Anyone Care about the Ryerson Fiction Award?

It's not found in The Canadian Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature or W.H. New's Companion to Canadian Literature; the three-volume History of the Book in Canada limits mention to a single sentence; misnamed the "Ryerson Fiction Prize", fleeting reference is made in The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature – yet in mid-20th-century Canada the Ryerson Fiction Award was second only to the Governor General's Award. Authors were encouraged to submit manuscripts to Ryerson, which in turn would publish the winning work.

The Cambridge error is understandable. The award-winning titles I've seen invariably feature a page listing past recipients, similar to the one above from Evelyn M. Richardson's Desired Haven. Each repeats this bit of awkwardness:

THE RYERSON FICTION AWARD

The All-Canada Prize Novels

Most dust jackets add to the confusion in trumpeting "The All-Canada Fiction Award".

The Ryerson Fiction Award... The All-Canada Prize... The All-Canada Fiction Award... Whatever the name, it seems clear that by "fiction" Ryerson meant "novel." As for "All-Canada"? Well, our French-language novelists need not submit.

First presented in 1942, the award moved in fits and starts. There was no recipient in its second year... or its third... no award in 1946, 1948, 1951, 1952 or 1955 either. Some years saw the honour go to two titles. It was last presented in 1960.

Does anyone care about the Ryerson Fiction Award? Did anyone care about the Ryerson Fiction Award? I imagine the winners were delighted, but I see no evidence that it made much of an impression on the public. Only one title, Will R. Bird's Here Lies Good Yorkshire, enjoyed a second printing, and only five have ever appeared in paperback. The academics don't appear to have been much impressed. Writing in Queen's Quarterly, Desmond W. Cole concluded his review of 1958 winner Gladys Taylor's The King Tree:

If this is the "All-Canada Fiction Award" as the dust cover asserts, it has been a slim year for the novel, or at least for the publisher who has the presumption to imply that this is the best work of fiction published in Canada in the past year.

Edward McCourt's Music at the Close is the only title to have been included in the New Canadian Library. Tellingly, I think, the author used the opportunity to revise the text. NCL has since dropped the novel.

All I've seen of the first winner, G. Herbert Sallans' Little Man, is the little jpeg above. A shame. Going by bookseller Stephen Temple's description, Little Man is the Ryerson Fiction Award-winner I'd most like to read:

A novel covering four decades of Canadian life, set in Canada, France and Britain. "The author is merciless in his handling of shoddy Top Hats, fake Utopia Builders, spurious Abundant Lifers and Crack Pots of all sorts." – jacket.

"I remember when this was a very common book that no one wanted," continues Mr Temple. "It is surprisingly scarce, and saleable, in the market today. But it ain't no four figure book, not even close."

That last sentence appears to be a dig at an Oregon bookseller who demands an even US$1000 for a jacket-less copy in Fair condition. Mr Temple's, a Very Good copy in Good dust jacket, is being offered for US$85. My birthday is in August.

The thirteen other Ryerson Fiction Award-winners follow.

I've read one.

You?

Here Stays Good Yorkshire
Will R. Bird
1945

Day of Wrath
Philip Child
1945

Music at the Close
Edward McCourt
1947

Judgement Glen
Will R. Bird
1947

Mr. Ames Against Time
Philip Child
1949

Blaze of Noon
Jeann Beattie
1950

Desired Haven
Evelyn M. Richardson
1953

Immortal Rock
Laura Goodman Salverson
1954

Pine Roots
Gladys Taylor
1956

Repent at Leisure
Joan Walker
1957

The King Tree
Gladys Taylor
1958

Prairie Harvest
Arthur G. Storey
1959

Short of the Glory
E.M. Granger Bennett
1960

Mr. Steven Against Company Policy

Thanks goes out to Jim B. for helping to identify the artist behind the handsome jacket to Philip Child's Mr. Ames Against Time, the subject of Wednesday's post. He is Arthur Steven, who from 1947 to 1970 served as Art Director of Ryerson Press. Mr Steven's illustration is wider than previously pictured, stretching from the spine to just inside the front flap. Clicking on the cover below will bring a nice-sized image.

Captured is the novel's opening scene:

The court-house clock boomed five times and Mr. Ames performed the rite of taking out his watch. It never failed to give him a small satisfaction to find that his watch was exactly on time, for he was a man who liked things in order: watch in order, clothes however shabby in order, conscience neatly in order.
   A dog chased a cat across Mr. Ames' path...

