Walking in on Virginia Box and Baird Rodd

The Girl From H.A.R.D.: Virginia Box and the "Unsatisfied"
James Moffatt
London: New English Library, 1974
112 pages 

I first visited the UK in 1974, arriving on a British Airways jet still painted in BOAC colours. My mother had brought us – my sister and myself – to meet relatives and friends of our late father. She gave me fifteen pounds, by far the most money I'd ever held held, which I spent it on a hardcover copy of the most recent Guinness Book of Records, a SHADO Interceptor, and a SHADO 2 Mobile.

The SHADO Dinkys have proven good investments – I have them still – but if I could go back in time, I would buy every copy of Skinhead, Suedehead, Demo, Boot Boys, Skinhead Escapes, Skinhead Girls, Glam, Smoothies, Sorts, Teeny Bopper Idol, Top Gear Skin, Trouble for Skinhead, and Skinhead Farewell I could find. Written by Canadian James Moffatt, sold for 30p, few can be purchased for under one hundred quid today. 

The Girl from H.A.R.D.: Virginia Box and the "Unsatisfied" was published during that 1974 summer in England. The second novel in the series, Moffatt presumes that the reader has read the first (right). I had not, but found it took little time to get up to speed. H.A.R.D. is the Hemisphere Administration for Regional Defence. Virginia Box – "leggy, busty blonde" – is its most valued agent. Baird Rodd is her superior. He sits on a "phallic-backed chair" behind a buttock-shaped "erotic desk."

Juvenile stuff, right? But things turn very dark in the fourth and fifth pages with Virginia working to procure an abortion for Ima Kissoff. Here the uninitiated are given a sense of what transpired in the the first Virginia Box novel. A Soviet agent, Ima was defeated by H.A.R.D., and at some point was raped by a man named Willi Kumm.

The Girl from H.A.R.D.: Virginia Box and the "Unsatisfied" is a lighter read. Our heroine is assigned to infiltrate Connie and the "Unsatisfied" (always in quotation marks), a rock band suspected of having ties with T.R.U.S.S. (Terrorism, Revolution and Underground Specialists in Sabotage). Much is made about lead singer Connie Linguistam being a lesbian, as are T.R.U.S.S. higher-ups Dolores Glamm and Magda Hott:

It stank of Rodd manipulation. As if her boss had deliberately put the computers to work and punched Box against lesbian and waited for a tray of cards to provide him with some inner, perverted sense of achievement.

May as well add that Ima Kissoff is also a lesbian.

Virginia's value to the agency is a sexuality so great that it can destroy creepy H.A.R.D. scientist Dr Spill's "sex computer" Exita (EXItments Transmitted into Action). Everyone is attracted to Virgina Box and wants to bed her. Club owner Dick Long gets lucky, but only because the agent was feeling amorous. There are no sex scenes, nor is there anything particularly sexy. Nothing else is so hot or inept as this passage:

Quickly now, she dressed. When she finished she postured before the mirrors again. The small, uplift brassiere did nothing except emphasise how firm her breasts really were and hoe exciting their nipples could be when fully awakened. The transparent blouse let every man see this. And the mini-skirt only served too whet appetites which could not, after one glance, have failed to be already whetted. Curvaceous legs, more curvaceous thighs beckoned sensually.

     "You're a sight for sore, lecherous eyes," she told her glassy self.

Late in the novel, Moffatt Rodd decides Virginia must uncover the identity of the man funding T.R.U.S.S. This she does by determining that his true initials are the reverse of those in his false name.

"'That's all you had to work on?' the man asked incredulously."

Yep.

All in all a frustrating, disappointing read. And not because it didn't last long.

Trivia: The Girl from H.A.R.D. was retired after a third adventure, Perfect Assignment (1975), in which she crosses paths with Perfect Laye, queen of the London underworld. 

Object and Access: A slim softcover. If WorldCat is to believed  – why should it? – only the National Library of Scotland has a copy. Mine was bought four years ago. I see only one copy listed for sale online. At US$9.96 it might seem a bargain, but the bookseller lists the shipping from New Zealand to Canada at an even US$37.00. 

Related posts:

The Queer Queen Kong

Nazis Threaten from Beyond the Grave!

$2 Connors

I will pay no more than two dollars on a book by Ralph Connor. This policy has stood me well. To date, my Connor collection consists of eighteen volumes – nearly all first editions – purchased at a total cost of thirty dollars and fifty cents.

This 1901 Westminster copy of The Man from Glengarry is the oldest. One bookseller believed it to be a first edition, and hoped that it would bring twenty dollars. Perhaps it did. I rescued it from a pile of books considered too damaged to be sold in a Friends of St Marys Public Library book sale.

The very first Connor I ever bought is this Triangle edition of The Runner, his 1929 novel of the War of 1812. The only one to have a dust jacket, I was won over by the publisher's description. 

