M is for Marginalia

Not Our Backwoods, Not Catharine Parr Traill

Backwoods Hussy
Hallan Whitney [pseud. Harry Whittington]
New York: Original Novels, 1952

L is for League of Canadian Poets

The League of Canadian Poets
The League of Canadian Poets
n.p.: The League of Canadian Poets, 1980

My present situation vis-à-vis the League of Canadian Poets is frankly selfish: I look on its annual meetings as no more than an opportunity for a free trip to somewhere or other in our broad land. Poets, I think, give so much to the world, and for so little that they’re entitled to this annual junket at the Canada Council’s expense. And I found the last meeting in Fredericton more rewarding for the chance it gave me to wander around that pleasant city than to listen to endless discussions on the subject of a paid Secretary, or Miriam Waddington scolding somebody, or Dr Cogswell expounding his theory of the place of the Sunday poet in our culture. If I get to the next general meeting I fully intend to register, greet a few friends, and disappear – unless there is an important vote to be taken on something really crucial like holding two general meetings every year.

— John Glassco, letter to Henry Beissel, 23 May 1975

A member since the League’s inception in 1966, Glassco was never much of a supporter. He thought the name silly and had from the start fought to make it an exclusive club. The battle was lost. By the League's tenth anniversary membership had increased more than ten fold to 160. Published at the fourteen year mark, this "concise guide" lists 197 members.

Glassco believed that the League had been inundated with “sensitive housewives from the Maritimes and the Prairies, all awful, all published at public expense in hideous little chapbooks.” He placed blame on Fred Cogswell and others who had pushed for a more inclusive organization. In an earlier letter to Beissel, Glassco writes:

If I understand Dr Cogswell correctly, his position is that everybody can and should write poetry, not so much in the pursuit of excellence or as a demanding vocation, but as a hobby or even a kind of therapy. This acknowledgement of the plight of the Sunday poet struck me as deeply humanitarian: we all know there is no one so pitiable as the person without talent who aspires to be a poet, and I can think of no one better qualified to represent her or him than Dr Cogswell, as his own work and his many sponsorings [sic] have shown over the years. He deserves the support he receives from these unhappy men and women. But I am troubled to see the league being taken over by them.

Certainly one of the most accomplished of its number, Glassco held his upturned nose in maintaining his membership. He lived just long enough to see his entry in this guide as “John Glasgow”.

Publications like these provide sharp snapshots of time and place, but for practical purposes the web serves best. Visit the League of Canadian Poets website today and you'll find listings for 557 members... and I'm not even counting Student Members, Honorary Members, Life Members and Supporting Members.

Some are friends.

Plug: Both letters feature in The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco.

Crossposted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

Montreal's Murderous Murder Mystery Writer (and the transvestite brother he passed off as his wife)

Montreal has produced some pretty awful writers, but the worst must surely be Nicholas A. Rossi. We don't talk about Rossi. Never did. Seventy years ago today he bludgeoned an old woman to death with an iron pipe. None of the Montreal papers covered the trial. The only mention of the crime came in this edited wire service story that The Gazette slipped between ads for the National Trust and Rols-Rim desks on the day after Rossi's execution:

The Gazette, 20 June 1945, p. 7

A murder committed by a "writer of pulp fiction murder mysteries" should've attracted much more attention. I blame it on the war. Only the Hartford Courant covered the unpleasantness in any detail. Several years later, a rival paper's wag described the Wegner murder as "one of the most bizarre cases in Connecticut criminal history." Can there really have been any other so odd?

Let's begin with the victim, a wealthy, widowed German immigrant whose only son was off fighting the Nazis. Mrs Wegner was the proprietress of what was cautiously described as "a high class boarding house." Early on the morning of 23 September 1943, police found her bloodied body wrapped in a comforter on the floor of the backyard garage. Suspicion fell first on a gentleman friend, bounced, then landed on Nick and Lana Williams, a married couple who lived in the basement quarters. They'd gone missing, as had Mrs Wegner's 1942 Chevrolet coupe.

Nick and Lana Williams at the time of their capture.

The pair made it as far as Missouri before being picked up trying to buy black market gasoline. It took little time for the police to identify the pair as the couple wanted in the Wegner murder. Further truths were revealed when stubble began to appear on Lana Williams' face. With this discovery, the pair not only admitted to being brothers Nicholas and Robert Rossi, but confessed to the killing.

They'd arrived in Plainville the previous month. Nicholas worked as fire warden of the Hotel Burritt in nearby New Britain, while younger brother Robert, as "Lana", served as Mrs Wegner's maid. According to one report, "Robert, in his skirts and wig, had the Wegner family fooled to the extent that he acted as personal maid and on several occasions aided Mrs. Wegner and her daughter-in-law in dressing."

The only account of the actual murder came from the brothers themselves. They told police that on the evening of the murder they'd ransacked the house while their landlady had been at the movies. Finding little, they'd waited for Mrs Wegner to return home with the intent of taking her car, purse, and whatever jewels she might've been wearing. Things got out of hand.

The Hartford Courant, 28 September 1943

The brothers were brought to Hartford for a trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death. While Nicholas was, of course, executed, Robert was spared the same fate by a public defender who managed to convince the Board of Pardons that he should not be held to the same account. It was pointed out that Nicholas had come up with the scheme to rob Mrs Wegner and it was he who had killed the old lady. Added to the obvious, was a novel argument that the older brother had been played a dominant role in the relationship, with Robert's transvestism presented as evidence of his submissive nature.

In writing about the Rossi brothers, both UPI and AP repeatedly employed the very same words: "born of the same Italian mother, but different Negro fathers." It could not have been easy growing up the son of a white mother and black father in early 20th-century Montreal. I'm left wondering  just how Nicholas came to attend Howard University. And then it was off to law school in Philadelphia? While I question that Nicholas Rossi fought "more than 100 bouts under the name Squire Williams," traces of a record linger. He was, for example, a runner-up in the 1937 Philadelphia Golden Gloves Championships.

But what of those pulp fiction murder mysteries? Scouring the references, I've not been able to find anything credited to a Nicholas Rossi or Nick Williams... or Squire Williams for that matter. When arrested, police recorded his occupation as "writer". Interesting to note, I think, that along with money, jewels and furs, the brothers had stolen a typewriter from the Wegner house.  Sixty-eight years after his death, Nicholas Rossi remains the only writer to have been executed by the State of Connecticut... the only Canadian, too.

The Milwaukee Sentinel, 20 June 1945

Brother Robert remained in prison until 1964 when his sentence was commuted. The Connecticut Board of Pardons was told that the former maid intended to leave the state to accept a job in a New Jersey hospital. There the trail ends.

My thanks to Kirstin Jones for the photograph of Mrs Wegner's gravesite. 

I first learned of this tragic episode in Canadian literary history through Kristian Gravenor's cool Coolopolis blog. Kristian's post on the Rossi brothers can be found through here.