Sex, Violence and Some Very Strong Language

Torch of Violence
Gerald Laing [pseud. Tedd Steele]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Torch of Violence holds a secure place in literature as the first Canadian novel to feature the word "shit". History is made on the fifty-ninth page:

"You know me, Alf. I'll take so much and that's all. I don't care who it is... I'll take just so much shit and that's all. Am I right or am I wrong? Am I right or am I wrong, Alf?"

You expect some rough stuff in crime fiction, but here the language is particularly coarse and the violence extreme.

The novel opens with the bloody beating of a bar owner by mob boss Goldie Vincetti's boys. "Dirty dago bastards. Dirty bitches," mutters an elderly drunk. A kick to the stomach is quick to come. I'm not saying that the old man deserved it, but his slurred comment was hardly fair in that one of Vincetti's boys is a WASP by the name of Eric Benedict. A year or so earlier, young Eric, who has a bit of a record, was looking at ten years after the cops found drugs in his flat. He was saved by clean-living, married brother Chris, who took the rap and was sentenced to a year in Kingsville (not Kingston) Penitentiary for his trouble. The deal between the brothers was that Eric would go straight, finish high school and then study to be a chemical engineer. Instead, he's become tighter the ever with Vincetti and has added adultery to his list of sins by messing around with another man's wife.

Eric doesn't feel at all bad about the beatings or his brother, but the guilt and self-loathing brought through sleeping with "the bitch" weighs heavily. His retreat to a "beverage room" provides for the most interesting pages in the novel. Eric sits, beer in hand, watching others fight for a change:

     "I'm a Canadian. Jack. I don't give a dog damn whether you're a Scot or a Britisher or a Hungarian or a Chink. I'm a Canadian and that's what it said on my shoulder when I went overseas and this is Canada and if you don't like it           off back to lower Slobbovia where you come from." 

     "Ha, ha. A Canadian? What was your father... an Indian? This place might be called Canada, lad, but you're either an Englishman or a Frenchman or God knows what. The only Canadians here are the Indians, and if you're an Indian, they shouldn't be serving you in a beverage room. It's against the law."  

This may be hell of a sort, with brimstone that smoulders to this day, but it's a whole lot better than Kingsville Penitentiary. Behind its impenetrable walls, Chris shares a cell with a man who is descending into madness. You see, cellmate Trent Richards, just can't deal with the knowledge that Shirley, an old flame, once attended a petting party.

Cover copy pitches Torch of Violence as not just a crime novel, but "an intelligently sympathetic treatment of an important subject." That subject, infidelity, is one that pretty much every character must face. Chris has his own chance to cheat when Trent's replacement, a man named Bill English, tries to lure him into his bunk. After this fails, the new cellmate shares a rumour going around that Helen, Chris's wife, is sleeping with brother Eric. Big mistake. Chris beats English to a pulp, moves his bloodied body to his bunk, and covers it with a blanket.

Meanwhile, across town:

He screamed once as a bullet smashed against bone and then another bullet struck him full in the face and the red liquid made a hideous mask of his features. Only the eyes remained discernible and they were frightfully unhuman, wide open, staring as if at some nameless horror.

I won't reveal the victim's name, the identity of the assailant or the twist that brings this all about – don't want to spoil everything – but I can't resist sharing the novel's abrupt and absurd ending.

Chris has just tucked English into bed when he's brought to the warden under guard of a man named Baker. Readers who have no stomach for violence or poor punctuation will want to skip Chris's internal monologue:

I haven't any faith in God anymore, how could I have, but in case there is something, maybe the devil, I'll ask him for a special request. Let me find you two together, naked in each other's armsthe way you've been doing all this time. Oh, God, I hope I find you together . I'll kill you first Eric with Baker's gun... not easily... in the stomach so you can know how it feels to have an ache in your guts that won't come out and then I'll take care of you Helen. I know exactly what to do with you. I'll rape you first, you dirty bitch. A husband should have his wife when he returns from such a long absence, so I'll rape you while you're listening to my brother cough his blood and entrails all over the bed. And then I'll tear out your hair and slap you in the face with the bloody roots and then I'll put some bullets into you where they should go.

