Growing up with Mother

Miranda
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard -Schuman, 1960
247 pages 

Miranda is the mother of two daughters, the younger being Rose, the narrator of this novel. Rose calls her mother Miranda, as encouraged by Miranda because Miranda would rather be taken for an older sister.

Miranda has aspirations. She married Alfie Arnold with the expectation that he would raise her above the class into which she'd been born. They are a good match – he loves her dearly, she really loves him –except that Alfie is content with living a modest life on his aunt's small Sussex farm. Miranda will have none of it. At her urging, the family is uprooted, trading Aunt Eliza's farm for a much larger one in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley. The Arnolds are able to do this only with the financial assistance of a Government of Canada program designed to bring agricultural labourers to the country. This is not to suggest that Miranda herself has any intention of working herself. She had her fill during the Great War, when she's served as a Park Lane parlourmaid. Again, Miranda has aspirations:

The Arnolds spend three years in Cheswick, living in a small house on the farm of Mr and Mrs Saunders. Alfie, a cheerful soul by nature, is happier than he's ever been. Not so Miranda. In Canada, she'd expected her family would "stand out like a pearl among the stones," but the locals take no particular notice. The farming couple's warmth and friendliness, so appreciated by Alfie and the girls, only serves to irritate. One particular Sunday road trip to Grande Pré, complete with the recitation of select lines from Evangeline and an account of the Acadian Expulsion, was almost too much for Miranda to bear. And then came Mrs Saunders' offer, filled "with such enthusiasm and goodwill," to teach Miranda Canadian ways and customs:

"Why should I learn their damned customs?" Miranda demanded as soon as she got my father home. The story of Evangeline had not gone over too well with her. She suspected Mrs. Saunders was being anti-British. "What's the matter with English customs?
   "She was only trying to help," Alfie said in a placating voice.
   "Saying she'd make real Canadians out of us in no time! I never heard of anything so insulting. I didn't come to the colonies to be one of them."

Miranda avoids Mrs Saunders, but does enjoy the company Dan Murphy, District Representative of veterinary supply firm B.F. Whitney. Whether the salesman sees Miranda as a pearl among the stones is debatable, but he does drop by from time to time, always when Alfie is in the fields. Dan strokes her amour propre, but nothing more. Through the salesman, Miranda gets the idea that Alfie himself might find a district representative position with B.F. Whitney. She prods, eventually applying to the company on her husband's behalf and Alfie is quickly hired. At about the same time his Aunt Eliza kicks the washtub, leaving an inheritance of £200 (roughly $16,000 today). 

"'My husband has fallen heir to his aunt's estate in Sussex,'" Rose hears Miranda tell Mrs Saunders. "She made poor old Great-aunt Eliza, who used to wear men's boots indoors and out and took her baths standing up at the sink in the scullery, sound like an offshoot of royalty."

The family relocates to Yarmouth – "which I shall call Southport" – the biggest town in Alfie's district. This raised concern in this reader, who well-remembers grade six geography class.

Southport is much more to Miranda's liking. She now lives one block from Main Street in a once grand rented house (a deal, owing to it being across the street from the jail yard), and so has frequent opportunity to show herself off. Her flapper dress is thin, and her heels too narrow to be practical, but she really cuts a figure next to the heavy coated, rubber booted fishermen's wives negotiating the slush of Main Street.

Herein lies the problem. There's not much call for veterinary supplies in an area so reliant on fishing. The land is poor and the farms hardscrabble. Alfie is miserable, casting about for customers, as his inheritance evaporates. Miranda tries to help by working part-time at Betty's Beauty Parlor, but all too quickly Alfie's position at The B.F. Whitney Company quite literally kills him.  

Miranda is devastated – again, she really did love Alfie – yet has the strength to rally. She takes in roomers and increases her hours at Betty's.* The job feeds her ego. After all, who better to work in a beauty salon than the town beauty? Without Alfie to rely upon, she reveals herself as a very clever woman, adding layer after layer to her facade, never being caught out on one of her many, many fabrications.

