Last week, I has the pleasure of joining Alexandra Irimia, Bilal Hashmi, Patricia Godbout, Phyllis Aronoff, and Arianne Des Rochers for the 2021 John Glassco Translation Prize Gala.
The streamed event has been preserved for posterity on YouTube:
Arianne Des Rocher delivers the jury statement at 51:40, which is followed by Luba Markovskaia's acceptance speech.
Beginning at 19:45, my participation takes the form of a discussion of Glassco's life and work with Patricia Godbout. Host Alexandra Irimia serves as moderator. What a pleasure it was to finally meet Prof Godbout... if only virtually. She's does such good work. I've long admired her Traduction littéraire et sociabilité interculturelle au Canada (1950-1960).
Here's hoping for a healthier 2022, and that the John Glassco Translation Prize Gala can return to being an in-person event.
Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
Cousin Elva Stuart Trueman Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1955 224 pages
I prefer my humour dark, which pretty much explains why I haven't read this mid-century comic novel. The jacket copy discourages:
What does it say about me that I have have no interest in a group of lovable characters? What does it mean that I don't want to read "a truly happy book."
Nothing good, I expect.
Did McClelland & Stewart do its author a disservice? It wouldn't be the first time. And I do like Trueman's illustrations.
Do Cousin Elva, Mr Bogson, Dr Fergus, Nathaniel Scribner, and luscious Beth Hailley rank amongst the most extraordinary characters in Canadian literature?
Quebec in Revolt Herman Buller Toronto: Swan, 1966 352 pages
The cover has all the look of a 1960s polemic, but Quebec in Revolt is in fact a historical novel. Its key characters are depicted on the title pages:
At far left is Joseph Guibord, he of the Guibord Affair.
The Guibord Affair?
Like Gordon Sinclair, one of twelve columnists and critics quoted on the back cover, the Guibord Affair meant nothing to me.
It most certainly didn't feature in the textbooks I was assigned in school. This is a shame because the Guibord Affair would've challenged classmates who complained that Canadian history was boring.
Here's what happened:
In 1844, Montreal typographer Joseph Guibord helped found the Institut canadien. An association dedicated to the principles of liberalism, its library included titles prohibited by the Roman Catholic Index – the Index Librorum Prohibitoru. These volumes, combined with the Institut's cultural and political activities, drew the condemnation of Ignace Bourget, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Montreal. In July 1869, Bourget issued a decree depriving members of the sacraments. Guibord died four months later.
Here's what happened next:
Guibord's body was transported to a plot he'd purchased at Montreal's Catholic Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery, only to be refused burial by the Church. The remains found a temporary resting place at the Protestant Mount Royal Cemetery, while friend and lawyer Joseph Doutre brought a lawsuit on behalf of the widow Guibord. In 1874, after the initial court case and a series of appeals, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ordered the burial. In response, Bourget deconsecrated Guibord's plot.
The second attempt at interment, on 2 September 1875, began at Mount Royal Cemetery:
At Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a violent mob attacked, forcing a retreat to Mount Royal.
The third attempt, on 16 November, was accompanied by a military escort of over 1200 men. Guibord's coffin was encased in concrete so as to protect his body from vandals.
The sorry "Guibord Affair" spans the second half of the novel. The focus of the first half is the man himself. Young Guibord woos and weds Henriette Brown, the smallpox-scared orphaned daughter of a poor shoemaker. He moves up the ranks within Louis Perrault & Co, the printing firm in which he'd worked since a boy, eventually becoming manager of the entire operation.
Louis Perrault & Co, c.1869
Henriette and husband come to be joined by Della, the daughter of one of her distant Irish cousins. Poor girl, Della was part of the exodus brought on by the Potato Famine. Her father and lone sibling having died whilst crossing the Atlantic – mother soon to follow – she clings to life in one of the "pestilential sheds" built for accommodate diseased immigrants. The most dramatic scene in the novel has Joseph defying authority by lifting he girl from her sickbed and carrying her home.