Chris is handed a near-perfect opportunity to escape, but chooses not to because Baker says something about trusting him as much as he does his wife. This makes the imprisoned man reconsider his own lack of trust, thus sparing Helen from horror. More reevaluation takes place when the warden introduces him to Shirley, Trent's old girlfriend. Seems she behaved herself at that petting party and can't quite understand why her old beau won't believe her. Enter smug prison psychiatrist Dr Ferguson, who between bemused chuckles explains that all Trent needs is a trusted person to tell him that Shirley is as chaste and true as she claims. It's Ferguson's opinion that Chris Benedict is just the man for the job:

He welcomed the task before him and knew he would be successful. His thoughts went to his wife Helen and he blessed her name... He had the vision of Helen's face before him. It was sufficient.

FIN

Now, I don't pretend to know much about the mysteries of the human mind, but I do question that Trent's psychosis can be so easily cured. Frankly, I'm not convinced that there isn't something more to his issues with Shirley and the petting party.* Doctor knows best, I suppose, but what with his mad (albeit internal) monologue and his dead or dying cellmate, it seems to me that a psychiatrist would detect something amiss in Chris. I don't know, call all it a "torch of violence".

Am I right or am I wrong?

Trivia: A second edition, credited to "David Forrest", was published the very same year for the American market. Sensitive readers will prefer this version:

"You know me, Alf. I'll take so much and that's all. I don't care who it is... I'll take just so much dirt and that's all. Am I right or am I wrong? Am I right or am I wrong, Alf?"

More trivia: The novel contains what just might be the longest sentence of any book covered in this blog:

A night breeze came over the north wall in gay contempt of the guard towers, stirred the dusty sand of the prison yards, climbed the sheer stone side of the prison and thrust little inquiring fingers of fresh air into the rows of barred holes that broke the blankness of the stone, then recoiling at the heavy breath of the imprisoned men, the fingers withdrew as if from the touch of death and the breeze slackened, dropped lower, moved faintly across the prison yard and tried to scale it to the freedom of the night, then fell back and died in little swirls of dust above the flat emptiness of the prison yard.

Object: A poorly produced mass market paperback, this is typical News Stand Library, except that it tends to fall apart more easily than most.

Access: No library carries the Canadian edition, though the University of Calgary has a copy of that intended for export. Given the historical import – by which I mean the use of the word "shit" –  it's the Canadian you'll be wanting. Right now, just three copies are listed online at prices ranging from US$3.99 to US$32.00. Condition is an issue. The American edition is a bit more common, though prices are similar.

*Great name for a band, by the way.

Ce soir: The Heart Accepts It All

THE HEART ACCEPTS IT ALL

SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN GLASSCO

BOOK LAUNCH

Wednesday, 14 August 2013, 7:30 p.m.

THE WORD

467 Milton Street

Montreal

F is for First Statement

The editor of this mag, John Sutherland, is a very decent chap, about 30, a pretty good drinker too...

– John Glassco, letter to Robert McAlmon, 16 August 1944

The April & May 1945 issue of influential Montreal little magazine First Statement. Irving Layton, A.M. Klein, Patrick Anderson, Ralph Gustafson, Miriam Waddington... amongst the lesser-known writers we find Wingate Taylor, "a farmer in the Eastern townships [sic] of Quebec." He's better remembered – though, in truth, he's barely remembered at all – as Graeme Taylor, the man who shares many adventures with John Glassco in Memoirs of Montparnasse.

I've long been fascinated by Taylor, in part because he was expected to do such great things. Writing in the 'twenties, Leon Edel described him as one of the three premier Canadian writers of his generation, while A.J.M. Smith recommended his writing to anthologist Raymond Knister. I read nothing of Taylor's  that would justify such praise, but it appears Edel and Smith weren't alone in seeing something; while living in Paris, Taylor's writing appeared in This Quarter and transition, sharing pages with James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles and William Carlos Williams.

