The Dusty Bookcase

25 November 2024

Thomas P. Kelley's Elusive Gorilla's Daughter

The Gorilla's Daughter
Thomas P. Kelley
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

160 pages

Note: The Gorilla's Daughter is the most sought-after Canadian paperback. It is also the most notorious, though I would argue this has everything to do with the cover. Because copies are so scarce, and access so limited, I'll be relaying the story of the gorilla's daughter from beginning to end. There will be spoilers. Criticism will be kept to a minimum.

Blonde and beautiful Diana Lynn, nineteen-year-old daughter of archeologist and big game hunter Professor Theodore Lynn, is abducted by Bontu, a five-hundred-pound male gorilla, whist on safari in Equatorial Africa. She'd heard stories of native women who had been carried off by "the hairy men of the trees," but had dismissed them as products of "the wild imagination of the village natives, the witch doctors and the porters." Now, she knew different. Or was she having a nightmare?

But, no, it isn't a bad dream; rather a living nightmare.

Fortunately, the wild imagination of Thomas P. Kelley spares the reader the worst, instead skipping ahead a year to the point Diana gives birth to the "hideous offspring of their union!"

Do you think this impossible? I did, but was soon set straight:

"Oh, you fool. You blind fool. Do you not know history as you should? Can't you realize that the ancient Druids of England mated humans with animals? Don't you realize that the ancient Roman Emperor Caligula, chose a beautiful and snow-white mare for his mistress?"

Blade Runner being my favourite film, and Taffy's Snake Pit Bar being a favourite hangout, this particular example stood out:

"If you know anything about Egyptian history, you will realize that the great Queen Hetshepsut, always employed an asp – yes, a slimy reptile, a snake – for her moments of love. History can't deny that."

Can't it? In my defence, I minored in Canadian history. For what its worth, I have read Marian Engel's Bear, and do not recall a pregnancy.

Bear
Marian Engel
Toronto: Seal, 1977

Returning to The Gorilla's Daughter, as the title suggests, the "OFFSPRING of MAID and MONSTER" is female, possessing a "shapely form like that of her mother," but with the face of her father. Diana names her Tara... "Tara, the gorilla's daughter!"

Fourteen years pass, during which mother and daughter cement the closest of bonds. Though Tara is unable to communicate verbally, except in the language of the gorillas, she is taught to write and proves herself every bit as intelligent as her English educated mother. Tara grows strong while her mother grows weak. No longer blonde or beautiful, Bontu's abuse has taken a great toll and her body is giving out.

Escape attempts are long in the past; Bontu was always quick to recapture and punish her. Diana will come to accept that she can never return to London society:

In Tara's fifteenth year, there occurs an event that changes everything. Bontu has been relocating his tribe ever eastward so as to avoid encroaching white trophy hunters. When one evening a safari comes uncomfortably close to Bontu's tribe, Diana sees an opportunity. She moves in on the camp late at night, has Tara kill a sentry, then awakens a member of the party. It is at this point that she learns that her dear father spent his remaining years searching for her, before dropping dead of a heart attack. Her fiancé, was similarly dedicated, until scandal arose. A blackmail attempt by bespectacled, ugly, fat Lancashire scullery maid led to his suicide.

The only positive thing Diana takes away from the meeting is a rifle, which she then uses to kill Bontu.

Ill health claims her shortly thereafter.

Tara inherits the rifle and remains with the tribe, which is taken over by a gorilla named Targash. He's neither better nor worse than her father. For three years, Tara stays out of his way until the day Targash kills Taka, the semi-lame gorilla who is her crush. The tribe leader had wanted her for his mate, but the grieving gorilla's daughter stabs Targash to death, thus becoming "Tara, Queen of the tribe of Tara!"

Two more years pass, during which the white men continue to encroach. Tara is running out of territory in which to relocate when Patak, the eldest member of the tribe, tells her of a land of gurgling streams and abundant fruit surrounded by a ring of mountains where the white hunters do not venture.

Here the narrative shifts abruptly to focus on handsome Bob Wickson. The son of American steel baron Andrew J. Wickson, he's "one of those fortunate young men who has too much money" and not much to do. Looking for adventure, he heads for Cape Town where he encounters an old drunk who tells him a story of Atlantis which has the survivors of that mythological sunken continent settling in the heart of Africa where they built a city of untold wealth encircled by "The Forbidden Mountains."