I found this 1917 McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart edition of The Major at an outdoor bookstall in London, Ontario. It's in pretty rough shape, but at one dollar I couldn't resist. Besides, it was about to rain.

Imagine my surprise in discovering this inscription after returning home:

I bought this copy of The Prospector for two dollars from a bookseller who knew it was signed. He'd given up on his dreams of making $9.95... or even $5.00. 

Beautiful penmanship, don't you think?

You too can own a signed Connor! They can be purchased online for as little as US$12.00.

Too dear for me.

I began this piece forgetting that I'd mentioned my $2 Connor policy in a 2016 review of The Man from Glengarry. At the time, my collection consisted of sixteen titles. In the six years that have followed that number has grown by only two.

Has inflation taken its toll? Is two dollars now too low? Should be I raising my cut-off to three dollars? Four?

What think you?

Related posts:

Behind Every Successful Man from Glengarry

Ralph Connor's Beautiful War of 1812

Ralph Connor's Canada Dry

Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police:
   A Tale of the MacLeod Trail
Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon]

Toronto: Westminster, 1912
454 pages

We begin on an Inverleith rugby pitch. Scotland is up against Wales in the International. It's a close contest, in part because Allan Cameron, fierce-fighting half-back of the Scottish line, hasn't been playing up to snuff. In the dying minutes, the Scots get a lucky break when the ball comes tumbling Cameron's way. He hesitates, and the promise of victory turns to defeat.

"Oh-h-h-h, Cam-er-on!" is the novel's first sentence. What has happened to Scotland's star player?

The answer is drink.

This is not to suggest that Cameron was under the influence during the game, rather that "he was out of condition; he had let himself run down last week, since the last match, indeed, got out of hand a bit."

The loss isn't the worst of it. Days later, Cameron faces arrest for passing a forged cheque. He doesn't remember doing so, but is unable to deny the charge because... well, you know, drink. 

The half-back is saved from arrest by Miss Brody, rugby-loving niece of the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Scotland, and Cameron's conscience is later cleared when a dishonourable drinking buddy owns up to the crime. However, the damage has been done; Cameron has decided to give up drink, give up his studies, and make a new life for himself in Canada, envisioning himself "a wealthy rancher, ranging over square miles of his estate upon a 'bucking broncho,' garbed in the picturesque cowboy dress."

Instead, he ends up a low-level clerk at a Montreal shipping company.

The job doesn't last long – something to do with losing his temper and throwing his superior against a wall – and so, newly unemployed, Cameron does what we've all done in the same situation by taking in a travelling circus. There he chances upon farmer Tom Haley and his son Timmy who've come to the city to take in the show and purchase provisions for the family farm. Sadly, young freckle-faced Timmy winds up outside one of the drinking tents dotting the circus grounds as inside his father – rather sloshed – begins dipping into the money meant for baking flour and such. Cameron comes to the rescue by dragging Tom out, beating back "circus toughs" in the process.

Grateful and somewhat sobered by the violence, Tom offers our hero a position on his farm, twelve miles outside of town. Cameron accepts. Before long, he's proven himself an expert milker of cows, hoer of beets, player of bagpipes, and temperate role model to young Timmy. Over the course of the growing season, unrefined Mandy, the farmer's daughter, falls for the new hired hand, which scares Cameron into setting out for the West.

Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police is divided fairly evenly into three books, each with very different settings: Inverleith, Montreal and surrounding countryside, and the Canadian West. As a reader I found the first the most entertaining. As a Montrealer, the second held some interest, but only because it depicted a unilingual city that never existed. The last third, in which our hero finds an enemy in a whiskey trader, held the most action, but there's only so much fisticuffs and gunplay I can take. Its depiction of "our Indians" and mythologizing of the NWMP was particularly hard to stomach:

To the whole country the advent of the police proved an incalculable blessing. But to the Indian tribes especially was this the case. The natives soon learned to regard the police officers as their friends. In them they found protection from the unscrupulous traders who had hitherto cheated them without mercy or conscience, as well as from the whiskey runners through whose devilish activities their people had suffered irreparable loss.
     The administration of the law by the officers of the police with firm and patient justice put an end also to the frequent and bloody wars that had prevailed previously between the various tribes, till, by these wild and savage people the red coat came to be regarded with mingled awe and confidence, a terror to evil-doers and a protection to those that did well.

In the introduction to his anthology Best Mounted Police Stories (Edmonton: U of Alberta Press, 1978), Dick Harrison writes that Connor "did more to create the literary image of the Mountie than any other writer." He doesn't say whether this is a good thing, but I'll suggest it is not.

At the end of it all, I was left wondering whether early readers of Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police were a touch disappointed. As Connor's title suggests, Cameron does indeed join the force, but this doesn't happen until the twenty-second of the novel's twenty-five chapters. By this point, I'd long since lost interest; the late introductions of Big Bear, Crowfoot, Louis Riel, and other historic figures to Cameron's story only irritated.  

