The Curious and Unknown Leo Orenstein

© The Estate of Leo Orenstein

Leo Orenstein is worthy of much overdue attention for his work as one of this country's early television directors and producers. I hope that a bookish fellow like myself will be forgiven for focussing on his even earlier work as an illustrator.

Curious Relations of Mankind is one of two recently discovered cover designs that come to me courtesy of the late Mr Orenstein's family. Curious, indeed. It would appear that the book it was meant to grace was never published. WorldCat gives us no hits, Abebooks is silent... and yet the identity  of the intended publisher is clear. Those familiar with the eariest days of Canadian paperbacks will recognize the three-sided Fireside Publicatons style in the price.

But what was Curious Relations of Mankind? And who was Doctor J.G. Wood? I step out on a limb in suggesting that the good doctor was Reverend J.G. Wood. I'll even be so bold as to suggest that Curious Relations of Mankind was the clergyman's The Civilized Races of Men retitled and bowdlerized.

It would not have been the only time Fireside gave an fresh title to an old book. Here's their edition of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon:

Now, to be fair, From the Earth to the Moon is naught but a translation of the true title: De la Terre à la Lune. Yes, it's the most common, but we've also seen the novel published as A Trip to the Moon in Ninety-seven Hours, A Voyage to the Moon, The Moon Voyage, Balbicane and Co.,  and The Baltimore Gun Club. The problem I have with Rocket Flight to the Moon is that the novel features no rockets – the adventurers are sent to the moon in a projectile shot from a massive cannon.

Of the two discovered Orensteins, I prefer this mock-up for The Queers of New York (Pocket Books, 1972), his lone novel.

© The Estate of Leo Orenstein

One is left to assume that Those Queers of New York was a working title, just as the cover itself was something that was not quite ready. The Queers of New York is a better title, I think.

A favourite Canadian cover of that lost decade, my only complaint is that Leo Orenstein's name is so very small.

Related posts:

A Leo Orenstein Tripych

Figuring Out the Queers of New York

The Talented Mr. Orenstein

Ce Soir: Montreal Noir

Tonight at the Blue Metropolis festival I'll have the honour of hosting 'Montreal Noir', a panel discussion focussing on the city's suppressed, ignored and forgotten novels of the mid-20th century.

Joining me on stage will be Trevor Ferguson, Jim Napier and Will Straw. Actor Marcel Jeannin will be reading excerpts from work by David Montrose, Martin Brett and the great Brian Moore:

Montreal Noir: The City's Forgotten Pulp Past

OPUS Montreal Hotel, Salon St-Laurent

10 Sherbrooke Street West

Saturday, 21 April, 8:30 pm 

Shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize

The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2011 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English Section), which each year honours the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English. This year’s shortlisted finalists (in alphabetical order) are Brian Busby for A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator, and Pornographer (McGill-Queen’s UP); Alan Filewod for Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada (Between the Lines Press); Sophie McCall for First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (UBC Press); and Herb Wyile for Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature (Wilfrid Laurier UP).

The shortlist was chosen by a jury composed of David Creelman (UNB, Saint John), Carrie Dawson (Dalhousie University), and Cynthia Sugars (University of Ottawa).

The winner will be announced publicly on May 26th, 2012, at the Gabrielle Roy Prize reception at the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures annual conference, which this year will take place in Waterloo, Ontario. The prize reception will be held from 6:00-7:30 p.m. on May 26th in the Graduate Lounge on the first floor of the Student Services Building at Wilfrid Laurier University.

The jury was unanimous in selecting A Gentleman of Pleasure for particular recognition. One member described the book as “a beautifully written and very well researched account of Glassco’s life and, equally interesting, of his interactions with so many other Canadian writers, artists, and intellectuals. Never before has the mid-twentieth-century Canadian literary and cultural scene appeared so … scandalous!” Another wrote: “Balanced, incisive, and precise, Busby has produced a carefully researched and elegantly written biography. Focusing on a minor writer with a persistent talent, the book is more than a chronicle of the main events of Glassco’s life. A Gentleman of Pleasure captures the tone of the different eras through which Glassco moved and is imprinted with the anxieties and difficulties of an uncentered writer emerging in the midst of the emptiness of the modernist era. The writing is professional, clear, and engaging, and the research is meticulously documented.”