Taylor's lone contribution to First Statement, "The Horse-Stall" broke a fifteen year silence, marking his first appearance in print since those days in Montparnasse. It was also his last.

"The Horse-Stall" isn't a short story, but an excerpt from a lost, unpublished novel titled Brazenhead. The twelve pages in First Statement is all that survives – an apt reflection of a man who, as Michael Gnarowski has written, "remains unrealized and obscure to the present day."

A shorter, earlier version of this piece was cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure. 

An Invitation to the Heart Accepts It All Launch

E is for Early Work

I once met Barbara Gowdy at a Chapters Inc annual shareholders meeting; I owned stock, she was signing copies of The White Bone. Anyone who finds this at all peculiar is advised to revisit their memories of the 'nineties. The very same meeting saw the launch of a short-lived, ill-conceived venture, immortalized through laminated bookmarks slipped into copies of Ms Gowdy's novel:

The White Bone was free to anyone willing to stand in line. I took my place, but what I really wanted was Ms Gowdy's signature on the book pictured above. Published in 1988, Through the Green Valley was her first. I've not read it – 'tis a historical romance – though I am intrigued because it is so very different from the rest of her oeuvre. Where Falling Angels, the author's sophomore novel, is in print Through the Green Valley has been unavailable for a quarter century.

"I'm not sure I want to sign this," said Ms Gowdy.

I felt bad.

Brian Moore disowned his earliest novels. For three decades, friend Mordecai Richler kept his debut, The Acrobats, out of print. In university, this paperback copy made the rounds of my friends like a Bowie bootleg.

(Am I alone in being amazed by the speed with which it returned to print after Richer's death?)

I've been thinking of early work and all associated embarrassment ever since receiving a query brought by last week's post on doppelgängers:

You wrote that you used to write as Brian John Busby. Someone called Brian John Busby wrote for a Canadian TV show called "Time of Your Life". Are you that Brian John Busby?

Yes, I am. A low-budget, low-rent teen soap, Time of Your LIfe was my first paid writing gig.

The correspondent adds: "Great show!"

Wish I could agree, though I'll allow that the stray bits posted online point to something that is not nearly so horrible as I remember.

As for Ms Gowdy... I didn't press, and she proved to be a good sport.

Addendum (for my nieces):

Margaret Millar's Michigan Murder Mystery

Vanish in an Instant

Margaret Millar

New York: Dell, [1953]

224 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.

D is for Doppelgänger

There was a Brian Busby who lived two blocks from the house in which I grew up. Our paths never crossed – he was eight years older – but I was aware of his presence and remember the day his family moved. There was also a Brian Busby who attended our church and another who worked for the CBC. I can't tell you what the latter did, but his name did leap out as credits rolled. I came to the illogical conclusion that while "Busby" wasn't terribly common, "Brian Busby" was.

All this is to explain why I used my full name on my early writing.

Austin Clarke did something similar at the beginning in his career to set himself apart from Irish poet Austin Clarke.

Amongst Thistles and Thorns
Austin C. Clarke
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965

Collected Poems
Austin Clarke
London: Allen & Unwin, 1936

A New Canadian Library reissue of Amongst Thorns and Thistles aside, the last I've seen "Austin C. Clarke" used by a North American publisher was on McClelland & Stewart's 1967 first edition of The Meeting Place – thus avoiding further confusion with this man:

2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke
New York: New American Library, 1968

  
You wouldn't think a name like Austin Clarke would cause such trouble. Thomas King, I can understand...

King's Explanatory Arithmetic
Thomas King
London: The Author [c. 1920]

Lisa Moore and William Gibson, too.

Merveilleux Voyage
Lisa Moore
Toronto: Harlequin, 1986

A Vision of Faery Land and Other Poems
William Gibson
Boston: Munroe & Co., 1853

Even John Metcalf.

Milk for Babes; or, A Catecism in Verse
John Metcalf
Northampton, MA: The Author, 1840

But Clarke seems a particularly, peculiarly problematic surname for Canadian publishers. Forget publisher Clarke Irwin, consider my friend, poet George Elliott Clarke...

