Frank Prewett on Canvas and Paper (w/ updates)

Frank Prewett ranks amongst the very best of the Great War poets. Anyone looking to challenge this statement should consider the poem at the end of this post. That Frank Prewett was also Canadian explains why it is that our media has ignored entirely two items being auctioned tomorrow afternoon at Bonham's on London's New Bond Street as part 'The Roy Davids Collection'.

I appreciate that Four Weddings and a Funeral fans will be attracted to the autograph manuscript copy of Auden's 'Stop All the Clocks' – already sold for £23,750 – but for me the gem is the  Prewett portrait above. Bonham's estimates that it will go for £1500 to £2000 – six to eight percent of the Auden poem, £642,790 less than the cost of airlifting Mr Harper's limousine to India. Painted in 1923, the work of Prewett's lover Dorothy Brett, it once belonged to Siegfried Sassoon.

I'd not seen it before, nor had I seen this other Prewett item:

Anyone know it?

Anyone?

More to the point, is there anyone out there who can bring these items home?

CARD GAME

                     Hearing the whine and crash
                     We hastened out
                     And found a few poor men
                     Lying about. 

                     I put my hand in the breast
                     Of the first met.
                     His heart thumped, stopped, and I drew
                     My hand out wet. 

                     Another, he seemed a boy,
                     Rolled in the mud
                     Screaming "my legs, my legs,"
                     And he poured out his blood.

                     We bandaged the rest
                     And went in,
                     And started again at our cards
                     Where we had been.

The following day: Well, it turned out that both portrait and poem realized more than was estimated – £2500 and £1750 respectively. No word yet on the purchaser. Dare I hope that it was the Canadian War Museum? Yes, I dare.

Bruce Meyer, co-editor of Selected Poems of Frank Prewett, tells me that he doesn't recognize the auctioned poem.

And the day after that: I'm informed that the Canadian War Museum was the successful bidder. I could not be more pleased.

Related post:

Canada's Great War Poets: Frank Prewett

The Second Greatest Magazine Cover of All Time

Uncanny Tales, vol. 2, no. 13
January 1942
Illustrator: Bick

Related posts:
The Greatest Magazine Cover of All Time
The Ugliest Canadian Book Cover of All Time
Exclamation Marks Abound!

Michel Tremblay's Macabre Juvenilia

Stories for Late Night Drinkers
     [Contes pour buveurs attardés]
Michel Tremblay [trans. Michael Bullock]
Vancouver: Intermedia, 1977

Having raised more than a few glasses after hours on St-Laurent, St-Denis and Mont-Royal, I thought I might have some small idea of what to expect here. I was so very wrong. The stories in this translation of Michel Tremblay's first book are set far, far away, in both time and place, from the streets of his Montreal; castles and dark mansions take the places of modest apartments and rooming houses.

Poe and Lovecraft are in evidence. In the first of these twenty-five stories, a caretaker keeps watch over a hanged man left dangling until dawn. In the wee hours, the body sighs and begins to move. Minutes later it's laughing, swinging so violently that the rope breaks and it falls to the ground. The caretaker flees. He returns the next day with the prison governor to find a headless corpse. The upper extremity, of course, is never found.

Stories for Late Night Drinkers was written between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Tremblay has been fairly dismissive of the whole thing. "I wrote fantastic stuff until I was twenty-three. Pretty bad, all that," he told Jean Royer. And yet, he has allowed reprint after reprint.

It's not his best work, but I found it entertaining. You see, though we're not of the same generation, I saw something of my own youth in this juvenilia. Though, sadly, there was no Poe in mine, at ten I was subsumed by Ghosts, House of Secrets, House of Mystery and The Witching Hour. I've not read anything quite so similar since.

As Tremblay told Royer, "we were all brought up in a country where culture was something exotic and it came from somewhere else." Like the author, I was in my mid-twenties before I realized otherwise.

Object: A trade-size paperback. My copy once belonged to John Glassco, and includes this careless note in his hand:

Of the thirty-five hundred or so Canadian books in my library, this is the only one published by Intermedia.

Doesn't the company's logo look like it belongs to a 'seventies underground comic book publisher?

Maybe it's just me.

Access: Our academic libraries do well, as do those serving the fine folks of Toronto and Vancouver. Montreal fails.

Contes pour buveurs attardés, the French original, was first published in 1966 by Éditions le Jour (right). It's published today by Bibliothèque Québécoise. Though Stories for Late Night Drinkers hasn't been quite so fortunate, its publication history isn't shameful. The first printing, amounting to one thousand copies, sold out... as did the second. Intermedia went back to the printers a third time, but that's the end. It has been out of print for well over thirty years.

There is good news in that decent used copies can be bought as little as ten dollars. Ignore the Vancouver bookseller offering a crummy stamped and stickered ex-library copy at US$48.00 (w/ an additional US$16.50 for shipping within Canada).

Montreal Noir on Film

For your pleasure, Jean Palardy and Arthur Burrows' 1947 Montreal by Night. Filmed in glorious black and white, here is the city of Al Palmer, David Montrose, Brian Moore, Martin Brett and – ahem – Ricochet Books.

It's a city of bright neon and dark, nefarious doings. This frame captures a night watchman "hurrying to answer a wrong number." Hmm...

At 4:55 we're introduced to Colette, who like Gisele Lepine in Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, is "one of many who left the farms and villages of Quebec to seek work in Montreal."

But while Colette "works with three thousand other girls in a cigarette factory", Gisele finds employment as a hoofer at one of the city's nightclubs... as did this young lady:

Sadly, there are no shots of Lili St Cyr, though you will see Mayor Camillien Houde and wife.

And here's Gratien Gélinas as an Anglophone asking for directions:

Also on view: old cronies at croquet, le jeu canadien and the wonder that was Belmont Park in its prime. But for my money, the best sights come when Colette and her guy stroll along the Main.

A National Film Board production, Montreal by Night represents our parents' and grandparents' taxes at work. Something to keep in mind now that you've filed your return.

You did finish, right?

Thanks go out to my friend Mary Anne Straw for putting me on to this wonderful short.