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure

Mean Mister MacDonald Attacks a Prime Minister

Day seventeen of National Poetry Month and there's been nary a mention here. Today, the 120th anniversary of the passing of Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie, will be different. He's remembered as a humble man who took pride in his working class origins, though you'd never know it from this verse by J. J. MacDonald, the "James MacRae" of The Four Jameses.

I'm not so unfair as the poet in describing the verse below as bad. The misspelling of Mackenzie's name is minor; sin comes with the claim that in 1875 the politician travelled overseas with the sole goal of obtaining a knighthood. In fact. Mackenzie thrice declined the honour.

The poet pretends otherwise, adopting the prime minister's voice in addressing "dear generous Brown" – George Brown – whom Mackenzie had succeeded as leader of the Liberal Party (and who had also declined the title):

A. McKENZIE AT QUEBEC IN HIS RETURN FROM GREAT BRITAIN IN 1875, WHICH IT WAS SAID HE VISITED IN ORDER TO GET THE TITLE OF “SIR” 

My sight you would pity, dear generous Brown,
On nearing a city or reaching a town;
For charity hide me from scornful disgrace,
Or crows will deride me and laugh in my face. 

They know when we parted I travelled for fame;
To find as I started my title’s the same,
To party relations returning, I swear
Is more than my patience is able to bear. 

How gladly I’d wander, how swiftly I’d stride
Where back streams meander, and wild beasts abide!
The Ottawa Valley unseen would I roam,
To reach and to rally my dear friends at home! 

In rural seclusion to live as before,
I find ’tis delusion to seek any more;
My standing much lower than ever I see;
The honors of power are useless to me. 

To want them’s unpleasant, to have them no gain;
They prove evanescent, delusive and vain;
They give us more trouble than ease or delight,
And, fleet as a bubble, they’re out of our sight. 

An humble mechanic, oh! did I remain,
And titles Britannic not seek to obtain,
And prosper as Alick with friends as before,
When fables in Gaelic alone was my lore. 

My curses with Britain forever abide–
Her children have smitten by glory and pride.
Though aristocratic, I think they are fools,
They speak so dogmatic on etiquette rules. 

When my predecessor went over before,
They thought no aggressor invaded their shore;
Their nobles held meetings to honor him there,
Nor jovial greetings to him did they spare. 

Though fate made me humble, yet chance made me great,
No mortal should grumble at doings of fate;
Through folly and error from greatness I fell,
My anguish and terror no creature can tell. 

"A. McKenzie at Quebec..." joins the similarly mean-spirited "A. McKenzie's Reflections While About to Address His Constituents at Sarnia in 1875" in leading off the poet's self-published debut, Poems Written by J.J. MacDonald, a Native of Glengarry, Ont. (c. 1877). It precedes further attacks on an unnamed Grit politician, drinkers, bachelors, Protestant converts, Charles Chiniquy, Maria Monk, one Miss A— and pretty much anyone who was not an immediate member of the poet's family.

"In submitting the following poems to your judgment, the author does so in a truly Christian spirit", MacDonald writes in presenting his verse.

Were he alive, I'd call him out on this.

A John Glassco Soirée

Later this month I'll be joining Carmine Starnino, editor of the recent John Glassco and the Other Montreal, in a discussion of Glassco's life and work at St. James the Apostle's Writers' Chapel:

A John Glassco Soirée

The Writers' Chapel

Church of St. James the Apostle

1439 St. Catherine Street West (corner Bishop)

Montreal 

Friday, April 27, 7:00 pm

Glassco's good friend Michael Gnarowski, editor of John Glassco: Selected Poems with Three Notes on the Poetic Process and publisher of the only Canadian edition of The English Governess, will be hosting the evening.

St. James the Apostle was the church of Glassco's childhood. The plaque celebrating his life, affixed to its walls in 2009, marked the beginning of the Writers' Chapel.