Execution Poems
George Elliott Clarke
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2009

... who has followed fellow Canadians George Herbert Clarke...

The Hasting Day
George Frederick Clarke
Toronto: Dent, 1930

...and George Frederick Clarke.

That would be the same George Frederick Clarke who wrote David Cameron's Adventures.

David Cameron's Adventures
George Frederick Clarke
London: Blackie & Sons, [1950]

Some British readers may prefer this edition:

David Cameron [David Cameron's Adventures]
George F. Clarke [W. Joosten, trans.]
Amsterdam: De Verkenner, 1953

Go, Dog, Go!

Addendum: Don't get me started on Robert Finch.

C is for Canada Monthly

The October 1912 issue of Canada Monthly, purchased late last year for the humour – black humour – of its cover:

Agnes Deans Cameron's Last Article

"THE THAMES BY CANADIAN CANOE"

In fact, Miss Cameron survived, dodging sailboats and steamers, only to succumb to pneumonia shortly after her return home to Victoria.

"The liveliest, most entertaining, most thoroughly Canadian of the magazines published in Canada" was owned, edited and published by Herbert Vanderhoof, a Chicago publicity agent who made his fortune pushing land in our four westernmost provinces. The District of Vanderhoof – "Geographic Centre of British Columbia" – was named in his honour.

It makes perfect sense that Miss Cameron was one of Herbert Vanderhoof's writers; she spent much of her forty-eight years encouraging western settlement. That trip down the Thames was made possible in part by an Ottawa that was eager to promote British immigration.

Agnes Deans Cameron isn't the biggest name in this particular issue; Isabel Ecclestone Mackay contributes a particularly bad poem. For my money – I paid $2.80 – the most interesting offering is this bit o' verse by Dorothy Livesay's mother:

Most writers in this "most thoroughly Canadian of the magazines published in Canada" are American. Lesser names like Wilbur D. Nesbit, best remembered for "A Song for Flag Day", a jingoistic ode to the Stars and Stripes, populate its pages. Canada Monthly was never intended to be a showcase for this country's writing, but as a means to sell the West. Nesbit's countryman Arthur I. Street contributes "How Many More? What the Business Man Can Make in Canada", in which he appeals to our greed:

An increase of nine and three-quarter millions in population, a million and a half in dwellings, and three-quarters of a million in the number of farms would mean an increase in farm values of nearly two billions. And that's your particular "baby", isn't it? Increase your land values? Isn't that where you make your money? Isn't that the temptation that leads you into a new country?

A century later the West is still chasing that "increase of nine and three-quarter millions in population".

The caption on this accompanying W.C. Sheppard [sic] illustration reflects Street's optimism...

...as do the advertisements.

Twenty-two months later, on August 4, 1914, everything changed. It seems oddly appropriate that the pitch for property in Fraser Lake is followed by this advert for the infamous Ross rifle:

"You Buy a Rifle to Last Your Life-time..."

The cruelest joke of all.

The Heart Accepts It All in the Rural Mail

Copies of The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited and annotated by yours truly, arrived at our home on Friday – brought, appropriately, by the rural mail. Expect to see it in all of our finest bookstores by early next month.

Featured are 147 letters written by Glassco between 1929 and 1980 to family, friends, foes and fellow writers, including:

Rosalie Abella

Bernard Amtmann

Margaret Atwood

Alma Balster

Henry Beissel

Beatrice Bishop

Kay Boyle

Brian Brett

Glendon Brown

Marilyn Bowering

Philip Core

Malcolm Cowley

Viginia Dehn

Louis Dudek

Leon Edel

Marian Engel

Douglas Fetherling

Andrew Field

Sheila Fischman

Hugh Ford

Northrop Frye

Michel Garneau

Gary Geddes

Donna George

Gera

Paul J. Gillette

Maurice Girodias

Beatrice Glassco

Elma Glassco

Michael Gnarowski

Gérald Godin

Eldon Grier

Ralph Gustafson

Gilles Hénault

Daryl Hine

Milton Kastilo

Margaret Laurence

Irving Layton

Jean Le Moyne

Sandra Martin

Seymour Mayne

Robert McAlmon

Al Purdy

Stephen Scobie

F.R. Scott

A.J.M. Smith

F.M. Southam

Fraser Sutherland

John Sutherland

Ronald Sutherland

Julian Symons

William Toye

Gael Turnbull

Geoffrey Wagner

George Woodcock

and a transvestite from Chibougamau named Carmen.

