The Hidden Robert Kroetsch

(cliquez pour agrandir)

Discovered last week in the little town of St Marys, Ontario, the key to understanding and properly recognizing the symbolism, messages and codes hidden within Robert Kroetsch's 1975 novel Badlands.

An unknown hand reveals the secrets, so many secrets, held by each and every paragraph – yes, each and every paragraph – of this 270-page novel.

I am now entertaining offers for this unique, invaluable volume.

Further images available upon request.

Serious enquiries only, please.

Beer, Broads and Blackmail Bring Confusion

Mark it for Murder
Douglas Sanderson
New York: Avon, [1959]

Douglas Sanderson had left Montreal behind as both a home and a setting when Mark it for Murder was published, but traces of the city remain. Just look at John Molson, the name of our hero. We're told next to nothing about this man, except that he once studied at the Sorbonne. Europeans take him for an American, but I wouldn't be so sure.

The opening pages of Mark it for Murder find Molson at a private club on the French Riviera. He gets plastered with a Swede, makes love on the beach with beautiful Julie Chirac and pummels her escort Roger Lascelles before being called away to attend to Joseph P. Craddock, his wealthy employer. On the way back the Mercedes Molson drives loses a wheel and careens off a cliff into the Mediterranean. He bails, rescuing Louise (another love interest) in the process.

Stripped to its bare bones, the beginning of the novel sounds rather silly, but it's actually very strong. Mark it for Murder features some of Sanderson's finest writing, particularly in its sketches of Spain:

So up and down they walk, making talk as adolescents make drawings on a lavatory wall. From the same motive and with the same innocence. I listened. Spaniards talk so loudly it is difficult not to listen. They were describing as true the things imagined before falling asleep the previous night. But their lies were gracious, interesting and enthusiastic. They enjoyed what they were saying and politely hid their disbelief in another man's story.

The change in location comes courtesy of Craddock. An aged blackmailing businessman who has found religion, he's by far the most realized and intelligent character in the novel. Craddock's violent death, depicted on the cover of Cry Wolfram, the Secker & Warwick edition, marks an unfortunate downturn.

Craddock really knew the ins and outs of the extortion business; now that he's no longer around to explain the novel becomes a confusing mess. Things get so bad that by the third to last chapter, Sanderson resorts to a sit-down with a chatty, campy, faux-English queen who happily answers any and all questions that Molson cares to pose. This is followed by a chapter in which all the key players gather in a room to hear out the accusations and theories of the local governor. And finally – in the final chapter – an attempt at a denouement as Molson and Louise take in a bullfight.

A frustrating book, it features a surprise ending with Molson losing Louise to a matador on the final page. I'm not sure why, but I'm sure Craddock could've explained it... or maybe the chatty, campy, faux-English queen.

Object: A fragile 160-page mass market paperback. Though labeled "An Avon Original", it looks to have been preceeded by Cry Wolfram, Secker & Warburg's UK first. Both editions enjoyed just a single printing each.

Access: Canadian library patrons will find Mark it for Murder at Concordia University and Library and Archives Canada. The University of Calgary and University of Victoria have Cry Wolfram.

Curiously, Cry Wolfram appears to be more common than Mark it for Murder. Seven copies of the former are listed online – all with dust jackets – at prices ranging from eight to thirty dollars. Very Good plus copies of Mark it for Murder can be had for between four and eighteen dollars. But hurry – only four copies are listed online.

A French translation using under Sanderson's Martin Brett pseudonym was published by Gallimard. Title: La semaine de bonté.

Not to be confused with Max Ernst's Une semaine de bonté.

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon and Her Critics

A fleeting follow-up to the previous post:

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon earned a English B.A. (Honours) at Queen's, though I don't see much evidence of this in Miriam of Queen's. What the university's website describes as a "critical success" received a mixed bag of reviews. The harshest appraisal comes from an anonymous critic in the December 1921 edition of Canadian Bookman:

The book gives one the idea that Mrs. MacKinnon enjoyed her student life under "Geordie" Grant to the full, and wants to enable others to see it as she did, but is handicapped in her effort by a desire to stick to literal facts. It is somewhat as if one were to attempt to describe  the life of a great university by reproducing a sophomore's diary.

