Thomas D'Arcy McGee: 200 Years

Thomas D'Arcy McGee

13 April 1825, Carlingford, County Louth, Ireland

7 April 1868, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

RIP

Related posts:

'O Martyr'd McGee!'

D'Arcy McGee's Query (with a response)

D'Arcy McGee, All Compliment to Thee

'Death of D'Arcy McGee'

'IN MEMORIAM! The Hon. T.D. McGee'

Remembering Edith Eaton and D'Arcy McGee

'Erin's Address to the Hon. Thomas D'Arcy McGee'

A Poet's Angry Words for the Fenian Brotherhood

'Mort de Thomas D'Arcy McGee'
Thomas D'Arcy McGee: 150 Years

The Great Gatsby: 100 years

I was on my lunch break when I first read of Jay Gatsby's death. This was in the back room of the Rockland Centre Sam the Record Man. Twenty-one, I was in charge of the singles department.

The description, as imagined by Nick, is so subtle that the tragedy passed without me seeing it. In my old Bantam edition it begins and ends on a single page. I returned to the beginning because I couldn't quite believe it.

I write about Canadian literature. The Great Gatsby is not a Canadian novel, but it but it is my favourite novel. 

On this, the one hundredth anniversary of its publication, it is only right to recognize it.

I didn't realise that you wrote poetry. I didn't realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry

Say what you will about Satan, he's no dummy.

I think I'm right about this, but am not sure.

He had no place in my family's place of worship. I never once heard mention of the Prince of Darkness in church school, confirmation class or even a sermon. This could have something to do with having been raised Anglican.

I am not sure.

My early reading on Satan was extremely limited. It began in October 1974 with 'The Ecchorcist,' MAD magazine's parody of The Exorcist, continued with Joy Carroll's horror romance Satan's Bell (1976), and more or less ended with novelizations of the films The Omen (1976) and Damien:The Omen II (1978).

Since beginning the exploration that is the Dusty Bookcase, I've learned a bit more about Beelzebub through American expat Jules-Paul Tardivel. He believed novels to be "weapons forged by Satan himself for the destruction of mankind," but seized one of "the enemy's war machines" in writing Pour la patrie (1895). Set in the far off future of 1945, the devil is very much present and very much focussed in destroying Quebec as the last bastion of Catholicism.

No one I've read thus far had more to say about Satan and what he's up to than the late televangelist John Wesley White – author of Re-entry (1970), The Man from Krypton (1978), Arming for Armageddon (1983), and Thinking the Unthinkable (1992) – though I'm not sure how much he can be believed. I very much doubt that this song is intended to bring the listener to love Satan, as Dr White claims:

I may be wrong.

From everything I've read, Satan is cunning, creative, devious, and extremely intelligent. What he isn't is a good poet.

I can say this with certainty having browsed Michelle Remembers, the 1980 bestseller credited with providing the spark for the Satanic Panic. I'm planning on writing about it later this year, but for now, this being the first day of National Poetry Month, I thought it might be appropriate to share one of the many samples of Satan's verse recorded in the book by authors Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder:

            If you say one word I say to you,
            You'll say it all until it's through.
            You'll run out of time, run out of space,
            Run at the mouth all over the place.
            You can only go inside your head,
            And if you go there, then you're dead.

            So you see, I've turned it inside out;

            I've turned you around, turned you about,

            You always come back to me,

            The only way out is to see through me.

            The more goes out, the more comes in,

            You'll start to end when you begin.

So begins a theological debate. Is there something lacking in the Prince of Darkness – a heart, perhaps – that prevents him from being anything other than a rotten poet or is his verse intentionally bad so as to bring hell on Earth?

Frankly, I'm beginning to have doubts that Satan composed any of the poems in Michelle Remembers.

My thanks to fellow CanLit scholar Brad Middleton, who generously donated two copies of Michelle Remembers to The Dusty Bookcase.

Related posts:

Ontario Gothic Romance (with a scent of Brut)
The Strange Satanic Canada of a Future Past

Come, Come, Come - Nuclear Bomb

Same Old Same Old about Armageddon
The Oxford PhD Rambles On
Man of Faith, Man of Steel

Songs for Sunday Suggested by John Wesley White
Immoral Music for a Monday Morning

Joyce Boyle: Early Research

An addendum to Saturday's post on The Stone Cottage Mystery.

Emily Joyce Boyle was born on April 6, 1901, missing that year's census by a matter of days. The 1911 census finds Joyce as a ten-year-old living at 227 Westminster Avenue in Toronto with her mother Charlotte and three surviving siblings (Gertrude, John, and Beatrice). Her father, William, recorded in previous censuses as lumber merchant and a crockery merchant, died when she was a four-year-old.

At the time of the 1921 census, Joyce was still living on Westminster Avenue with her mother, Gertrude, and Beatrice. Interestingly, all four Boyle women are reported as having no occupation. They were  certainly not members of the leisure class, yet the family appears to have had the means to send Beatrice and Joyce off to the University of Toronto.

The photo of Joyce Boyle featured above, the only one I've found, comes from the 1924 edition of Torontonesis, the university's student annual. These are the words that appear below:

In the 1931 census, thirty-year-old Joyce and forty-six-year-old sister Gertrude are listed as living at 307 Castlefield Avenue in Toronto. Joyce's occupation is school teacher, while Gertrude's is school librarian.

307 Castlefield Avenue in June 2021

The previous year, Joyce had published Mary, John and Peter, which is most likely her first book.

