25 July 2014

Leonard Cohen Erotica… and John Glassco Porn



Five glimpses of Leonard Cohen's short story "Barbers and Lovers", from the Spring 1971 issue of Ingluvin.


The artwork is by Susan Hales.

Five pages later, John Glassco offers "Saisons de l'avenir" and "The Marital Sex Education Film":


All three published once… and never again.

21 July 2014

Quebec Gothic



The Temple on the River [Les Écœurants]
Jacques Hébert [trans. Gerald Taaffe]
Montreal: Harvest House, 1967

More novella than novel, I first read The Temple on the River a couple of hours before meeting the author. Picking it up twenty-eight years later later, I remembered little. A coming of age story, right?

Why The Temple on the River didn't stay with me must have to do with the speed at which it was read. A very entertaining story, it's infused with brilliant humour of the blackest sort.

The narrator and protagonist is François Sigouin of the Quebec City Sigouins. His father is a Superior Court judge, as was his father before him… that is until grand-père raped the niece of a Dominican father on the Plains of Abraham. The flames of scandal are quickly extinguished, but not before they kill proper, pearl-wearing grand-mère. The newly widowed judge retires to the village of La Malbaie, "where they can't believe that one of the Sigouins could be a dirty old man", never mind a rapist.

Young François is summoned to keep his exiled grandfather company, but spends most of his time in the company of housekeeper Sévérine, an elderly spinster:
She was still in the Legion of Mary at sixty-five, the kind of old woman that hangs around the sacristy, on the prier's skirts, all year round, a frog boiled to death in holy water. At her age she kept suing that she was a virgin and pure, though she didn't take two baths a year.
Under Sévérine's guidance François becomes an enthusiastic churchgoer, but this has everything to do with pretty Mireille, the beer-drinking labourer's daughter, who seems always to be sitting beneath a statue of St Anthony.

The Temple on the River is indeed a coming of age novel. Returning to it all these years later I was surprised to find that it takes place decades after the author's own youth. François watches television, dreams of destinations depicted in Air France travel posters and later, as a student at the Collège des Jésuits, listens jazz and bad poetry at a Quebec City beatnik club. His adolescence leads to the Quiet Revolution, when it could be argued Quebec itself came of age.

Hébert himself played a liberating role during those years. He was an old man of forty-three when the story of François Sigouin was first published, yet it demonstrates a true understanding of the younger generation.

That would be the generation before mine. I could be wrong.


Object: A 175-page paperback in Penguin orange, slightly wider than a typical mass market. It features ten full-page illustrations by Pierre Lusier. In 1985, I purchased my copy – then not inscribed – from a Montreal bookseller for 25 cents.

Access: The Temple on the River was published simultaneously in paper and cloth – then never again. Two paperback copies are currently list online – $9.99 and $19.95 – but I recommend the uncommon cloth. Both have dust jackets, both are inscribed, and at US$33.75 and US$39.00 aren't too far apart in terms of price.

The original French, Les Écœurants, was published in 1966 by Éditions du Jour. I've never seen a copy, so shamefully present this image (right), lifted from a Gatineau bookseller. He's asking only $10.00, which seems a very good deal. It was last reissued in 1987 by Stanké.

Most universities have a copy, as does Bibliothèque et Archives nationals du Québec, but Library and Archives Canada fails. The only public library that serves is that of the City of Vancouver. Curiously, the French-language original is much more common in English-language institutions.

15 July 2014

Richard Rohmer's Retaliation: The Chairmen Rave



Retaliation
Richard Rohmer
Toronto: PaperJacks, 1983
298 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through

The Globe & Mail, 6 November 1982

11 July 2014

The Gayest Femme Fatale



No Place in Heaven
Laura Warren
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

News Stand Library flogged No Place in Heaven as a scandalous memoir, but I think it's a work of fiction. Somehow I can't bring myself to believe that the manuscript of a repentant, dying woman ended up with a crooked, fly-by-night Toronto paperback publisher.

Laura Warren (née Fletcher) looks back on life from her deathbed, beginning with the miracle of her birth, not six months after her parents' marriage. Ma and Pa, vaudeville performers both, shoot for Hollywood stardom, but lose a race with a locomotive. Baby Laura is left to be raised by her Aunt Bessie who runs a New York rooming house catering to artistic types.

"Living in Aunt Bessie's rooming house [sic] was like taking the vow of chastity and then moving into the YMCA", says Laura. "You took a chance just bending over to pick up a bar of soap." It's a little hard to imagine our heroine growing to be such an innocent eighteen-year-old, but there you are. She gets a job as a hat check girl at the Kit Kat Club, where she meets Tony Warren. The reader pegs him as a good-for-nothing louse, but not Laura. She falls for him bad, he takes her virginity and then they marry.

But, wait, isn't he a louse?

Tony joins the Marines, is shipped out to fight the "Japs", and a baby is left on Aunt Bessie's doorstep. Laura cares for the child until old high school friend Marie Gibbs, she of the "moist hour glass [sic] figure", reveals herself as the mother and Tony as the father. Minutes later, Aunt Bessie tells Laura that the Japs have done in her husband. By her own admission, the poor girl goes a bit loopy:
     I sobbed to a shuddering stop.
     "Revenge is mine, saith the Lord," I giggled. "But don't forget Aunt Bessie, the world is full of Tonys… yep, the woods are full of them… like Japs. And little Laura is going out and shoot 'em down," I pointed my finger, "boom, boom, boom, like that, like I had a gun."
It's impolite but accurate to say that little Laura slays the "Tonys" by being a tease. She sends her first victims to find relief with a prostitute known as Syphilis Sal. Laura leads the wealthy wife of a kept man to believe that she is his mistress, and walks out on vain Max Arnott after convincing him that he is far too small to satisfy a woman. Her most interesting victim is gay bookseller John Ossington, whom she tortures by bedding, bedding, bedding and bedding the young object of his desire.*

All is done with a smile on her face.


No Place in Heaven is the fourth title tackled in a focused effort to uncover unrecognized Canadian novels buried in News Stand Library's pulp. While nothing here is reminiscent of NSL authors Hugh Garner and Ted Allan, I wouldn't rule out Thomas P. Kelley.

More than anything, No Place in Heaven brought to mind No Tears for Goldie, Kelley's pseudonymous 1950 novel, with Aunt Bessie sitting in for kind-hearted Aunt Maggie. Both are built of workmanlike prose enlivened by ribaldry – but then much the same could be said about many News Stand Library titles. I could be wrong. Could've been written by someone else. And there's always some slight possibility that Laura Warren was a real person. Hope not. I hate to think of her in hell.


Favourite passage:
     "You're the sexiest looking bast'd I've seen in ages," she slurred, "I'd like to sleep with yoooo."
Object: A poorly produced, 160-page mass market paperback, my copy was printed for the American market. The cover artist – unidentified – does not do Laura Warren justice.

Access: No listing on WorldCat. Two copies are currently for sale online – one Fair Canadian at US$7.95 and one Very Good American at US$20. Can't say which is the better buy. Get 'em while you can.
* "Bedding" isn't quite the word – the trysts take place in a boathouse – but you know what I mean. 
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