There's more, of course, but I've chosen these words because they touch on the autobiographical nature of the novel. It's this reading of Miriam of Queen's – as a roman à clef – that brought the most positive reviews, like this one in The Ottawa Citizen:

Many of the characters in "Miriam of Queen's" will be recognized. There is for instance her father, a good civil servant. "Roderick Campbell had been in the government employ in increasingly responsible positions since he had moved to Ottawa from the Island of Cape Breton. Highly esteemed, reserved to the point of austerity, a scholarly man, books were his favorite pastime." The Campbell's lived "in a substantial brick house set among the trees" in the Capital.

Like Miriam, Lilian Vaux MacKinnon called Ottawa home, and like her heroine she travelled widely. The Citizen review describes Marion of Queen's as being "almost Dominion-wide in its scope, the scenes extending from the countryside to Cape Breton to the cities of eastern, middle and western Canada."

And so I'm left shaking my head over this:

Canadian Bookman, June 1922

Never assume that a reviewer has actually read the book in question.

Related post:

Back to School with Miriam of Queen's

Back to School with Miriam of Queen's

Miriam of Queen's

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1921

Imagine, a Canadian college novel published just one year after This Side of Paradise.

I expected nothing quite so impressive from Miriam of Queen's. That said, what I'd thought would be a light fin de l'été read turned out to be the year's toughest slog; it took three runs at the first chapter before I found my footing. The opening pages bring Elizabeth Danvers, Aunt Laura, Mrs Roderick Campbell, Pauline, Sedley, John Hielanman, Aunt Hannah, Cora Hotchkiss and, of course Miriam. Many more will follow. Most, though not all, are related in some way to one another – but how? It's much like being thrust into a wedding reception at which one knows no one. Indeed, a wedding is in the offing, as Mrs Roderick Campbell reveals:

"You're getting another son, Ellen. Isn't that the modern form of consolation? And a bookish sort like Sedley, too." She turned suddenly to listen. "That is not his voice now is it? Mr. Rutherford's, I mean. It sounds familiar, though."
     "And so it should be, my dear," Mrs. Danvers rejoined, rising and leading the way across the hall. "It should be familiar, since it is your own nephew's – Fyfe Boulding, you know. He is to have a little part in tomorrow's ceremony, just a bit of distraction because of his connection."

I'm of the opinion that there's much to be learned from bad writing. In Miriam of Queen's lessons come  on every page, and are of such clarity that I feel no need to do anything but present. This paragraph comes at the end of Miriam's first year:

And at last came the days of the trial, when Convocation Hall was turned into a vast arena, where the competitors gathered in mortal combat and the witnesses were those bygone seers on the wall who, unmoved, had witnessed many a struggle, from their eventual element of calm, and whose lofty gaze inspired the frantic souls below to fight on. Elbowed by a science man on one hand, by a theologian on the other, Miriam wrote away. All her store of hardy-won knowledge was registered once and for all on paper, before the cares of this work-a-day world should have blotted it out. There was something fitting in the act, and a feeling of triumph visited those well-doers who were enabled to give an account at last of the laborious days they had lived.

Prose such as this leaves little room for plot. Miriam, our heroine, attends Queen's and looks on as dramatic events envelope others. Kind-hearted Cousin Sedley makes the mistake of marrying a vicious and vacuous flirt. Cousin Fyfe, a ne'er do well, is arrested, tried, and sent to Kingston Penitentiary. But before this takes place, in the most dramatic scene, both fall in the drink whilst playing hockey:

They are coming from all quarters. The ice is blackening with fleet figures. Will it be too late? The girls are lying flat and Elizabeth has caught Sedley's foot and Miriam, Elizabeth's, and the living chain moves nearer. Slowly, slowly, and oh, how carefully! Up, up and cautiously, cautiously! Out of the deathly waters, over the treacherous edge, Fyfe Boulding is drawn to safety. Then, just as the cry of thanskgiving rises to their lips, the ice gives way under double strain. there is an ominous crack, the sound of heavy body splashing down, and as Boulding creeps to safety Sedley Danvers goes down, down, into the icy waters of Lake Ontario.
     Stretch out your stick to save him now! If he can come up! Will he strike under the ice? Will the current bear him away? Or is there a chance, one chance in a thousand, that he may be seen again? The crowd presses nearer, strong arms stretch out to aid. Yes, there it is, that dark, struggling, helpless object at the edge of the break. Too late! Down, down it goes, while a cry of anguish breaks from the lips of the onlookers. Once more, once it comes. Now, men, now! They reached him , they drag him out, white and sodden and spent. Miriam, turning in horror from that death-like form, looks into Hugh Stewart's face.
     "Oh, Hugh,!" she screams. "Take me home! Take me home! Sedley is drowned! Don't you see? Sedley is drowned!"
    But no! It is a collapse, consequent on shock and exhaustion.

As I say, there's much to be learned from prose such as this.

The Regina Leader-Post, 17 December 1921

Any value in Miriam of Queen's lies in what it captures of student life at Queen's University during the earliest years of the last century. Though their debut novels were published so close together, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Lilian Vaux MacKinnon were of different generations. Mrs MacKinnon graduated from Queen's in 1902, a decade before the petting parties of Princeton. Her university experience – and Miriam's – consisted of muscular Christianity, college songs and fleeting glimpses of the Very Reverend George Monro Grant.

Modest mention in the 12 September 1942 Regina Leader-Post has Mrs MacKinnon as the author of two novels: Miriam of Queen's and The Guinea Stamp. I can find no record of the latter. The Queen's University Archives holds the manuscript of an unpublished romance "set near Brockville"  with the rather ribald title Hard by St. Lawrence.

Unpublished?

I'm not at all surprised.

Object: An attractive hardcover in mustard cloth. I found my copy nine years ago in a Vancouver Salvation Army Thrift Store. Price: $2.

Access: A very scarce title, it appears that the only public library carrying the book serves the good folks of Toronto; Kingston's has no copy.

Miriam of Queen's enjoyed a single run, split by McClelland & Stewart and George H. Doran. All of two editions, the latter is by far the least common. One copy of each is listed for sale online. At US$75, the less expensive is a "Fair to Good, Reading Copy" McClelland & Stewart edition. The other is the one to buy: a Near Fine copy of the American first in "Very Good plus dustjacket" for US$175.

Great price! Take note, Kingston Frontenac Public Library.

The Poetic Martin Brett

Cast your eyes on what is surely the most elegant Douglas Sanderson item. Printed with a Vandercook SP-15 press on St. Armand Old Master Rideau paper, In The Darkness is the work of J.C. Byers.

Mr Byers gives us extracts from four of Sanderson's Martin Brett novels "presented so as to highlight the poetic elements of noir novels."

The above, drawn from the opening of Hot Freeze, is a favourite, but the one that really got to me comes from The Darker Traffic:

This was a night
When I needed a friend,
In case I opened my eyes
In the darkness
And had nothing
     intimate and
     familiar and
     trivial
To talk about,
To make me stop
     remembering
That the little kid
With the big eyes
Was dead.

In The Darkness was produced in an edition of twenty numbered copies. I'm told that this is just the first in a series and that the hard boiled epigrams of David Montrose are next.

Those hoping to add a copy to their library can contact J.C. Byers through Wollamshram's Blog.

The photographs do not do it justice.

Thirty Years After Thirty Years at Stratford

Thirty Years at Stratford
Robertson Davies
Stratford, ON: Stratford Festival, 1982

Christopher Plummer left town a few days ago, signalling the coming end of Stratford's sixtieth season. Oh, the shows will go on – some for two more months – but the crowds will thin, temperatures will fall, and the ladies will begin wearing shawls and wraps. It's my favourite part of the season.

Delivered thirty years ago yesterday, the day after the great man's 69th birthday, this lecture is a souvenir of a familiar time – one in which the festival was fighting for funds, and against declining ticket sales. Be not deceived by its title, this not a history – "Shakespeare has reminded us in many passages of the tediousness of the oft-told tale", Davies tells us – rather it's an attempt to properly place the festival within the history of Canadian theatre.

Dry stuff?

Not at all.

