is expected to support his betrothed, and so has made the decision to give up his paltry teacher's salary and try his hand at farming in Manitoba. The plan, which John has taken care to hide, involves traveling west the next spring, locating a homestead, constructing some sort of shelter, and breaking ground. If all goes well, he'll return for Mary. If not, well, there's aways the year after that.

There's something about Mary in these early pages. Lithe and beautiful, she is not "a daughter of the sturdy backwoods pioneers, bred to hard work in field and barnyard," rather "she was sprung from gentler stock." Mary is also the only character in this novel to demonstrate a sense of humour, as when she ribs John:

“Always at your studies,” she cried, as he sprang eagerly to his feet. “You must be seeking a professorship. But I suppose you have to be always brushing up,” she continued, banteringly. “Your oldest pupil must be—let me see—not less than eight?”

Clever and quick, Mary was onto her fiancé from the start. “I declare, if it isn’t Manitoba!" she says, snatching a map from his hands. "What next? Siberia or Patagonia? I thought you were still in the Eastern Townships.”

Mary insists on accompanying John west, moving up their wedding day in the process. What follows is not an account of their honeymoon, rather descriptions of lengthy train travel to Emerson and an oh-so-slow trek northward to tracts of land Ottawa is offering gratis to men who prove themselves able to establish working farms. The couple's first marital home is a windowless sod shack with a heavy blanket for a door.

These are the novel's most interesting pages, no doubt drawn from Stead's childhood memories and experiences. Born in Ontario's Lanark Highlands, as a toddler Robert, his father (Robert, Sr). and mother (tellingly, Mary) established a Manitoba homestead in the very same year as John and Mary Harris.

Robert J.C. Stead
Bookseller & Stationer, October 1916

The fictional couple's success in meeting the government's terms has to do with hard work, but not necessarily self-sufficiency. Friendships were formed as those cramped railcars made their way across Ontario. Though the homesteaders settle miles away from one another, their struggle is common. The men work together, loaning each other mowers, plows, and hayracks. As for the women:

Mrs. Grant was the proud possessor of a very modern labour- saver in the shape of a clothes-wringer, as a consequence of which wash-day was rotated throughout the community, and it was well known that Mrs. Riles and Mrs. Harris had to do their churning alternately.

Stead takes great care here. This is not drudgery, rather progress, with each couple striving for a better life. The most dramatic pages are set after the first harvest, reaching a climax in the fifth chapter when, during a winter storm, John abducts a drunken doctor to aid with the delivery of Allan, his first child.

cliquez pour agrandir

Moving between chapters five and six can be jarring. Twenty-five years have passed. The sod shack has been replaced by a brick house. Family and farm have expanded with the addition of a second child, Beulah, and many more acres of land. But all this is no way satisfies John:

He saw the light ahead, but it was now a phantom of the imagination. He said, “When I am worth ten thousand I will have reached it”; when he was worth ten thousand he found the faithless light had moved on to twenty-five thousand. He said, “When I am worth twenty-five thousand I will have reached it”; when he was worth twenty-five thousand he saw the glow still ahead, beckoning him on to fifty thousand. It never occurred to him to slacken his pace—to allow his mind a rest from its concentration; if he had paused and looked about he might, even yet, have recognized the distant lighthouse on the reef about the wreck of his ideals. But to stop now might mean losing sight of his goal, and John Harris held nothing in heaven or earth so great as its attainment.

The John of the early chapters has become crude; even his whole manner of speech has changed. Mary too is transformed, but only physically. The years have taken a toll, "the shoulders, in mute testimony to much hard labour of the hands, had drooped forward over the deepening chest; the hair was thinner, and farther back above the forehead, and streaked with grey at the temples; the mouth lacked the rosy sensuousness of youth, and sat now in a mould, half of resolution, half submission."

The community formed a quarter-century earlier in those railcars is already a thing of the past. Though one of the most prosperous homesteaders, John cannot help but compare himself to others. Wanting more, he teams up with neighbouring homesteader Hirim Riles. They plan to go out to Alberta, the new frontier, and procure four or five tracts of free land. John will set up a homestead on the first and Riles will establish another on the second. The third, four and possibly fifth would be worked by men who will be provided grub and a small wage during the three years required to secure titles which would subsequently be be transferred to Harris and Riles:

This was strictly against the law, but the two pioneers felt no sense of crime or shame for their plans, but rather congratulated themselves upon their cunning though by no means original scheme to evade the regulations.

Indeed, by no means an original scheme. There is no way the two men would've succeeded, though the scheme does serve to bring further notice to John's descent from the decent, dedicated Eastern Townships schoolteacher with whom Marys fell in love.

The last fifteen chapters are far less interesting than the first five, in part because there isn't nearly so much about the pioneer experience, and in part because too many of its pages focus on a crime that takes too long to unfold. I suppose there is a lesson to be learned about working with another when committing a crime, but only if one has never heard of the time-worn observation on honour amongst thieves.

What I liked most was Mary leaving John.

Beulah running away was second.

She is in every way her mother's daughter.

Censorship?: Riles reaches Alberta before partner-in-crime Harris. Though a miser, he enters a bar in order to get the lay of the land (no pun intended). What follows is a scene somewhat reminiscent of this 2016 Heritage Minute:

The American in Stead's novel threatens a lumberjack – yes, a lumberjack – for what he perceives as a personal slight.

