The Great War: The Reveille of Romance

Peregrine Acland, 1914

THE REVEILLE OF ROMANCE

(Written in early October, 1914, in mid-ocean, on board H.M. Troopship “Megantic,” of the fleet bearing the first contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force to England.)

     Regret no more the age of arms,
          Nor sigh “Romance is dead,”
     Out of life’s dull and dreary maze
          Romance has raised her head.

     Now at her golden clarion call
          The sword salutes the sun;
     The bayonet glitters from its sheath
          To deck the deadly gun;

     The tramp of horse is heard afar
          And down the autumn wind
     The shrapnel shrieks of sudden doom
          To which brave eyes are blind.

     From East and West and South and North,
          The hosts are crowding still;
     The long rails hum as troop-trains come
          By valley, plain and hill;

     And whence came yearly argosies
          Laden with silks and corn,
     Vast fleets of countless armed men
          O’er the broad seas are borne.

     All come to that gay festival
          Of rifle, lance and sword,
     Where toasts are pledged in red heart’s blood
          And Death sits at the board.

     Now Briton, Gaul and Slav and Serb
          Clash with the Goth and Hun
     Upon grim fields where whoso yields
          Romance, at least, has won.

     Though warriors fall like frosted leaves
          Before November winds,
     They only lose what all must lose,
          But find what none else finds.

     Their bodies lie beside the way,
          In trench, by barricade,
     Discarded by the Titan will
          That shatters what it made.

     Poor empty sheaths, they mark the course
          Of spirits bold as young:
     Whatever checked that fiery charge
          As dust to dust was flung.

     For terrible it is slay
          And bitter to be slain,
     But joy it is to crown the soul
          In its heroic reign.

     And better far to make or mar,
          Godlike, for but a day,
     Than pace the sluggard’s slavish round
          In life-long, mean decay.

                       * * * * * *

     Who sighs then for the golden age?
          Romance has raised her head,
     And in the sad and somber days
          Walks proudly o’er your dead.

Related posts:

Remembering Peregrine Acland

Alec Falcon, c'est moi
A Neglected Novelst's Neglected Grave
The Great Canadian Great War Novel

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.

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.

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

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

The Globe & Mail, 6 November 1982