I ramble a bit, but then so does Davies. The Festival Theatre crowd that night was treated to the raising of the ghost of Sarah Bernhardt, a tender tickling and ribbing of puritans, and the drawing of parallels between Beautiful Joe, Little Lord Fauntleroy and E.T. I'd have fallen off my seat.

At its heart Davies' lecture is a celebration of Stratford, a lively schooling of those who attack the festival as being something somehow not Canadian. But at the end I found my mind returning to Davies' opening remarks about the "oft-told tale":

Of course, the story of the very long chance that at last romps home with the prize is one of the best stories in the world, but insofar as it applies to Stratford, you have heard it.

Yes. Yes, I have. As those ladies in shawls age, and I find my middle-aged self counted amongst the youngest patrons, I wonder if it isn't time to let the younger generation in on it.

A personal note: "Canada has had a theatre ever since it had good-sized towns," writes Davies, "and it says something about our ancestors – something we often forget – that they regarded a theatre as a necessary part of a good-sized town."

Sure enough, at the centre of my adopted town of St Marys, seventeen kilometres south of Stratford, rests this magnificent opera house:

It's a mere fine-minute stroll from the inn at which Plummer stays when he plays Stratford.

Object: Sixteen glossy staple-bound pages with card covers. I purchased my sun-bleached copy for $1.50 last year in Montreal. A festival price sticker indicates that it originally sold for $2.50.

Access: A rare item, only three copies are currently listed by online booksellers. The cheapest, in Fine condition, is going for US$25. At US$30, the most expensive is offered by a confused bookseller who pitches "signed at back", then adds "hard to tell if it is printed or signed." Hard to tell? How absurd. Here's my "signed" copy:

Believe me, you can tell.

Collecting Norman Levine (Arts '48)

A collector writes today in response to my column in the new Norman Levine issue of Canadian Notes & Queries: "You mentioned that you asked Levine if you could use one of his stories in an anthology. Was it ever published?"

Indeed it was. The story in question, "My Karsh Picture" was included in Classics Canada, Book 2 (Prentice-Hall Canada, 1994), the second of six ESL textbooks I co-edited with Patricia Brock.

Looking it over all these years later, I see that the story appears between Daniel David Moses' "King of the Raft" and "April Fish" by Mavis Gallant; selections by Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Irving Layton, bonnet-babe Susanna Moodie and a bunch of other CanLit names also feature.

Must admit that despite my great admiration and appreciation, I've never really collected Levine's work myself. I have only five of his books, my favourite being a copy of the Porcupine's Quill Canada Made Me, which he inscribed nineteen years ago at Westmount's Double Hook Bookstore.

My most cherished Levine items are those I inherited from my father: the 1947 and 1948 issues of Forge, McGill's University's literary magazine.

These three issues feature some of Levine's earliest published work, most of it uncollected: the poems "Myssium", "Circles", "It Was a Dull Day", "Autumn" and "A Dead Airman Speaks"; the short story "Our Life is to Be Envied"; and "Prologue", which would today be described as creative non-fiction. Levine served as Poetry Editor in the 1947 issues and was elevated to Editor for the lone 1948 number.

Old McGill '48

He and my father attended McGill at the same time and were in the same faculty and graduating class. I don't know that they ever encountered one another. I like to think so. Both R.C.A.F. vets, they had a good deal in common.

Old McGill '48

Advertising Norman Levine

Jack McClelland never tried to hide his dislike for Norman Levine's Canada Made Me; that his house acted as Canadian distributor was the result of an early promise made to its UK publisher. McClelland & Stewart took 500 copies, shipped 300, sent a further thirty or so out as review copies and sat back. There were no ads.

The above, put together by my daughter Astrid for the current issue of Canadian Notes & Queries, was inspired by a 12 December 1958 letter Levine sent Jack McClelland:

Writes Levine: "Do you mind me suggesting the kind of ad I'd like to see appear in those Canadian papers."

No question mark.

I think he knew the answer.

Astrid followed Levine's text and rough layout, all the while considering these McClelland & Stewart ads from 1958... four decades before she was born.

