My Canadian Book of Lists Lists: An Introduction

The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book
   of Lists
Jeremy Brown and David Ondaatje
Scarborough: Signet, 1979
391 pages

The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists isn't terribly original in that it owes its concept, format, and very existence to The Book of Lists, David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace's runaway American bestseller.

As a teen, I had a copy of The Book of Lists (1977) and its first sequel, The Book of Lists 2 (1980), but never bought the Canadian cash in. My guess is that I never saw a copy; it would've certainly appealed to my nascent patriotism.

Does the The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists contain "1001 AMAZING FACTS, QUOTATIONS, ANSWERS, OPINIONS, AND STATISTICS" as claimed on the cover?

Depends on how one counts, I suppose.  

Frankly, I think Signet was selling its authors short. The book features over 350 lists divided into twenty-one categories. At 43 pages, "Sports" is easily the longest. "Private and Confidential," five pages, dealing  with the bedrooms of the nation, is the shortest by far.

Nowhere near long enough and over all too quickly.

The longest, THE 16 GREATEST PROBLEMS FACING LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES IN CANADA, comes courtesy of His Honour Judge Philip Givens, Chairman of the Board of Commissioners, Metropolitan Police Force. The shortest, as short as a list can be, is credited to Claire Wallace, author of Mind Your Manners: 2 IMPORTANT ITEMS OF NATIONAL ETIQUETTE CANADIANS SHOULD RESPECT.

The majority, an even three hundred lists, have ten entries each. These alone suggest 3000 facts... or maybe not. The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists is at once a fact-checkers nightmare and a walk through a different time. Let's take a stroll through the first five:

1. 10 GREAT CANADIAN QUOTATIONS ON CANADIANS

The book's first list contains the first two errors: Northrop Frye is referred to as ""Northrup Frye." Susanna Moodie is "Susanna Moddie."

2. 10 CANADIANS WHO DIED TOO YOUNG

The errors in the second list are numerous. Norman Bethune was born in 1890, not 1899. The doctor was forty-nine when he died. John Sparrow Thompson, our fourth prime minster, was born in 1845, not 1844. Tom Thomson met his end at thirty-nine, not forty. Tim Horton died in February 1974, not September 1974. At the time of his murder, Pierre Laporte held two ministerial portfolios, not one. George McCuklagh, the publisger who married the Toronto Globe and Mail and Empire, did not die in an accident, rather he took his own life. Bill Barilko was killed more than four months after scoring his legendary goal, which I would argue was not "almost immediately after the game."

3. 10 PEOPLE MOST LIKELY TO INFLUENCE THE COURSE OF EVENTS IN CANADA

The book's third list comes courtesy of Peter C. Newman, then Editor of Maclean's. His number one is John Turner, after whom we find Conrad Black. Number three is Brian Mulroney: "Bicultural, brilliant, and beautiful, he is the dream incarnation of the Conservative party. Some day they'll realize it and he will become Prime Minister of Canada." This is, of course, the very same beautiful man who would one day tell Newman to go fuck himself.

4. THE 10 MOST EXCLUSIVE MEN'S CLUBS IN CANADA

An odd inclusion, particularly so early in the book, but given the focus on male opinion, mortality, and power of the previous three could male privilege be so far behind?

For anyone who cares, Toronto's York Club tops the list.

5. 10 WELL-KNOWN DIVORCED OR SEPARATED CANADIANS

1.   PIERRE ELLOTT TRUDEAU, prime minister

2.   RENÉ LÉVESQUE, Quebec premier

3.   FRANCIS FOX, former Solictor-General

4.   GORDON LIGHTFOOT, singer

5.   PETER WORTHINGTON, Editor-in-Chief, The Toronto Sun

6.   ADRIENNE CLARKSON, television performer, author

7.   CAROLE TAYLOR, former television star

8.   PETER C. NEWMAN, Editor, Maclean's Magazine

9.   LYNNE GORDON, broadcaster, head of Ontario 

         Women's Task Force

10. JOYCE DAVIDSON, television broadcaster 

This is another list that surprises, not because it comes so early, or is so random, but because it achieves something close to gender parity. Consider the previous four:

• three of the 10 GREAT CANADIAN QUOTATIONS ON CANADIANS were made by women;
• all 10 CANADIANS WHO DIED TOO YOUNG are men;
• two women feature in 10 PEOPLE MOST LIKELY TO INFLUENCE THE COURSE OF EVENTS IN CANADA, one of whom is the list makers's 14-year-old daughter;
• THE 10 MOST EXCLUSIVE MEN'S CLUBS IN CANADA.

I add that four of the forty persons featured in the first five lists are francophones. Not one would've then be termed "Indian."