By far the most superfluous scene in the novel, it is nevertheless interesting for these two instances of... what exactly? Is it censorship? An author well aware of the impermissible?  Or just Stead having some fun?

I leave it for you to judge.

Object: My first edition is printed on paper so acidic that it's a wonder I didn't burn my fingers. It was acquired in 2018 as part of a lot. A few years earlier, I'd purchased a copy of the 1973 University of Toronto Press reissue with introduction by Susan Wood Glicksohn.

Access: A Canadian bestseller, The Homesteaders went through five printings. It was also published in the UK by Unwin (1916) and Hodder & Stoughton (1923). Used copies aren't at all difficult to find online. 

 

The Dodo Press print on demand edition uses a detail of Abraham Louis Buvelot's 1873 painting Tubbutt Homestead in the Bombala district, in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. Two different countries, two different continents, the distance between the Tubbutt and Harris homesteads amounts to roughly 15,000 kilometres. 

The novel is available online here thanks to the Internet Archive.

Related post:

A Man of Peculiar Notions

Looking Back on Looking Forward

The Daily Witness, 16 May 1913

An addendum to last week's post on Looking Forward by Hugh Pedley.

Looking Forward features cub reporter Billy Scooper. We also meet a disreputable promoter named Humphrey Hustleman. There aren't really any laughs, but there is fun to be had. 

A 1913 novel set in 1927, Looking Forward reminded me of nothing so much as Tim Ososko's 1979 book Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?

Oh, boy, was it!

I gobbled up every detail of Rev Pedley's future Canada no matter how small, as in this description of a Montreal streetcar:

This carriage of the common people was not without its touch of the beautiful. Instead of the long row of heterogeneous advertisements above the windows was a series of fine reproductions of great masters. The city authorities had evidently decided that a ride in a street-car might be a phase of the aesthetic education of the people. They had come to the conclusion that, the suggestion of beauty was better for the health of the people than the suggestion of disease as furnished by the advertisements of patent medicines.

Montreal plays a central role in Looking Forward. It is the city in which Fergus attends university, it is the city in which he befriends those of different faiths, it is the city in which he meets and falls in love with Florence Atherton, it is the city in which he solves the mysteries of hibernation, and it is the city in which he marries Florence Atherton's daughter.

Its best not to focus on that last bit.

Some of Rev Pedley's predictions, like the Mount Royal Tunnel, would've been safe bets. Work began in 1911, two years before Looking Forward was published.  

Construction of the Mount Royal Tunnel, c.1912.

He also anticipates the amalgamation Port Arthur and Fort William, a done deal by 1927, which in reality did not take place until 1970. Rev Pedley's unified city is called Portchester, not Thunder Bay.

Most remarkably, this 1913 novel describes "magnificent new government buildings, which a devastating fire had rendered necessary." It was not three years after publication that the seat of Canadian government went up in flames.

The Globe, 4 February 1916

Telephones, automobiles, paved streets, aeroplanes, and dirigibles, the author plays it safe with his predictions. The outlier is a mountain built in the heart of Winnipeg by wealthy bachelor Irish-Canadian Teddy Ryan. I get the feeling that its existence is meant to be a joke. 

Being a student of the Great War, and noting that this novel dates from 1913, I looked for recognition that  Armageddon might be in the offing. I found it when Billy Scooper tells Fergus that news of his quarter-century hibernation has broken in the eastern papers. “Is it likely to make a stir?” our hero asks:

“Stir! Stir!” said the man excitedly. “Stir! The biggest ship on the sea might go down with all on board, the navies of Britain and France might have a battle with those of the Triple Alliance, Teddy Ryan’s mountain might turn into a volcano, and there wouldn’t be a bigger stir than there’s going to be over this.”

Reference to the Triple Alliance sent a bit of a chill.

Looking Forward was published the year before the start of the Great War. On 30 May 1915, when the conflict was in full force, Rev Pedley preached a sermon titled 'War and the New Earth,' in which he said these words:

Forget not, O forget not, that which is perhaps the noblest sacrifice of all, the surrender by parents of their sons, by wives of their husbands, to the hardships and deadly perils of war by land and self.

Hugh Pedley and his wife Eliza (née Field) had three sons. The eldest, Norman Field Pedley (1884-1909), a civil engineer, died when he was struck by a train in Springfield, Illinois.

Old McGill, 1906

Once war was declared, youngest son, Frank Gordon Pedley (1892-1972), enlisted and served ten months before returning to McGill to continue his medical studies.

Old McGill, 1913

Born in 1888, middle brother Hugh Stowell Pedley, a lawyer, served twenty-nine months. He was killed on 31 January 1918. His body rests at Villers-au-Bois, Departement du Pas-de-Calais, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France.

Old McGill, 1912

Both men Frank and Hugh were recipients of the Military Cross.

Their father died on 26 July 1923, not two years before the realization of the union of of Canada's Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches.

  

The Gazette, 27 July 1923 

The United Church of Canada celebrates its centenary today.

 

Would that Rev Pedley had lived to see it. Would that son Hugh had lived nearly so long.

Reprise: In the epilogue, the reader is presented with this passage which takes place in a future 1927 on the lookout of the steel structure lookout atop Mount Royal:

A couple of German merchants who are in Canada with a view to trade extension stop for a moment, and one says to the other: “Ach Gott! gegen diese zu fechten ware eine schande” (Good heavens! To fight with such as these would be a shame.)

Related post:

Towards a Canada of Light