Local Poet!

The Four Jameses

William Arthur Deacon

Toronto: Macmillan, 1974

A bit of a risk acknowledging National Poetry Month on a day when people are looking-out for hoaxes and practical jokes. I double the hazard by focusing on this book, with its lousy cover and cheap sales pitch. The whole thing looks a bit fake - but, as George Fetherling (then Doug) notes, Deacon's book is 'that rare thing in Canadian literature: an underground classic.' As is often the fate of titles that fall into this category, The Four Jameses has had an unusual history. First issued as a hardcover in 1927, its publisher, Graphic, was felled by the Depression. After a period in limbo, unbound sheets were bought and issued in paper wraps. In 1953, Ryerson published a revised edition, which was followed, a little over two decades later, by this Macmillan paperback. With one publisher done in by hard times, and the others victims of manifest destiny, you'd almost think that The Four Jameses was cursed. Still, I keep it on my shelves.

Deacon's book centres on James Gay, James McIntyre, James D. Gillis and James MacRae, four poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are, as Fetherling points out, united by Christian name, nationality and sheer lack of talent. That said, I'm quick to express my doubts that they are 'Canada's Four Worst - And Funniest - Poets', as claimed on the cover. True, their work can raise a smile or two, but I've read much worse.

Of the four, I prefer James MacRae (né John James MacDonald), who published his first book of verse, Poems written by J. J. MacDonald, a Native of Glengarry, in or about 1877. Deacon is good enough to provide several lines from this extremely rare book, including:

How oft thus lay the secret way

In which the game is played:-

A shapely mass, by name a lass,

Is artfully arrayed.

Is neatly bound with metal round

And trimmings wisely made,

And padded o'er with worthless store

To cover unbetrayed

The sad defects, which one detects

When nature is displayed.

Forty-six years elapsed between the poet's debut and his second book, An Ideal Courtship. Published in 1923 under the nom de plume James MacRae, it is described by Deacon as the poet's magnum opus. An Ideal Courtship is a long narrative poem telling of the company kept between Mary Campbell, formed by her parents as a chaste 'model for the public to admire', and William Chisholm, a stick-in-the-mud farmer from the Maritimes. There doesn't appear to be much amour or ardor in this poem. In MacRae's world, an ideal courtship ends not at the altar, but the grave:

Mary suddenly took sick, and human skill could find no relief

Render her in her distress, which made the tragic struggle brief.

But, wait, a few days later the grief-stricken William is found dead, lying on his fiancée's grave:

Though so often disappointed by events beyond their power.

They were finally reunited at their own appointed hour.

But so well their lives were ended, and so holy was their love,

We may hope that they were married at the altar steps above.

MacRae didn't let another 46 years pass before publishing his next book. A septuagenarian, how could he? His Poems and Essays was published in 1930.

Sadly, The Four Jameses provides little biographical information about MacRae. Deacon tells us that the poet was born in 1849 in what was then Alexandria, roughly 40 kilometres north of Cornwall, Ontario. In 1875 he arrived in St Marys, Ontario, and was living in the town when his first volume was published. It seems MacRae stayed in St Marys for about a decade, before settling out to farm in parts unknown. According to Deacon, in 1918 the poet returned to St Marys, 'where he spent a pleasant old age, and where the Public Library was an unfailing source of enjoyment... Among the townspeople he was reported to be mildly eccentric, which probably means nothing more than a strongly marked personality intensified by a touch of the artistic temperament, without which no poet is properly equipped.'

Here I admit that my preference for MacRae is influenced by my move to this pretty little town last year. I, too, have found the library to be an 'unfailing source of enjoyment' - though, I regret to report, it contains not a single volume of MacRae's verse. Nor does it have a copy of The Four Jameses.

St Marys Public Library

Object: We all live on a yellow hunk of cheese... I can't imagine how many people were turned away by the cover. Fairly typical of Macmillan's paperbacks, at 35 it's holding up quite well.

