21 January 2013

Shhhh...



A week tomorrow it will be my honour to moderate a panel featuring Chris Woodrow (Acting CEO and Director of Strategic Planning, Windsor Public Library), Brian Owens (Librarian and Chief Archivist, Leddy Library, University of Windsor) and Jennifer Franklin-McInnis (Deputy Chief Librarian and Manager of Branches, Essex County Libraries).

The topic? I'll leave that to hosts Biblioasis:
The latest issue of Canadian Notes & Queries is library-themed, and to celebrate its launch we’re holding an informal panel discussion on the role of libraries in Windsor and beyond. Want to learn more about the social challenges libraries face as one of the few remaining (free) public institutions? How librarians and publishers are negotiating rights for e-book lending? What the best arguments are in favour of growing a library’s physical archives? Join us for these discussions and more at the store.
Everything else you need to know is on the poster above. Click for a larger view, 'tis a thing of beauty.

See ya there!



18 January 2013

The Paralyzing Success of Gwethalyn Graham


Gwethalyn Graham
18 January 1913 – 26 November 1965
Expect no media recognition today of the Gwethalyn Graham centenary – such things just aren't done in this country. Oh, there was a good deal of fuss last year over Irving Layton at 100, but the silence surrounding the similar anniversaries of Gabrielle Roy and Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau are more in keeping with cool Canadian tradition.

In Graham's case, the neglect is a bit easier to understand. She produced only three books in her short life. The first, Swiss Sonata (1938), was published in England and the United States, earned reviews of the "respectable first novel" variety, won a Governor General's Award, then quickly slipped out of print and out of mind. The third, Dear Enemies (1963), "a dialogue on French and English Canada" with unhappy journalist Solange Chaput-Rolland, might be of interest to those studying the Quiet Revolution.

It's for that middle book, the novel Earth and High Heaven, that we remember Graham. Or do we? Before Cormorant Books resurrected Swiss Sonata and Earth and High Heaven last decade, Graham had been long out-of-print. But in 1944 and 1945, she was a publishing sensation.


Arriving in bookstores during the final months of the Second World War, Earth and High Heaven and its romantic story of the forbidden love between a Gentile and a Jew appealed.


"Deserves the widest possible audience," decreed the New York Times. Earth and High Heaven received just that. The week of publication, a portrait of the unknown author graced the cover of The Saturday Review. Two weeks later, the magazine featured an advert boasting that the book was in its third printing.

Life, 19 February 1945
There was a Lippincott edition, a Jonathan Cape edition, an Armed Services edition and a cheap hardcover from Sun Dial Press. Earth and High Heaven became the first Canadian novel to hold number one spot on the New York Times Best Seller list. Throughout the following year, it worked steadily beside Elizabeth Goudge's Green Dolphin Street in luring readers to join the Literary Guild and the Doubleday One Dollar Book Club. Fifteen translations were to come.

Ottawa Citizen
12 October 1946
Earth and High Heaven received the 1944 Governor General's Award for Fiction and the 1945 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book on race relations. Not everyone was on board. Writing in First Statement, John Glassco dismissed the novel as "cinematic and strictly spurious." Samuel Goldwyn half-agreed, paying $100,000 for the screen rights. Screenwriter Howard Koch was dispatched to Montreal, where he visited the author and strolled about Windsor Station, Dominion Square, Mount Royal and Westmount.

Graham estimated that her novel sold 1,250,000 copies in its first thirteen months. Sure seems like it. When I was a student back in the 'eighties, Montreal's used bookstores were giving away copies gratis.

There would be no movie – film historians are of the mind that it was somehow killed by the success of Gentleman's Agreement. There was no third novel, either. One might blame the riches – they did get in the way for a time – but I think the true reason for the silence was fear. Accepting her second Governor General's Award at Montreal's Ritz-Carleton Graham admitted that she was "worried to death" about her next book:
At the risk of sounding ungrateful – which Heaven knows I am not – being so strongly identified with one book and one title gives one an awful feeling at times, and I should like to forget all about Earth and High Heaven and get on to something else if I can, and, with luck do a better job next time.
Gwethalyn Graham never could forget Earth and High Heaven... and yet we did.

14 January 2013

Glassco's $9500 Library and the Montreal Eatons



Canadian Notes & Queries number 86 has arrived, bringing with it all kinds of goodness from Caroline Adderson, Mike Barnes, Nigel Beale, Darryl Joel Berger, Steven W. Beattie, Aaron Costain, Evie Christie, Jason Dickson, Nicole Dixon, Emily Donaldson, Sharon English, Alex Good, Finn Harvor, Jeet Heer, Even Jones, David Mason, Ben McNally, Sarah Neville, James Pollock, John Richmond, Mark Sampson and Bruce Whiteman, wrapped in a cover by Seth.


I have two pieces in this issue, the first being a look at John Glassco: A Personal and Working Library, issued in 1982 by Montreal's Word Bookstore. Compiled by Glassco's bibliographer Fraser Sutherland, this cerlox-bound 47-page catalogue offers the poet and pornographer's library en masse:
The Library occupies approximately 29 feet of shelf-space, and comprises 526 books and 88 periodicals – most of them signed and annotated – as well as hundreds of other printed items, letters, and manuscripts. Editions are usually First. Except for books or periodicals published before 1940, condition is usually Fine. On the rare occasions were pages are missing, these are indicated. The price of JOHN GLASSCO: A PERSONAL AND WORKING LIBRARY is Can$9500.
That's right, $9500. And yet only one institution stepped forward. And it wasn't McGill, his alma mater.

The collection was purchased by Queen's University and can be viewed, even by unaccompanied minors, at Special Collections at the W.D. Jordan Library. Select pages from the catalogue can be seen here at my Gentleman of Pleasure blog.


The second contribution is a review of Marion: The Story of an Artist's Model by Winnifred Eaton (a/k/a Onoto Watanna). First published in 1916 as a biography, reissued last year by McGill-Queen's as a novel, it provides a fictionalized account of sister Sara Eaton's youth, along with glimpses of artist father Edward, mother Lotus Blossom, and more than a few of the thirteen other Eaton children.

The Metropolitan, 10 February 1894
The new edition benefits from a fascinating 49-page Introduction by Karen E.H. Skinazi and the inclusion of Henry Hutt's original illustrations.


Rereading the review, I see that I've described the Eatons as "perhaps the most unusual and unconventional family of Victorian Montreal."

I'm now reconsidering the word "perhaps".

Related post:

Cross-posted, in part, at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

10 January 2013

Dope Rings in Canada! Oh My!



Die with Me, Lady
Ronald Cocking
Toronto: Harlequin, 1953
224 pages
This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through