Ultimately, Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police turned out to be another of those novels that gets off to a fairly good start, but quickly loses momentum, grows tired and begins to wander, much like Cameron on the pitch at Inverleith.

I've nothing more to add. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get a drink.

Bloomer: "When a fellow gets on the bum and gets into a hole he knows well that there'll be a lot of people tumbling over each other to get him out, hence he deliberately and cheerfully slides in."

Trivia: The novel was adapted to the silent screen in 1921 as Cameron of the Royal Mounted; an interesting title change given that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had replaced the North-West Mounted Police (note the hyphen) just the previous year.

Filmed in Banff, directed by son of Toronto Henry MacRae, unlike the vast majority of silent-era films Cameron of the Royal Mounted is not lost!

Well, not entirely.

The first three of its nine reels are preserved at Library and Archives Canada.

Object and Access: An embossed hardcover, typical of its time, mine is a first Canadian edition. The book was purchased eight years ago in London, Ontario. At most, it set me back two dollars.

Used copies are plentiful and cheap. Of those listed for sale online, Doran's first American edition in uncommon dust jacket is the one to buy. Price: US$40.00.

The Internet Archive offers several editions online, including the Westminster, which can be be read through this link. Sadly, there was no photoplay edition.

Related posts:

Dale's Dumb Luck; or, A Mountie Messes Up

The Atomic Dale; or, The Mounties Mess Up?

Queen Remembers a Forgotten Book

Is This the Dominion's Only Goose Girl Poem?

Now that National Poetry Month is over, a poem for May by Virna Sheard, pride of Cobourg, Ontario, from Candle Flame (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1926).

It follows verse in which she rightly praises postmen.

ALL ON A MAY MORNING

I saw a lovely lady walk along a leafy lane,

When primroses were blowing and the cuckoo sang again;

She wore a ruffled gown of pink, a hat of rosy hues,

And twinkling silver buckles on her little high-heeled shoes;

     Most daintily she carried a tall tasselled cane,

     While a small beribboned poodle came following in her train.

Then said I to the morning sun: "O do not let her pass!

A more bewitching, beauteous maid ne'er owned a looking-glass!

And if she turns in any gate, and goes I know not where,

It's probable I'll never see another maid as fair!

     Without the faintest knowledge of her charming name, alas!

     I sallied forth to meet her across the young green grass.

My hand upon my fluttering heart, I bowed extremely low,

And said: "A thousand pardons, but my way I do not know,

For since I chanced to see you from yon blossoming orchard tree,

The West is East, the South is North,—and all the same to me!

     And I have not any notion which way the four winds blow,

     Or on what highroad, up or down, t'would be the best to go!

"Of your kindness pray direct me to the left—or to the right;—

(You really should—because 'tis you have put my wits to flight,)

And I'd be quite madly joyful, and grateful this sweet day

If it should hap, by any luck, that your way was my way.

     There surely never was a morn more gay and golden-bright,

     And I have not a thing to do, but walk about till night."

Alack! That shining lady in that green primrosy lane,

Turned first to whitest marble—and then turned back again!

Her cheeks flamed red with fury—and her eyes flamed black with rage,

And she looked at me as might a queen at a good-for-nothing page!

     She tossed her head, and firmly, set down the tasselled cane,

     "I do not know you Sir!" she said,—and walked on with disdain.

"Beauty altogether perfect, cannot possibly be rude,"

Said I, and went the other way—but in a chastened mood;

Nor did I start a-whistling—as on such a day one should—

Till I reached the village common where a little goose-girl stood,

     Egad! The prettiest goose-girl that I have ever viewed!

     (Her flock was one grey gosling, by a frantic dog pursued.)

But tears were falling from her eyes, her eyes of blue-bell blue;

So I said: "Come! Come! Now what's amiss? Why all of this ado?"

And she cried: "O Sir! My darling geese! Of them I am bereft!

Of all the lovely twenty-five, there's only this one left!

     What shall I do! What shall I do! Whatever shall I do!

     The huntsmen came a-riding by—and all my geese just flew!"

I could not bear to see a little maiden so forlorn,

(I noticed that her curls were just the color of ripe corn;)

"Why go along with me!" said I, "tame geese will not fly far, 

And you and I together will discover where they are!"

     So hand in hand we hunted geese that mellow May-day morn,

     And I found that little goose-girl was a rose without a thorn.

Related posts:

May Day and the Promise of May

A Poem for May Day by Gay Page

Happy May Day!

