'THE NEONS GO UP ON MONTREAL'

Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street

Al Palmer

Toronto: New Stand Library, 1949

Sugar-Puss is Gisele Lepine — not Gisèle Lépine — a farmer's daughter from the fictional Laurentian village of St Christophe. At thirteen, she's brought to Montreal for the St Jean Baptiste parade and is enchanted by shining pavement, neon signs and snappy dressers. In an instant, Gisele's 'neat and pleasant' home is 'mentally transformed into one of bleak desolation'. The next five years are devoted to saving and self-betterment, all so that she might one day take her place amongst the city folk — not for her the life of a 'farmette', 'first a slave to a husband then to an ever-growing family.'

Gisele is eighteen when her dream is realized. She returns to Montreal as a beauty blessed with large, firm breasts, 'a legacy of her Norman ancestry', soft brown skin that hints at Basque blood and feet that are 'small and beautifully formed as are those of most French Canadian women.'

Foot fetishists aside, who knew?

Montreal moves at a much different pace than quiet St. Christophe. Gisele gets a job waitressing in a cheap restaurant, but flees after her oily Greek employer tries pawing her. In the next 48 hours, she becomes a chorus line dancer, meets the love of her life, makes a BFF and loses her virginity.

Events were piling up too fast for her to cope with. She couldn't think clearly. She closed her eyes tightly and shook her head to free some of the turmoil that raged within.

Next is a marriage proposal, the move to a luxurious apartment, a shoot-out with police, a death, another marriage proposal, a kidnapping, a car chase, a second death and a walk 'into the brilliant sunshine of Dorchester Street.' It's a helluva week.

This was Al Palmer's first book, published the year before Montreal Confidential. I'd have preferred the latter had it not been for the intriguing cover copy on Sugar-Puss: 'He takes his readers behind the scene of a metropolitan newspaper. He takes them backstage to the city's leading night clubs and introduces them to the fabulous characters he knows so well.' Just who are these people? We meet Jim Schultz, a former boxer, who assures a nervous Gisele: 'you're just as safe as if you were in yah mudda's arms. Safer unless yah mudda's got cauliflower ears.' The 'bistro bossman' of The Breakers — really Slitkin's and Slotkin's — he may have been inspired by one or both of the owners, former boxers. Or the model may have been Maxie Berger, who, like Schwartz, was welterweight champion. And what about Gaston Courtney, the drug dealing night club owner? Who inspired Diane and Trixie, Gisele's fellow hoofers? The questions linger.

Object: 'Sugar-Puss' or 'Sugar Puss'? Picky, I know, but the inconsistency points to the sloppy editing and production values of the News Stand Library. In my copy the very first sentence of the novel fades into nothingness: 'Dorchester Street spews out almost...' Almost what? The mystery is nearly enough to erase the image of vomiting asphalt.

Access: 'The Best Selling Novel About Montreal' claims the first edition, first printing. However could they have known? News Stand Library's second printing appeared four months later — with a new cover in which Jimmy and Gisele look like pimp and prostitute. Library and Archives Canada doesn't have a copy of either edition; the curious are directed to the Toronto Public Library, the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the University of Calgary. An uncommon title, prices have risen considerably these last few years, and are currently in the C$60 to C$80 area. One bookseller is offering a copy of the second printing in a very scarce dustjacket. At $C90, it may very well be a bargain, despite some loose leaves.

Related post:

Sugar-Puss Returns!

'...a helluva town to come back to'

Montreal Confidential

Al Palmer

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

Readying for a trip to my hometown, I reach for this cheap little paperback. A bit of a lark, really — this is a Montreal that no longer exists, one I know only through ephemera, flotsam and William Weintraub's excellent City Unique. Palmer's book sells glossy snapshots of a time when Stanley was Swing Street and St Catherine was known as St Kit's ('as every native Montrealer calls it'). These were the years of radio personalities, hat check girls and Lili St Cyr, 'who spreads an epidemic of striptacoccus'. It's easy to see why Weintraub dubbed Palmer the 'poet laureate of Montreal nightlife'. In his eyes, dancers aren't dancers, they're glamorines who pitch their curves around while gawkers down stagger syrup.

A once and future columnist for the Herald, Palmer warns that his book is no tourist guide: 'It doesn't tell you how to find a hotel room and a companion — if you're under 21 we wouldn't tell you and if you're over 21 you shouldn't need to be told.' Not entirely true. The newspaperman tells the reader how to smuggle a doll into a hotel room, where heroin and marijuana might be bought, and which restaurant will impress a date (the Laurentian Hotel's Pine Lounge). There's plenty of other advice, such as:

If it is at all possible don't go out on Saturday night. That is the night when all niteries are jampacked by those of the lesser income brackets. Cafe Society usually remains at home and house parties are the gathering spots of those who would normally be ringsiding it. Saturday night is the one night the shoe clerks go out and howl.

There's no denying that Montreal Confidential is a rip-off of Dell's New York: Confidential! (1949) and Chicago Confidential (1950) — the latter employed the very same pitch: 'The Low Down on the Big Town' — yet Palmer's is an altogether different treatment. He has a great affection for his city, and — as early as 1950 — has begun a fall into nostalgia. The Frolics and El Morocco had closed their doors, Johnny 'The Wop' Pannunzio was dead and Harry David had been filled 'full of uncomfortable bullet holes in the tatter's horse parlor on Stanley Street.'

Seven years after Montreal Confidential appeared in drugstores, the Herald folded; Palmer moved on to the crime beat at the Gazette. He died in 1971.

Trivia: Concordia University holds the Al Palmer fonds, which includes well over 300 photographs of the era's nightclub entertainers, and at least one of the author himself.

Object: Cheap and nasty. My copy has a poorly cut head and isn't even rectangular.

Access: Library and Archives Canada has a copy, as does Concordia, but that's it. A handful of acceptable copies are available from online booksellers at between C$30 and C$40.

The St Marys James

John James MacDonald (a.k.a. James MacRae)

A bit of research at the St Marys Museum answers a few questions raised by The Four Jameses, including the source of John James MacDonald's nom de plume (his mother's maiden name). For 42 years, a period covered by the span between his first and second books, he farmed in the Township of Downie, close to St Marys. The poet died on 23 June 1937, just short of his 88th birthday. This sad news was reported the following day on the front page of the St Marys Journal-Argus, under the headlines:

JOHN J. MACDONALD

PASSES TO REWARD

AGED CITIZEN HAD SCHOLARLY

MIND AND CONTRIBUTED TO

CURRENT LITERATURE —

WAS NATIVE OF GLENGARRY

MacDonald is buried in the St Marys Cemetery, sharing a plot with his wife and a daughter.

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).