Cousin Basil's Dickensian Christmas Gift

The Happy Isles
Basil King
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923

I nearly let the year pass without reading any Basil King, and started in on this novel only when I remembered that my copy had been given as a present ninety years ago this month.

Not much of a reason, is it.

To be frank, after The Inner Shrine and The Contract of the Letter, I'd had enough of Reverend King's gentle preaching on matters of reputation, flirtation, infidelity, separation and divorce. I was wrong to expect more of the same in The Happy Isles. All figure, of course, but here things edge away from the matrimonial and toward the political.

The novel opens on a splendid spring day spoiled when eight-month-old Henry Elphinstone Whitelaw, of the New York Whitelaws, is stolen from his carriage in Central Park. A tragic event, it calls to mind Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's The House of Windows (1912), which is built around the abduction of a wealthy Vancouver couple's infant daughter. The balance of this novel, however, owes much more to Charles Dickens than Mrs Mackay.

King's abductor is Lucy Coburn. A young woman  "feeble in mind from birth, half-demented by the death first of her husband and then of her child," Lucy took the baby so as to "satisfy her thwarted mother-love."

Love Henry she did, moving about Manhattan, forever fearing that someone might identify him as the missing Whitelaw baby. Good thing, too, because Lucy can't quite keep her story straight; even Henry, whom she calls both Tom and Gracie, is confused:

   "I'm a little boy, ain't I?"
   "Yes, you're a little boy, but you should have been a little girl. It was a little girl I wanted."

The early years are the easiest, with poor, damaged Lucy living off her husband's life insurance. When the money runs out, she turns to shoplifting. Lucy's luck ends on 24 December 1904, when she is caught lifting a pair of fur-lined mittens that Tom had hoped would be his Christmas gift. The boy spends Christmas Eve in a children's home. The next morning he learns that his "mudda" has suffered a painful death by downing cyanide.

A Merry Christmas to you, Cousin Ida!

Now orphaned – or so the authorities believe – eight-year-old waif Tom is shipped up the Hudson to an unwelcoming foster family in an ugly little town. After a time – an unpleasant time – he is adopted by an unhappy couple who are suffering from a failing farm and failing marriage. King is on familiar territory here. I set aside all earlier complaints in recognizing the chapters that follow as the very finest in the novel.

There be many troubled souls in The Happy Isles, but not one so well drawn as Quidmore, Tom's adoptive father. An adulterous coward haunted by the road not travelled, he takes inspiration from the story of poor Lucy Coburn in trying to rid himself of a wife, Tom's adoptive mother. Quidmore tries to trick his freshly minted  son into administering the fatal dose. When this doesn't happen the farmer breaks down, as much from relief as failure. Quidmore is a man tortured, troubled and torn until wife Anna learns that he's been seeing the local widow. It's only then that he can summon enough courage to do the dastardly deed himself.

Rejected by the widow lady, who is no fool, Quidmore makes himself scarce. He takes Tom to New York, holing himself in the  very sort of place Lucy would've considered home.

Remember when I described Quidmore is a troubled soul? Well, he disappears, leaving Tom all his money. I think we can all assume that he took a dive off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Orphaned – kinda – for a second time, the boy is taken under the wing of fellow lodger, one-eyed Liverpudlian Lemuel Honeybun. "A rogue, a burglar, an ex-convict," old Honey Lem gives up his thieving ways and devotes himself to raising young Tom.

It's all downhill from here, I'm afraid. Tom, who has already shown himself to be an A+ student, uses Quidmore's money to pay for Harvard. In his very first class, he's seated next to Tad Whitelaw, the brother her didn't know he had. This is one of the more believable coincidences.

The Happy Isles marks something of a departure for Reverend King in that it ends up as less a comment on marriage than society. In its pages the poor suffer, they work hard and they take risks. Honey Lem dies after being is crushed in a workplace accident.

My apologies for that spoiler.