This is indicative of the 350 or so lists that follow. It's not that The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists focusses on Anglo-Canada, rather that it is Toronto-centric. Consider 10 WELL-KNOWN DIVORCED OR SEPARATED CANADIANS: Peter Worthington, Adrienne Clarkson, Carole Taylor, Peter C. Newman, Lynne Gordon, Joyce Davidson... You get the picture.

Still, for all its faults, The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists inspires. And so, over the next four days, I'll be posting my own lists, each dealing with The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists. Carole Taylor, "former television star," will reappear in tomorrow's list. For now, I'll leave you with this.

Object and Access: A mass market paperback with the laziest and cheapest of designs. The interior apes The Book of Lists.  

The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists was first published in 1978 by the late Pagurian Press. I've yet to stumble upon a copy though one – and only one – is listed for sale online at $8.00. Likewise, just one copy of the Signet edition is listed. Price: $10.00. 

My copy was purchased three years ago. It set me back $2.00.

Happy Canada Day!

Related post:

On Addressing a Duke's Eldest Son's Younger Son

Fifteen Favourite Quebec Novels pour la Fête

For the day, a list of fifteen novels by Quebecers – born and bred – all deserving more attention. In each case, the image presented is the cover of the edition I read. Descriptions are short, but clicking on the links will give a better idea as to why they were selected.

Was 1960 the banner year for Quebec literature? 1962? 1916?

Les Anciens Canadiens
Phillipe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé
1863

The second French-language novel – following son Philippe-Ignace-Francois's L'influence d'un livre (1837) – Les Anciens Canadiens is set in the decades surrounding the fall of New France. Steeped in history, culture, and the supernatural, I've read it twice, but only in translation.    

Armand Durand

Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
1868

A novel I read in French translation, though it was composted in English. Makes sense in a way because Mme Leprohon was even more popular amongst French readers. Like Les Anciens Canadiens, it leans heavily on what would've then been described as Canadien traditions and culture. A moving tale of love and betrayal.

La Scouine

Albert Laberge

1909

Condemned by Mgr Paul Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal, as "ignoble pornographie," you can understand the attraction. La Scouine is populated by dislikable, immoral, and hypocritical characters, clergy included. It is, in short, the anti-roman a terre. Sadly, Laberge paid a real price in writing this novel.

The Miracle Man
Frank L. Packard
1911

A gang of thieves and con artists leave New York City for rural Maine so as to get in on the scam pushed by a blind faith-healer, only to find there there is no grift. The 1919 Hollywood adaptation is considered one of the great lost silent films. Since writing my 2011 review twenty-four more seconds have been found. I couldn't be happier.

Similia Similibus
Ulrich Barthe
1916

A Great War nightmare in which Germans invade Quebec City, seize the Legislative Assembly, and slaughter citizens, this novel was almost certainly inspired by propaganda involving supposed atrocities committed in Belgium. Civil servant Barthe's lone novel, it is itself propaganda.

Marion: An Artist's Model
Winnifred Eaton
1916

No other Montreal family has been so remarkable. Though a novel, Marion provides the most intimate glimpse of the Eatons' struggles against racism and poverty. Winnifed was a successful novelist with a career in early Hollywood. Whether she was the most accomplished of the twelve Eaton children is a matter of debate. Imagine!

Les Demi-civilisés

Jean-Charles Harvey

1934

Another banned book, the villain this time is Jean-Marie-Rodrigue Villeneuve, Archbishop of Quebec, who condemned it for criticizing religion. It does not. What Les Demi-civilisés does criticize is the Roman Catholic Church. The novel has been translated twice, but John Glassco's is the one to read.

Erres boréales
Faurent Laurin [Armond Grenier]

1944

The craziest Quebec novel I've read thus far, in Erres boréales massive heaters have been placed in the Gulf of St Laurence so as to make Quebec a tropical paradise. A travelogue of sorts, the story follows friends as they explore the province, now an independent country with palm trees.

Les Plouffe

Roger Lemelin

1948 

Roger Lemelin's first book, for decades Les Plouffe stood second only to Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion as the best known French Canadian novel. The television series it inspired made for essential viewing. So why is Mary Finch's translation not in print? I blame Bertelsmann.

Le Libraire
Gérard Bessette

1960

The story of a washed up man who somehow manages to get a job in a shop selling stationary, religious items, and books. After a time, the proprietor comes to trust him with selling literature banned by the Catholic Church. Le Libraire was first published in France, not Quebec... 'cause, you know, the Church. 

 

The English Governess
Miles Underwood [John Glassco]

1960

First published in Paris by Olympia Press, The English Governess is both this country's finest and best selling work of erotica. That said, I much prefer Harriet Marwood, Governess, the more elegant version of the love story, published fourteen years later. 

Doux-amer
Claire Martin [Claire Montreuil]

1960

A literary editor is presented with a bad manuscript by a good looking woman. He reworks, remakes, and remodels, crafting a work that is both a critical and commercial success. A novel of obsession, it is vaguely Nabokovian – which is always a plus.

