The Man Who Clung to an Upward Bottom

The Man from Nowhere
Anna T. Sadlier
New York: Benziger Bros, 1918
187 pages

Has anyone out there read Anna T. Sadlier? If so, can you tell me whether The Man from Nowhere is typical of her novels? Do you know it?

Here's a summary:

Brothers Harry and Fred Tremaine are spending the summer at the family's seaside villa, outside an unnamed village not far from their New York City home. As Mr and Mrs Tremaine are holidaying abroad, the boys are in the care of former nursemaid Hannah, who now serves as housekeeper. Coachman Mike is on standby, and will come in handy as the action begins.

Harry and Fred are on the beach, digging a sand tunnel, as young locals Bill Masterton and Paddy Wallace look on. It's Ben who sets the plot in motion:

“Paddy, look out yonder!”
     Paddy looked and uttered an exclamation:
     “Cricky, Ben!” he cried, “it’s a boat, a catboat, I guess, and what — "
     He said no more, but ran with a quick, instinctive movement down to the water’s edge. “It’s bottom upward!” he cried, “that’s what it is.”
     “By Jingo!” was all Ben said, as he strode after his friend. By mutual consent, they seemed to ignore the city boys, who could not be expected to know anything of such an emergency.

Ben takes charge, dispatching Paddy and the Tremaine brothers to help round up the crew of the local lifeboat. The craft sets out for the overturned vessel, upon which balances a desperate man.

Father McNeirny shows up to comfort the anxious amassing crowd. When a wave hits, sweeping the desperate man out of sight, the priest offers conditional absolution.

The man resurfaces, is rescued by the lifeboat, and Mike rushes him to the Tremaine summer villa. Hannah has prepared a bed in which, exhausted, the rescued man sleeps soundly as the four boys keep watch. When he awakens, he toys with the boys' fears that he might be a thief looking to make off with the Tremaine family silver, and then sets out on a walk from which he never returns.

During the remainder of the summer, the village experiences some very strange happenings. The first occurs when Harry, Fred, Ben, and Paddy come upon a food hamper, clearly left for them, at the end of a crabbing expedition.

The others are tied to Father McNeirny's annual picnic, at which "it was jestingly suggested that those present should severally or individually put their wishes upon record, and a secretary was actually chosen for the purpose."

You know, the usual picnic pastime.

Next thing you know, the wishes are fulfilled. Ben receives a complete fishing kit, Paddy is sent fifty dollars, Hannah gets a silk dress, and the village is given an anonymous donation to be used in the construction of a community hall. Most important of all, Father McNeirny receives a new set of vestments in anticipation of the bishop's next visit.

Who might be the source of all this magnificence?

Can you guess?

Why, it's the man who was rescued from the sea!

Turns out that he's a famous billionaire who had become a recluse following the untimely deaths of his wife and children. The great reveal is provided by Father McNeirny:

"What I have to tell you first is deeply shocking, especially to our Catholic instincts. Boys, he went out there into those waves with the deliberate purpose of destroying himself.”
     Exclamations of horror broke from the lads. The Tremaines particularly, in their sturdy and enlightened Catholicity, felt loathing of that capital crime, that unpardonable sin, which done deliberately, makes even the mercy of a Redeeming God unavailable.

But, of course, the boys' good work helped save the wealthy man from eternal damnation.

And now, the billionaire has decided to convert to Catholicism.

Huzzah!

from The World's Columbian Catholic Congresses and Educational Exhibit
(Chicago: J.S. Hyland & Co., 1893)

The doctrinaire was expected. Before opening this book, I knew Anna T. Sadler to have been one of Canada's most popular religious novelists. I'd read others – Margaret Murray Robertson, Laure Conan, W.H. Withrow, Ralph Connor – but nothing prepared me for the religiosity of The Man from Nowhere. Consider this passage, in which Father McNeirny grants the shipwrecked billionaire absolution:

“God bless you and do, Father,” cried an old woman, from whose aged eyes tears were streaming.
     Every one waited respectfully. Even Protestants or other outsiders who had no hold whatever upon Christianity regarded him curiously. They drew a kind of comfort from the mysterious power which, as it was quietly whispered around, he was about to exert over that human soul which might be even then slipping from its bonds and losing its hold upon earthly life. The priest had with him the stole which he had but lately worn when administering the Sacraments to a dying person in the calm obscurity of a little inland village. He put this about his neck and knelt a moment in prayer, and the Catholics — of whom there were many present — knelt likewise, while others raised their hats or bent the knee, sympathetically. Fred and Harry afterward declared that they had never prayed so hard in their lives as then. After that slight pause the priest arose and said in a clear, distinct voice:
     “By the power which the Church confers upon her ministers, the power derived from Christ, I am about to give this man conditional absolution.’’
     There was a dead silence, broken only by a giant wave breaking upon the shore. The priest raised his hand and every one present, forgetting all controversial differences, was impressed by the tremendous power of the act.
     “I absolve you,” he said in Latin, “from all sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” To which he added: “May the Almighty God have mercy on you and forgive you your sins and bring you to life everlasting. Amen.”
     A kind of peace and quietness fell over the scene with the performance of that holy act. Women and even strong men, overcome by the solemnity of the occasion, wept audibly, while the priest, sinking once more upon his knees, prayed aloud and begged the  people to pray for the rescue of the unhappy being thus buffeted by the waves or for the salvation of his soul. The air seemed to vibrate with those burning words of supplication wherein people of all creeds or of none felt impelled to join. It used to be said long afterwards in the village that the whole incident was better than twenty sermons and it brought back more than one stray sheep to the fold. It showed the relative values, the little space which divides time from eternity and made every one realize, with a strange new force, the almost infinite power of the priesthood.

I ask again, has anyone out there read Anna T. Sadlier? Is this typical of her novels?

If so, I won't bother reading another.

If not Sadlier, should I try Janette Oke?

Object: I see evidence of two printings: one in red cloth, the other in olive. My (olive) copy includes a twelve-page list of "BOOKS OF DOCTRINE, INSTRUCTION, DEVOTION, MEDITATION, BIOGRAPHY, NOVELS, JUVENILES, ETC. PUBLISHED BY BENZIGER BROTHERS." Amongst its five hundred or so titles, I spot a dozen by Sadlier: Names That Live in Catholic Hearts, Women of Catholicity, The Pilkington Heir, The Red Inn of St. Lyphar, The True Story of Master Gerard, Mary Tracy's Fortune, The Mysterious Doorway, The Mystery of Hornby Hall, Pauline Archer, A Summer in Woodville, The Talisman, and my favourite title, Wayward Winifred.

Access: All of three copies are listed for sale online, the least expensive – US$12.00 – being a first edition. At US$35.00, the most expensive, claimed to be a first edition (in olive boards), has a "slight musty odor." My advice is to purchase the cheapest.

Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, and three of our university libraries hold copies.

The novel can be read here – gratis – courtesy of the Internet Archive.

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Reading Gérard Bessette on His Hundredth

Not for Every Eye [Le libraire]
Gérard Bessette [trans. Glen Shortliffe] 
Toronto: Macmillan, 1962
98 pages

Yesterday marked the centenary of Gérard Bessette's birth. I spent an hour or so reading this translation of his most celebrated work. A novella – not a novel, as Macmillan claims – it isn't very long.

Bessette's title, Le libraire (The Bookseller), refers to narrator and protagonist Hervé Jodoin. It takes the form of a journal written on Sundays, when the bars are closed. The first entry involves Jodoin's arrival in the fictional Quebec town of Saint Joachim, where he has accepted a job in a bookstore. In truth, it's as much a bookstore as, say, Indigo; the better part of the establishment has been given over to toys, stationary, and religious articles. The book department is in the rear, allowing Jodoin to pass a good portion of the day in a quiet snooze.

Killing time is Jodoin's main occupation. He quickly settles into a routine – "book shop, beer parlour, room; room, book shop, beer parlour." At the end of each workday, he heads for Chez Treffelé, a working class bar where he drinks alone at a table located conveniently near the lavatory. After that – meaning, after the bar closes – Jodoin makes for his rooming house bed.