At Harvard, Tom finds himself surrounded by a privileged, spoiled, ill-behaved lot – and here I include brother Tad. There's more than an insinuation that when inherited, not earned, wealth and position lead to ruin. Socialism is spoken of, but only by goodhearted retired crook Honey Lem. Tom recognizes that it's all so unfair, but can see no solution to what ails the nation.

He's chosen banking as a profession, so one can't expect much.

The Happy Isles was King's penultimate novel. The last published during his lifetime, it first ran from March through October 1923 in Harper's Magazine. Advertisements for the finished book described the serialization as having "aroused interest almost if not quite equal to the furore which resulted from the anonymous publication of 'The Inner Shrine' by the same author years ago."

Not true.

In 1907, the furore surrounding The Inner Shrine was front page news in Canada and the United States; discussion of The Happy Isles was limited to book reviews… of which this is one.

Will there ever be another?

Most interesting passage:

Honey never pawed him, as the masters often pawed the boys, and the boys pawed one another. He never threw an arm across his shoulder, or call him by a more endearing name than Kiddy. Apart from an eagle-eyed solicitude, he never manifested tenderness, nor asked for it.

Object: A 485-page hardcover bound in green cloth with gilt lettering. I bought my copy – signed, of course – from a New York City bookseller late last year. Price: US$43.86. I'm blaming the missing jacket on Cousin Ida.

A first edition, it includes four plates by John Alonzo Williams. Knowing there were more, I splurged – ten American dollars! – on the advance copy made up of pages from the Harper's serialization.

With nine more illustrations, it turned out to be well worth the price. The depiction above of a collapsing Quidmore is one.

Here Tom has a chance encounter with a woman he does not know is his mother:

Access: The Harper first enjoyed no second printing, though a cheap Grosset & Dunlap edition did follow. Hodder & Stoughton released a UK edition in 1924. No reprint there either. The Canadian branch of Hodder & Stoughton appears to have released an edition in 1923 – it was advertised in that November's Canadian Bookman – but I'll be damned if I can find a trace.

As with nearly all Basil King items, prices are cheap. Very Good first editions, sans jacket, can be had for US$4.50. Copies of the UK Hodder & Stoughton edition are more scarce, but are only marginally more expensive.

Outside of the Toronto Public Library, we Canadians are served only by our universities.

A Last-Minute Slogan, "Give Books"

Coaching courtesy of an old Eaton's ad published in the 23 December 1933 Globe & Mail. The venerable department store recommended forty-two books, though only five are Canadian: Cannibal Quest by Gordon Sinclair, My Vision for Canada by William Arthur Deacon, The Girl from Glengarry by Ralph Connor, The Master of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche, and for the kiddies, Picture History of Canada by Jessie McEwan and Kathleen Moore.

The young lady gracing the cover of that month's Maclean's appears unfazed by the slim pickings.

You just know that first gift is a book. I'm betting the second is an album of Duke Ellington 78s. The third is, of course, a box of Laura Secord chocolates.

Fast-forward eight decades to this, my annual year-end summary. There will be gift suggestions.

This got off to a good start in January with Philip Child's Mr. Ames Against Time, then hit its stride in the first two chapters of Ronald Cocking's Die with Me Lady, before stumbling badly in the third. "Never have I seen a book fall apart quite so dramatically and melodramatically", I wrote in reviewing Cocking's novel. There was no recovery, which is not to say that the marathon didn't have its moments.

I've fallen into the habit of the listing the three books that are most deserving of reissue. In 2012, Margaret Millar, the pride of Kitchener, swept all spots. I read only one of her novels in 2013, yet here she is again:

For Maimie's Sake – Grant Allen
Vanish in an Instant – Margaret Millar
A Stranger and Afraid – Marika Robert

Of the twenty-four titles reviewed here this past year, only one, Ross Macdonald's The Dark Tunnel (a/k/a I Die Slowly), is currently in print. I saw a copy in the London Indigo just last week. Imagine!