'When April Comes' by Virna Sheard

Now That April's Here, Virna Sheard's 'April'

Virna Sheard Sees November as a Hooded Friar

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 10: 'April' by Mary Morgan

For the month, the last of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

A final poem for National Poetry Month, 'April' comes from the pen of Mary Morgan, daughter of James and Catherine Morgan, niece of Montreal merchant king Henry Morgan of the Henry Morgan Company. The brief biography included in Types of Canadian Women by Henry James Morgan (no relation, I believe) suggests a life of both privilege and constraint.

cliquez pour agrandir

'April' is found in Poems and Translations (Montreal: J Theo Robinson, 1887), her first volume of verse.

APRIL

                         Thou balmy April evening,

                              I love thy beauty rare;

                         The clouds obscure the heavens,

                              A star shines here and there.

                         The breath of love is filling

                              The zephyrs as they blow;

                         The fragrance of the violet

                              Is wafted from below.

                         O for a strain of music

                              To suit the pensive hour

                         Some cadence low and tender

                              To lell its soothing power!

The poet identifies 'April' as a translation "from the German of Geibel." I'm unfamiliar with the language, but believe the original to be 'Im April' by Emanuel von Geibel:

                        Du feuchter Fruehlingsabend,

                        Wie hab' ich dich so gern!

                        Der Himmel wolkenverhangen,

                        Nur hie und da ein Stern.

                        Wie leiser Liebesodem

                        Hauchet so lau die Luft,

                        Es steiget aus allen

                        Talen Ein warmer Veilchenduft.

                        Ich moecht' ein Lied ersinnen,

                        Das diesem Abend gleich,

                        Und kann den Klang nicht finden,

                        So dunkel, mild und weich.

Am I right?

My conclusion is based on a translation provided by Google:

                         You damp spring evening,

                         How I like you so much!

                         the sky overcast,

                         Just a star here and there.

                         Like a gentle breath of love

                         breathe so lukewarm the air,

                         It rises from all valleys

                         A warm violet scent.

                         I want to think up a song

                         The same this evening

                         And can't find the sound

                         So dark, mild and soft.

Assuming I am correct, I much prefer Mary Morgan's.

How 'bout you?

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 9: 'My Own Canadian Girl' by W.M. MacKeracher

For the month, the ninth of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

What could be considered romantic verse from W.M. (William MacKay) MacKeracher's Canada, My Land and Other Compositions in Verse (Toronto: William Briggs, 1908).

MY OWN CANADIAN GIRL

                    The demoiselles of sunny France

                         Have gaiety and grace;

                    Britannia's maids a tender glance,

                         A sweet and gentle face;

                    Columbia's virgins bring to knee

                         Full many a duke and earl;

                    But there is none can equal thee,

                         My own Canadian girl.

                    Thy hair is finer than the floss

                         That tufts the ears of corn;

                    Its tresses have a silken gloss,

                         A glory like the morn;

                    I prize the rich, luxuriant mass,

                         And each endearing curl

                    A special grace and beauty has,

                         My own Canadian girl.

                   Thy brow is like the silver moon

                        That sails in summer skies.

                   The mirror of a mind immune

                        From care, serene and wise.

                   Thy nose is sculptured ivory;

                        Thine ears are lobes of pearl;

                   Thy lips are corals from the sea,

                        My own Canadian girl.

                   Thine eyes are limpid pools of light,

                        The windows of thy soul;

                   The stars are not so clear and bright

                        That shine around the pole.

                   The crimson banners of thy cheeks

                        To sun and wind unfurl;

                   Thy tongue makes music when it speaks,

                        My own Canadian girl.

                   God keep thee fair and bright and good

                        As in thy morning hour,

                   And make thy gracious womanhood

                        A still unfolding fiow'r.

                   And stay thy thoughts from trifles vain,

                        Thy feet from folly's whirl,

                   And guard thy life from every stain,

                        My own Canadian girl!

 

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 8: 'Mended' by Edith Lelean Groves

For the month, the eighth of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

Verse from Edith Lelean Groves' Everyday Children (Toronto: The Committee in Charge of the Edith L. Groves Memorial Fund for Underprivileged Children, 1932)

MENDED

          "You've mended my dolly, now please mend me."

               And the sapphire eyes they were dim

          As she showed me her poor bent twisted foot,

               And her queer little mis-shaped limb.

          "My dolly was hurled worse than me,

               For her stuffing came out, and then

          Her foot it came off, Oh, she was a sight!

               But they've made her over again.

          "I think I'm most as important as she,

               Dad calls me his own precious pearl,

          And mummy she cries, for I'm all that they've got,

               That one little onliest girl.

          "I'm awfully tired of braces and things,

               And crutches that weight most a ton,

          I want to run round on my own two feet,

               Like the others and have some fun."

          So early one day they carried her off,

               With never a sigh or a frown,

          To a wonderful children's hospital,

               In the heart of her own home town.

          "Why I think," she said, "this is fairyland!"

               And then she was sure it was Heaven,

          The nurses were kind and the doctors good,

               To this dear little girl just seven.