"Skin and bone had given way to flesh and curves," Della recovers and grows to become a headstrong young woman. Buller makes much of her breasts. Ever one to buck convention and authority, Della spurns marriage, has a lengthy sexual and intellectual relationship with journalist Arthur Buies, and ends up living openly with Joseph Doutre ("Josef" in the novel). Truly, a liberated woman; remarkable for her time.
Were it not for the novel's Author's Note, pointing out that Guibord began his career working for John Lovell (not Louis Perrault), or that he was born on 31 March 1809 (not 1 April 1809), or that women didn't wear bustles in 1820s Montreal, might seem nit-picky.
I expect there many more fabrications and errors in this novel and its packaging, but can't say for sure. Again, we didn't learn about the Guibord Affair in school.
About the author: Herman Buller joins Kenneth Orvis and Ernie Hollands as Dusty Bookcase jailbird authors. A lawyer, he rose to fame in the 'fifties as part of a baby-selling ring.
The Gazette, 13 February 1954
Buller was arrested at Dorval Airport on 12 February 1954 whilst attempting to board a flight to Israel with his wife and in-laws. The worst of it all – according to the French-language press – was that the lawyer had placed babies born to unwed Catholic women with Jewish couples.
La Patrie, 11 February 1954
Remarkably, Buller served just one day in prison. He paid a $20,000 fine, was disbarred, and was good to go.
Though Quebec in Revolt was published just eleven years after all this, not a single review mentioned of Buller's criminal past.
I hadn't heard of the Buller Affair (as I call it) until researching this novel, despite it having been dramatized in Le berceau des anges (2015) a five-part Series+ series. Buller (played by Lorne Bass) is mentioned twenty-two seconds into the trailer.
Fun fact: I read Quebec in Revolt during a recent stay at the Monastère des Augustines in Quebec City.
Object and Access: A bulky, well-read mass-market paperback, my copy was purchased for one dollar this past summer at an antiques/book store in Spencerville, Ontario.
Quebec in Revolt was first published in 1965 by Centennial Press. If the back cover is to be believed, McKenzie Porter of the Toronto Telegram describes that edition as a "Canadian best seller." I've yet to come across a copy.
As of this morning, seven copies of Quebec in Revolt are listed for sale online. At US$6.00, the least expensive is offered by Thiftbooks: "Unknown Binding. Condition: Fair. No Jacket. Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting," Take a chance! Who knows what will arrive!
There are two Swan copies at US$8.00 and US$12.45. Prices for the Centennial edition range from US$10.00 (sans jacket) to US$24.00.
Surprisingly, Quebec in Revolt enjoyed an Estonian translation: Ja mullaks ei pea sa saama... Google translates this as And you don't have to become soil...
A sixty-page booklet published by William Southam, father of the Southam newspaper empire, Regimental Songs was distributed to members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The first song is "Alexander's Ragtime Band;" the second, "Alouette," is followed by "Annie Laurie." My favourite is the fourth: "Any Little Girl That's a Nice Little Girl is the Right Little Girl for Me." Regimental Songs provides only the chorus:
Southam's booklet contains 168 songs – some bowdlerized, some not. "God Save the King" is sandwiched between the chorus of "Every Little Bit Added to What You've Got Makes Just a Little Bit More" and select lines from "Good-Night, Ladies."
Regimental Songs isn't all King, Country, and girls.
I purchased the booklet ten years ago at a library book sale. It once belonged to Calvin Dale Williamson of St Marys, Ontario, who at nineteen enlisted to serve as a private in the 55th Overseas Battery, Canadian Field Artillery.
Après la guerre, Cal Williamson worked as a plumber. A life-long bachelor, he lived in a modest house on Jones Street East (likely the same house in which he was born). A friend who hired him in his later years remembers Mr Williamson as a hoarder and something of an eccentric. Calvin Dale Williamson died in 1983, at the age of eighty-seven. "When he died, the contents of his house were cleared out and dispersed," writes my friend. "The house was demolished and there is no trace of this interesting man left in St. Marys – except, perhaps, at some drilled wells."
Calvin Dale Williamson lies next to his parents, Thomas and Cordelia, in the St Marys Cemetery.
A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's UP, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