The Calgary Herald, 11 May 1961

This is, of course, Miranda's story, but only as seen by her youngest. As she grows into womanhood, Rose gradually comes to see – and then comes to terms – with not only her mother's imperfections, but how she is perceived, fairly or not, by others.

Reviews of Miranda were without exception enthusiastic; Walter O'Hearne raved in The New York Times (16 April 1961), as did fellow Leacock winner Joan Walker in The Globe & Mail (1 July 1961). Not that any of this meant anything in the long run.

Sadly, unfairly, Miranda is yet another novel that was printed once and then never again. In this respect, it is very much a pearl among the stones.

Will a publisher please pick it up.

*The 1931 census, records the author, age 20, as working as a hairdresser

and living in a Yarmouth rooming house.

About the author:

Object and Access: A butter-coloured cloth hardcover with violet type. I'm guessing that the jacket illustration is the author's own doing, though I could be wrong.

I'm pleased to see that Yarmouth's Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Library has copies of all the author's books.

As of this writing, I see just one copy listed for sale online. Near Fine, at US$9.25, it's a steal. The seller is located in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, which I shall call Cheswick.

Related post:

A Crooked Cousin in a Country Cottage

Of Cannibals and Christians

The Great Taboo
Grant Allen
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891
271 pages

Reviewing Gilbert Parker's The Right of Way a while back, I expressed my opposition to the idea of starting a novel with dialogue. "'Not guilty, your Honor!'" –  italics and all – is its first line.

The first line in The Great Taboo is "'Man overboard!'"

Better than "Splash!" I suppose.

The man who has gone overboard is, in fact, a woman. No one knows this better than English civil servant Felix Thurston. An instant earlier he'd grasped Miss Muriel Ellis' slender waist as a wall of water struck the deck of the Austalasian:

The wave had knocked him down, and dashed him against the bulwark on the leeward side. As he picked himself up, wet, bruised, and shaken, he looked about for Muriel. A terrible dread seized upon his soul at once. Impossible! Impossible! she couldn't have been washed overboard!

Thurston dives into the "fierce black water" – I should've mentioned it is nighttime – intent on rescue. Lifebelts are flung in their general direction and a boat is lowered, its light playing upon the waves, but to no avail. After an exhaustive search, the crewmen return to the ship. Their captain is philosophical:

"I knew there wasn't a chance; but in common humanity one was bound to make some show of trying to save 'em. He was a brave fellow to go after her, though it was no good, of course. He couldn't even find her, at night, and with such a sea as that running."

In fact, Mr Thurston did find Miss Owen; Felix and Muriel cling to each other even as the captain speaks. Buoyed by lifebelts, the pair drifts toward a reef that bounds Boupari, "one of those rare remote islets where the very rumor of our European civilization has hardly yet penetrated." As the new day dawns, Felix begins to make out signs of habitation. He's well aware that the Polynesian islands are home to "the fiercest and most bloodthirsty cannibals known to travellers." And so, he is on his guard as smiling, friendly souls paddle to transport the two castaways from reef to islet.

Felix and Muriel are not eaten, rather they're made the King of Rain and Queen of Clouds. The two are considered gods, subservient only to the high god Tu-Kila-Kila. They are also deemed "Korong," a word the civil servant, who is otherwise conversant in Polynesian languages, knows not.

Here the reader has an advantage in that the word was chanted repeatedly during the roasting of two Boupari inhabitants mere hours before Felix and Muriel's arrival. Still, it is surprising that the King of Rain and Queen of Clouds, who seem fairly sharp, need be told its meaning... and by a parrot, no less!

Grant Allen was all too dismissive of his novels, but I'm not. The best part of worthwhile nineteenth-century Canadian fiction was written by Allen. That said, I have been dismissive of his adventure novels, Wednesday the Tenth (aka The Cruise of the Albatross) included. Published the same year The Great Taboo, it too features cannibals.*

But I wonder, could it be that The Great Taboo is something more than an adventure novel? Allen's preface is by turns intriguing and amusing:

This reviewer is aware of Frazier's The Golden Bough (1890-1915), but has not read it. I'm familiar with Andrew Lang, but not his Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887). Henry Ogg Forbes's A Naturalist's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago (1885) and Julian Thomas's Cannibals and Convicts (1886) are both new to me, as they would have been to Allen in the years preceding The Great Taboo.