The Gazette, 1 November 1958

The Gazette, 15 November 1958

The Gazette, 13 December 1958

More in the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries.

Subscribe today!

Recognizing Norman Levine

The new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries landed in my mail box on Friday – a few days late owing, I suspect, to an ill-tempered sorting machine.

My heart sank... until I discovered that everything had arrived intact. Now I boast: "officially repaired". How special is that!

I always look forward to Canadian Notes & Queries, but this issue was more eagerly anticipated than most. Its focus is Norman Levine, a writer who has never received anything close to the attention he deserves. Happily, this issue goes some way in redressing the deficit, with:

"Kaddish (A Sketch Towards a Portrait of Norman Levine)"
by John Metcalf
"All the Heart is in the Things: Mapping Levine-land" by Cynthia Flood
"Chasing Norman: A Book-collector's Memoir" by Philip Fernandez
"Remembering Norman Forgetting" by T.F. Rigelhof
"Fiction, Faction, Autobiography: Norman Levine at McGill University, 1946-1949" by Robert H. Michel

and

Ethan Rilly's adaptation of Canada Made Me, episode six in his "The North Wing: Selections from the Lost Library of CanLit Graphic Novels"

Much more modest, my contribution covers correspondence between Levine, Jack McClelland and Putnum's John Huntington relating to Canada Made Me.

Further riches are found in a new short story by Lynn Coady, poetry by Mathew Henderson and a piece of creative non-fiction by my old pal Andrew Steinmetz.

You'll also find my review of Fraser Sutherland's Lost Passport: The Life and Words of Edward Lacey.

And finally, there's this issue's limited edition collectable, Signal to Noise, an excerpt from C.P. Boyko's forthcoming collection Psychology and Other Stories.

My copy is number 159.

The collectables are only for those with subscriptions.

You know you want one.

Here's the link.

Saturday Night with the Alpha Jerks

Montreal's beloved Alpha Jerks – Dan Babineau, Thomas Bachelder, James Malloch and novelist manqué Daniel Richler –  caught on film as "The Eatables", from the 1980 Alison Burns' film of the same name.

Related post:

One Band Wonder?

Les Anciens Québécois

Le Nom dans le bronze
Michelle Le Normand [pseud. Marie-Antoninette Desrosiers]
Montreal: Éditions de Devoir, 1933

Well, didn't this turn out to be a timely read.

A short novel, Le nom dans le Bronze seems at first a light and pleasant love story. Our heroine, Marguerite Couillard, is the youngest daughter of a bourgeois family in the Quebec town of Sorel. Steven Bayle, the object of her affection, doesn't quite qualify as our hero, but he's not a villain either. Frankly, he's a pretty swell guy and a bit of a catch; even for Marguerite. Though an anglophone, Steven appears entirely at home in French Canadian society; were it not for his pesky Protestant faith one might even consider him assimilated. However, as their love grows, storm clouds gather in the ciel lourd that opens the novel. Family and community shudder at the possibility of a "marriage mixte", pressing upon Marguerite "la différence de sang et la disparité de religion".

An intervention disguised as an invitation to visit friends in Quebec City brings an abrupt change in genre. What began as a romance novel becomes a Micheline guide, with Marguerite taking in the sights as friend Philippe fills her in on the history of the city, the province and her own family. "Il y avait à Québec deux générations de Couillard, quand on construisit cette chapelle", he says before the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, so named after the respective defeats of Englishmen William Phips and Hovenden Walker. "Mais en 1759, l'ère des Victoires était passée et la chapelle fut incendiée par les bombes de Wolfe. Ce sont encore les mêmes murs, toutefois..."

The pressure put on Marguerite is relentless and none too subtle. "Rien n'est plus affaiblissant pour notre peuple que ces marriages mixtes", she's told by her father. "Justement ce matin, je m'irritais de constater combien des nôtres, pendant la guerre, ont épousé des Anglaises d'outre-mer..."

The coup de grâce comes when Marguerite is taken to see the statue of Louis Hébert, and its plaque bearing the names of Quebec's earliest settlers. She not only learns that she is a decedent, but sees that she bears the same name – Marguerite Couillard – as one of her ancestors. Le nom dans le bronze. Says Philippe, "Marguerite, épousez un homme au nom aussi respectable, et appelez votre premier fils: Couillard..."