He has a map to sell.

Bob buys it for £2500 – roughly £138,000 today – telling himself that there's one chance in a hundred that the drunk is telling the truth.

I thought this wildly optimistic.

The gamble pays off quickly and the Forbidden Mountains are found in the very next paragraph. As they approach, there is unrest amongst Bob's native guides and porters. It's left to his chief gun-bearer to enlighten:

"The men are afraid, they do not want to go any further. We are approaching the land of the evil spirits, Bwana. Our ancestors have told it is a terrible place of death and destruction, where huge beasts ten times larger than the biggest elephant, fly through the air and devour everything they see!"
To say that young Bob Wickson was annoyed, would be putting it mildly.

Bob instructs his men to wait and continues alone. Coincidentally, this is very same instruction given by Tara to her tribe upon reaching the mountains that very same day. Once inside the ring, she finds a paradise as described by Patak... and then she spots Bob from her perch upon a tree:

Tara shoots the panther, saving Bob's life, and jumps to the ground.

Hey, she has a nice personality.

Tara finds Bob intriguing and attractive, despite his short narrow nose. She falls in love, and asks him to be her mate. Bob accepts the proposal, though his motivation is unclear. I suggest it has something to do with a recognizing that Tara will protect and keep him alive.

Soon enough, the pair are captured by the short-legged, long-armed, white-haired descendants of Atlantis, and it is only though Tara's strength that they are able to escape. In fleeing, Bob sprains his ankle and is carried to safety in the gorilla's daughter's arms. She will later save him from another panther and from being sacrificed at the Temple of the Flaming God.

For Tara, the Forbidden Mountains has everything she has desired, Bob most of all. And so, she leads her tribe in the slaughter of the Atlanteans, crushing skulls, and tearing off limbs:

The tribe of Tara made no discrimination as to sex – wives meeting the same fate as their husbands – while infants and children were raised upwards by shaggy paws which dashed their heads against the massive and towering pillars. Screams and shrieks arose, then frantic cries for mercy. But the beasts of Tara could not understand the words, and mercy was a thing unknown to them.

Curiously, Bob expresses no reaction to the carnage. What's even more strange is that he uses the occasion of the victory to break his engagement to Tara:

"Well, Tara, the truth is that you are not a human. To be sure, you have the most glorious human body that ever trod the earth. But – but your face is that of a beast. Oh, don't you see – you're a freak, a grotesque freak – part human, part beast. If we were ever to go to my country, people would shudder at the sight of you!"

Tara is, of course, only able to write her response: "But your promise. You promised that you would be my mate and that we would have four children!"

She says nothing more, rather collapses on the alter upon which Bob was to have been sacrificed.

Eight days later, Bob's ankle has all but healed. He manages to climb the range and return to his camp, only to find that his guides and porters are gone. The fortunate young man with too much money has two hundred miles to traverse without arms, support or supplies. As the terrible truth sets in, Tara reappears to guides and protect him on a trek that would otherwise result in certain death.

They walk in silence for nearly a week, until they near a friendly native village. Tara turns but Bob can't bear to let her go:

Half-beast or not, he realized that in this strange creature he has found nothing but goodness – loyalty, unselfishness and honesty. Yes, perhaps she was some queer quirk of nature, but there was something in her that was fine, FINE!

He encircles Tara in his arms and holds her body to his, a motion that in her tribe signifies acceptance of a mate. Their embrace is broken by a charging lion. Tara whips out her knife and is killed saving her mate.

FIN

I lie.

There's more to The Gorilla's Daughter. The novella continues a further three pages in which it is revealed that the narrator learned the story from Bob during a long night spent smoking ciggies atop the Great Pyramid of Giza. There's also a subplot concerning a failed campaign by Mrs C. Anthony Van Carlson of the Boston Carlsons to marry daughter Gloria into the Wickson family.

This is not their story, it is the story of Tara, the gorilla's daughter.

Bonus: The Gorilla's Daughter ends on page 127, falling far short of the standard News Stand Library title. Padding is provided by a thirty-page science fiction story titled 'Awaken the Dead!' by Halls Wells.

