The Pyx Censored!

I spent a couple of hours this past weekend researching John Buell's second novel, Four Days, first published fifty-five years ago by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. And why not? Buell is one of our finest novelists – Edmund Wilson thought so – but he is also one of our most unjustly neglected. I was honoured to help usher his debut, The Pyx, back into print last year as part of the Ricochet Books series.

The Pyx was roundly praised, enjoyed numerous translations, and was adapted to the screen in a not so bad film starring Christopher Plummer and Karen Black. Four Days too was praised. It has always been in the shadow of Buell's debut, and yet it is the better novel. In fact, Four Days is the author's best novel and is one of the greatest novels set, as least partly, in Montreal.

Why was I researching?

I'll leave you to guess.

An unexpected discovery came from an unlikely source, Anne Montagnes' review of Four Days in the 24 February 1962 edition of the Globe & Mail:

This, Mr. Buell's second novel, is of a texture with his first, The Pyx. Both reveal his careful study of Graham Greene – the concern with outlaw characters, the struggle between good and evil, the ever-narrowing pursuit both spiritual and physical, the compassionate Catholicism that appears before even those who spurn it, the violence, the pity. Unlike Mr. Greene, Mr. Buell writes with an economy of viewpoint and action, a simple unfolding of his story. Furthermore, Mr. Buell is never off-colour, as Mr. Greene sometimes is, making it even stranger that at least one branch of the Toronto Public Library has, because of vociferous complaints, removed The Pyx from its open shelves.

This is the first I'd learned of The Pyx being attacked by the censors... and in Protestant Toronto, no less. Further research uncovered this Letter to the Editor (6 March 1962):

The Toronto Public Library website informs that six copies of the Ricochet Books edition are in circulation. Only one copy of the Farrar, Straus & Cudahy edition survives.

It's reference only.

A coincidence, I'm sure.

Related posts:

A Penthouse Killing in Montreal

Six Pyxides for Sunday

The Return of The Pyx

Four Days in Darkest Quebec

Where is Catherine Deneuve?

Six Exits to Shrewsdale

Remembering John Buell: A Lot to Make Up For

'March, 1918' by H.C. Mason

Canadians outside Lens, France
March, 1918

A century-old poem by Great War veteran Harold Campbell Mason (1895-1976), gunner with the 72nd Battalion, CFA. This version comes from These Things Only..., his lone volume of verse, published in 1953 by Thomas Nelson.

March, 1918 

"Stranger, go tell the Lancedaemonians that we lie here, obedient to their commands." 

               When at long last the strife is done
                    And you who live look back on war,
               And sadly enter, one by one,
                    The items the grisly score —
               Whatever weakness you deplore,
                    Whatever failings mar our sheet,
               Write in one credit, if no more —
                    Canadians did not retreat. 

               When stalled the tank and stilled the gun
                    And silenced all the barrage roar,
               When you shall know what's lost and won
                    And who the brunt of battle bore.
               And whether Peace we struggled for
                    Be peace indeed or but a cheat,
               Add then this learning to thy lore —
                    Canadians did not retreat. 

               Whether we live to see the sun
                    Flame through the maples as before,
               Whether the death we seek and shun
                    Shall lay us here in the mud and gore.
               Whatever the future hold in store
                    Of stern success or made defeat
               We cannot know — but know we swore
                    Canadians did not retreat. 

               Canadian, in the deep heart's core
                    When life and peace again are sweet
               Keep this of us, if nothing more —
                    Canadians did not retreat.

The poet was a student at the Ontario Agricultural College when he enlisted. Mason returned after the war, earned a graduate degree, and served some time as a lecturer. He eventually settled on a dairy farm in Wilton Grove, now swallowed up by the sprawl of London, Ontario.

Related Posts:

'The Call of Christmas - 1914'

'The Easter Parade, 1915'

'June, 1915'

'Motherhood, 1916'

'The Campus - June 1916'

'A Canadian Day, September 15th, 1916'

'Christmas, 1916'

'A Christmas Prayer, 1916'

'The New Year, 1917 A.D.'

'Canada to England, July 1, 1917'

'Over the Top: Ypres, July 31, 1917'

'Autumn 1917'

Not to Be Confused with Bust Planet

The new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries has arrived, bringing with it my long promised review of W.E.D. Ross's Lust Planet (1962), Canada's very first work of science fiction erotica. I found the novel every bit as good as expected.

Collectors of Canadian literature are advised to pick up this France' Book – oddly-named imprint of Hollywood's International Publications – while they still can. As I write, I see just one copy listed for sale online. To those requiring further enticement, I offer this: something I neglected to mention in the review is that Lust Planet features three intriguing illustrations. Intriguing because they have no connection at all with the text.

The other two are even better.

As I say, get it while you can. Better yet, subscribe to CNQ... easily done through this link at the magazine's website.