This is a free event presented by the Argo Bookshop.

All are welcome.

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure

Arthur Stringer from Chatham to London

Arthur Stringer House, London, Ontario

17 March 2012

The current edition of Chatham This Week features Karen Robinet's  tribute to that neglected man of letters Arthur Stringer. There are a few words by yours truly, along with a photo, much like the one above, that I took last month.

Arthur Stringer was a hometown boy who made good, though you'd never know it walking through Chatham; not even on Colborne, the street of his birth. As Ms Robinet notes – with some regret, I think – the only lasting memorials to the man are in London, the city to which his family moved in 1884. Victor Lauriston picks up the story in Arthur Stringer: Son of the North (Ryerson, 1941):

The records of the Middlesex Teachers' Association show that he was awarded the Diploma of Honour as the pupil obtaining the highest standing in the High School Entrance examination in the year 1886. At the London Collegiate Institute he established his dislike and likewise revealed his leaning toward letters by founding and editing a school magazine, Chips, copy of which are still treasured by L.C.I. Old Boys. 

While the London Collegiate Institute was destroyed by fire in 1920, the house in which Stringer spent the latter years of his childhood still stands... as does the school that bears his name.

'Tis a touch bland, 'tis true, but still I'm impressed; we don't see many tributes of this kind in Canada... And then, as if to disprove my own observation I find that there's also a school named in honour of Victor Lauriston, Stringer's biographer. 

Never mind. I'm standing by my words. 

On Wednesday the Tenth

Today is the eleventh. I don't mean to confuse, but so much of Grant Allen's bibliography bewilders, bedevils and befuddles. The Cruise of the Albatross; or, When Was Wednesday the Tenth?, the subject of  the previous post, is all too typical. It first appeared as "Wednesday the Tenth", serialized in a British girl's magazine called Atalanta. The novella made its American debut with the 1890 Lothrop edition pictured above. Yankee boys were treated to images that had been denied young English roses. Here, for example, are the well-toned men of Tanaki:  

Even in retreat, they appear a very formidable force:

Allen was a recognized name when Wednesday the Tenth first appeared between cloth covers, but not so much that he could carry a British edition. This was, as I've said, a slight work. A mere 121 pages of sparsely-laid type, and still I found it a bit of a chore to reach the end. No surpass, then, that it was republished only once... or twice.

In 1898 Lothrop repackaged the novella as The Cruise of the Albatross; or, When Was Wednesday the Tenth? The title page mentions nothing of the previous title, but it has all sorts of other information, including a credit to "Bridgman" for the illustrations.

This would be the busy L.J. Bridgman (1857-1931), whose work can also be found in works by Rudyard Kipling and a whole lot of forgotten writers like Eustace Leroy Williams and Mary Hazelton Wade. My copy includes two plates. Not profusely illustrated, but illustrated none the less.

A much more common Lothrop edition, also dated 1898, was issued under this cover. More often than not it is this that is described by booksellers as the "First Edition". Some copies have the Bridgman plates, some do not.

Caveat emptor.

Cruising Toward Cannibals with Grant Allen

The Cruise of the Albatross;
   or, When was Wednesday the Tenth?
Grant Allen
Boston: Lothrop, 1898

I've never bothered with the stories in The Boy's Own Annual – the pictures are more than enough fun – but I imagine they read something like this very slight Grant Allen novella. Cannibals, slave traders and a powerful thirty-pound brass gun are just a few of its many attractions.

The Cruise of the Albatross begins aboard same with the sighting of a small boat bobbing in the Pacific Ocean.  Ship's captain Julian Braithwaite sets out for the lesser vessel and finds "two white-faced lads, apparently twelve or thirteen years old, dressed in loose blue cotton shirts and European trousers". The pair cling to life, but manage to convey that their missionary parents and siblings are captives of cannibals on the far off island of Tanaki. Barring an act of divine providence or earthly daring-do, all will feature in a feast to take place on "Wednesday the tenth".