At the right, we can see the Urania Burlesque Theatre, at which Mr. Ames serves as doorman.

Randall Speller has written a very fine piece on the artist, "Arthur Steven at the Ryerson Press: Designing the Post-War Years (1949-1969)" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Cahiers De La Société Bibliographique Du Canada, Fall/Automne 2003), in which we find this:

In opposition to company policy during these early years, Steven was able to discreetly insert his name or an initial on the occasional dust jacket or illustration, something that appears to have been easier in the early 1950s. The jackets for Philip Child's Mr. Ames against Time [sic] (1949), J.V. McAree's Cabbagetown Store (1953), and William Arthur Deacon's The 4 Jameses (1953), among others, are signed "Steven" in very small letters; Isabelle Hughes' The Wise Brother (1954) and the map endpapers of Marjorie Freeman Campbell's Niagara: Hinge of the Golden Arc (1958) are signed with a very small 'S' in the lower right corner. These "signatures" are the first indicators of a consistent design presence at Ryerson in the post-Thoreau MacDonald years.

This, of course, has sent me running to the bookcase. Sure enough, I found "STEVEN" by the side of the road on the cover of Cabbagetown Store.

On the jacket he produced for Ryerson's The 4 Jameses, a favourite, "STEVEN" can be seen near the bottom right-hand corner.

And, also bottom right, there's that "S" on the cover of The Wise Brother.

I found no other jackets signed "STEVEN" or "S" in my modest collection of Ryerson Press books – just forty-two in all – but that doesn't mean I won't keep looking.

Related post:

Mr. Child's Simple Story of Dramatic Suspense

Mr. Child's Simple Story of Dramatic Suspense

Mr. Ames Against Time

Philip Child

Toronto: Ryerson, 1949

244 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related post:

Mr. Steven Against Company Policy
(in which the cover artist is identified)

An Old Poem for the New Year by Arthur Stringer

from Open Water
(New York: John Lane, 1914)

Related posts:

A New Year

Immature Verse for the New Year

Temperance Verse for New Year's Day

Mistake at Beechwood Cemetery?

As 2012 draws to a close, I find myself wondering whether this was the year in which we should have been celebrating the sesquicentennial of William Wilfred Campbell's birth. If so, where would we have held the parade?

It's a mystery to me that such uncertainty envelopes the date and place of this Confederation Poet's birth. After all, 'twas only 150 (or so) years ago; one would think that the son of an Anglican clergyman would have a good solid record of his christening.

The plaque pictured above, standing not twenty paces from Campbell's grave at Ottawa's Beechwood Cemetery, tells visitors that the poet's year of birth was 1862, yet the unusual bench/memorial marking the grave itself records the year as 1858.

In her Introduction to William Wilfred Campbell: Selected Poetry and Essays (1987), editor Laurel Boone writes that the poet was born in 1860 at Athens, a township not too far from Brockville in eastern Ontario. Ms Boone revises her claim in the fourteenth volume of The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1994), providing only a probable date – 15 June 1860 – and a likely place of birth: Newmarket, some 300 or so kilometres to the west. 

 Tracy Ware is confident in The Canadian Encyclopedia, naming Berlin – now Kitchener – as Campbell's birthplace, but shows caution concerning the date: "1 June 1858?"

In his Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature, W.H. New shows no hesitation whatsoever: "b Berlin (Kitchener), ON, 1 June 1858".

The entry George Wicken penned for The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature challenges with the pronouncement that Campbell was born in 1860 "in Newmarket, Canada West (not in Berlin/Kitchener, in 1858, as has been supposed)".

from The Poems of Wilfred Campbell (Toronto: William Briggs, 1905)

All agree, at least, that Campbell was born somewhere in Ontario in 1858 or 1860, but there's not a single source out there that supports 1862, the year cast (pun intended) by Beechwood. I'd like to think that the cemetery's plaque is the result of further research, but I'm not so sure. My queries have brought this response:

From the information available in our records, the informant for the passing of Mr. William Wilfred Campbell was his son in law [sic] Mr. E. Malloch. He is probably the person who provided the information on Mr. Campbell to the funeral home (‘Rogers & Burney Fineral Home’) and to the cemetery. Our records indicate that Mr. Campbell was 56 when he passed, that is why you get the ‘abt 1862’ year of birth on the ancestry website. We do not have any other details on the date of birth. 

