13 April 2014

Gay on Sunday: The Temperance Poems



Teetotalism trickles as gentle, concordant music through the verse of our James Gay. No Carrie Nation, the man abhorred violence. True, he was a gunsmith, but then he was also a carpenter, an innkeeper and, of course, Master of All Poets. Where Mrs Nation wielded a hatchet, Gay preferred the written word. Consider, for example, this stanza from "The Great Exhibition", written in anticipation of the 1875 Guelph Fair, in which he entreats fellows in his profession to forgo the drink (if only temporarily):

Few words for our Town Innkeepers, I hope you won't get tight.
Carry out your business decently from morning until night.
So as our visitors by the thousands will return and have to say
They've been treated in our town of Guelph in a kind and friendly way.

Only two Gay temperance poems survive – I've always assumed there were more – both found in Canada's Poet (London: Field & Tuer [1885?]). I leave you this Palm Sunday with his words:

THROW ALL OUR GROG BOTTLES AWAY, LIKE J. GAY

Your poet is a great advocate for good. All our duty as far as we can,
Is to love and respect our fellow-man;
Rush to do him good, that's if we can;
Whether Greek, Gentile, or a Jew,
We are in duty bound to help him through.
It's not the church of any kind
Can destroy the peace of your poet's mind;
He's a true believer every day,
Lives as happy as the flowers in May.
Anything for good that we can see
We should turn out and help like that busy bee;
Those are a guide for our fellow-man,
Doing good is their every day's plan;
All through the day all do their best,
When night comes on they take their rest.
All insects have their cunning ways;
All those are of one mind
To make their homes so neat and fine.
Oh, if man could only see,
And live as happy as that bee;
Cast off bad thoughts of any kind,
The world very soon would be of one mind.
Live on this earth in love and peace,
And not to act as brutes and beasts.
Let temperance be our guide while on this earth we stay;
With good of all kinds
Be on our minds.
And throw all our grog bottles away,
Like J. Gay.


TEMPERANCE

Temperance and sobriety all should understand,
Two of the best things ever carried out by man;
Study this word temperance all for the best,
To be taken in so many ways, carry nothing to excess.

Intemperance is the forerunner of crimes,
Draws thousands into rascality and death before their times;
And still don't blame liquor for all,
Other things too are not for the best;
We should never fill our bodies to excess.
So many rascalities carried out by man,
Better than Gay who can understand;
Allow me to warn you of your danger of doing so,
But running further into sin is all the go.


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11 April 2014

The Return of Hugh Garner's Neglected Novel



As promised, after a sixty-three year and nine month absence Hugh Garner's Waste No Tears returned to print last week. The fifth Vehicle Press Ricochet Book, it marks something of a departure in the series as the first reissue set in Toronto. It is also the first novel written by a
Governor General's Award-winning author, which begs the question: Where is David Montrose's award? Murder Over Dorval is a hell of a lot better than The Pillar.

Never mind.

Waste No Tears was Garner's third novel, and follows Storm Below in being the second published. As mentioned elsewhere, the original News Stand Library edition from July 1950 is uncommon – three of our university libraries have copies – but this only goes part way in explaining the neglect and indifference shown by those who have written on Garner and his work. The novel receives no mention in  The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Yet, the novel is ever-present in the bibliographies featured in the author's books. Here it is in Hugh Garner's Best Stories, for which he won that Governor General's Award:


Garner's early paperback originals have been too readily dismissed. It seems that only Cabbagetown has been deemed worthy of attention – in large part, I think, because the bowdlerized Collins White Circle first edition was restored and published by respectable Ryerson Press.


In his Canadian Literary Landmarks, John Robert Colombo writes of Waste No Tears as "hack work". Paul Stuewe, Garner's biographer, echoes in describing it as a "book noteworthy only as an example of how rapidly a professional writer can produce hackwork when necessary."

Hey, we non-academics have to make a living somehow. Besides, writing produced with an eye on manna can have value.

