Harlequin's Romantic View of the Past

Harlequin's sixtieth anniversary celebrations continue this weekend with the opening of an exhibit devoted to its cover illustrations. Look not in Winnipeg, the city of its birth, or Toronto, home of parent corporation Torstar, the showing is being held at SoHo's Openhouse Gallery.

Since it was announced a few months back, I've been wondering how the publisher would handle its first twelve or so years. As noted previously, Harlequin hasn't been much interested in having attention drawn to its early history. What to do? The answer is found in the exhibition's title: The Heart of a Woman: Harlequin Cover Art 1949-2009. Little place here for Joe Barry's Fall Guy, never mind the vast majority of books from the publisher's first decade. I expect James Hadley Chase's Twelve Chinks and a Woman was particularly unwelcome.

I don't deny that there's interest to be had in viewing sixty years of romance novel cover art; witnessing the rise and fall of the nurse, the rise and fall of the mini-skirt, and the rise and shine of 'inspirational' romances targeted toward born-again Christians. That said, aside from Doctor in Bondage, I find each individual title so very lackluster. True, the artists are technically competent, but like Harlequin's writers they follow formulae. The same notes are struck repeatedly, the same themes are followed, evolution is slow, change is subtle and at times microscopic. The parade of covers is the visual equivalent of Kraftwerk's 'Trans-Europe Express' – except that the latter doesn't go on for six decades. And it's beautiful.

So, I join the publisher's sixtieth anniversary celebrations by presenting, in order, my three all-time favourite Harlequin covers.

Related posts:

Harlequin's Change of Heart

Covering Up the Past

Hard Lessons in Publishing

Not Only Chic, but Well-read

A photograph of Yves Thériault, André Langevin and Jean-Charles Harvey, stumbled upon early this week in the 28 November 1954 edition of Chic, Montreal's 'Journal de la Femme'. The weekly devoted a two-page spread, 'LES ECRIVANS CANADIENS FONT FACE LEUR CHER PUBLIC', to a 14 November gathering of 'romanciers et quelques romancières du Canada français' at the Windsor Hotel's Rose Room. Judging by the photographs, our romancières were severely outnumbered; not one features a female novelist. Here's Thériault again, looking a touch less shifty, standing between Robert Élie and Roger Viau:


Other photos capture Eugène Cloutier, Bertrand Vac, Guy Boulizon and Jean Bruchési. In short, a lot of men who appear happy to be surrounded by the stylish women of the Société d'étude et de conférences, including vice-president Miss Louise McNichols and president Mrs Redmond Roche, shown here with the dowdy Father Marie-Ceslas Forest.

Father Forest served as professor at the Dominican College of Ottawa and the Université de Montréal, was an early supporter of women's suffrage and wrote Le divorce (1920). His papers are held at the Université of Montréal. Much less can be said about Chic. Quebec's Bibliotèque et Archives nationales holds only eleven issues, the final being the edition in which these photographs appeared. Though the newspaper states otherwise, the BAN claims that it was published by Merlin, the company best known for Allô police.

Another Handful of Dust

Dust Over the City [Poussière sur la ville]

André Langevin

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1955

Since the death of André Langevin in February, I've been reading so slowly, so very slowly, this translation of his second novel. I discovered Dust Over the City by chance when a student – and as with everything from those heady days, it was revisited with trepidation. I needn't have worried.

The opening image continues to haunt: a lone man stands motionless, bareheaded, coatless, late at night in the swirling snow, eyes fixed on the darkened house in which his adulterous wife of three months sleeps. Alain Dubois is a talented young doctor who attends to the pale, sickly, suffering citizens of Macklin (really Thetford Mines – those swirling flakes of snow mix with asbestos dust). Confident and efficacious in his professional life, he is staggered and debilitated by his wife's infidelity.

There's little story here; these are the thoughts of a tortured soul who struggles to comprehend. It's not the sort of novel suited for the screen, yet in 1968 Langevin adapted the work for director by Arthur Lamothe. The resulting film has disappeared from view. The only glimpse I've had comes from this brief clip that appeared mysteriously last year on YouTube.