I haven't had time to read those books, but have read Mary Beard's review of Robert Fraser's 1990 The Making of ‘The Golden Bough’: The Origin and Growth of an Argument (London Review of Books, 26 June 1990), in which she writes that The Great Taboo "turned Frazer’s metaphorical journey into a literal tale of travel and adventure." It is, in her words, "a crude and simplified retelling of The Golden Bough," and "important for our understanding of the immediate popular reception of Frazer’s work."

In the end, Felix and Muriel are not consumed by cannibals. As the genre dictates, they escape Boupari, marry, and return to England. The final scene is also the best. It takes place in the London drawing room of the Mrs Ellis, Muriel's aunt by marriage, in which the newlyweds are confronted with the taboos of their own island.

The last sentence is much better than the first.

* Five years ago, I posted a Grant Allen top ten in which The Cruise of the Albatross takes the final spot. At the time, I'd read all of twelve Allen novels. I've now read eighteen. The Cruise of the Albatross has fallen to fourteenth position.

Trivia: Being of a certain age, I couldn't read the title without thinking of the Great Gazoo. The name Felix Thurston reminded me of this more famous fictional castaway:

Object and Access: My first American edition was purchased four or five years ago. I cannot remember how much I paid, but it couldn't have been fifty dollars. The true first is the British first. Published in 1890 by Chatto & Windus, I see evidence of a second printing the following year.

No copies of either is listed for sale online today. It would appear that there have been no other editions.

The Harper & Bros edition can be read online here courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Related posts:

Born Again Infidel
Grant Allen's Wicked Novel

Cruising Toward Cannibals with Grant Allen

Starting in on Grant Allen: A Top Ten

Morley Callaghan's Red Ryan Rocket

More Joy in Heaven
Morley Callaghan
New York: Random House, 1937
278 pages

It's been decades since Intro to CanLit II, my second introduction to Canadian literature. Like Intro to CanLit I, the  course covered four works; all novels, all written by men. Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night was my favourite, but I do remember liking They Shall Inherit the Earth. We were told that its author, Morley Callaghan, was “perhaps the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world.” Here our professor was quoting Edmund Wilson. He made much of this, but at  twenty the name Edmund Wilson meant nothing to me.

They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935) sits in the middle of a run of three novels considered Callaghan's best. The first, Such is My Beloved (1934), involves a handsome young priest – in fiction all young priests are handsome – who befriends two prostitutes. It vies with the third, More Joy in Heaven, as Callaghan's best known novel. They Shall Inherit the Earth is not nearly so well known. You can understand why. They Shall Inherit the Earth is a story about a father and son who, to quote the cover of my old NCL edition (right), are "forced to re-examine the nature of individual conscience and responsibility." It has no sex workers, nor does it have a bank robber.

More Joy in Heaven has both.

Its protagonist, Kip Caley, isn't a prostitute, but he had robbed banks – so many banks that he was sentenced to life and twenty lashes. In prison, Caley underwent a transformation of some kind. There's no suggestion that he found God, though Caley did find Father Butler, the prison chaplain. Somehow, the worst man in Canada becomes the most beloved.

Callaghan is lazy.

The novel opens on Christmas Day, the day of Caley's release from Kingston Penitentiary. Father Brown is present, as is Senator Maclean, who had fought for a pardon.

Caley returns to his hometown, Toronto, where he takes a job at a hotel and nightclub that caters to sporting types. The senator arranged it all. A greeter, a position in which he never feels comfortable, all Caley has to do is welcome patrons. Everyone wants to meet the reformed man; it's great for business. Kip Caley is the toast of the town, but as months pass he seems more the man of the hour.

More Joy in Heaven is a good novel, but the greatest fiction is found on its copyright page:

Contemporary reviewers were not fooled.