Four Days

John Buell

1962

This writer is far better known for his first novel, The Pyx (1960), but it was the second that caused critic Edmond Wilson to place Buell alongside Marie-Claire Blais as one of Canada's great writers. Of the nineteen novels I've helped return to print, this is my favourite.

The Damned and the Destroyed

Kenneth Orvis
   [Kenneth Lemieux]

1962

Another novel I helped usher back to print, The Damned and the Destroyed is set during the earliest days of Jean Drapeau's first term. Its hero, a Korean War vet, is hired to go after the heroin ring polluting the veins of a rich man's daughter. Lee Child is a massive fan.

Une Chaîne dans le parc

André Langevin

1974

Jack McClelland considered this novel the best to have come out of French Canada since Bonheur d'occasion. Sadly, sales did not in any way match expectations. Alan Brown's 1976 translation received no second printing and has been out of print ever since. The novel is a masterpiece.

Bonne fête!

Related posts:

Gothique Canadien

Armand Durand; or, A Summer Project

Ignoble Phorographie - Translated!

The Miracle Man on Paper and Nitrate Film

Dreaming of the Hun

Glassco's $9500 Library and the Montreal Eatons
Cardinal Villeneuve's Folly
Global Warming as a Nationalist Dream

What's Going on with The Plouffe Family?
Reading Gérard Bessette on His Hundredth
Canada's Olympians (Part III)

Claire Martin at the Start of a Quiet Revolution
Four Days in Darkest Quebec
'A Relentless Story of the Hell of Drug Addiction'
Langevin's Masterpiece; McClelland's Disappointment

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Morgan's Castle
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard & Schulman, 1964
188 pages

An uncredited dust jacket of mysterious design, whatever does it mean? The rear image provides no clue.

The covers of Jan Hilliard's other novels are much more straight-forward. Consider this:

A View of the Town, is "A NOVEL OF SMALL TOWN LIFE IN NOVA SCOTIA," as are most of her novels. Morgan's Castle stands with The Jameson Girls and Dove Cottage as one of three set outside her home province. The Jameson Girls and Dove Cottage are darker than her Nova Scotia novels, while Morgan's Castle is the darkest by far. This is not to suggest that the humour, which runs through all her fiction, is entirely black.

Jan Hilliard's career as a novelist lasted just ten years. One wonders why it wasn't longer. Her novels garnered uniformly positive reviews – I've yet to find an exception – yet Morgan's Castle is the only one to have been reissued in paperback. "A spellbinding novel of romance and suspense in the Du Maurier [sic] tradition," the tagline reads. I was reminded more of Muriel Spark and Margaret Millar, but this may be because I'm more familiar with their respective works.

The heroine of Morgan's Castle is Laura Dean. The youngest member of the Dean family, she lives with her widowed artist father Sidney in a ramshackle house located somewhere in the countryside between lakes Ontario and Erie. Amy Scott, sister of Laura's late mother, isn't at all happy with her niece's situation. Nature can have such a bad influence on a maturing girl. And then there's Sidney, who Amy considers a "rural Dion Juan." For goodness sake, the man gets around on a bicycle! 

Aunt Amy has sent Laura money for a train ticket to the town of Greenwood, where she lives and breeds spaniels. There is a husband, Uncle James, but he is as irrelevant to the story as he is to Aunt Amy. The focus of her life is Charlotte Morgan, depicted here by Reint de Jonge on the cover of the Dutch translation, Spel met de dood (Haarlem: Staarnrstad, 1966).

Charlotte may just be the most beautiful, most refined, most elegant woman in Greenwood; that she is the wealthiest is not up for debate. The widow of Robert Morgan, heir to a vast Niagara winery, she lives with her twenty-eight-year-old son Robbie and various servants at Hilltop House, known to the locals as "Morgan's Castle." It is located on a bluff above and away from the town and is described as looking something like a castle, though the artist for the Ace edition imagines it as a large Anglican church. 

Aunt Amy sent her niece train fare on the pretence of wanting to give the girl a birthday party. Laura's four brothers and their wives will be there, but not the patriarch. Amy is well aware that Sidney won't be able to afford a ticket.

Because she's turning sixteen, Laura's siblings are concerned about shouldering the cost of further education. Is it not enough that their wives provide her with their castoffs? Sure, those old dresses have frayed hems and missing buttons, but Laura knows knows how to sew. They need not worry. Aunt Amy has a plan – and it has nothing to do with tuition.

Over the past year, Charlotte has taken a shining to the girl. Once so skinny and boyish, Laura is becoming a woman. This, um, development hasn't escaped Aunt Amy's attention either. She criticizes her niece's white dress as being too revealing, even though it's an old thing that once belonged to a brother's wife.