          And they straightened her mis-shaped twisted foot,

               Though the time it seemed very long,

          She never grumbled but cheered the rest up

               Right bravely with chatter and song.

          And this all has a fairy tale ending,

               For gladness and joy and laughter

          Came into the life of the little girl,

               Happy she lived ever after.

Related posts:

Hurray for the Crippled Children's Bus!

What About the Children?

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 7: 'Dat's Laurier' by William Wilber MacCuaig

For the month, the seventh of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

The second of two poems praising Wilfrid Laurier in William Wilber MacCuaig's Songs of a Shanty-Man and other "Dialect Poems" of French-Canadian Life (Toronto: Musson, 1913). The poet's only book, it's also dedicated to the great statesman.

"DAT'S LAURIER"

                    Who's dat raise h'all de row 'e can,

                    When 'e's small boy, h'also beeg man,

                    An' gets dere firs' mos' h'every tam?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when 'e's young lad at school,

                    Was at de top 'es class, no fool.

                    Can fight lak' mischief an' keep cool ?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat when partee Liberal

                    Was all bus' up on N.P. wall

                    'E save dat ship safe trou' it all?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    When partee Conservateur was run,

                    An' on 'es side got all de fun,

                    Who's dat was firin' off 'es gun?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when Boer in h'Africa,

                    Raise beeg hurrah about some law,

                    'E feex 'im wid sodger from Canada?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when our good Queen she die,

                    Advise dem people fer to try,

                    Dat young fella—de Prince, so shy?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when in politique dey fight.

                    An' knock h'each oder out of sight,

                    Was settle h'everything all right ?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when 'e's gone far away,

                    De people's lonesome every day,

                    De crop 's bad, and dere's no hay?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat dey blame for h'everyting.

                    When dere's damp wedder and cole spring,

                    But 'e jus' smiles an' says, "By jing!"—

                          Dat's Laurier.

Related posts:

Wilfrid Laurier: 100 Years

Further Along The Lane That Had No Turning

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 6: 'Easter, 1942' by H.C. Mason

For the month, the sixth of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

Unconventional Easter verse, eight decades old this year, by son of Staffordville, Ontario Harold Campbell Mason (1895-1976). The poet served as gunner in the First World War, surviving a leg wound that took him out of the fighting two months before the Armistice. After his return to Canada, he studied at the Ontario Agriculture College, turned to dairy farming, served as farming editor for the London Advertiser, and worked on adverts for Purina.

Mason wrote two books, the first, Bits o' Brass (Toronto: Thomas Allen, c.1921), being a collection of short stories and verse inspired largely by the war in which he'd fought. His second and last book, Three Things Only... (Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1953) collects verse from the first, adding others, some of which were inspired by the Second World War.

This is one.

Mason's enlistment papers record his religion as Methodist.  

EASTER, 1942

        

Ring out, O happy Easter bells
For Christ is risen, is risen indeed!
Proclaim to priest and people from every chiming steeple
That Christ is risen, is risen indeed!

Let your clamor, let your clanger, let your chime

     Beating time

     Praise the Lord!

Praise the risen Victor-Victim by all the saints adored.

     Praise the Lord!

For Christ is risen, is risen, is risen

For Christ is risen, is risen indeed

For Christ the Lord is risen, is risen indeed!

        Young Jimmy Geantley, fresh-faced fighter pilot,

        Just ten months out of college

        Still grilled by his commission,

        His uniform and badges,

        His cunning and his courage,

        The thunder of his engine and the power of his guns,

        Sees the tracers smoking past him,

             Dives her,

             Spins her,

        Sees the blue and orange flame-spout

        Spurt across the dizzy cockpit,

        Tries to beat the horror down with bare hands,

        Burned and helpless hopeless hands,

        While he plummets flaring, flaming

             To the earth.

        There's a girl in far Toronto who will never know her mate

        But such is human nature, such is fate.

        Every Sunday, through the years,

        Through a haze of prideful tears

             She will see his name enshrined

        "To the glory of our God and in loving memory"

        While the boy fades out of mind

        And legend grows instead,

             Warrior-hero, warrior-dead,

             Happy hero, happy dead,

        Smiling hero, dead to save us

             In the war.

Ring out, O happy Easter bells
For Christ is risen, is risen indeed!

He is risen, He is risen, He escapes this earthly prison,

He prepares us many mansions

     For believers

     In the skies!

        "Ah lovely and blue is the sky above Naples

             And lovely and blue is the sea,

        And lovely and blue are the eyes of Giana

        The bright one, the fair one, from fair Lombardy!"

        So humming to comfort him, heartsick and lonely

             To bolster his courage, alone in the night,

             Antonio Rillio hears not the rustle, the only

        Faint warning of peril, of heart-clutching fright-

        Of the rush, of the yell, of the knives, and the Night.

Ring out, O happy Easter bells
For Christ is risen, is risen indeed!

