Sex, Violence and Some Very Strong Language

Torch of Violence
Gerald Laing [pseud. Tedd Steele]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Torch of Violence holds a secure place in literature as the first Canadian novel to feature the word "shit". History is made on the fifty-ninth page:

"You know me, Alf. I'll take so much and that's all. I don't care who it is... I'll take just so much shit and that's all. Am I right or am I wrong? Am I right or am I wrong, Alf?"

You expect some rough stuff in crime fiction, but here the language is particularly coarse and the violence extreme.

The novel opens with the bloody beating of a bar owner by mob boss Goldie Vincetti's boys. "Dirty dago bastards. Dirty bitches," mutters an elderly drunk. A kick to the stomach is quick to come. I'm not saying that the old man deserved it, but his slurred comment was hardly fair in that one of Vincetti's boys is a WASP by the name of Eric Benedict. A year or so earlier, young Eric, who has a bit of a record, was looking at ten years after the cops found drugs in his flat. He was saved by clean-living, married brother Chris, who took the rap and was sentenced to a year in Kingsville (not Kingston) Penitentiary for his trouble. The deal between the brothers was that Eric would go straight, finish high school and then study to be a chemical engineer. Instead, he's become tighter the ever with Vincetti and has added adultery to his list of sins by messing around with another man's wife.

Eric doesn't feel at all bad about the beatings or his brother, but the guilt and self-loathing brought through sleeping with "the bitch" weighs heavily. His retreat to a "beverage room" provides for the most interesting pages in the novel. Eric sits, beer in hand, watching others fight for a change:

     "I'm a Canadian. Jack. I don't give a dog damn whether you're a Scot or a Britisher or a Hungarian or a Chink. I'm a Canadian and that's what it said on my shoulder when I went overseas and this is Canada and if you don't like it           off back to lower Slobbovia where you come from." 

     "Ha, ha. A Canadian? What was your father... an Indian? This place might be called Canada, lad, but you're either an Englishman or a Frenchman or God knows what. The only Canadians here are the Indians, and if you're an Indian, they shouldn't be serving you in a beverage room. It's against the law."  

This may be hell of a sort, with brimstone that smoulders to this day, but it's a whole lot better than Kingsville Penitentiary. Behind its impenetrable walls, Chris shares a cell with a man who is descending into madness. You see, cellmate Trent Richards, just can't deal with the knowledge that Shirley, an old flame, once attended a petting party.

Cover copy pitches Torch of Violence as not just a crime novel, but "an intelligently sympathetic treatment of an important subject." That subject, infidelity, is one that pretty much every character must face. Chris has his own chance to cheat when Trent's replacement, a man named Bill English, tries to lure him into his bunk. After this fails, the new cellmate shares a rumour going around that Helen, Chris's wife, is sleeping with brother Eric. Big mistake. Chris beats English to a pulp, moves his bloodied body to his bunk, and covers it with a blanket.

Meanwhile, across town:

He screamed once as a bullet smashed against bone and then another bullet struck him full in the face and the red liquid made a hideous mask of his features. Only the eyes remained discernible and they were frightfully unhuman, wide open, staring as if at some nameless horror.

I won't reveal the victim's name, the identity of the assailant or the twist that brings this all about – don't want to spoil everything – but I can't resist sharing the novel's abrupt and absurd ending.

Chris has just tucked English into bed when he's brought to the warden under guard of a man named Baker. Readers who have no stomach for violence or poor punctuation will want to skip Chris's internal monologue:

I haven't any faith in God anymore, how could I have, but in case there is something, maybe the devil, I'll ask him for a special request. Let me find you two together, naked in each other's armsthe way you've been doing all this time. Oh, God, I hope I find you together . I'll kill you first Eric with Baker's gun... not easily... in the stomach so you can know how it feels to have an ache in your guts that won't come out and then I'll take care of you Helen. I know exactly what to do with you. I'll rape you first, you dirty bitch. A husband should have his wife when he returns from such a long absence, so I'll rape you while you're listening to my brother cough his blood and entrails all over the bed. And then I'll tear out your hair and slap you in the face with the bloody roots and then I'll put some bullets into you where they should go.