And Bayle? Really, how respectable is that?

Their love is doomed. Sacrifices must be made for one's "race".

Le Nom dans le bronze is a work from a different time. Times change, but we see remnants in the chronic xenophobia that plagues Pauline Marois' efforts to become the next premier of Quebec. Surrounded, as she is, by her base, she cannot see that her words alienate more than just those she considers les autres. And so, we have an election in which a scandal-ridden, disgraced and very tired Liberal government is still in contention.

What Ms Marois fails to recognize is that her brand of bigoted, frightened nationalism began dying decades ago, and that a much younger, more confident generation – what Chantal Hébert astutely refers to as "the Arcade Fire generation" – want nothing to do with her kind.

Trivia: The name "Marguerite Couillard" really does feature on the plaque in question (though, sadly, it can't be made out in this image).

Object: Rather bland paper wraps cover what is an otherwise attractive book. My first edition copy was bought last year from a bookseller in the village of St-Malachie, some 50 kilometres south-east of Quebec City.

Access: Though reprinted no less than three times in the 'fifties, Le Nom dans le bronze is surprisingly hard to come by. Four copies are currently listed for sale online, only one of which is a first edition. Leather-bound, signed, inscribed and dated, this is the one to buy – a bargain at US$97.75.

Canada's 100 Best Books? 102? 111?

Something strange stumbled upon yesterday, this list intended for "people in other countries interested in Canadian literature" from the 1 May 1948 edition of the Ottawa Citizen. Odd and awkward, it was cobbled together at the behest of UNESCO by a committee of eight: E.K. Brown, Philip Child, William Arthur Deacon, F.C. Jennings, Watson Kirkconnell, Lorne Pierce, B.K. Sandwell and W. Stewart Wallace. How anti-commie kook Kirkconnell justified his participation I cannot say.*

The headline in the Citizen is deceiving. Yes, it's meant to be a list of the 100 best, but there are eleven too many. Most of the overrun comes courtesy of Mazo de la Roche's Whiteoak Chronicles, which then numbered ten volumes. The others? Well, one might just be Tom MacInnes' Collected Poems, which doesn't exist.

As I say, odd and awkward. William Osler didn't write The Master Word, but he was the author of The Master-Word in Medicine; Joseph Schull's The Legend of Ghost Lagoon is listed as The Legend of Lost Lagoon; and poor B.K. Sandwell suffers the indignity of being called B.S. Sandwell.

"A list of Canadian books of special merit written in French is also to be compiled by a similar committee", we're told. By whom? Who knows. I find no trace of the committee or its list. What we're to make of the inclusion of Pierre Esprit Radisson's Voyages – recorded as Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson – on the English-language list I cannot say.

Despite the flaws, it's all good fun... for me, at least. So many unfamiliar titles, so many unfamiliar names and so much to explore, the list begins with a forgotten collection of short stories by Will R. Bird:

Sunrise for Peter – Will R. Bird
The Strait of Anian – Earle Birney

Brown Waters – W.H. Blake
North Atlantic Triangle – John Bartlet Brebner
A Dryad in Nanaimo – Audrey Alexandra Brown
James Wilson Morrice – Donald W. Buchanan
The Search for the Western Sea – Lawrence J. Burpee
Now That April's Here – Morley Callaghan
Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell – Wilfred Campbell
Bliss Carman – James Cappon
Bliss Carman's Poems – Bliss Carman
Klee Wyck – Emily Carr
Jean Racine – A.F.B. Clark
Christianity and Classical Culture – Charles Norris Cochrane
Postscript to Adventure – Ralph Connor
Father on the Farm – Kenneth C. Cragg
Collected Poems of Isabella Valancy Crawford – Isabella Valancy Crawford