Proclaim to every nation glad tidings of salvation

For Christ the Lord is risen, is risen, is risen, is risen,

For Christ the Lord is risen, is risen indeed!

        Soldier Ivan Volushenko hangs groaning on the wire.

             Hangs tangled in the wire,

        Holding hard his belly where the Fascist bullet got him

        As if almost he hoped to stop that steady bleeding, that inward fatal bleeding,

             But he knows— 

        He knows the thing will kill him

        Here so far from far Kazan.

        Little Ivan, and Katushka, and the others,

        They will never know their father,

        They will think of him as a hero, not as a man,

        They will tell the tale with pride,

        How he fought and how he died,

        How he died to save his comrades

             In the war.

Ring out, O happy Easter bells— 

Intone, O priest, and chant, O choir!

     Let your voices, soaring higher,

Join a tale of jubilation, tell the story of salvation,

Spread the story far and wide

How the Victor-Victim died,

How he died and how he rose

With a mighty, mighty triumph o'er his foes,

     O'er his foes— 

Alleluia, praise the Lord,

For Christ the Lord is risen, is risen indeed!

        Little Gretchen Kinderkin lies dying in the rubble,

        Lies dying in the rubbish where the British bomb exploded,

        Twisted, torn, and flung to die

        Pinned beneath the bone brickwork.

             She is lucky, she is dying

        Free from pain and freeform terror

        After that first shrieking instant,

        That brief shrieking instant,

        Not again too hear the bombers, not again to bear the bombings,

        Not again to shrink and shiver

        And hear the children cry.

             She is dying,

        Luckier far than brother Hansel whom she sheltered as they fell

        In the centre of the howling and the thunder-blast of hell—

        He must live out his life with his arm torn off.

        They will tell him, when he's older,

        How his sister sought to save him,

        How his sister died to save him

             In the war.

Ring out, O Easter bells, ring out,

For Christ is risen, is risen indeed,

And Mrs. John Jones has a new spring hat.

Let your calmer, let your clanger, let your chime

     Beating time

     Praise the Lord!

Doesn't Mrs. Smith look ghastly in that ghastly green creation,

I wonder what it is he sees in her?

Do you think the tartan tie is really regulation,

And the collar of that tunic—do you think it's really fur?

Proclaim to every nation glad tidings of salvation,

     Tell a tale of jubilation

To the booming and clanging of the bells—

     Praise the Lord,

For Christ is risen, is risen indeed!

        For Christ is risen, is risen indeed?

        Ah no. He hangs upon his cross

        Bewildered by defeat and loss— 

        Worshipped. A god. A thing apart.

        The nails still tearing at his tortured hands,

        The doubt still tearing at his tortured heart.

Related posts:

'Easter Lilies' by Agnes Maule Machar

'The Eastern Winds' by Liliian Leveridge

Dorothy Dumbrille's Easter Prayer

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

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 5: 'Sad End of a Noted Politician' by James MacRae

For the month, the fifth of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

To think I once worked to celebrate this horrible man.

I first learned of John J. MacDonald – "James MacRae" – a few months after moving to St Marys, the small Ontario town he adopted as his home. That introduction came through The Four James, William Arthur Deacon's 1927 study of MacRae and fellow poets James McIntyre, James Gay and James D. Gillis.

The four are forever united by that book. Indeed, their very legacies are crafted by that book and its subsequent reissues, the last of which was published forty-eight years ago by Macmillan.

"Canada's Four Worst- And Funniest-Poets."

They're not the four worst, nor are they the four funniest.

It's all too easy to see the Four Jameses as being similar (Paper Lace), when in fact they were actually very different from one another (The Beatles). McIntyre, the most prolific, was the most grounded. Like so much of his verse, 'Ode on the Mammoth Cheese,' his greatest hit, was intended to raise a smile at country fairs. Deacon encourages us to laugh at it, when we should be laughing with it. Gay, a loving and loveable loon who thought himself Tennyson's rival, is the most fun to read. Gillis wasn't so much a poet as a prose writer. He's included for no other reason than to make for a great title.

The differences between these four men is most evident in their respective reactions to the 1880 murder of politician and Globe publisher George Brown.

Unsurprisingly, the tragedy inspired no verse from prose-writer James Gillis. James McIntyre writes of his sorrow in a poem titled 'Departed Statesman.' James Gay expresses great affection for the fallen man with 'The Honourable G. Brown.' James MacRae's 'Sad End of a Noted Politician' is something else entirely.

A different kind of loon than Gay, much of MacRae's poetry is taken up by hate thrown on women, strangers, Protestants, and Liberals. 

'Sad End of a Noted Politician' comes from The Poems and Essays of John J. MacDonald, (Ottawa: Ru-Mi-Lou, 1928), the poet's third and final book.

MacDonald's nom de plume is misspelled on the cover.