A crack appears in what Jodoin describes as "the monotony of my life" when the store's proprietor, Léon Chicoine, determines that his new bookseller is a believer in liberty and is a proponent of free thought. Chicoine unlocks a door to what Jodoin had thought was a closet, revealing the "sanctum sanctorum," a small, windowless room lined with books found in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and listed by Abbé Bethléem and Père Georges Sagehomme.*

Chicoine demands Jodoin's discretion, and asks him to sell the volumes (at inflated prices) to "serious purchasers." Our hero agrees, and starts off for Chez Treffelé "caressing the innocent notion that perhaps after all I was not yet completely useless, that perhaps my life might have a meaning."

Sadly, Jodoin's new customers fail to give meaning to his life:

They sidle up to me with a conspiratorial air and murmur into my ear the name of some author or book, all this in the same tone of someone asking for a condom or a suppository in a drug store. Others are more evasive still; they shower me with meaningful glances and ask me to recommend "something a little out of the ordinary" or "something with a kick to it."

Jodoin quickly comes to resent the extra work involved in retrieving volumes from the sanctum sanctorum, recognizing most aren't at all interested in liberty and freedom of thought: "If these jokers are looking for an aphrodisiac, they can find more effective ones."

The crack widens and drama begins with a pimply-faced boy he recognizes as a student of the Saint Roch School, "located a couple of miles from the town in open country, in the middle of a vast domain belonging to  a community of clerics who combine the dairy industry with the rearing of young men." The student asks for a volume by Voltaire, and whether "through curiosity or a kind of fellow-feeling produced by nostalgia for my own school days," Jodoin retrieves a copy from the sanctum sanctorum.

Le libraire was first published in Paris because Bessette was unable to find a Quebec publisher. This was in 1960, mere months before the Quiet Revolution began. Within two years, the novel had found a Quebec publisher, and had been translated and published in English.

I received this copy of Not for Every Eye as a gift on my twenty-third birthday. I read it the very same summer. A university student at the time, I used its story, and the story of its publication, in writing papers on the Quiet Revolution.

Much of the revolution took place when I was asleep in a crib.

I have people like Gérard Bessette to thank that it did.

* Researching this piece, I was amused to discover that Georges Sagehomme's Répertoire alphabétique de plus de 7000 auteurs avec leurs ouvrages au nombre de 32000 (romans et pièces de théâtre) qualifiés quant à leur valeur morale (1931), was revised nine times; the last – published twenty-nine years after his death – is Répertoire alphabétique de 16700 auteurs 70000 romans et pièces de théâtre cotés au point de vue moral.

Trivia: There is an actual St-Joachim, Quebec, located roughly thirty kilometres downriver from Quebec City, but it bears no resemblance to the town depicted in Bessette's novel.

More trivia: Adapted by M. Charles Cohen for CBC Television (1963) and CBC Radio (1967). The former starred Jack Creley, Larry Mann, and Barbara Hamilton.

Object: A slim volume consisting of white boards with purple type, as an objet Not for Every Eye is my favourite Macmillan of Canada book. Credit goes to Leslie Smart. Arnaud Maggs designed the jacket.

Bibliophiles will appreciate the adverts for other Macmillan titles on the back cover. I own three, but have read only one.

Access: The translation may be neglected, but it is not rare. Very Good copies are offered online for as little as ten dollars. I've seen some evidence of a softcover edition that may have been a rebind. It would seem that in 1977 the novella was absorbed into Macmillan's moribund Laurentian Library, though I've yet to encounter a copy. I have, however, seen the 1984 edition, issued by Exile (right). It is still available for purchase.

A second English translation, which I've not read, was published in 1999 by Guernica Editions. Its translator, Steven Urquhart has written a very interesting essay about the need and process:

Retranslating a Quebec Classic

The Urquhart translation is also still in print.

Remarkably, there is a Czech translation, Skandal V Knihkpectvi (Scandal in the Bookstore; Prague: Odeon, 1974). Collectors may be interested in a copy inscribed to Bessette by translator Ea Masnerova on offer from an Oregon bookseller.

Copies of Le libraire are plentiful. The cheapest copy I've seen offered online is going for one Yankee dollar. Few copies of the first edition, published in Paris by Jilliard, are in evidence.