As with Brian Moore's pulp work – similarly neglected – there is much to explore in Waste No Tears. I recommend Michael P.J. Kennedy's "Garner's Forgotten Novel and Its Relationship to the Stories", which deals with the links between Waste No Tears, "Lucy", "Mama Says to Tell You She's Out" and "The Yellow Sweater". Amy Lavender Harris gives us not only "Hugh Garner's Forgotten Toronto Novel, Waste No Tears", but graciously accepted my invitation to write the Introduction to the new edition:
Although Morley Callaghan’s early Toronto novel Strange Fugitive – set in a long-vanished downtown slum district known as 'the Ward' – often receives literary credit for exposing the city’s seedy underside, it is Garner’s paperback novels – Waste No Tears and Present Reckoning chief among them – that reveal how narrow is the line that separates 'Toronto the Good' from its seamier shadow. It’s a line drawn precisely along Jarvis Street, a street that even now remains incompletely improved, the converted mansions and corporate towers at its north end still sliding irrevocably downhill toward the rooming houses and massage parlors where brutal necessities continue to be transacted in what remains of Toronto’s notorious skid row.
More Toronto novels to come. Promise.

More Montreal, too. Another promise.

But first, Niagara Falls.

That's a tease.


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07 April 2014

Remembering Edith Eaton and D'Arcy McGee



It's become something of a tradition here to acknowledge Thomas D'Arcy McGee on this day, the anniversary of his assassination. And I will. But it would be wrong to let this seventh of April pass without paying homage to Edith Eaton, who died one hundred years ago today.

Writing as "Sui Sin Far", Eaton has been described variously as "the first Chinese-American fictionist", "the first Chinese-American woman writer" and "the mother of Chinese-American literature", but these descriptions come from our cousins to the south. Pay them no mind.

The eldest daughter of Englishman Edward Eaton and his Chinese wife Lotus Blossom, she was born in 15 March 1865 in Prestbury, Cheshire, emigrating to Montreal seven or eight years later.

Eaton's earliest writing appeared in The Dominion Illustrated, The Montreal Daily Star and The Montreal Daily Witness. Both fiction and non-fiction, all show a great sensitivity toward the Chinese communities of Canada and the United States, as reflected in her modest memoir, "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian", published in the Independent (21 January 1890):
I have come from a race on my mother’s side which is said to be the most stolid and insensible to feeling of all races, yet I look back over the years and see myself so keenly alive to every shade of sorrow and suffering that it is almost a pain to live.
Never a healthy woman, in her mid-thirties she left Quebec for more temperate California. The writer spent roughly a decade on the American west coast and lived briefly in Boston before returning to Montreal. A monument stands in her honour at Mount Royal Cemetery, in which D'Arcy McGee is also interred.

This year, a poem to the politician by Joliette's Louis-Thomas Groulx, written six days after the assassination.


Assasinat de l'honorable Thomas D'Arcy McGee — 7 avril 1868

I

O mon Dieu!… c'est horrible!… une assassine
     A tranché le fil de ses jours….
Mais son âme set allée à ta bonté divine
     Qui sourit aux martyrs – toujours.

     Il meurt ennemi du désordre
Et de ces hommes vile qu'on nomme Feniens.
     Prions pour ce martyr de l'Ordre,
Nous tous qu'il a servis, ô mes concitoyens.

Dieu veuille que son sang répandu par ses frères,
Ne tombe – encore tout chaud – sur leurs fils et sur eux.
Appraise, O doux Jésus, la haine et les colères
Qui vont semant le meurtre et font le deuil affreux.

II

Il ne reverra plus sa femme ni sa fille,
Ni son fils qu'il aimait d'un amour infini.
Tous vont pleurer, hélas! – Console la famille
Seigneur, et dis: enfants, votre père est béni.

La Nation prend soin de l'épouse chérie,
De la famille et du fils – tendre orphelin qui prie,
Il est pour chaque vie, une heure de douleur
Que je ne saurais pendre et qui bris le cœur.

Alors, heureux qui meurt: mais malheur à qui tue.
Des vivants et des morts, Dieu seul se constitue
Juge. Aussi, seul il a droit de vie et de mort
Sur tous. Caïn, – tuer d'Abel – en vain se tord.

De désespoir. Son crime est avec lui, sans cesse.
Et suivra, partout, soit qu'il coure ou bien cesse
D'Aller. Qu'il veille ou dorme, Abel agonisant
Sera, devant sa face, à toute heure, présent.