SAD END OF A NOTED POLITICIAN

On a cold winter night, cruel death in its might,
Deprives Mr. Brown of his senses;

Now the joys that attend all his honours must end,

And his long night of sorrow commences.

As he hears the decree, he determines to flee

To the gate of the dwelling of glory,

But that gate he finds closed, and his entrance opposed,

Although sad to his party the story.

Thus insultingly used, thus disowned and refused,

He goes on in another direction;

At that medium place, where the Papists have grace,

He asks humbly for rest and protection.

But in vain as before for thgat rest to implore—

He must follow his downward gradation;

With the devil despite he soon meets at the gate,

And there follows this sort of conversation:—

 

     G.B.—Disappointed and grieved, of mu comforts bereaved,

                 And my relatives all at a distance,

                 I have come to request of you leave her to rest,

                 And to ask your paternal assistance.

     DEV.—Oh! my corpulent friend, I your case apprehend,

                 And will grant you coveted pittance;

                 If you tell me the claim that you have on the same

                 You will gain to my dwelling admittance.

     G.B.—It is little you know in these regions below;

                You must think I'm a Papist or Paddy;

                As a Child if you prize the retailer of lies,

                I can certainly claim you for daddy.

     DEV.—You must still keep aloof till you give me some proof

                 On your noble and worthy exertions;

                 For I oft shall mistake if I venture to take

                 Every wandering stranger's assertions.

     G.B.—In my nethermost robes I have brought you some globes,

                You will find them a recommendation;

                     They will prove beyond doubt that I laboured throughout

                 In extending your own dominion.

     DEV.—By the stories they tell now I know you too well,

                 And to have one more prudent would rather,

                 For, exposing my plan by the course which you ran,

                 You have brought disgrace on your father.

                 For to win the applause some men for my cause

                 Some discretion and caution are needed;

                 But, regardless of this, you have acted amiss,

                 And my wise inspirations unheeded.

                 But your failings I feel have resulted from zeal

                 To encourage your partners in evil;

                 So forgetting your sin, you may quietly come in

                 But you must be exceedingly civil.

Related posts:

The Murder of George Brown: He Died With Grit

A Mildly Eccentric Man Turns Nasty
Poet Names Newspaper Editor as Lucifer's Heir

Mean Mister MacDonald Attacks a Prime Minister

Words of Hate for Maria Monk

A Prudish Poet's Struggle with Stays

The St Marys James

Local Poet!

A Local Poet is Recognized

Unpleasant Verse for New Year's Day

McIntyre's Mammoth Ode

Talking Ted Allan with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle

The second of my two conversations with Leacock Medal scholar Dick Bourgeois-Doyle is now available here on Soundcloud.

The topic is Ted Allan's Love is a Long Shot – in its 1949 and 1984 incarnations – and why I believe the latter was ineligible for the award.

I first wrote about Love is a Long Shot in the 2011 Fall/Winter issue of Canadian Notes & Queries; then reworked the piece for The Dusty Bookcase book. I'm sharing it here for the first time:

NEVER SO DISTURBING

Love is a Long Shot

Alice K. Doherty [pseud. Ted Allan]

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

160 pages

Can a writer, even a deceased writer, be stripped of the Leacock Medal? It’s a fair question, particularly when one considers the late Ted Allan, who received the honour in 1984 for Love is a Long Shot. This slight, uninspired novel tells the story of seventeen-year-old David Webber and his sometimes ribald adventures tending the till in a thirties-era Montreal cigar store-cum-bookie joint. It features a cast of characters that are characters; each ultimately and invariably proving themselves loveable types despite earlier indiscretions. Readers familiar with Lies My Father Told Me, the 1975 film that earned Allan an Academy Award nomination, will recognize some of these folks, including David’s frustrated inventor-father and his ideas for moveable cufflinks and permanently creased trousers.

This is not to suggest that there’s anything deceitful here; not with the film, at least. The overlap between Lies My Father Told Me and Love is a Long Shot is trifling, and in no way makes the latter ineligible for the Leacock. The medal’s rules inform: adaptations are fair game, we need only discount works of which “significant or substantial parts have been previously published in book form.”

Like so many tomes, the 1984 Love is a Long Shot includes a list of the author’s previous works. Allan’s first novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939), is followed by The Scalpel, The Sword (1952), the commercially successful biography of Norman Bethune that he wrote with Sydney Gordon. There’s Quest for Pajaro (1957), the science-fiction novel Allan published under nom de plume “Edward Maxwell,” and his children’s book Willie, the Squowse (1973). Also included is a comprehensive list of Allan’s plays and screenplays. What’s missing is telling: an earlier Love is a Long Shot.