Chris is handed a near-perfect opportunity to escape, but chooses not to because Baker says something about trusting him as much as he does his wife. This makes the imprisoned man reconsider his own lack of trust, thus sparing Helen from horror. More reevaluation takes place when the warden introduces him to Shirley, Trent's old girlfriend. Seems she behaved herself at that petting party and can't quite understand why her old beau won't believe her. Enter smug prison psychiatrist Dr Ferguson, who between bemused chuckles explains that all Trent needs is a trusted person to tell him that Shirley is as chaste and true as she claims. It's Ferguson's opinion that Chris Benedict is just the man for the job:

He welcomed the task before him and knew he would be successful. His thoughts went to his wife Helen and he blessed her name... He had the vision of Helen's face before him. It was sufficient.

FIN

Now, I don't pretend to know much about the mysteries of the human mind, but I do question that Trent's psychosis can be so easily cured. Frankly, I'm not convinced that there isn't something more to his issues with Shirley and the petting party.* Doctor knows best, I suppose, but what with his mad (albeit internal) monologue and his dead or dying cellmate, it seems to me that a psychiatrist would detect something amiss in Chris. I don't know, call all it a "torch of violence".

Am I right or am I wrong?

Trivia: A second edition, credited to "David Forrest", was published the very same year for the American market. Sensitive readers will prefer this version:

"You know me, Alf. I'll take so much and that's all. I don't care who it is... I'll take just so much dirt and that's all. Am I right or am I wrong? Am I right or am I wrong, Alf?"

More trivia: The novel contains what just might be the longest sentence of any book covered in this blog:

A night breeze came over the north wall in gay contempt of the guard towers, stirred the dusty sand of the prison yards, climbed the sheer stone side of the prison and thrust little inquiring fingers of fresh air into the rows of barred holes that broke the blankness of the stone, then recoiling at the heavy breath of the imprisoned men, the fingers withdrew as if from the touch of death and the breeze slackened, dropped lower, moved faintly across the prison yard and tried to scale it to the freedom of the night, then fell back and died in little swirls of dust above the flat emptiness of the prison yard.

Object: A poorly produced mass market paperback, this is typical News Stand Library, except that it tends to fall apart more easily than most.

Access: No library carries the Canadian edition, though the University of Calgary has a copy of that intended for export. Given the historical import – by which I mean the use of the word "shit" –  it's the Canadian you'll be wanting. Right now, just three copies are listed online at prices ranging from US$3.99 to US$32.00. Condition is an issue. The American edition is a bit more common, though prices are similar.

*Great name for a band, by the way.

Ce soir: The Heart Accepts It All

THE HEART ACCEPTS IT ALL

SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN GLASSCO

BOOK LAUNCH

Wednesday, 14 August 2013, 7:30 p.m.

THE WORD

467 Milton Street

Montreal

F is for First Statement

The editor of this mag, John Sutherland, is a very decent chap, about 30, a pretty good drinker too...

– John Glassco, letter to Robert McAlmon, 16 August 1944

The April & May 1945 issue of influential Montreal little magazine First Statement. Irving Layton, A.M. Klein, Patrick Anderson, Ralph Gustafson, Miriam Waddington... amongst the lesser-known writers we find Wingate Taylor, "a farmer in the Eastern townships [sic] of Quebec." He's better remembered – though, in truth, he's barely remembered at all – as Graeme Taylor, the man who shares many adventures with John Glassco in Memoirs of Montparnasse.

I've long been fascinated by Taylor, in part because he was expected to do such great things. Writing in the 'twenties, Leon Edel described him as one of the three premier Canadian writers of his generation, while A.J.M. Smith recommended his writing to anthologist Raymond Knister. I read nothing of Taylor's  that would justify such praise, but it appears Edel and Smith weren't alone in seeing something; while living in Paris, Taylor's writing appeared in This Quarter and transition, sharing pages with James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles and William Carlos Williams.

Taylor's lone contribution to First Statement, "The Horse-Stall" broke a fifteen year silence, marking his first appearance in print since those days in Montparnasse. It was also his last.

"The Horse-Stall" isn't a short story, but an excerpt from a lost, unpublished novel titled Brazenhead. The twelve pages in First Statement is all that survives – an apt reflection of a man who, as Michael Gnarowski has written, "remains unrealized and obscure to the present day."

A shorter, earlier version of this piece was cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure. 

An Invitation to the Heart Accepts It All Launch