Debout, Canadiens-français!

George William Alphred Chapman
13 December 1850, Saint-François-de-Beauce, Canada East
23 February 1917, Ottawa, Ontario
RIP

For la Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, this William Chapman poem from his critically-acclaimed Les fleurs de givre (Paris: Éditions de la Revue des poètes, 1912).

DEBOUT, CANADIENS-FRANÇAIS!

                         Nous sommes des fils de guerriers,

                         Et nos pères, pleins de vaillance,

                         Vinrent au bord d’un fleuve immense

                         Planter leurs étendards altiers.

                         Durant un siècle, sur nos plages

                         Ces lutteurs au bras redouté

                         Pour la France et la chrétienté

                         Déployèrent tous les courages.

                         Debout, Canadiens-français!

                         Luttons comme ont lutté nos pères!

                         Au milieu de races prospères.

                         Déroulons au vent du Progrès,

                         Qui souffle à travers les forêts,

                         Nos vieilles et saintes bannières!

                         Luttons comme ont lutté nos pères!

                         Debout, Canadiens-français!

                         Forts d’une foi que rien n’émeut,

                         Comme les Croisés, leurs ancêtres.

                         Ces preux, marins, soldats et prêtres,

                         Partout répétaient: «Dieu le veut»!

                         Jusqu’aux glaçons géants du Pôle,

                         De l’Équateur au Groenland,

                         Ils dirent, dans leur noble élan,

                         Les refrains bénis de la Gaule.

                         Debout, Canadiens-français!

                         Ils furent grands dans le danger,

                         Ils furent beaux dans les batailles...

                         Mais, hélas! la cour de Versailles

                         Céda leurs bords à l’étranger.

                         Orgueilleux, malgré la conquête,

                         Ces hommes au cœur de lion

                         Sous la bannière d’Albion

                         Ne courbèrent jamais la tête.

                         Debout, Canadiens-français!

                         Fidèles aux maîtres nouveaux,

                         Et toujours pleins d’ardeurs guerrières,

                         Pour chasser l’Aigle des frontières,

                         Nous avons suivi leurs drapeaux.

                         Des conscrits, altérés de gloire,

                         Vainquirent un peuple aguerri;

                         Et le nom de Salaberry

                         Luit comme un soleil dans l’Histoire.

                         Debout, Canadiens-français!

                         Le sang ne rougit plus nos prés;

                         L’astre du Travail y flamboie,

                         Et sur tous nos foyers en joie

                         La Paix répand ses fruits dorés.

                         L’Espoir de ses rayons inonde

                         Tous les cœurs et tous les cerveaux...

                         Demain nous serons les rivaux

                         Des grands peuples de l’ancien monde.

                         Debout, Canadiens-français!

Bonne fête!

Related posts:

Acerbic Sait-Jean-Baptiste Verse
'Hommage' pour la Fête

Root Beer for a Sober Fête de la St-Jean Baptiste

A Highly Inappropriate St-Jean-Baptiste Advert

Burpee's Bad 'St. John the Baptist': Truly Criminal
Pour la fête de St-Jean-Baptiste
Celebrating la Fête in 19th-Century Massachusetts
La Fête: Il y'a 100 ans

Canadian Womanhood on Parade!

'Ô Canada! mon pays! mes amours!'

A Song for la Fête de la St-Jean 

Encore!

The Dustiest Bookcase: O is for Oxley

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

North Overland with Franklin
J Macdonald Oxley

New York: Crowell, 1907

286 pages

I'm not sure what's going on here, but the image does remind me of this iconic cover:

I read Bear as a twenty-year-old, and have not revisited.

Do the two novels have much in common?

Doubt it. North Overland was Franklin was first published by the Religious Tract Society. My copy features this bookplate:

I'm a bit peeved. As a boy, my father, an Anglican, was awarded many books for regularity and punctuality at the Church of St John the Baptist, Pointe Claire, Quebec. Walter Scott's The Black Arrow was one, but the novel that made he greatest impression was Number 44 by Harold M Sherman.