Confidence is further shaken by the plaque itself, which sums up Campbell's life in just two sentences:

AN OUTSTANDING FIGURE IN CANADIAN POETRY, CAMPBELL HAD A LONG AND DISTINGUISHED CAREER AS A WRITER, CLERGYMAN AND CIVIL SERVANT. HE AUTHORED MANY NOVELS AND WAS APPOINTED INTO THE DEPARTMENT OF MILITIA IN 1883 AND THEN IN 1897 MOVED TO THE PRIVY COUNCIL OFFICE.

"HE AUTHORED MANY NOVELS"?

I knew of two obscurities, Ian of the Orcades (1906) and A Beautiful Rebel (1909), when I began this investigation. I've since learned of a third, "Richard Fizzell", which was serialized in 1909 and 1910 issues of The Christian Guardian (it has never appeared in book form). Apparently, two others exist as manuscripts only. 

Can this be considered "MANY"?

Perhaps.

Meanwhile, the real Mystery at Beechwood Cemetery remains unsolved.

Maybe next year.

Christmas Verse by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

from Fires of Driftwood (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922) 

A Merry Christmas to all!

Related posts:

Christmas Verse from Master of All Poets James Gay
Arthur Stringer Pines for Christmas Past

Christmas Greetings from Gay Page!

Miss Machar's 'The Call of Christmas - 1914'

A Neglected Novelist's Neglected Grave

Three photographs taken yesterday in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery at the gravesite of Peregrine Acland, author of All Else is Folly, and his wife Mary Louise Danforth.

Related post:
Peregrine Acland: Fifty Years
The Great Canadian Great War Novel

Grumbles About Gumble & Praise for Stark House

Looking back, I see this as a year of reading riches bookended by two great disappointments. In January it was Douglas Durkin's Mr. Gumble Sits Up, the story of an indebted, tired man whose rest in peace is interrupted when he returns to life at his funeral. December brought Tan Ming, a self-published, pseudonymous fantasy penned by electronic organ pioneer Morse Robb. It's the tale of an Eaton's window dresser who falls in love with a mannequin, uses magic to make her come alive, and then flees into a post-apocalyptic future.

Oh, but don't both sound fun?

Mr. Gumble Sits Up and Tan Ming ended up being the two hardest slogs of the year; at 471 deathly dull and dense pages of text, the latter was particularly trying. My now eleven-month-old post on Mr. Gumble Sits Up can be found through this link. Anyone interested in hearing more about Tan Ming will have to wait for a future Dusty Bookcase column in Canadian Notes & Queries.

Of the thirty-two titles reviewed here and in CNQ, I count three novels that should be reissued forthwith. All are by Margaret Millar, the pride of Kitchener, Ontario:

     Wall of Eyes
     Beast in View
     An Air that Kills

Not one is available in Canada, which isn't to say that they can't be purchased abroad. Orion reissued Beast in View under its Phoenix imprint just last year, while An Air that Kills is available in the United States courtesy of California publisher Stark House.

This year's tip of the hat and pat on the back goes to Stark House for having returned An Air that Kills to print, along with five other Canadian novels:

An Air that Kills/Do Evil in Return – Margaret Millar

I won't pretend to have read all twenty-five Margaret Millar novels, but I have An Air that Kills. The best thus far, my take can be found here:

Margaret Millar and the Air Up North

The Deadly Dames/A Dum-Dum for the President – Douglas Sanderson

Originally published in 1956 and 1961 respectively, these Montreal noir mysteries are the last novels Sanderson set in Canada. I've written about The Deadly Dames here:

A Dick's Deadly Dames

Pure Sweet Hell/Catch a Fallen Starlet – Douglas Sanderson

I can't speak to Pure Sweet Hell, but Catch a Fallen Starlet is one of my favourite Sanderson titles. My thoughts on the novel:

Drunken Writer Exposes Hollywood Hush-Up



Sadly, Stark House has no Canadian distributor. All titles are available through the Stark House website and, ahem, amazon.com (not amazon.ca).

Canadian distributors take note.