This issue's contributors include:

Madhur Anand

Jason Dickson

Jesse Eckerlin

André Forget

Cecil Foster

Stephen Fowler

Alex Good

Dominic Hardy

Ann Ireland

Penn Javdan

Samuel Johnson

Colette Maitland

Dominic Martinello

David Mason

Dakota McFadzean

Rebecca Rosenblum

Kate Sherren

JC Sutcliffe

Derek Webster

Bruce Whiteman

In addition to the cover and design, Seth reflects on CANADA official handbooks of days gone by (including this one): "I find these books fascinating, in a doctor's office kind of way. They have a sort of sublime dullness about them. A quality hard to put into words. Pleasing. Comforting. Sleep-inducing."

Editor Emily Donaldson not only put the whole thing together, she contributed a review of  David Chariandy's Brother.

This issue marks the second time I've shared pages with John Metcalf. Friends will recognize how much this means to me. Coincidentally, it was through John that I first learned of W.E.D. Ross.

Related post:

Winning With the erotic W.E.D. Ross
The Greater Canada of 1962
When Poets Ruled; Or, Never Mind the Novelists

Wither the Nurse Novel?

Much of this past weekend was spent reading Backstage Nurse, a W.E.D. Ross novel published in 1963 under his "Judith Rossiter" pseudonym. The book is 220 pages long, the print is of good size, and yet I'm nowhere near finished. I'm taking time to pause and consider because Backstage Nurse is my first nurse novel. By great coincidence, it was also the author's first nurse novel. He went on to write fifty-six more.

Rightly or wrongly, I've always associated the subgenre with Harlequin. However, if the back cover of Backstage Nurse is anything to go by, it had some pretty significant competition.

Must say, Jane Corby's Staff Nurse doesn't do much for me, but doesn't Dr. Jeffrey's Awakening sound interesting? And what about Jane Arden, Space Nurse?

Sadly, Avalon is no more; Amazon bought it for its backlist in 2012. Its last nurse novels – Everglades Nurse and Nurse Misty's Magic – were published in 1987, by which point the Harlequin nurse novel was long a thing of the past.

The rise and fall of the Harlequin nurse novel is reflected in this bar graph I put together over the weekend:

cliquez pour agrandir

I do like a good bar graph – "an understatement," says my eye-rolling wife – but this one doesn't give a complete picture. As with Avalon's "NURSE STORIES" – Susan Lennox's Doctor's Choice, for example – not all nurse novels published by Harlequin had "Nurse" in the title. "Hospital" featured frequently, and "Surgeon" sometimes, but the most prominent after "Nurse" was "Doctor."

As I've discovered, more often than not, doctors are the object of a nurses longing.

Interestingly, the first doctor to appear in a book published by Harlequin was a woman; the beautifully-named Serenity Parrish, heroine of Joseph McCord's His Wife the Doctor (1949), the publisher's thirteenth title. No longing nurse in this one, sadly.

The first nurse as heroine doesn't appear until Registered Nurse by Carl Sturdy (Charles Stanley Strong), which was published in 1950 as Harlequin's forty-seventh book.

As far as I've been able to determine, the heyday came in 1961, which saw forty-eight Harlequins featuring nurses as the main character.

The last new Harlequin to feature "Nurse" in the title was Roumelia Lane's Nurse at Noongwalla, which hit the racks in January 1974:

Alex had always been fascinated by Australia and went out there from England to get a job as a nurse. 

There she met the autocratic boss of a logging camp, Grant Mitchell, who told her, "There's no padding around in this job, Miss Leighton. Just dust and drought and a twenty-four-hour day." 

She would show him she wasn't scared of hard work, or of him!

And she did. She showed him.

Curiously, in the early 'eighties, Harlequin revived several of it's old nurse titles – General Duty Nurse, Queen's Nurse, Resident Nurse, Nurse Barlowe, Nurse Templar, Nurse Aide, Nurse in White, Nurse of All Work, A Nurse is Born, Nurses Are People, The Nurse Most Likely, and Staff Nurse (not Avalon's Jane Corby classic) – in its short-lived Harlequin Classics Library and even shorter-lived Harlequin Celebrates series.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the nurse novel continued on without a hiccup in Harlequin's Mill & Boon imprint. It does to this day in M&B's Medical Romance series. Released just last year, my favourite title is Kate Hardy's Mummy, Nurse... Duchess?:

The duke and the single mom! 

Nurse Rosie Hobbes knows charming men cannot be trusted. Visiting pediatrician and sexy Italian duke Dr. Leo Marchetti is surely no exception! Her toddler twins are now the centre of her life, and she expects Leo to run a mile when he meets them. Instead his warmth leaves her breathless!

Not just a doctor, but a duke. Sexy to boot! Looks like he showed her!

Are we on the cusp seeing a nurse novel revival? I ask because select titles in the Medical Romance series have begun appearing in Canada, though only in bastardized "LARGER PRINT" editions.

Yes, bastardized.

Look what they've done to Mummy, Nurse... Duchess?

Mommy?

I blame Rupert Murdoch.

Commercial break:

Related posts:

Covering Up the Past

Hard Lessons in Publishing