Julian is a good man – he once risked his life to free forty or so kanakas from slavery – so it comes as no surprise when he sets course to save the boys' parents. The captain's brother figures they'll arrive just in time:

Jim took out a piece of paper and totted up a few figures carelessly on the back. "We've plenty of coal," he said, "and I reckon we can make nine knots an hour, if comes to a push, even against this head wind. To-day's the sixth; that gives us four clear days still to the good. At nine knots, we can do a run of two hundred and thirty-six knots a day. Four two-hundred-and-thirty-sixes is nine hundred and forty-four, isn't it? Let me see; four sixes is twenty-four, put down four and carry two; four three's is twelve, and two's fourteen; four three's is twelve, and four two's - year that's all right: nine hundred and forty-four, you see, exactly. Well, then look here Julian: unless Tanaki's further off than nine hundred and forty-four nautical miles, - which isn't likely – we ought to be there by twelve o'clock Wednesday, at latest.

Anyone familiar with adventure stories will recognize Jim's calculations as more than mere filler. Time is not only of the essence, it is central to both plot and plot twist. When Was Wednesday the Tenth? – the alternate title – gives away something of the latter. I'll go a bit further and spoil things for the well-read by revealing that the story's twist owes everything to Around the World in Eighty Days.

This is a late Victorian story, complete with heavy, politically incorrect steamer trunks and other musty baggage. Thus, Allen writes about the sensitive European nostril and sharp Polynesian eyes. When ship's boy Nassaline, speculates that the two boys had run away because they feared being eaten by their own kind, Julian responds:

It's my belief, Nassaline, we'll never make a civilized Christian creature of you, in a tall hat, and with a glass in your eye. You ain't cut out for it, somehow. How many times have I explained to you, boy, that Christians never cook and eat their enemies ? They only love them, and blow them up with Gatlinojs or Armstronos – a purely fraternal method of expressing slight differences of international opinion....  

I omitted to have remarked to him (as I might have done) that I hadn't seen such a painful sight before, since I saw the inhabitants of a French village in Lorraine – old men, young girls, and mothers with babies pressed against their breasts – flying, pell-mell, before the sudden onslaught of a hundred and fifty Christian Prussian Uhlans. These little peculiarities of our advanced civilization are best not mentioned to the heathen Polynesian.

Now, I find myself wondering. Would a passage such as this have made it into The Boys' Own Annual, a publication of the Religious Tract Society?

Object: An attractive, slim hardcover in olive green cloth, my copy was purchased for $20 last month from a London, Ontario bookseller. The front free endpaper is signed and dated by a Marion Allen. I've not been able to determine whether this lady was in any related to the author.

Access: Held by most universities, the public libraries serving Toronto and Kingston, the National Gallery of Canada Library, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, but not Library and Archives Canada.

"An uncommon Allen title", claims one bookseller. Well... not really. More than three dozen can be bought online with Very Good copies going for under ten dollars. The print on demand folks have really moved in on this title, offering all sorts of ugliness at much higher prices.

'Death of D'Arcy McGee'

McGee Mausoleum

Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Montreal

A poem on the death of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, assassinated 144 years ago this morning.

from Verses and Rhymes by the Way

Nora Pembroke [pseud. Margaret Moran Dixon McDougall]

Pembroke, Ont.: S.E. Mitchell, 1880

Related posts:

'O Martyr'd McGee!'

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

D'Arcy McGee, All Compliment to Thee

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

A Poet's Angry Word With the Fenian Brotherhood

Now that April's Here...

Spring has sprung and the thoughts of a middle aged man turn to work. Much of these past few months have been spent going through John Glassco's letters in preparation for a volume to be published this coming autumn.

More on that another day.

This morning, rereading correspondence between the poet and his old McGill friend Leon Edel, I was stuck – for the nth time – by their final exchanges. Glassco, not long for this world, continues to be haunted by a short story published a half-century earlier: Morley Callaghan's "Now that April's Here".