Mention must also be made of Toronto Doctor by Sol Allen, which vies with Neil Perrin's The Door Between as the strangest Canadian novel I've ever read. This brings me to the good people of the Editing Modernism in Canada Project and Ottawa University Press, who are the recipients of this year's praise.

For six years now, project and press have been bringing new and reissued works by our most significant modernist authors. They're attractive and inexpensive to boot!

If all goes well, next year will see a return to print of Sol Allen's 1928 debut novel They Have Bodies, edited by Brock University's Gregory Betts. For this gift-giving season, I ignore Sinclair, Deacon, Connor, de la Roche and McEwan in recommending the following:

Waste Heritage
Irene Baird

Edited by Colin Hill

The Wrong World
Bertram Brooker

Edited by Gregory Betts

Swinging the Maelstrom
Malcolm Lowry

Edited by Vik Doyen
Introduction by Miguel Mota
Notes by Chris Ackerley

Eight Men Speak
Oscar Ryan et al.

Edited by Alan Filewood

Dry Water
Robert J.C. Stead

Edited by Neil Querengesser
     and Jean Horton





And, if I may, I'd like to suggest The Heart Accepts it All, the recently published collection of letters by John Glassco edited by yours truly.

Happy Holidays!

W is for Wood's 'Winter's Treasures'

WINTER'S TREASURES

                               When Autumn days are over

                                    And the north winds blow

                               And mother earth is bedded

                                    'Neath her robes of snow;

                               When trees are robbed of beauty

                                    And the gaunt limbs sigh
                               To slumbering Apollo
                                    In the gray dark sky;

                               My heart begins a yearning
                                    And my thoughts to stray
                               O'er the highways I wandered
                                    In the yesterday.

                               I hear the merry laughter
                                    Of the long ago
                               As we gazed through the windows
                                    At the falling snow.

                               I hear the ringing sleighbells
                                    On the Deacon's horse
                               And itch to throw a snowball
                                    In a straight true course.

                               I feel the tingling coldness
                                    On the nose again
                               From frosted wonder castles
                                    On the window pane.

                               Oh, if you're feeling lonesome
                                    For the summer breeze
                               Or the beauty of springtime
                                    On the bare-limbed trees.

                               Just find the key to childhood,
                                    Open wide the door.
                               There's sure tonic waiting
                                    Labelled "Days of Yore."

                               For nothing keeps a fellow
                                    Looking young and spry
                               Like wandering the pathways
                                    Of the days gone by.

from Your Home and Mine

Harold S. Wood

Toronto: Musson, 1932

Bilious, Bitchy and Bedevilled by Spite? Not at All.

Just in time for Christmas, the new Canadian Notes & Queries is here. Seth provides the cover, along with a short tribute to the Maclean's illustrated cover. The magazine switched to photographs before I came along, but old issues lingered in our home. The 10 January 1952 cover by Oscar Cahén was a favourite. I think of it each dying year as winter moves in.

Here I am getting all nostalgic.

John Metcalf, not Maclean's, is the focus of this CNQ. Contributors include Caroline Adderson, Mike Barnes, Clarke Blaise, Michael Darling, Alex Good, Jeet Heer, Kim Jernigan, David Mason and Dan Wells. Cartoonist David Collier gives us a two-page adaptation of Going Down Slow. Roy MacSkimming, Christopher Moore and Nick Mount have interviews with the man, while I praise Metcalf's invigorating, irreverent Bumper Books.

But wait, there's more: a new short story from Kathy Page, four poems by Jim Johnston, along with reviews from Steven W. Beattie, Kerry Clare, Emily Donaldson and Bruce Whiteman.

I think all contributors will forgive and understand that my favourite thing about the issue is the collectable. A numbered, limited edition chapbook containing a new John Metcalf story, it's available only to subscribers.

And subscriptions are only $20.

And they make a great Christmas gift.

Here's how to order.

A bonus:

(cliquez pour agrandir)

The back cover of Carry On Bumping (Toronto: ECW, 1988).

Now, that's how you sell a book.