Callaghan modelled Caley on Norman "Red" Ryan, a career criminal who had been killed by police on 23 May 1936, eighteen months before publication. It was big news.
 

The Globe, 25 May 1936

Like Caley, Ryan was held up – no pun intended  – as a model of reform. He was fêted and given plumb jobs,  including a weekly radio show, only to be gunned down ten months later during the botched robbery of a Sarnia liquor store.

The Big Red Fox, Peter McSherry's 1999 Arthur Ellis nominated biography of Ryan, is recommended.

More Joy in Heaven is also recommended, as is They Shall Inherit the Earth.

I'm guessing Edmund Wilson would concur.

Trivia: Ernest Hemingway covered Ryan for the Toronto Daily Star and had himself considered writing a novel with a character modelled on the man. I've often wondered whether Papa mentioned the idea to fellow Star reporter Callaghan.

Object: I purchased my copy, a first edition, in 1989 from a cart at the Westmount Public Library. Sadly, it lacks the dust jacket (above), but then what can you expect for $1.00.

Access: The novel remains in print, though I suspect the copies have been sitting in Penguin Random House for over a decade now. What's offered features the 2007 New Canadian Library cover design... and, well, the New Canadian Library is long dead.

The 1960 and 2009 NCL editions.

More Joy in Heaven was one of the earliest NCL titles. Hugo McPherson wrote the introduction to the first NCL edition; Margaret Avison wrote an afterword for the last. Penguin Random House LLC is asking $19.95, though used copies are far cheaper. First editions listed online start at US$20 (sans dust jacket) and go all the way up to US$150. For my money, the best buy is a Very Good to Near Fine copy offered by a Winchester, Virginia bookseller. Price: US$110.

I expected Italian and French translations, but have found only a Russian: Радость на небесах. The first in a three-novel Морли Каллаган volume published in 1982, it also features Тихий уголок (A Fine and Private Place) and И снова к солнцу (Closer to the Sun).

Why those novels, I wonder?

I read More Joy in Heaven for The 1937 Club.

After all these years, the only other 1937 title I've reviewed at The Dusty Bookcase is John by Irene Baird.

Related post:

James de Mille's Antarctic Death Cult
A Quiet, Mildly Depressing Depression-Era Debut

Of Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns, and David Richard Beasley

 

Canadian Authors You Should Know is a self-published book written by a man who counts himself amongst those you should know.

   Is that not absurd?

   It was doubly so for this reviewer because I do know David Richard Beasley.

So begins my review of Canadian Authors You Should Know, now available in the Spring edition of The Dorchester Review. Beasley's book is one of the most idiosyncratic works of CanLit scholarship I have ever read. His Canadian authors you should know number eight, of which these are the first seven:

John Richardson

Herman Whitaker

Frederick Philip Grove

Wyndham Lewis

Norman, Newton

Thomas B. Costain

Jamie Brown

The eighth is David Richard Beasley.

I knew six. Herman Whitaker (1867-1919) was new to me. A Brit, he spent spent much of his twenties in Canada before leaving in 1895 for California. The first of his three novels, The Settler, was published ten years later.

I've never considered writers just passing through Canadian, so was more interested in what Beasley had to say about Vancouver's Norman Newton (1929-2011), another author who was new to me.

Just think, all those years I'd lived on Davie Street, immersed in the literary scene, President of the Federation of BC Writers, and I'd never once heard Norman Newton's name.

And so I purchased a copy – sight unseen – of The Big Stuffed Hand of Friendship, Newton's fourth and final novel. 

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969

Black matte with a foil overlay, as an object it hasn't aged particularly well. Never mind. Look closely at the jacket and you will see this:

Oh, Canada.

Turn around, bright eyes (just don't look up)

Eclipse of the Heart
Mary Lyons
Toronto: Harlequin, 1985

Perhaps not a total eclipse, but then it's only 189 pages.

Update:

Our home during the eclipse.

Related posts:

Harlequin: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome
Harlequin Librarians: So Many Secrets
Harlequin's Filthiest Title