The story is one the writer's most anthologized, but I've never quite understood its weight; Callaghan had better than this. Its real value lies in it being a nouvelle à clef, with Glassco cast as Johnny Hill, a young, chinless expatriate who is writing his memoirs. Glassco's friend Graeme Taylor appears as Charles Milford, whom Johnny supports through a small monthly income. As portrayed by Callaghan, they're two gay boys who delight in snickering at others. Robert McAlmon makes an appearance as Stan Mason, a boozy writer who is hurt to discover that he is their chief target.

Graeme Taylor, John Glassco and Robert McAlmon, Nice, 1929

The story was first published in the Autumn 1929 number of This Quarter, by which time Callaghan had completed his "summer in Paris" and was safely back in Toronto. He never got to witness the effects the time bomb left behind in Montparnasse had on Glassco's friendship with McAlmon. Leon Edel came to Glassco's aid by dismissing the story in his "Paris Notes" column for the Montreal Daily Star. Late in life, after Glassco's death, he allowed that Callaghan's depiction of the "two boys" was accurate.

For Glassco, it was a story that just wouldn't go away. In 1936, he saw it given a place of prominence in Now that April's Here and Other Stories. It would return in Morley Callaghan's Stories (1959) and lives on in the man's misleadingly-titled Complete Stories (2003).

Then we have Now that April's Here, an odd 1958 feature comprised of four Callaghan short stories": “Silk Stockings”, “Rocking Chair”, “The Rejected One” and “A Sick Call”, but not the one that gives the film its title.

Now that April's Here enjoyed a gala opening in Toronto, closing after two weeks. After a few more runs through a projector in Hamilton, it was never screened again. Glassco was spared the distress of reading the title on Montreal movie marquees.

This seven minute clip, courtesy of YouTube, reveals why the film is forgotten:

Criterion will not be interested.

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

A Dick's Deadly Dames

The Deadly Dames

Malcolm Douglas [pseud. Douglas Sanderson]

Greenwich, CT: Gold Medal, 1956

Douglas Sanderson's fifth novel, The Deadly Dames was the first to be published as a paperback original. Not quite the same as "straight to DVD", of course, but I don't think it's such a coincidence that this book is by far the weakest of the lot.

With The Deadly Dames we have a new publisher, a new nom de plume and a new hero. Sort of. That hero, Bill Yates, shares something with Mike Garfin, the protagonist of Sanderson's two preceding books: both are Montreal private investigators, both are the sons of French Canadian mothers and both have Scotch landladies.

As with Garfin's outings – Hot Freeze and The Darker Traffic – things start rolling when the private investigator is hired by someone of considerable wealth. In this case, the client is Philip Corday, a spoiled lush who hopes to get the goods that will allow him to divorce his cheating wife Grace. Yates has only just accepted the job when an expensively dressed woman tries to hire him away. Minutes later, she's crushed under the wheels of a streetcar rounding the corner of St Catherine and Peel. And so, what began as a bland divorce case takes a deadly turn. Pun intended.

St Catherine and Peel, Montreal, 1956

Mike doesn't stick around. No pun intended. Hoping of catch Grace and her lover, he heads north to the Corday country home. Things become complicated when he confuses the unfaithful wife with her beautiful older sister. Some PI.

Bodies pile up quickly in The Deadly Dames – nine corpses in 160 pages – but our man Yates is not one of them. Dozens of shots are fired in his direction, but none find their mark. He's beaten senseless repeatedly, but bounces back with superhuman speed. Not even a broken nose slows him down. Good thing too, because the action in this novel clocks in at well under 72 hours.

A lazy novel, the fast pace is provided by characters that exist for no other reason than to propel the plot. There's Corday's chatty Russian housekeeper, a talkative cop with an encyclopedic knowledge of Montreal's underworld and a rural hashslinger who likes nothing more than to listen to the police waveband. As for Yates, he's not so much Mike Garfin under a different name as a pale imitation. There's not much to him, and yet every woman, bar none, throws herself at him.

I lie.

There was that lady who was run over by the streetcar, but she never had a chance.

Worst sentence: "In that dress, in those surroundings, she looked like a poem that got printed by accident in an anthology of prose."