Access: The Four Jameses is readily available in our larger public libraries, most often in the Macmillan edition. The Graphic Publishers first is by far the most attractive, and includes illustrations and photos not found in the others. Nice copies of the cloth and paper editions can be found for under C$30. The Ryerson edition, the least desirable, can be had for C$20. Macmillan's 1974 edition benefits from Fetherling's informative Introduction. Curiously, it's the least common of the three - only two copies are currently listed online: one going for US$11, the other at US$59.85 (on offer from an optimistic bookseller in Little Elm, Texas).

Alec Falcon, c'est moi

All Else is Folly

Peregrine Acland

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1929

Peregrine Acland is not the sort of name one forgets. I first heard it during a seminar course, lumped in with Charles Yale Harrison and Philip Child as one of the few Canadian veterans to have penned a novel about the Great War. Harrison's Generals Die in Bed was in print, Child's God's Sparrows had been part of the New Canadian Library, but what about Acland? All Else is Folly was praised by Bertrand Russell and Frank Harris, Ford Madox Ford contributed a preface, and yet it hadn't been published since 1929.

What intrigued Ford was the idea of a war novel with a hero 'as normal in temperament and circumstance as it is possible to be.' In All Else is Folly he saw that protagonist in Alec Falcon, who is really Peregrine Acland himself. Not so normal in circumstance, the character enjoys a privileged background similar to the author, the son of the Deputy Minister of Labor in Ottawa. Like Acland, Falcon is tall, university educated and a mediocre poet (Acland's only other publication was a long poem, The Reveille of Romance, which he composed while crossing the Atlantic to war). Both creator and character fought at Ypres, attained the rank of major and were badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme. But what else of Peregrine Acland's wartime experience is there in Alec Falcon? This 'Tale of War and Passion' has our hero fending off the advances of officer's wives, enjoying the company of prostitutes and pursuing a married woman. These elements caused another Canadian veteran of the Somme, Colonel Cyrus Peck, VC, who quite possibly served as a model for one of the characters, to place the work 'on a level with the filth-purveyors of other nations'.

All Else is Folly is not a filthy novel, nor is it a great novel - but it is a good one. Acland's descriptions of the Battle of the Somme are particularly effective. While I won't agree with Ford that it would be 'little less than a scandal if the book is not read enormously widely', I wonder that it has been out of print these last eight decades.

Object: My copy is one of at least three McClelland and Stewart printings - there is no indication as to which. Sadly, no dust jacket. The image above, that of the first American edition, comes courtesy of Alan Hewer, the foremost collector of Great War dust jackets. His website is well-worth repeated visits.

Access: A forgotten book of the Great War, All Else is Folly isn't held by many public libraries. The good news is that copies, though uncommon, aren't obscenely expensive. Nice copies of the American first, published by Coward-McCann, can usually to be had for somewhere in the area of C$50 sans dust jacket. Those who follow the flag may face a challenge in finding the McClelland and Stewart edition. The English Constable edition is nowhere in sight.

Related post:

Remembering Peregrine Acland

The Great Canadian Great War Novel

Gabrielle Roy at 100 (and One Day)

The Globe & Mail, 26 April 1947

Referencing the above yesterday, I thought it best to hunt the thing down - if only to make certain I had the correct wording. In doing so, I came upon the following less attractive, but more interesting ad, published the year before Hannah Josephson's translation became available.

The Globe & Mail, 27 April 1946

I can't imagine many French-language novels received similar promotion in 1946 Toronto.

Gabrielle Roy at 100

The great Gabrielle Roy was born one hundred years ago today. Recognition is, I suppose, not in keeping with the stated theme of this blog. Never suppressed, never ignored and very much remembered, she towers over nearly all of her contemporaries. A quarter-century after Roy's death, eight of her titles remain available in English translation; two posthumous collections of letters are also in print. Of course, Bonheur d'occasion dominates. A best-seller from the start, it was advertised, without exaggeration, as 'the Greatest Canadian Novel ever written'. In 1947, as The Tin Flute, it sold over 700,000 copies in the United States alone.

While Roy's popularity south of the border soon dissolved into nothing, it remained strong in Canada, despite the author's refusal to promote her books. Not surprisingly, signed copies are uncommon. And so, in honour of the day: the front free endpaper of The Tin Flute, purchased from a Montreal bookseller for... well, you can see. He's no longer in business. I don't think he much cared for books.