Set in 1947, it concerns a wealthy Wall Street investor who, at age ninety-two, is doing his darnest to stave off death. To this end, he has himself refrigerated so that he might be thawed out when there are cures for his ailments.

Halls Wells that ends well, except for Harley D. Haworth.

About the cover: Is the woman meant to be Diana or Tara? Either way, the illustrator errs in that both are blonde. In fact, Tara is described as having platinum blonde hair.

Object and Access: A typical NSL mass market paperback. The rear cover copy does indeed consist of excerpts, the lone difference being "blonde." Kelley uses "blond" throughout the novel. I prefer the former.

Library and Archives Canada, McMaster University, and the University of Calgary have copies, but that's it.

My three decade pursuit of The Gorilla's Daughter has failed to yield so much as a sighting. I have bowdler of Fly-by-Night to thank for sending me scans and photocopies.

As of this writing, no copies are listed for sale online.

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Exclamation Marks Abound!

18 November 2024

There's a New Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street

Whenever I'm asked to talk about Ricochet Books, I make a point of mentioning Al Palmer's Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street. The title never fails to raise a smile, and often bemusement. Montrealers of a certain age – mine, for example – remember Dorchester as a boulevard, not a street. My daughter has known it only as boulevard René-Lévesque, as it was rechristened in November 1987, two years after the former premier's November 1985 death.

In November 1949, when the novel first appeared, Dorchester was a centre of Montreal's nightlife. Five years later, scores of building were razed under moralizing mayor Jean Drapeau. The street became an eight-lane boulevard with no curb appeal. I'm not sure this Montrealer has walked so much as four or five blocks along its barren sidewalks.

The corner of René-Lévesque and Beaver Hill, November 2022

The heroine of Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street is Gisele Lepine, an eighteen-year-old farm girl "fresh as the cool clean air of her Laurentian village." She was first depicted by D. Rickard on the cover of the first edition.

Draw your eyes away from Gisele, if you can, and you'll see on the right a sign for The Breakers, which was modeled on Slitkin & Slotkin, a Dorchester bar and grill located between Drummond and Mountain.

When first published, Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street was being sold as 'The Best Selling Novel of Montreal,' though it had yet to move a copy.

I expect it did better than the average average New Stand Library title because three months later it published an edition intended for the American market. For this cover, NSL turned to Sid Dyke, who would later do work for Harlequin. The title was unchanged, though the cover image relies on the reader to put it together.

This scene, with Gisele and her newspaperman lover Jimmy Holden, does not feature in the novel. I should add that at no point is the Laurentian country girl shown to be a smoker.

What's most fascinating in the publisher's short-lived excursion into the American market was the decision to use dust jackets. They covered entirely different illustrations, some of which had been made exclusively for export to the United States. Such was the case with Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street.

This jacket illustration hid Dyke's Sugar-Puss:

Sadly, the illustrator is unknown. A clue as to who it might be is found in the bright lights of the big city. The Breakers is back – it doesn't feature in the Dyke illustration – but look to the left and you'll see The Gayety. When Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street was published, it was the club in which Lili St. Cyr performed.

The Gayety is never mentioned in the novel, so how did the nightclub make it into this illustration? Was the artist a Montrealer, or just one of the thousands who visited Canada's sin city? What to make of the fact that the Gayety was on St Catherine not Dorchester?

This summer, as stock in the Ricochet's Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street was reaching an end and reprint was imminent, I suggested replacing the cover. We'd been using a version of the original altered by J.W. Stewart.

Why not one of the two others?

We settled on the dust jacket. Brian Morgan did some cleaning and punched up "ON DORCHESTER STREET."

This is all to say that Ricochet's new Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street has just been released.

Consider it the 75th anniversary edition.

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'THE NEONS GO UP IN MONTREAL'

12 November 2024

Last Words of a Raconteur

Yellow-Wolf & Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence [Divers]
Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé [trans Jane Brierley]
Montreal: Véhicule, 1990

159 pages

Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé follows Arthur Hailey, William C. Heine, Tom Alderman, Richard Rohmer, Bruce Powe, and Joy Carroll as the seventh Canadian novelist I ever read. Three things set him apart, the first being that he was Canadien, in the nineteenth-century definition of the word. The second is that he was from the nineteenth century. The third is that he is a different class of writer. The Last Canadian has nothing on Les Anciens Canadiens.