Object: A slim mass market paperback with vibrant cover image by Bob Peake, whose work graced this pretty pink book belonging to my mother:

Warner Brothers Presents My Fair Lady
New York: Warner Brothers Pictures, 1964

Access: The first edition enjoyed one lone printing. A handful are listed online, with decent copies gong for under ten dollars. I could find no library copies outside Ohio State University's William Charvet Collection of American Fiction. Yep, "American Fiction". The first British edition, published in 1961 by Consul, is both less attractive and less common. Two crummy copies are listed for sale online at £2 and £5.

Translated by Laurette Brunius, in 1956 Galimard published a French language edition titled Du Rebecca chez les femmes. The original features no character named Rebecca.

In 2006, a half century after the Gold Medal edition, The Deadly Dames was paired with Sanderson's next novel, A Dum-Dum for the President, and returned to print by the dedicated people at Stark House. The twofer is blessed with a very fine essay by expat Montreal critic Kevin Burton Smith, and an all too brief interview with the author. My copy, a second printing, was bought south of the border. The book is unavailable in Canada. 

The Retired Reverend King on Abolishing Death

A new Canadian Notes and Queries arrives bringing another Dusty Bookcase sur papier. This one, a bit longer than usual, focuses on that old odd bird Basil King's spiritualism.  Eternally fascinating.

Seth's superhero cover compliments an appreciation of Alvin Schwartz by Devon Code, my old dining parter Shaena Lambert contributes a new short story and Michel Basilières reviews The Sister Brothers. Steven W. Beattie, Marc Bell, Alex Boyd, Michael Bryson, Mark Callanan, Kerry Clare, Emily Donaldson, Aaron Gilbreath, Alex Good, Philip Marchand, John Martz, David Mason, K.D. Miller, Tara Murphy, Shane Nelson, Tina Northrup, Patricia Robertson, Christian Schumann, Kenneth Sherman, Zachariah Wells and Nathan Whitlock add to the goodness. But let me draw attention to Mike Barnes' contributions: an essay and The Reasonable Ogre, a Biblioasis chapbook featuring a new short story with illustrations by Segbingway.

Produced in an edition of 450 copies as a collectible for subscribers of CNQ. My copy's #149.

Information on subscriptions to Canadian Notes & Queries can be found here.

a/k/a Frank Tarbeaux

Tarboe: The Story of a Life
Gilbert Parker
Toronto: Copp Clarke, 1927

Imagine how old fashioned a fellow Sir Gilbert must have seemed when Tarboe first hit the bookstores. In 1927, the bewhiskered baronet had been a member of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council for nearly a decade. While he'd begun his career in fin de siecle London, the author had had nothing to do with Oscar Wilde, the Decadents and The Yellow Book. In the Jazz Age, Tarboe fought a losing battle against Men Without Women and To the Lighthouse for the reader's dollar.

Published late in the author's life, just five years before the end, Tarboe stands alone in a bibliography dominated by adventure romances and historic novels. What is meant to be "the story of a life" –  another man's life – is in reality nothing more than accounts of encounters Parker shared with a man named Frank Tarbeaux. Like the knighted Canadian novelist, the American Tarbeaux is pretty much forgotten today, but in his time he appeared with some regularity in English-language newspapers.

The New York Times, 21 April 1913

A colourful character, "The King of the Card Sharks", Tarbeaux's portrait is painted here by an unnamed journalist in the 10 August 1895 edition of the Auckland Star:

He is uneducated and quite illiterate, but he is as clever as a monkey at what is called, in thieves' slang, "faking the broads," bunko steering, slim gambling, the gyp game, three-card monte, and is a proficient horse-shark, and an expert in green goods.

Nearly every mention I can find of Tarboe describes the book as a novel. The title – Tarboe, not Tarbeaux – more than hints that liberties have been taken. Parker has changed names to protect the innocent, the not-so-innocent and, I expect, the litigious. Of those we see touched by the card-shark's hand, only three, Hawai'i's King Kalākaua, Prince Consort John Owen Dominis and author George W. Peck are accurately recorded.* I think it no coincidence that all were long dead at time of publication.