The translation, credited to John Latrobe and Robert Gottlieb (Robert Gottlieb? The editor?), is a haphazard piece of work. I suspect it was tackled tag-team. Sure, as a whole it's more than competent, but it often becomes awkward and clumsy. An example: recklessness nearly leads to violent death – the couple's car is nearly hit by a train. The young wife's passion inflamed, she kisses Dubois savagely. Latrobe and Gottlieb have our hero confess:

Her ardor bowled me over. Gently I repulsed her. We drove on...

Though Dust Over the City was published in the United States by Putnam, English-language editions of Langevin's work never achieved much in the way of sales. He wrote four other novels – all acclaimed – but only one, Une Chain dans la park (1974), the first Canadian book to be nominated for the Prix Goncourt, appeared in English. In 1976, when Jack McClelland published the translation, Orphan Street, he wrote Hugh MacLennan, 'I am tempted to get really carried away on this one and really try to force-feed the market. We don't do that very often, but there is some justification for it because, as I am sure know, French-Canadian novels in translation almost invariably bomb in English.'

Sadly, Orphan Street was no exception.

Object and Access: Readily available in our larger public libraries. More good news: as number 113 in the old New Canadian Library, there are plenty of copies out there at under C$10. The first edition, a handsome hardcover with dust jacket by Rus Anderson, is usually found at C$20 or less. Copies of Poussière sur la ville are cheaper still – and, as might be expected, more common.

Hey Kids! Comix!

I imagine that there is no more cautionary a tale in comicdom than that of Toronto-born Joe Shuster. Things seemed to have got off to such a good start (though perhaps not quite as swell as is portrayed in the Historica Minute): kid cartoonist Joe and his writer friend Jerry Siegel create Superman and spend several years flogging the character before finding a home with Detective Comics Inc. Then they make the mistake of selling their creation for US$130. Never mind, for the next ten years the pair rake in big bucks working for DC, until they take their employer to court in an ill-fated effort to win back the rights.

Shuster's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia tells us that he was fired and 'stopped drawing completely.' It's a sloppy error. Shuster and Siegel went on to create Funnyman, a 'two-fisted howlarious scrapper' that soon appeared in dustbins everywhere. A few years later, having finally parted ways with Siegel, Shuster was reduced to providing fetish art for cheap publications like Hollywood Detective, Rod Rule and, above all, Nights of Horror.

Last month, the multi-talented Craig Yoe published Secret Identity, an entertaining and informative look at Shuster's later artistic endeavours. The most interesting aspect of our countryman's work is the inclusion of characters that resemble members of what DC calls 'the Superman family'. Yoe's cover image features a scantily-clad Lois Lane look-alike whipping a man who resembles Superman. And is this cub reporter Jimmy Olsen putting his hand up Lois Lane's skirt? In a library? For shame.

Nights of Horror was eventually banned, its destruction called for by no less a body than the Supreme Court of the United States. Blame for this censorship rests squarely on the shoulders of the Thrill Killers, a Brooklyn-based group of Jewish neo-Nazis. I kid you not, and direct those interested to Yoe's 23 April interview on NPR's Fresh Air.

Queen Victoria and He

A song for Victoria Day.

Leonard Cohen's words to our celebrated monarch, "mean governess of the huge pink maps", first surfaced as "Queen Victoria and Me" in Flowers for Hitler, his 1964 collection of poems. The song differs only sightly; title aside, the most noticeable change occurs a few lines in.

I love you too in all your forms

the slim unlovely virgin anyone would lay

the white figure floating among German beards 

becomes

I love you too in all your forms

the slim unlovely virgin floating among German beards

I've twice seen 'German beards' misquoted as 'German beers'. Make mine a Beck's.

No 'Hallelujah' this, 'Queen Victoria' certainly ranks amongst Cohen's least noticed songs. It has never featured in his public performances, yet is tacked on the end of 1973's Live Songs.

Related posts:

A Civil Servant's Awful Victoria Day Poem

Victoria Day Poetry Disaster

Verse for Victoria Day by the Master of All Poets

Cheery Victoria Day Verse from the Cheese Poet

'Away to Canada' – A Song for Victoria Day

Elizabeth Smart Burned and Banned?