A Stranger Comes to Town; an Author Vanishes

Forever 33
Jacques Byfield
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982
175 pages

The Alberta town of Breery exists nowhere outside Forever 33, but should be familiar to readers of Canadian fiction. Its five hundred inhabitants – those featured in the novel, anyway – will be equally familiar; there's the voluptuous waitress (she's up for anything), the tempted hardware store owner (his wife wants to start a family), the brooding farmer (he beats his kids), the widowed schoolteacher (with a heart of gold), and the troubled preacher (who is questioning his faith).

As might be expected from its Alberta setting, the novel takes place during the Great Depression.

The unfamiliar comes in the form of a one-legged gravedigger named John Evans. I'm betting that the novel's first sentence – "No one knew where he had come from, and no one went out of his way to find out." – inspired the copy on the back of the dust jacket:

The front flap looks to build upon the aura of mystery: "He was a stranger who seemed to know things people didn't know about themselves." The words "haunting" and "mesmerizing" feature, followed by this: "none is left untouched by the watchful presence of the gravedigger."

Memories of Evans, like this one, fill the earliest pages:

Pastor Clough remarked more than once that his gravedigger showed little concern for the rituals of pre-burial; he even went so far as to doubt the man's confederacy with Christianity. John Evans was never seen inside the church. He remained for the most part a man unnoticed, passing his days digging deep holes and then refilling them upon the heads the town's deceased. Occasionally he would disappear; on those occasions he would be employed at other towns in the vicinity digging for their burials. No one had to tell him where or when his particular services were required. He just knew. The man had a nose for death. He could sniff its adolescent scent on the breeze and be gone in its direction before the bereaved could gather.

All hints at the supernatural, bringing to mind Ray Bradbury's G.M. Dark (Something Wicked This Way Comes) and Stephen King's Leland Gaunt (Needful Things), mysterious outsiders who wreak havoc on small town America. I expected gravedigger Evans to be their Canadian cousin.

I was wrong.

Evans is a mysterious figure only in that the author doesn't share as much about him as he does Breery's townsfolk. His powers rest on observation, and are no more remarkable than those of local gossip Vera Roden:

The woman had an uncanny knack. If she caught only so much as one word of private conversation, then the cat was out of the bag.

As the novel progressed, I became less interested those living in Breery than I did the town as a whole. How did was it, I wondered, that a town of five hundred could support a hardware store and diner? How was it that everyone lived in comfort, despite the Great Depression? More than anything, I wondered how Breery was able to afford a full-time gravedigger.

Then there was Byfield's style, which swings wildly. Compare the passages quoted above with this, in which young Peter Carlson, son of the brutal farmer, chases after Evans:

The boy's breath billowed with the exertion of his haste. It was in his heart to consummate their earliest vague discussion. Since that first talk he'd been savouring with anticipation what he hoped the digger might tell him next. He hurried and was quickly upon the object of his haste.

Forever 33 was declared a finalist in the $50,000 Seal Books First Novel Award.

No winner was awarded.

How is that fair?

For all its flaws, Forever 33 is a better debut novel than Mordecai Richler's The Acrobats, Daniel Richler's Kicking Tomorrow, and Emma Richler's Feed My Dear Dogs. I admired Byfield's imagination and looked forward to a more mature sophomoric work... only to discover that his bibliography begins and ends with Forever 33.

The publicity sheet inserted in my copy informs that he author is at work on a new novel.

It's been thirty-eight years.

About the title: In reminiscing, the gravedigger recites lines from a song he remembers from the Great War: "The soldier knows that he will die and buried deep he'll be. The digger may live to be ninety-nine, but he'll stay thirty-three."

I've found no evidence that these lines exist outside the pages of this novel.

Fun fact: According to the Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data, Jacques Byfield was born in 1948, which would have made him either 33 or 34 at time of publication.

Object and Access: A slim volume bound in brown boards. The jacket design is credited to Fernley Hesse Ltd. My copy is a first edition. I see no sign of another.

I can find all of two copies available for sale online, neither of which is offered by a Canadian bookseller. How is that possible?

The cheaper of the two is priced at £15. I can't say it's worth the price. I can't say it isn't.

Held by Library and Archives Canada, the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and twelve of our academic libraries. Of our public libraries, only that serving Toronto comes through. Not only that, it offers this photograph of the young author on its website.

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