Dominion of the North – Donald Creighton

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks – Robertson Davies
The Government of Canada – Robert MacGregor Dawson
Whiteoak Chronicles – Mazo de la Roche
The Law Marches West – Cecil E. Denny
Complete Poems –  William Henry Drummond
Grand River – Mabel Dunham
The Art of the Novel – Pelham Edgar
A Study on Goethe – Barker Fairley
Poems – Robert Finch
Fearful Symmetry – Northrop Frye
Arctic Trader – Philip H. Godsell
Napoleon Tremblay – Angus Graham
Earth and High Heaven – Gwethalyn Graham
Pilgrims of the Wild – Grey Owl
Fruits of the Earth – Frederick Philip Grove
Over Prairie Trails – Frederick Philip Grove
A Search for America – Frederick Philip Grove
Brave Harvest – Kennethe M. Haig
Sam Slick – Thomas Chandler Haliburton
All the Trumpets Sounded – W.G. Hardy
Saul – Charles Heavysege
The Drama of the Forests – Arthur Heming
Father Lacombe – Katherine Hughes
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada – Anna Brownell Jameson
Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America – Paul Kane
Lord Elgin – W.P.M. Kennedy
The Golden Dog – William Kirby
Bride of Quietness – Alexander Knox
Selected Poems of Archibald Lampman – Archibald Lampman
Lake Huron – Fred Landon

Leacock Roundabout – Stephen Leacock
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town – Stephen Leacock
From Colony to Nation – A.R.M. Lower
Out of the Wilderness – Wilson MacDonald
Collected Poems – Tom MacInnes
The Honourable Company – Douglas MacKay
Barometer Rising – Hugh MacLennan
Tales of the Sea – Archibald MacMechan
Lord Strathcona – John MacNaughton
The Master's Wife – Andrew Macphail
In Pastures Green – Peter McArthur

The Champlain Road – Franklin Davey McDowell
The Unguarded Frontier – Edgar McInnis
Who Has Seen the Wind – W.O. Mitchell
Roughing It in the Bush – Susanna Moodie
Gauntlet to Overlord – Ross Munro
Lord Durham – Chester W. New
Mine Inheritance – Frederick Niven
Pindar – Gilbert Norwood
The Master Word – William Osler
A Book of Canadian Stories – Desmond Pacey
When Valmond Came to Pontiac – Gilbert Parker
The Complete Poems of Marjorie Pickthall – Marjorie Pickthall
Collected Poems – E.J. Pratt
Voyages of Peter [sic] Esprit Radisson – Pierre Esprit Radisson
His Majesty's Yankees – Thomas H. Raddall
Wisdom of the Wilderness – Charles G.D. Roberts
The Leather Bottle – Theodore Goodridge Roberts
The Incomplete Anglers –  J.D. Robins
Toronto During the French Regime –  Percy J. Robinson
As for Me and My House – Sinclair Ross
Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter – Laura Salverson
Flashing Wings –  Richard M. Saunders
Legend of Lost [sic] Lagoon –  Joseph Schull
The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott –  Duncan Campbell Scott
In the Village of Viger – Duncan Campbell Scott
Wild Animals I Have Known – Ernest Thompson Seton
The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe – Elizabeth Simcoe
Man's Rock –  Bertrand W. Sinclair
Egerton Ryerson –  C.B. Sissons
Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier –  Oscar Douglas Skelton
The Yellow Briar – Patrick Slater

The Book of Canadian Poetry –  A.J.M. Smith
Policing the Arctic – Harwood Steele
Sir Frederick Banting –  Lloyd Stevenson
The Friendly Arctic –  Vihjalmur Stefansson
Under the Northern Lights –  Alan Sullivan
Plowing the Arctic –  G.J. Tranter
Salt, Seas and Sailormen –  Frederick William Wallace
James Wolfe –  W.T. Waugh
The Owl Pen –  Kenneth McNeill Wells
The Birth of Language –  R.A. Wilson
The Canadians –  George M. Wrong
The Rise and Fall of New France –  George M. Wrong

What, no Wacousta?

I've read six.

* "At the close of the Second World War, the Russians took a leading part, along with 'capitalist imperialists,' in organizing another League of Nations, the so-called 'United Nations.' and the Communist Party of the U.S.A. joined in a psalm of praise over the new turn in policy."

–  Watson Kirkconnell, "Communism in Canada and the United States",

Canadian Catholic Historical Association Report 15 (1947-1948)