Set in and around the conquest of New France, Les Anciens Canadiens (1863) was a critical and commercial success in the years preceding Confederation. It is by turns a historical novel, a supernatural novel, a religious novel, a gothic novel, a horror novel, a war novel, a memoir, and a romance. It was also the first Canadien novel to be translated twice into English; by Georgians M. Pennée (1864) and Charles G.D. Roberts (1898). In 1996, it was translated a third time by Jane Brierley. Her Canadians of Old is the only complete translation.

Since my teenage years, when I first read the Roberts, I've been struck by the focus on Les Anciens Canadiens to the exclusion of Aubert de Gaspé's other writings. It wasn't until 1988, 122 years after the first French-language edition that there was an English translation of his Mémoires. That translation, A Man of Sentiment, was also by Jane Brierley.

Yellow-Wolf & Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence, was the second Brierley Aubert de Gaspé translation. In a sense, she was at the end, or rather after the end as the author died decades before Divers first appeared in bookstores. It presents four pieces composed late in life, discovered amongst family papers. Writes the 1893 editor in his avant-propos: "Je prie le lecteur bienveillant de prendre en considération que ce sont les derniers écrits d'un octogénaire, qui est décédé avant d'avoir eu l'avantage de pouvoir les repasser."

The note isn't entirely honest in that two of the four had appeared previously in 1866 numbers of Le Foyer Canadien. Brierley takes a small liberty in rearranging the order. And why not? It's not as if Aubert de Gaspé had a say in Divers, or whether it would be published in the first place.

So we begin with 'Yellow-Wolf, 'Le Loup-Jaune' in Divers. The longest of the four, it takes the form of a tale told the author as a very young man by a elderly Malecite chieftain. The supernatural figures, as does brutal reality in the form of torture he suffered in Iroquois captivity. In 'Woman of the Foxes' ('Femme de la tribu des Renards') the victim this time is a young Iroquois slave girl who is acquired by a forefather of the author's dear friend Antoine -Gaspard Couillard. 'Big Louis and the Legend of Indian Lorette' ('Le Village indien de la Jeune-Lorette'), the finest of all four, relates to an exchange between the author and Big Louis, a Huron known for his intelligence and repartee. The latter shares the story of the great serpent, which very nearly brought an end to his people, all the while recognizing that he is sharing the tale with a man whose own people, religion, and drink has brought even greater devastation.

The final piece, 'General Wolfe's Statue' ('La statue de général Wolfe') is something of a detective story in which the author shares his findings and theories as to the origin of a less-than-life-size wooden tribute that once stood at the corner of du Palais and Saint-Jean in Quebec City. Murder figures! The translator continues the research in her endnotes.

The statue in its current location at the Morrin Centre, Quebec City.

Jane Brierley was awarded the 1990 Governor General's Award for English-language Translation for this book, but she brought so much more. She adds an introduction and meticulous annotations. Each of the four pieces is preceded by a "translator's advice to the reader," providing context.

The tales themselves comprise just 84 pages, but Yellow-Wolf & Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence is not a fast read. There is the richness of style, there is the weight of history and all that, and there is artifice to be recognized. Canadians of Old is most certainly the place to begin with Aubert de Gaspé... after that, A Man of Sentiment. But how wonderful that this exists!

Object: A trade size paperback, Yellow-Wolf & Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence is one of the the most attractive books in Véhicule's fifty-one year history. Credit goes to the translator who worked with J.W. Stewart on its design. The interior features thirteen illustrations, a map, and a photograph. The striking cover painting is a self-portrait by Huron chief Zacharie Vincent (1815-1886).

Access: Used copies listed online range between $9.76 and $131.12. I recommend the one going for $9.76. Better yet, pristine, unused copies can be purchased directly from the publisher at $14.95 through this link.

The original French, Divers, was first published in 1893 by Beauchemin. A Gatineau bookseller is offering a library discard of the first edition at $41.60. It has been rebound in just about the ugliest boards imaginable, but still seems a bargain.

Divers can be read online here courtesy of the University of Toronto and Internet Archive.

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