Unsettling Garners

Hugh Garner's pseudonymous second novel, Waste No Tears, goes to press next week, returning after a sixty-four year absence as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series. I'm proud to have played a part in its resurrection, and am particularly pleased with myself for having asked Amy Lavender Harris to pen the Introduction. Anyone at all familiar with her work will understand.

Waste No Tears is not a feel-good novel, but then one would never expect such a thing from a book pitched as "The Novel about the Abortion Racket". The cover, by unappreciated Winnipeg boy Syd Dyke, has haunted me from the day I first set eyes on it.

Published in 1950 by Toronto's New Stand Library, it's a rare book – so rare that two decades later George (then Doug) Fetherling had to give it a pass when writing on Garner for Forum House's Canadian Writers & Their Works series:

It is a novel so scarce that it cannot be found in Canada's largest public library, it's largest university library or even the National Library's copyright deposit.

Odd thing about Garner: his books were graced with some of the most disturbing images. He was, of course, a Governor General's Award-winner, once considered one of our greatest short story writers, but you'd never know it to look at these.

Hugh Garner's Best Stories
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971

A Nice PLace to Visit
Toronto: Ryerson, 1970

A Nice Place to Visit
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971

Violation of the Virgins
Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1970

Violation of the Virgins
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket, 1975

Out of print, each and every one. Well, next month Waste No Tears will be available again, in original cover tweaked to give Garner his due. Pre-orders are being taken by the usual sources.

Can't wait? There's a decent copy of the original New Stand Library edition listed online. But it'll cost you US$249, and it won't have Amy's Introduction.

Related post:

The Return of Hugh Garner's Neglected Novel

Still Reading Richard Rohmer. Is Alice Munro?

More than a month into the New Year and I'm still at it. So are my pals Chris Kelly and Stanley Whyte.

The books themselves have been a breeze; the last, Exxoneration, was really just a novella made to look like a novel through maps, technical drawings, clip art and appendices.

More padding than Craig Russell.

The real challenge has come in hunting down the darn things.

Time was Rohmer could be found in every bookstore and library in the land. Ultimatum, his 1973 debut novel, topped Canadian bestseller lists for nearly six months in hardcover, and did even better in paperback. Such was its success that the Americans noticed, publishing this edition:

The scene isn't in the novel. Never mind, the adventures of a no nonsense President piloting Air Force One around the arctic and ordering an invasion of Canada could not have failed to excite. New York publishers were much less interested in Exxoneration, the 1974 sequel, in which the invasion party retreats, leaving two hundred burning Yankee corpses on the tarmac outside arrivals at Toronto International Airport. There has never been an American edition.

North of the border, it seemed Richard Rohmer could do no wrong. Each fall a new novel, each novel a bestseller. His success was limited to Canada, and his success puzzled. In the 2 October 1976 Globe & Mail, no less a mind than the great Stephen Lewis searched for an explanation:

Perhaps it's all the hype and determined salesmanship of McClelland and Stewart. Perhaps, more likely, it's that Rohmer neatly touches Canadian themes in a country starving for Canadian themes. Perhaps the very superficiality engages interest without emotion, so that there's no investment of the mind and spirit, and the reading is easy. Or perhaps we're just a not very discriminating public…

Perhaps it's all four, but I think the second is key. My pre-teen self was starved for Canadian fiction, and the wire racks of Kane's Super Drug Mart in Kirkland, Quebec, provided what the Lakeshore School Board did not. Rohmer's talent lay in an uncanny ability to tap into his fellow citizens' fantasies and fears. Separation, about the threatened succession of Quebec, was published the month before the surprise victory of the Parti Québécois in the 1976 provincial election.

Separation proved to be the end of the Rohmer's rapid-fire round. When he returned with his fifth novel, four years later, the momentum was gone. Balls! was another bestseller, sure, but nothing like the others; most of the publicity focussed on the ribald title. Its 1980 publication marked the beginning of a long slow decline.

Just five Rohmer novels are in print today, three of which are bound up in an omnibus edition. How different are the days when we were not only reading Rohmer but passing him around. My copy of Ultimatum had once been given as a gift by Eric Kierans.

Our local library doesn't have one of Rohmer's thirty-one books, nor does its much larger sister in Stratford. The copy of Exodus/UK pictured at the top of this post had to be brought in from Huron County through an interlibrary loan. Starting in on it late last night I noticed this:

Time was we all read Richard Rohmer.

Related post:

Resolved to Reading Richard Rohmer

Trudeau Redux: Compare and Contrast II

Pierre Trudeau and Joni Mitchell at her induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame,
O'Keefe Centre, Toronto, 5 October 1981.

Stephen Harper awards Justin Bieber the Diamond Jubilee Medal,
Scotiabank Place, Ottawa, 23 November 2012. 

Related post:

Trudeau Redux: Compare and Contrast

Remembering John Buell: A Lot to Make Up For

A Lot to Make Up For
John Buell
Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 1990

John Buell died last month. I know because a friend forwarded the obituary his family placed in The Gazette. The newspaper itself did nothing. The fourth estate, which in life never properly recognized the novelist, has been silent on Buell's passing.

Edmund Wilson, the great American critic, praised John Buell's novels. Forget him. Wilson knew nothing about Canadian literature. O Canada, the book he crafted for the centennial, is an embarrassing late career cash-in. And yet, for all his flailing, Bunny landed truth with Buell.

John Buell's novels came onto us in fits and starts. The first, The Pyx (1959) and Four Days (1962), were followed by a decade of silence; then came The Shrewsdale Exit (1972) and Playground (1976). A Lot to Make Up For, his fifth and final novel, broke an even longer silence. Short, yet complex, it centres on three damaged characters: Adele Symons, Stan Hagan, and Martin Lacey. Things come together. A single mother, Adele is cleaning houses in Quebec's Eastern Townships. Stan is searching for her, intent on righting past wrongs. Martin offers Stan room and board in exchange for help with his crops. Addiction plays a role in all three lives. Past addiction. A Lot to Make Up For is a story of recovery, redemption and restoration. Positive, it gives hope, yet there is no happy ending.

The words end, but not the story.

The Globe & Mail, 4 August 1990

Object: A 202-page hardcover in tan boards. The HarperCollins Canada edition is so similar to the American Farrar, Straus & Giroux that the author bio reads:

Access: Concordia University, the institution at which the author taught for thirty-seven years, does not have a copy.

More than decent copies of the Canadian first edition are available online for as little as eight dollars. The American first edition can be had for a buck. Neither HarperCollins Canada nor Farrar, Straus & Giroux went back for second printings.

In the autumn of 1991, HarperCollins Canada reissued the novel as a trade paperback. I've never seen a copy. A Lot to Make Up For is the alone amongst Buell's five novels in having not been translated.

"In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in John's name to the charity you support."

Related posts:

A Penthouse Killing in Montreal

Six Pyxides for Sunday

Four Days in Darkest Quebec

Where is Catherine Deneuve?

Six Exits to Shrewsdale