Tarboe is not a novel; the proof lies in its structure. Parker was far too fine a craftsman to have composed so a rambling story. Here he is constrained by fact, limited by both what he had witnessed and what he had been told by his subject.

The drama takes place far away from the restaurants, art galleries and Parisian streets in which Tarbeaux tells his tales. It's in a comfortable Melbourne hotel room that he claims to be the sole survivor of Custer's Last Stand. His adventures with bounty hunters in the Transvaal are related at the Bodega on the rue de Rivoli.

The years go by and, as Parker notes (with some boasting, I think), encounters become less frequent:

The interests of my life grew wider and I entered the British Parliament but I had travelled before that in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Austria, Italy, Germany, and nearly all the European States, and since then in America, South America and elsewhere. I met many distinguished and notorious people, but never one with such interest for me as Frank Tarboe.

The final encounter, at a New York restaurant, takes place only through Parker's persistent pursuit of his old acquaintance. "I was called Arizona Frank", says Tarboe, launching into a story of how he once performed with Buffalo Bill.

Parker makes it plain that he has great admiration for the card shark. I'll join in. As portrayed by Sir Gilbert, the Frank Tarbeaux of Tarboe, though a crook, seems a stand-up guy:

Here was a man capable of great things, now a gambler by lack of moral courage, a menace to society while he could have been its benefactor, criminal now though he might have become a saint.

These words, coming early in the book, are followed by this passage in the final pages:

I would sooner have gone to Frank Tarboe in trouble than any relative of mine, or any friend I ever had. I'm not ashamed to have known him, to have liked him much, and here I have put upon record some of his sins, and his folly; but if we would count sins and folly, how many would stand the test? 

Three years after the publication of Tarboe, Frank Tarbeaux told his story to Donald Henderson Clarke, a writer of risqué novels. The resulting "story of a life", published as The Autobiography of Frank Tarbeaux, is much more fanciful than Tarboe. Unlike Parker, Clarke transcribed, he did not question.

In the autobiography, Tarbeaux says this about a man whom he claims was his cousin: "I shot Bob Ford, got him through the right lung down in the Gunnison County, in Southern Carolina."

That's right, Frank Tarbeaux was the man who shot the man who shot Jesse James.

Don't you believe it.

Object: An attractive book in moss green cover with gilt lettering, the Copp Clarke edition features four woodcuts by American illustrator Harry Cimino.

My copy, bought a few months ago from a London bookseller for $3.00, once belonged to the Rodney Public Library. To be honest, I'm not at all sure that it's not their property still; there is no discard stamp. The library card indicates that it was last checked out in 1933.

Access: The Copp Clarke Canadian first is joined by editions published in England (Cassell) and the United States (Harper). I see no evidence that any but the English enjoyed a second printing (peut-être). Very Good copies of the Copp Clarke edition, sans dust jacket, begin at $12.00. While Tarboe is easily found in our universities, patrons of public libraries will have real problems.

* Well, kinda. Parker slips up in recording Peck's name as "James Peck".

Montreal Noir at Blue Metropolis

Just announced by the good folks at the Blue Metropolis festival, a month tomorrow I'll have the honour of hosting 'Montreal Noir', a panel discussion focusing on the city's forgotten pulp past:

Cheap, disposable and sensationalistic, Montreal’s pulp fiction took its place on Canadian and American newsstands sixty years ago. It has since been ignored, neglected and, in some cases, hidden by its authors. What was so shameful about these books and why are we reviving them now?

Joining me on stage will be Trevor Ferguson, Jim Napier and Will Straw. Actor Marcel Jeannin will be reading excerpts from the work of Montreal's three best noir novelists. Who they? Buy a ticket and find out.

Montreal Noir: The City's Forgotten Pulp Past

OPUS Montreal Hotel, Salon St-Laurent

10 Sherbrooke Street West

Saturday, 21 April, 8:30 pm 

Dr. Drummond's Curious St. Patrick's Day Poem

The Quebec Saturday Budget, 2 April 1892

"He only Wore a Shamrock" 

He only wore a shamrock
On his faithful Irish breast,
Maybe a gift from his colleen one,
The maiden whom he loved best;
But the emblem of dear old Ireland,
Tho' worn on a jacket of red,
Was the emblem of rank disloyalty,
And treason most foul, they said. 