Not only that, my father was presented pins recognizing these accomplishment to be worn proudly on his lapel.

I too was raised an Anglican. Regularity and punctuality were not rewarded at my childhood church – St Marys, Kirkland, Quebec – though we children enjoyed juice and cookies after Sunday School.

The 2011 Canadian Census records George Bee (born 1895) as the eldest son of David and Catherine Bee. The Bee family lived at 240 Gerrard Street, now home to the Virginia Hamara Law Office.

I can't quite recall how I came to have George Bee's copy of North Overland with Franklin in my collection, but am fairly certain that I picked it up somewhere in Ontario and paid no more than two dollars. I do remember thinking that the Franklin of the title might just be Sir John Franklin, and that Oxley had penned a fantasy in which the explorer had somehow overcome the terror of HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, and had made his way toward Rupert's Land.

But then it would've been South Overland with Franklin, right?

To be fair – to myself – I wasn't far off. The hero of North Overland with Franklin is the very same John Franklin, though Oxley's adventure imagines the explorer's ill-fated Coppermine Expedition, which ended over three decades before his ill-fated Northwest Passage Expedition began.

Because the former featured a murder, dinners made of boiled boots, and suggestions of cannibalism, North Overland with Franklin might make for an interesting read; remember, it  began as a Religious Tract Society publication.

That said, because I believe in placing books in the best hands, I'm eager to return this copy of North Overland with Franklin to the Bee family, whether it's a descendent of George Bee or of one of his siblings: Ethel (b 1894) and Edward (b 1899).

Please contact me in the comments or by email through my profile.

Love is a Long Shot on the Nose

The Calgary Herald, 29 September 1978

This weekend the 29th Toronto Jewish Film Festival presents Love on the Nose.

Do you know it?

I didn't before being contacted by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. A made-for-TV movie, Love on the Nose, aired on the CBC in September 1978... and then never again. The screenplay, credited to  "John Smith" (read: Ted Allan), tells the story of David (Saul Rubinek), a young Trotskyite who, thanks to his uncle (Paul Soles), lands a job at Keller's cigar store in Depression-era Montreal. The establishment is a front for a bookie joint, which allows David a good amount of time for on-the-job studies of Karl Marx.

Love on the Nose received glowing reviews; I've yet to find a critic who said a bad word. Much of the praise landed on Saul Rubinek. He played a character a decade younger than himself, though you'd never know it. Al Waxman was singled out for playing a crime boss, a character so very different than the Larry King we'd come to love on The King of Kensington. Reading the reviews, it's clear that to that point the critics hadn't recognized the actor's range.

Months later, the Windsor Star was still going on about it.

The Windsor Star, 9 January 1979

I was contacted by the Festival because of my writing on Allan this blog, in Canadian Notes & Queries, and in my most recent book. It was my pleasure to provide a short video postscript to the film in which I discuss Love on the Nose, its relationship to Allan's 1949 pulp Love is a Long Shot, and the lighter 1984 version published by McClelland & Stewart.

What I didn't mention – but should've – is that Love on the Nose is the best of the three.

Tickets for Love on the Nose can be purchased through this link.

You will not be disappointed.

Related posts:

Remembering Ted Allan on His Hundredth

Pulp Noir à Montréal

Criminal Notes & Queries

The most recent number of Canadian Notes & Queries – The Crime Issue – arrived last week in our Upper Canada rural mailbox. I was honoured to serve as Guest Editor. It was a pleasure putting it together, though I must admit that the heavy lifting was done by regular editor Emily Donaldson.

As always, Seth's provides the front and back covers. Tell the truth, do you not see yourself in one of his mugshots?

In The Landscape, Seth shares an undated, uncredited insert from The Weekend Magazine – which, as he notes, was itself an insert.