Reading The Dead Seagull last week, I turned repeatedly to By Heart, Rosemary Sullivan's very fine life of Elizabeth Smart. The biographer devotes seven pages to George Barker's book, a work she describes, quite rightly, as having a 'profound and complex misogyny' lying beneath its surface.

By Heart is recommended, not only the story of Smart's extraordinary, but for the glimpse it provides of an Ottawa that is no more. In this city the Smart family enjoyed a position of influence and privilege due to father Russel, a lawyer. Elizabeth Smart's mother, a society hostess known as Louie, considered By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept a work of 'erotomania', and famously set her copy aflame. But, as Sullivan tells us, she didn't stop there: 'Louie had learned that six copies of the book had been seen at Murphy-Gamble's, a local dry-goods store in Ottawa; she immediately rushed down, bought, and burnt those books also. Louie was always thorough. She then approached her friends in External Affairs and requested them to ensure that the book would not be imported into Canada.'

Sullivan suggests that By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept may indeed have been banned in Canada. We'll probably never know; records of publications banned during wartime were frequently destroyed.

Conspiracy theorists, take note: It wasn't until 1981, thirty-six years later, that Deneau published the first and only Canadian edition.

One wonders what Louie Smart would have thought of Library and Archives Canada and their 'Canadian Writers' display, located a mere two kilometres from the former Smart family home. Here we find not only images of the book she so hated, but also pages from the manuscript.

Barker's Bird

The Dead Seagull

George Barker

New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, [1950]

Not a Canadian novel, but worthy of mention in this narrowly focused blog as a sort of companion to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart's account of her tortuous relationship with English poet Barker.

Consider this his side of the story.

The nameless narrator, a poet protagonist, looks back on his brief marriage to Theresa. Theirs was a steady, staid, serene relationship, one rocked by 'the other woman'. 'Marsden Forsden stepped out of a Venetian ceiling and into our hospitality', the narrator tells us. The entrance is no accident. Like Smart, her model, Marsden has fallen in love with a poet through his verse, and has attended dozens parties in hopes of meeting him. Eventually, Marsden contacts Theresa, conveniently an old school friend. Barker's hero is easily seduced. Moments before their first kiss, she tells the man who is to become her lover, 'It was your book. When I read it I sat down and wrote one exactly like it.'

Catch that?

'...I sat down and wrote...'

Not wept.

Barker's second and last novel, its plot may be trite, but the use of language and arrant displays of obsession, loathing and vainglory make for a rewarding, if disturbing, read.

Cassandra Pybus wrote about The Dead Seagull as her contribution to Lost Classics (a personal fave). She recalls coming upon the novel in a pile of bargain books and being 'astounded to read that Barker was describing the exact same passionate travail as Smart.' She adds: 'I have never heard another [sic] thing about this book.' No doubt. By Grand Central Station has acquired iconic status – and has been drawn upon repeatedly by Steven Patrick Morrissey* – while Barker's book is more than forty years out of print.

Trivia: Barker and Smart shared the stage reading from The Dead Seagull and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept at a 1980 Glasgow writers' conference. Imagine the discomfort.

A Bonus: The working title was Of Love.

Object: A handsome hardcover with dustjacket designed by Humphrey Spender. The religious tone set by the allusion to St Sebastian continues on the flap copy: 'It is a tragedy, told more as it might be poured out in the confessional of the Roman Catholic Church than in the more traditional modes of the English novel. Its subject is love; but it is also original sin, in the sense that Cardinal Newman wrote "We are all implicated in some dreadful aboriginal calamity". The theme of The Dead Seagull is that this calamity is love itself.' Note that Spender's arrow touches the right pectoralis major (opposite the heart), but does not pierce the skin.

Access: Universities and the ever reliable Toronto Public Library. I've spotted a paperback edition once or twice in our used bookstores, though no online Canadian bookseller offers the book. Very good copies of the true first, published by John Lehmann, can be had for as little as US$25. While the American first is currently listed online at US$20 to US$75, I bought my copy a couple of weeks ago at a Manhattan bookstore for US$15.

* See 'Reel Around the Fountain', 'Shakespeare's Sister', 'The Headmaster Ritual', 'Well I Wonder', 'What She Said', 'London', 'Late Night, Maudlin Street', 'Billy Budd, 'Do Your Best and Don't Worry', et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...