The book also features previously unpublished photographs and verse, including "For A.J.M. Smith", written by Glassco on occasion of his friend's seventieth birthday.

My thanks go out again to Carmine Starnino and Simon Dardick, publisher of Véhicule Press, for their good work in making this book possible.

            Scraping the crumbling roadbed of this strife
            With rotting fenceposts and old mortgages
            (No way of living, but a mode of life),
            How sift from death and waste three grains of duty,
            O thoughts that start from scratch and end in a dream
            Of graveyards minding their own business?

            But the heart accepts it all, this honest air
            Lapped in green valleys where accidents will happen!

                                                     — John Glassco, "The Rural Mail"

B is for the Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors

My introduction to Canadian literature came in the pages of National Lampoon. No joke. Canada's writers weren't taught in the Montreal public schools I attended. The assigned reading for my Grade 10 English class featured Shane, The Pearl, Walkabout, The Chrysalids and, predictably, Lord of the Flies. Of these, my favourite was The Chrysalids, in part because it takes place in post-apocalyptic Labrador, as opposed to, say, nineteenth-century Wyoming.

So it was, just as I was preparing to shift my focus to the Australian Outback, that I bought the March 1978 issue of National Lampoon, featuring the first selection from The Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors.

"Financed by the Bombardier Snowmobile Company," written by Ted Mann, Brian Shein and Sean Kelly, the format of the guide was simple: a brief entry, followed by a rating on a scale of zero to five skidoos.

The first to be so honoured was Margaret Atwood (one skidoo). This brief except provides a fair example of the guide's style:

She is best known for advancing the theory that America and Canada are simply states of mind, the former comparable to that of a schnapps-crazed Wehrmacht foot soldier and the latter to that of an autistic child left behind in a deserted Muskoka summer cottage playing with Molson's Ale cans, spent shell casings, and dead birds hung from the light fixture, who will one day become aware of its situation, go to college, and write novels. She is better known, among Margaret-watchers, for taking gross offense at the suggestion (in a crudely dittoed literary periodical) that she may have sparked an erection in a considerably more talented Canadian author who shall here remain nameless (see Glassco, John).

That last sentence would've been my first encounter with Glassco's name. The incident described is one that demanded particular care when writing A Gentleman of Pleasure. Rosalie Abella, the lawyer Ms Atwood hired to go after the "crudely dittoed literary periodical", now sits on the Supreme Court.*

And here's Glassco again in the entry for "Callahan, Morely":

As The Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors, The Bombardier Skiddoo [sic] Guide to Canadian Authors, and, finally, The Bombardier Skiddoo [sic] Guide to Canadian Literature, the reference work appeared sporadically throughout 1978, then returned five years later. By that time, Grade 10 was far behind me and I was at university with two of Sean Kelly's kids. A coincidence worthy of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay (not covered), I suppose; much more predictable was the presence of Frederick Philip Grove on my reading lists. The April 1983 issue, marking the return of the guide, brought this well-timed entry:

The skidoo awarded Grove may have been an act of generosity. Sensitive Canadians all, the critics never left any writer empty-handed. Farley Mowat rated two snowshoes; Mazo de la Roche received two bags of cash. There was also some playing around with the skidoos, most notably the two awarded George Jonas and Barbara Amiel, "Canada's most formidable literary spouse-and-spouse team and toast of Toronto's propeller set" (see below).

Every bit as relevant as The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, and at times just as funny, I've held onto my copies.

It's doing a bit of a disservice to reduce the guide to a list of ratings, but the following gives a good idea of its scope.