Toronto: T. Eaton, 1930

Intriguingly, Joyce Boyle's entry in the Database of Canada's Early Women Writers notes that McMaster University's Macmillan Company of Canada Archives contains correspondence regarding an earlier work, Spring Blew Around the Corner, of which there is no known copy. Was it ever published? Thus far, I've found no reviews, adverts or even passing mentions in newspapers and magazines.

She's credited with eleven other titles, most of which – Mary, John and Peter being one – are schoolbooks meant for young children. Of those that aren't, the one that garnered the greatest attention was Muskoka Holiday, a 1953 girls' adventure novel published by Macmillan in Canada, England, and the United States.

Muskoka Holiday has my favourite cover by far, though Bobby's Neighbors has a certain lazy charm.

Nashville: Abingdon, 1959 

Once Upon a Time, a textbook edited in 1966 for Macmillan, appears to have been her last work. She would've been in her mid-sixties at the time.

Joyce Boyle died at the age of seventy-four on June 7, 1975, at Women's College Hospital in Toronto. She was predeceased by all of her siblings (including previously unmentioned Ernest, who died on the date of his birth, and Edith, who died at eleven). The University of Toronto's Joyce Boyle Scholarship is awarded to "a student with overall A standing who is enrolled in the Specialist or Major program in English, with preference to a student whose courses have included romantic poetry or prose." It was established by brother-in-law Stephen James Mathers (1896-1985), who was married to Joyce's sister Beatrice (1899-1969). Mathers also established a scholarship in honour of his late wife.

A good man.

From all I've been able to glean from newspaper articles, Joyce Boyle was a woman who dedicated her life to children's education. She was particularly focussed in fostering early interest in literature and the cause of world peace.

A good woman.

Related post:

TumblingTowards Mystery

Tumbling Towards Mystery

The Stone Cottage Mystery
Joyce Boyle
Toronto: Macmillan, 1961
151 pages

A big city girl made unhappy by her family's move to a small town, sixteen-year-old Isobel Anderson will be a familiar figure to readers of children's fiction. In her case, the big city is Toronto; the small town is Farston, to which Isabel's father (occupation unknown) has been transferred.

Coinciding with Farston High School's Christmas break, the Andersons' arrival is soon followed by a different sort of break. One particularly blowy, snowy day, Isobel is out on a solitary a walk when she falls and does something to her foot. Isobel tries to make for home, but the pain is too great. It's all she can do to reach the nearest dwelling, an old stone cottage that sits high on the hill at the end of her road. No one responds to her knocking, but she finds the door unlocked. And that is where she is found sometime later by young Eleanor Morgan. The girl lights a fire, makes sure Isobel is comfortable, and then sets off to get help. This arrives in in the form of a sleigh driven by Doctor Gordon Brown – "I'm Doctor Gordon Brown" – who then whisks her off to hospital where "several small foot bones" are found to be broken.

Forget the foot, this mystery concerns a stone cottage. Built by Eleanor's great-great-great grandfather, the building is now owned by the town, which has handed it over as the meeting place of the Farnston High School Historical Club.

Two observations:

• at my high school, clubs met in the school itself;
• there was always a teacher present, which is never the case here.

Before you get all hot and bothered about underage drinking, drugs, and sex, let me assure you that the students of Farston High are all good kids. They welcome Isobel with great warmth, going so far as to enlisting the help of  Norwegian immigrant Nels Olsen in building an elaborate sled so that she can participate in the school's Valentine skating party.

Isobel's date, Eleanor's brother John, proves a true gentleman:

"Good time?" he asked.
   "Never better," was Isobel's answer. "Oh, John, it was a perfect evening! And all I can say is 'Thank you'!"
   "That's all you need to say," was John's reply. "Thats all you need to say when you use that tone of voice."

And off he goes home.

The Edmonton Journal,
10 September 1958

The students of Farston High School are an extremely wholesome and cheery  lot, which is not to say that there isn't tension within their midst. Understanding the source is dependent one's knowledge of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. Eleanor's great-great-grandfather, Alan Donaldson, a supporter of reform, was falsely accused of being a rebel. Facing arrest, he fled to the United States and was never seen again. A box of money and papers entrusted to his care disappeared at the same time. Eleanor's great-great-grandmother was certain that her husband had hidden the box, but the Farr family is convinced that he stole it.

As expected, Isobel, Eleanor, and their schoolmates solve the mystery of the missing money and papers. That they do this with the assistance of Miss Malcolm (Isobel's Toronto history teacher), Miss Norman (Isobel's Farston history teacher), and Miss Fleming (the town librarian), raised a smile because Joyce Boyle herself was a teacher and librarian.

She never married.

I know more about her than I do my great-great-great-grandparents or even my great-great-grandparents.

Object and Access:  First published in 1958 by Macmillan of Canada. Unlike Joyce Boyle's previous novel, Muskoka Holiday (1953), it was not published in the United Kingdom or the United States; something to do with the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, I expect. My copy, a second printing in olive green hardcover with mustard printing, was purchased last year at my favourite local charity shop. Sadly, it lacks the dust jacket, but what do you want for 65 cents. 

As I write, just two copies of The Stone Cottage Mystery are being sold online, both published in 1969 by Macmillan. At US$13.00, the more attractive is a hardcover with dust jacket. The other bookseller offers a paperback copy for US$68.00: 

I recommend the hardcover.

Related post:

Joyce Boyle: Early Research