Published by News Stand Library in September 1949, two months before newspaperman Al Palmer’s Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, this Love is a Long Shot holds the distinction of being the first pulp noir novel set in Montreal. Its setting is a Depression-era city that’s as dark as the second Love is a Long Shot is light. Where in the remake David Webber gets his job through a helpful, good-natured uncle, our desperate protagonist—recently orphaned teenager Katie Doheny—is out of options. Like David, she takes a job in a cigar store that’s little more than a front for illegal gambling. The early pages of the girl’s bleak world are broken by fleeting moments of black humour—all of which Allan reused in his Leacock-winning novel. Here, for example, is the most memorable, a comic scene that features Molly, the wife of the cigar-store owner. It begins with a boast:

“Never wore a corset in my life. Never had to.” She swaggered out from behind the counter.  “If you don’t believe me, feel,” she said, offering me her hip.

     “I believe you,” I said.

     “Feel. Feel. Don’t be shy.”

     I touched her quickly with the tips of my fingers.

     She started to laugh again, a loud, hearty laugh. “How old are you?”

     I dug the broom into the floor, pushed hard and told her my age.

     “I bet you never had a man.”

The Molly of the 1984 Love is a Long Shot, also married to the cigar-store owner, is equally proud:

“Never wore a corset in my life. Never had to.” Weaving from behind the counter, she offered me her backside. “If you don’t believe me, feel.”
     “I believe you.”
     “Feel, feel, don’t be shy.” She wiggled her behind. I touched her hip quickly with the tips of my fingers. This made her cackle. You have to hear a woman with a bass voice cackle before you can believe the sound.
     “So help me, he’s blushing. How old are you?”
     “I’m twenty-one,” I lied.
     “I bet you’re still a cherry.”

Any further frivolity in the original Love is a Long Shot is soon overwhelmed by the noir. The greatest difference between the two novels lies in their depictions of organized crime. While the Leacock-winning Love is a Long Shot has the “syndicate” as a group of misbehaving boys, the 1949 original comes uncomfortably close to ugly reality.

Young Katie falls for “tall, rugged-looking, tanned” mob boss Hazen Black, a relatively young man rendered impotent by a life of debauchery. In what is surely one of the darkest scenes in Canadian literature, the appropriately-named Black masturbates while instructing his henchman Herbert to rape Katie:

Herbert grabbed me and held his hand over my mouth. I tried to bite it. “Go ahead,” Black was shouting. “Go ahead, damn it, go ahead.” His eyes looked insane. His breath was coming in short gasps, as if he’d been running. He was close to me, but hadn’t touched me yet. “Go ahead. Pick up her dress… do it, do it, do it.”

The original Love is a Long Shot ain’t that pretty at all—nor is it funny. Printed only once, in a fragile, disposable edition that credits the author variously as “Alice K. Doherty,” “Alice H. Doherty,” and simply “Alice Doherty,” it slipped by the judges of the 1984 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. The most one can say about the award-winning Love is a Long Shot that is that is was far superior to the previous year’s winner, Gary Lauten’s No Sex Please… We’re Married. Allan didn’t deserve the honour; the $3,500 cheque should have rightfully gone to fellow nominee John Gray, whose debut novel, Dazzled, had been issued by the anaemic Irwin Publishing. It’s a sad fact that the best novel Ted Allan ever wrote was one that he chose not to recognize. A cheap mass-market paperback issued under a pseudonym that the publisher couldn’t get right, it has been out of print for over half a century.  

Related posts:

Pulp Noir à Montréal

Love is a Long Shot on the Nose

He and His Arrow

Little Willie, Willie Won't Go Home

Talking Joan Walker with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle

This past weekend I had the pleasure of speaking with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle of Canus Humorous about the life and work of Joan Walker (née Suter), whose memoir Pardon My Parka received the 1954 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal.

You can listen to our conversation here at Soundcloud, or if you prefer, the transcript can be found through this link to Canus Humorous.

Related posts:

On the High Heels of Pleasure

The Incomplete Repent at Leisure

Joan Suter, Angus Hall, and the Collector

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 4: 'You' by Ram Spudd Stephen Leacock

For the month, the fourth of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

Verse from Ram Spudd, "one of nature's gentlemen," as celebrated in Stephen Leacock's Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (Toronto: Gundy, 1915).

YOU

                                          You!

With your warm, full, rich, red, ripe lips,

And your beautifully manicured finger-tips!

                                          You!

With your heaving, panting, rapidly expanding and contracting chest,

Lying against my perfectly ordinary shirt-front and dinner-jacket vest.

                                 It is too much

                                 Your touch

                                 As such.

                                 It and

                                 Your hand,

                           Can you not understand?

Last night an ostrich feather from your fragrant hair

                                Unnoticed fell.

                                I guard it

                                Well.

                                Yestere’en

                           From your tiara I have slid,

                               Unseen,

                               A single diamond,

                               And I keep it

                               Hid.

Last night you left inside the vestibule upon the sill

                               A quarter dollar,

                               And I have it

                               Still.

Related post:

Lunar Attractions; or, The Leacock I Like