Caïn voudrait mourir de remords qui l'oppresse,
Mais son crime est si grand qu'il lui faudra longtemps
Encore, ouïr la voix douce mais vengeresse
Qui dit toujours: "Caïn, que te faisais-je, aux champs."

Il ne dormira plus le cruel fratricide;
Et le bon Dieu, pourtant, l'a pris sous son égide,
Disant: en quelque lieu qu'il aille – ce vilain –
Chacun reconnaîtra mon signe sur Caïn.

III

Que l'assassin se nome Eagleson ou White,
Ou de tout autre nom qu'on entend prononcer,
Son forfait odieux rend mon âme interdite,
Et c'est presque mourir, mon dieu! que d'y penser.

Le ciel saura punir une action si noire.
………………………………………………….
Maintenant que McGee a vu Dieu dans sa gloire,
Et que sa voix se mêle au séraphique chanr,
Regrette-t-il la terre où l'hommes est si méchant?

IV

A quoi me servirait de biaiser ou de feindre?
La pauvre humanité, certes! est bien à plaindre
L'homme détruit, Dieu crée, et la gouffre béant
Dévore ce que Dieu fait sortir du Néant.

Qui sondera, Seigneur, ce mystère insondable?
Je vois, partout, l'énigme écrite par ton doigt.
Toujours, ce que tu fais me parait admirable
Ce que tu laisses faire est indigne de toi.

Tu ne réponds jamais, quand l'homme t'interroge
Pourquoi m'as-tu donné l'entendement, la voix
Et la cœur, si ce n'est pour faire ton éloge?
Mais le ferai-je…. après le meurtre que je vois?

Ou donc regardais-tu, quand fut ourdi ce crime?
Quand tombait, sous le coup, l'innocente victime?
Comment as-tu souffert – toi si juste et si bon –
Que D'Arcy fût atteint par balle de plomb?

Je ne veux pas, Seigneur, que mon âme murmure,
Mais je dis: ton enfant trouve cette morte dure!…
………………………………………………….
………………………………………………….
Merci. --Dieu parle enfin. Vici ce que j'entends:
"J'ai pris votre martyr." – Et le bourreau? – j'attends.

"L'ivraie est dans le blé, la rose a son épine,
"Je fais une Merveille avec une ruine.
"J'appelle à moi le bon et j'attends le méchant
"Mais que le juge humain sévisse et attendant.

"Que vos lois aient leur cours. Mais que votre sentence
"Ne fasse pas périr la timide innocence.
"Faites que la justice atteigne l'assassin.
"Ce qu'il doit, qu'il le paie à son fatal destin.

V

"Meurtrier, tue encor, tue encore et te hâte.
"Toi, martyr, souffre encore, souffre comme Socrate
"Sans te plaindre et pardonne. Ils viennent les temps dûis
"Ou ma faux abattra comme des épis mûrs

"Les hommes – cœurs pervers – qui font de la malice
"Et leur unique étude et leur plus cher délice.
"Je sais qui fait le mal, et sais qui fait le bien
"Je vois l'être maudit qui fait le Fenien.

"Il est tout près de moi; je le sens, je le touche
"Peu s'en faut que son nom ne sorte de ma bouche
"Et si je n'avais pas horreur de ce gueux-là,
"Mettant le pied dessus, je dirais – le voilà.

"On dirait que le peuple – aveugle volontaire –
"Ne voit pas le serpent, avec sa tête altière,
"Qui se plie et s'allonge, et se promène et va
"Jusqu'aux pieds de son Roi qu'il enlace déjà."

Quoi, donc, est le serpent? Est-ce le Royalisme,
Ou la démocratie, ou le saint-Simonisme,
Ou l'Athéisme encore? – Dis, seigneur, qu'est-ce enfin?
" – Aucun de ces mots-là ne convient au Matin.

"Vous le verrez bientôt. Son ardente prunelle
"Vous illumine avec sa brillante étincelle.
"Il s'en vient du Midi, sinon de l'Orient
"Qu'il souilla comme il veut souiller tout l'Occident.

"Si je n'étais pas là, quand paraîtra la Bête,
"Le combat serait court, et sûre le Défaite.
"Mais je veille sur vous et sur le Trône, aussi,
"Et garde auprès de moi mon fidèle D'Arcy."

Joliette, 13 avril 1868

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