Had he but borne the heather,
That grows on the Scottish hills,
A rose from an English garden,
Or a leek from the Cambrian rills,
Then he might summon his comrades,
With trumpet, and fife, and drum.
And march through the breadth of England,
Till trumpet and fife were dumb.
But he only wore a shamrock,
And tho' Britain's most gracious Queen
Had pinned her cross on his bosom,
Yet the little trefoil of green
Might not nestle down beside it,
For the color, alas! was banned,
And the Celtic soldier was made to feel
That he trod an alien land.

Oh! poor little modest symbol,
Of the glorious Trinity,
Rather bloom on your native hill-side,
Than cross the dark Irish sea;
Rather rest on the loving bosom,
Of the Mother that gave you birth,
For even your virtues can't chasten
The ungrateful English earth.

Atypical verse from William Henry Drummond, the poet we prefer to forget, "He only Wore a Shamrock" was inspired by an incident in which an Irish soldier in the British Army was punished for refusing to remove a shamrock from his non-dress uniform. We know this because the poet tells us much in an appended note that credits an anonymous headline writer for giving his poem its title:

Here's the thing: On 18 March 1894, a Sunday, there was no edition of the Gazette. While it's tempting to think that Drummond merely misremembered the year – the incident in question having taken place on  St Patrick's Day 1892 – there's no such heading in the 18 March 1892 edition. In fact, it wasn't until the next day that the story was broken by the Daily News. Despite dogged detective work, the Gazette heading has eluded me.

I'm not sure what to make of the  awkwardly composed quote. A sub-heading? Drummond's own words? In either case, it's all wrong. According to Hansard, Private O'Grady's bit 'o green was stuck not in a buttonhole, but his glengarry cap. More importantly, O'Grady was not court marshalled, but was received a punishment of 48 hours of hard labour.

William Henry Drummond, physician, poet and poor historian? Or is this just a case of poetic licence spilling over onto an explanatory note?

Irving Layton Rides a Rooster

Frank Newfeld doesn't figure in Irving Layton's memoir Waiting for the Messiah, he makes no appearance in Elspeth Cameron's 517-page Layton biography, and yet I'd argue that the designer's work played a key role in the poet's public persona.

I don't think I'm stepping out on too frail a limb in writing that The Laughing Rooster (working titles: Poems in Bad Taste and The Indelicate Touch) is the most illustrious Layton cover. It displays a bit of the whimsy that we might have seen in Newfeld's rejected "tits" cover for Leonard Cohen. Published by McClelland & Stewart in 1964, it opens in cinematic style with sixteen pages of images, credits, contents, dedication and more. At one point, rooster and poet face off.

The former seems to win – the rooster's image appears four more times before Layton begins his Preface.

Of course, it all really begins with Newfeld's first Layton cover, A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959). The poet's big press debut, it sold more than 8000 copies, elevating Layton to the level of national celebrity.

A Red Carpet for the Sun

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1959

Those eyes. Were they too intense for our cousins to the south? A different Newfeld design was used in the American edition. A shame. 

A Red Carpet for the Sun

Highlands, NC: Jonathan Williams, 1959

The Swinging Flesh

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961

Balls for a One-Armed Juggler

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963

Periods of the Moon

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967

Related posts:

McClelland's Expriment, Newfeld's Art

Frank Newfeld's Masterpiece (and Leonard Cohen's Unseen Face for Tits)

The Brilliance of Frank Newfeld

A Song for the Irving Layton Centenary

 
Irving Peter Layton
(né Israel Pincu Lazarovitch)
12 March 1912 – 4 January 2006

He is the light of our generation and after his 130 or 140 years are over and the man's removed from his work so that nothing lies between the reader and the work, the universe Irving created will shine forever.

– Leonard Cohen, 1997