Aunt Amy's attraction to Charlotte is nuanced while Charlotte's attraction to Laura is simple. She would like the girl to marry her son Robbie, produce offspring, and secure the line of succession in the family business. Never mind the age difference, the time is right. It's almost as if the fates had brought them together. Just a few months ago, not long after Laura's last visit to Greenwood, Robbie's childless wife Phyllis died suddenly after having sprinkled arsenic, which she thought was sugar, on a bowl of strawberries.

In his 1995 anthology Investigating Women, David Skene-Melvin describes Laura as a detective.

She is not.

Laura has a handle on her ne'er-do-well father, but is nowhere near so savvy or keen-eyed when it comes to others. There's no surprise here. Despite having had to deal with Sidney's fabrication and deceit, her innocence is such that she believes these traits are unique to Sidney.

Morgan's Castle is in no way a detective novel, nor is it a mystery novel, though there are two murders (and many more in the backstory). The first murderer is obvious. The second murderer is a little less so, though one anticipates the act. 

So much of what happens escapes Laura's attention. Does the girl's innocence have something to do with the rural environment Aunt Amy so disparages?

Could be.

Object: Yellow boards in an uncredited dust jacket. I've mentioned the uncredited bit before, I know, but it is relevant here because Hilliard, who worked for Abelard-Schulman, provided her own covers. The only one I have seen credited is Dove Cottage, which features this illustration by son of Scotland William McLaren:

Access: As with the author's four other novels, the first edition of Morgan's Castle enjoyed one lone printing. What sets it apart is a mass market paperback published three years later by Ace featured above, making it the biggest selling of the author's nine books.

The Toronto Star Weekly published Morgan's Castle in two parts over two issues (July 11-18, 1964). I've consulted various pals about the Ace cover, but have no definitive answer as to who should be credited with the illustration. What I can say is that it is accurate in its depiction of Laura.

As I write, two copies of the Abelard-Schulman edition are being offered online. Both ex-library copies, they're listed at US$5.06 and US$64.67. Take your pick. Two copies of the Ace edition are also listed. The cheaper, at US$7.12, has a cocked spine. The other, which "can have notes/highlighting," is being sold by Thrift Books for US$50.06.

The less said about Thrift Books the better.

Staarnrstad's aforementioned Spel met de dood was republished at some point. Judging by the dress, I'm guessing the second appeared in the 'seventies.

Related posts:

A Crooked Cousin in a Cunning Cottage

Growing up with Mother

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images

An addendum to last week's post on Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks. 

Of all the illustrations depicting young Paul Verdayne and his dark lady love, the worst I've seen is featured on the jacket for the 1950 Duckworth edition. The novel never once describes Paul as having a moustache. The lady's hair should be raven, not red. She dresses only in black, deep purple, and white. And does Paul not look older than his twenty-two years? The lady should be ten years his senior. They do travel by  gondola at one point, but it is covered.

The earliest editions of Three Weeks had no cover illustrations. In all likelihood the first depiction of the lady came with the frontispiece of the 1907 Duckworth first edition. I don't have a copy myself, and so am sharing this image of a copy currently being offered by Addyman Books of Hay-on Wye. A very good price at £154.50.

The description is every bit as striking as the portrait.

Duffield, the novel's first American publisher, used the above before switching to this:

And so we have two entirely different images described as "the only one available."

This early Macaulay dust jacket provides another mystery as no one has yet been able to identify the source of the photo.

I'm fairly certain that this woman is Madlaine Traverse:

The Moving Picture World, 15 June 1918

If true, I'm even more confident that the source is the 1914 film adaptation, in which Traverse plays the lady, known in this film as Sonia, Queen of Veseria.

Sadly, predictably, Hollywood's 1914 Three Days has long been lost. Not so the 1924 adaptation! My Macaulay copy is a tie-in. I chose it over this alternate cover:

The 1974 Duckworth hardcover also tempted because of the Cecil Beaton introduction, and for the glam rock-inspired cover illustration.

It reminds me of nothing so much as Bryan Ferry's tiger skin jacket, Flashbacks of a Fool, and this:

I don't know that I have a favourite cover, though I do enjoy looking over the translations. My favourite is the Czech, Tři Týdny (1925), which focusses on the gondola scene. As with the 1950 Duckworth edition, the cover is missing, but here hair colour and garb are pretty much correct...

...unlike the 1960 Digit paperback:

It has been over three decades since Three Weeks passed into the public domain. Remarkably, the only publisher taking advantage is Virago. Its cover uses a portion of Georges Clairin's 1876 Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt. Not a bad choice, though the only dog to feature in the novel is Pike, Paul's beloved terrier. The lady never meets him.

According to the Virago website, Three Weeks has sold over five million copies. Roughly two million more since the 1960 Digit edition. 

As far as I've been able to determine, there has never been a Canadian edition.

Related post:

Three Weeks a Lady