"What’s Old," our regular salute to reissues, coupled with offerings from the country’s antiquarian booksellers features Austin Clarke's When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (Anansi, 2021),  Carmine Starnino's Dirty Words: Selected Poems, 1997-2016 (Gaspereau, 2021), a new translation of Markoosie Patsauq's Hunter with Harpoon (MQUP, 2021). Windsor's Juniper Books offers The Executioners (Harlequin, 1951) and French for Murder (Fawcett, 1954), two old Brian Moore pulps that the late author's estate has kept out of print.

The Guest Editor’s Note, in which I recall childhood trauma brought on by a speeding ticket, is followed by the issue's Dusty Bookcase. This one is unusual in that the volume covered, Grant Allen's fin de siècle novel An African Millionaire, is not only in print, but is a certified Penguin Classic. We all remember studying it in high school, right?

Adam Sol and Manahil Bandukwala provide verse.

The issue's features begin with "Sin City," Will Straw's look at Police Journal, the post-war Montreal crime tabloid that anticipated Allô Police.

In "A Requiem for Skid Row," Amy Lavender Harris writes about a Toronto that has fallen to condos, but lives on in the works of Juan Butler, Austin Clarke, and Hugh Garner.

Novelist Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow) writes of his encounters with the criminal element in  "Fringe Elements."

Dedicated readers will remember my interest in the mysterious Kenneth Orvis (aka Kenneth Lemieux), author of Hickory House, The Damned and Destroyed,  Cry, Hallelujah!, and four other novels. You may even remember my 2016 plea for information about the man. Imagine my surprise in discovering that former 39 Steps frontman Chris Barry – whom I've seen onstage in Montreal and onscreen in Hannah and Her Sisters – is the mystery man's nephew.  Chris' "Uncle Ken, We Hardly Knew Ye: Kenneth Orvis’ Nephew Surveys the Writer’s Life, Hustles, and Mysterious Disappearance" helps fill in the gaps.

In "Vale of Fears," Monika Bartyzel looks at the influence of a 1935 murder on the fiction of Phyllis Brett Young, our most unjustly neglected novelist.

Jennifer Hambleton disturbs with "Shut Out: How University Libraries are Increasingly Limiting Public Access.

David Frank writes on the relationship between Jack London and all but forgotten Canadian socialist Wilfrid Gribble.

Chris Kelly looks at Blue City, the 1986 adaptation of the 1947 Ross Macdonald novel of the same name. You remember it, right? Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy starred.

No?

This GIF may refresh you memory.

I intrude again with an interview with Danny McAuley of Brome Lake Books in Knowlton, Quebec.

David Mason's Used and Rare column concerns book thieves and a revelation about a certain famous author.

In the North Wing - selections from the Lost Library of CanLit Graphic Novels -  Nathan Campagnaro adapts Thomas King’s DreadfulWater.

We've also got a new short story from Caroline Adderson, “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone.”

At a time when newspapers and magazines are slashing space devoted to book reviews, we buck the trend with:

Bruce Whiteman on Erin McLaren’s Little Resilience

Rohan Maitzen on Anna Porter’s The Appraisal and Deceptions

Laura Cameron on Amanda LeDuc’s The Centaur’s Wife 

Brett Josef Grubisic on Michael Melgaard’s Pallbearing 

Alex Good on Pasha Malla’s Kill the Mall 

Paige Cooper on Carrie Jenkins’ Victoria Sees It 

Dancy Mason on Patricia Robertson’s Hour of the Crab 

James Grainger on Andrée A Michaud’s Mirror Lake

Emily Donaldson on Sarah Berman’s Don’t Call it a Cult

The Shelf Talker belongs to The Bookshelf in Guelph. Catherine Bush's Blaze Island is one of their four titles.

As always, we finish off with Stephen Fowler's Exhumations. His pick this issue is Writing Thrillers for Profit: A Practical Guide by Basil Hogarth (London, Black, 1936), a volume that once belonged to "a recently deceased author of detective novels." Stephen suggests that it may have been a "joke gift." I'm betting he's right.

The CNQ Crime Issue can be purchased through this link.

It's a steal.