The Vancouver Sun, 7 December 1962

Bizarre Nightly Christmas Doings in 1912 Montreal

The Gazette, 14 December 1912

No Whack on the Side of the Head

Murder in the Rough
Leslie Allen [pseud. Horace Brown]
New York: Five Star Mysteries, 1946

Having never stumbled upon a murder victim myself, I view sleuths who do so with some suspicion. Believe me, the law will one day catch up with Jessica Fletcher. That said, I'm willing to give private detective Napoleon B. Smith, the star of Murder in the Rough, the benefit of the doubt.

According to fawning sidekick Leslie Allen, who claims to have been present, Napoleon B. was playing a round of golf at New York's Briar Hill when he sliced his Superlastic into italicized "Hell's Half-Acre", the choked green wilderness that borders the seventh hole. A good walk spoiled is ruined completely when the search for the missing golf ball turns up the warm corpse of wealthy eccentric Mrs Josiah Cartwright. Everyone is certain that the poor woman was killed by the ball hitting her head, but Napoleon B. comes to believe otherwise. Suspicion, naturally, falls upon Mrs Cartwright's heirs: no-good stepson Jack, incredibly handsome nephew Cyrus, and Allen's objet d'amour, beautiful stepdaughter Gale.

Where The Penthouse Killings, Horace Brown's 1950 mystery, has too many characters, here their number is so very small. Ignoring late entries, we have only Jack, Gale and Cyrus, coroner Thomas Bryce and Adam Johnson, the Cartwright family lawyer. There's also Napoleon B. and Allen, of course, along with Inspector Joe Brownlee, but this reader was correct in discounting them as persons of interest.

When Jack is murdered, Gale is nearly blown to bits by her stepmother's booby-tapped coffin and Napoleon B. dodges assassination by air rifle, accusatory fingers point to handsome Cyrus, "North American skeets champion, a successful manufacturer of small arms, including some adaptations of high-powered German compressed-air rifles, and an active leader in boys' work."

But Cyrus is just too obvious, isn't he?

The break in the case occurs when Napoleon B. grabs Gale and begins to "whipsaw her lovely face." Allen looks on:

   "Cut it out!" I yelled. "Napoleon B., are you crazy?"
   He was paying no attention. The methodical blows were not easy ones.
   "The police are in the house." Blow. "They'll be here in a moment," Blow. "Are you going to talk?" Blow. "Are you?" Blow. "Are you?"
   There was blood on her cheek. It all took only several seconds. He was talking through his teeth. I knew it was no use to interfere.
   "Yes!" The word was faint: "Yes!"

The information she's kept to herself brings things to the sharpest of points. When the murderer is finally revealed, some fifty or so pages later, there is no surprise.

Having stood by during the bloody inquisition, is it any wonder that Allen does not get the girl in the end?

Trivia: While cover copy would have you believe that Napoleon B. Smith is destined to become "one of your favorite fiction sleuths," he disappeared after Murder in the Rough.

Dedication:

According to Myrna Foley, the author's daughter, Newman was content to let rent payments lapse until her father was able to make a sale. The rental in question, a house on Fairport Beach Road in Dunbarton (now Pickering), still stands.

Here's to Harry A. Newman, K.C.!

Object: A slim, digest-size paperback in glossy paper wraps, apparently 60,000 words in length.

The cover illustration, which I quite like, is wrong to feature blood on the golf ball.

Access: A scarce title. The Toronto Public Library has a lonely non-circulating copy somewhere in its stacks, but that's it for Canada. Only two copies are listed online – both Very Good copies, they're priced at US$60 and US$85.

About Those Awful PaperJacks Covers

I don't mean to suggest that all PaperJacks covers were awful, but they did so often hurt the eyes. Consider the above, a detail from The Sixth of December, the subject of last Thursday's post.

Look away.

By far the worst cover PaperJacks ever produced was for Robert Kroetsch's The Words of My Roaring. One of their more attractive, it was ruined when the designer forgot to include Kroetsch's name.

The solution? Nasty-looking labels that look to have been cut and pasted by elementary school students. Here's another copy from Olman's Fifty.

One wonders when the folks at PaperJacks noticed? There are plenty of copies out there that have no trace of the offending label – and believe me, it would take an expert in paper conservation to remove that thing.

Competent, if uninspired, the cover for Kathleen Earle's Jenneth, Daughter of a Rebel is ruined by the pitch. Poor girl, "torn between the love of two men"... one of whom is a horse.

I've never known quite what to make of the quivering, friendly and freakish figure that graces the cover of Alan Fry's The Revenge of Annie Charlie.