6½ 

Northrop Frye

6

Lady Flora Eaton

5

Émile Nelligan

Malcolm Lowry

Society of Jesus

4

Stephen Leacock

E.J. Pratt

Mordecai Richler

Lubor J. Zink

3

Ralph Connor

Robertson Davies

Timothy Eaton

John Herbert

Brian Moore

F.R. Scott

George Woodcock

2

John Buchan

Morley Callaghan

Bliss Carman

William Henry Drummond

The Four Horsemen

Robert Fulford

Louis Hémon

Archibald Lampman

Eli Mandel

James Reaney

Sir Charles G.D. Roberts

1½

Irving Layton

1

Margaret Atwood

Pierre Berton

Earle Birney

bill bisset

Louis Dudek

Alan Fotheringham

Hugh Garner

Oliver Goldsmith

Frederick Philip Grove

Guy F. Claude Hamel

Hugh MacLennan

Marshall McLuhan

Jay McPherson

Susanna Moodie

John Newlove

Marjorie Pickthall

Al Purdy

Duncan Campbell Scott

Scott Symons

Charles Templeton

George Bowering (one skidoo, one baseball bat)

John Buell (two skidoos, two crosses)

Leonard Cohen (two skidoos, one razor blade)

Octave Crémazie (one flag bearing a fleur de lys)

Mazo de la Roche (two bags of cash)

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (one horse-drawn skidoo)

Hugh Hood (five baseball gloves)

Pauline Johnson (one canoe)
George Jonas and Barbara Amiel (two skidoos, mating)

A.M. Klein (three skidoos, three Stars of David)

John McCrae (one skidoo, one cross)

W.O. Mitchell (one skidoo, two rocking chairs)

Lucy Maud Montgomery (one skidoo, one bonnet)

Farley Mowat (two snowshoes)

Robert W. Service (one skidoo drawn by three huskies)

Joe Wallace (one skidoo, one hammer and sickle)

J. Michael Yates (one skidoo, two snakes)

Scott Young (one broken hockey stick)

There never was an entry for Glassco.

* Shameless plug: Still more on the scandal is found in the brand spanking new Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by yours truly. 

Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 27

Another July brings another Quill & Quire Fall Preview issue and the usual embarrassment of promised riches. Nothing from me, I'm afraid, and nothing from Stephen Harper either.

But that can't be right... We were told months ago by agent Bruce Westwood and publisher Simon & Schuster that the Prime Minister's long-awaited hockey history would be landing in November.

So, why no mention in Quill & Quire? Why nothing in the publisher's fall catalogues? Most intriguing of all, why is there not one word about the book or its author on the Simon & Schuster website?

For a while there it seemed like the stars were aligning for Mr Harper. In May, just three months after Simon & Schuster was outed as the PM's publisher, Heritage Canada announced that it would allow the company to publish Canadian books in Canada.

The reasons behind the decision remain a mystery. Never mind. For Simon & Schuster it was a twelve-year-old dream realized. And it couldn't have come at a better time for Stephen Harper, saving him the humiliation of having his book blocked from publication in the country he governs.

Since then, Mr Harper's heavenly bodies have really gone out of whack. The country has been beset by disasters both Shakespearean and Biblical in nature, including a massive flood that seemed intelligently designed to disrupt the Conservative Party's National Convention. In this, the summer of our discontent, Simon & Schuster suddenly finds itself saddled with an author who, like stablemate Paula Deen, is becoming more unpopular with each passing day.

The good news is that the convention has been rescheduled for All Hallow's Eve; perfect timing for the book's launch, presuming it's still slated for a November release. Curiously, the Conservative Party website maintains that Mr Harper is still working on it.

In related news, the man who should've been Mr Harper's chief foe in the last election has a new title coming this fall from Random House Canada.

It should be an interesting read. Michael Ignatieff may have been a bit of a wash as a politician, but he sure can write.

And he can skate.

Related posts:

Ignatieff's Ink and Harper's Hockey Book
The Harper Hockey Book Watch (Updated!)
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Eight, Day 253
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 39
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 222

Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 236
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 237
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 77
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Fin (et raison d'être)