Published in 1975, John Ballem's dark The Dirty Scenerio looks for all the world like a National Firearms Association annual report as designed by a poor man's Peter Max.

But for sheer awfulness, not one can hold a candle – or any similarly shaped object – to Marian Engel's phallus cover.

I call it One-Way Meat.

Related link:

About Those Ugly Old NCL Covers

The Sixth of December

The Sixth of December
Jim Lotz
Markham, Ont.: Paperjacks. 1981

For your consideration, a Richard Rohmer-approved thriller that imagines Leon Trotsky responsible for the Halifax Explosion.

That's meant to be Trotsky on the front cover. Don't recognize him? How about here, in this detail from the back?

Don't believe me? Well, just read the cover copy. Blow it up if you wish.

No pun intended.

Faith, Philanthropies and Verse for Air Raid Victims

Montreal in Verse:
     An Anthology of English Poetry by Montreal Poets
[Leo Cox, ed]
[Montreal]: Writers of the Poetry Group of the Canadian Authors Association, Montreal Branch, [1942]

A fundraiser in aid of the Queen's Canadian Fund for Air-raid Victims in Britain, this little chapbook of was published sixty years ago this month. Just in time for Christmas.

The Second World War looms large in these pages, but is dwarfed by Mount Royal.

(cliquez pour agrandir)

Thirty-two poets contribute thirty-two poems, and the hill that gives Montreal its name features in nearly half. I think the explanation may be found in the contributors' addresses. You won't find A.J.M. Smith, A.M. Klein or Leo Kennedy in these 48 pages, with few exceptions this is the verse of the city's privileged. And of this group, no one enjoyed greater status and comfort than Amy Redpath Roddick, whose family names kick off poetess Mildred Low's contribution, "Children of the McGill Campus":

Roddick and Redpath and old McGill,
Who, being dead, are living still,
How does it meet your kind intent
The way your benefice is spent?

Lady Roddick herself can't avoid same:

Six decades on, it's impossible to read this verse without thinking of F.R. Scott's "The Canadian Authors Meet" and the poets "measured for their faith and philanthropics". The good folks at Poetry Quebec have made a similar observation. That said, I'm not about to throw Montreal in Verse on the scrap heap. If anything, it reminds me of how much there is to explore of our literary past. Contributors Stella M. Bainbridge, Lily E.F. Barry, Warwick Chipman, Leo Cox, Lorraine Noel Finley, John Murray Gibbon, Christine L. Henderson, A. Beatrice Hickson, W.J King, Alice M.S. Lighthall, William D. Lighthall, Mildred Low, Margaret Furness MacLeod, Martha Martin, Dorothy Sproule, Jean Percival Waddell, Robert Stanley Weir and Margaret Ross Woods all had titles to their names, but I've yet to pick up even one of them.

Researching these names I discover that John Murray Gibbon once wrote a universally praised, yet entirely forgotten novel entitled Pagan Love (1922). Then there's R. Henry Mainer, whose Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road (1908) centres on a hard-as-nails widowed Upper Canadian tavern owner.

The most intriguing is A. Beatrice Hickson, whom Canada's Early Women Writers tells us not only founded and ran a school for "misdirected and wayward" girls, but "painted figurines which were unique in design and costume and whose popularity outran her ability to produce them."

In language and theme, Miss Hickson – she never married – stands apart from her polite and proper fellow poets:

Before reading this slim volume of verse I'd never heard of Leo Cox, who wrote these charitable lines in his Editor's Note:

As in all anthologies, quality and style vary considerably, but all the pieces possess in common a strong love of Montreal, of her history and infinite charm. These verses are a loving tribute from sensitive citizens.

Apparently Macmillan published a collection of Cox's verse in 1941. Must track it down. I'll pass on his  Story of the Mount Stephen Club.

Object: A nicely produced, staple-bound chapbook in red paper wraps, this copy comes to me from my father. The pencilled correction to Amy Redpath Roddick's poem is in an unknown hand. Dare I hope that it is the work of Lady Roddick herself?

The 1 May 1943 edition of the Gazette reports that nearly one thousand copies of Montreal in Verse had been sold, contributing $200 to the Queen's Canadian Fund. The selling price was 25¢.

Access: Not found in even one of our public libraries – those wishing to borrow a copy should look to our universities. Two copies are currently listed for sale online, the most expensive of which ($45) is dedicated and signed by contributor Jean Percival Waddell.