The Modern Canadian Novel at Fifty

A bit late, but it was only yesterday that I happened upon the above, placed in the 16 May 1959 edition of the Globe and Mail. Can't imagine Jack McClelland was too happy with the investment – the very same page features a review titled 'Left Hook, Right Hook, KO!'

While critic Isabelle Hughes begins by praising the experimental nature of the book, her compliments are directed at the publisher, not the author:

By far the most interesting thing about The Double Hook – which is a first novel by Canadian writer, Sheila Watson – is that it represents an unusual experiment in Canadian publishing. The book is available in two covers, one paper and one cloth. This arrangement, which seems eminently sensible, gives the reader a choice between buying a new book at a reasonable price if he does not wish to add it to his permanent library, or investing a larger sum in it if he does.

It is extremely doubtful, however, whether The Double Hook was a happy selection with which to introduce this experiment. Obscure in style, eccentric in punctuation, and with a plot that is difficult to follow, it is permeated by an odd atmosphere of unreality; it has the quality of a distorted, not especially vivid dream.

...

The Double Hook is by no means an easy book to read. Certainly, it cannot be described as entertainment in any sense of the word. And surely a novel, of all forms of literature, ought primarily to entertain the reader, or at least to draw him into a world which for the time seems real to him. However profound and thought-provoking a novel's thesis may be, if it is not intelligible to the average discerning person who likes an absorbing story, then that book fails as a novel.

The reviewer's words remind me of Earle Birney, who had two years earlier written McClelland to say that he'd found the novel 'monotonous, self-conscious, artificial and lacking in real fictional interest'. He advised McClelland not to publish, complaining, 'I just don't know what the damn novel is about, or I didn't until it was almost ended.'

A year after publication, McClelland told the Montrealer that he hadn't expected to break even on the novel. In fact, it had already turned a profit. Good man, that Jack McClelland.

Beauty Neglected

From time to time, by which I mean every other day, I receive emails from various online book marketplaces pushing titles that they somehow think I'll be wanting to buy. Most are ignored, but I usually have time for the folks at AbeBooks, who seem alone in recognizing my interests. Their latest – subject line: '30 Beautiful Old Books We'd Buy For the Cover Alone' – points to a visual feast comprised of titles published from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th. Who would've thought that a volume titled The Book of Bugs could look so attractive?

Among the other beauties is A Japanese Blossom, the 1906 novel by Winnifred Eaton, published under her nom de plume Onoto Watanna. I've written a good deal on Eaton in print, and don't really want to repeat myself here, but I continue to be mystified by the lack of recognition she's received in this fair Dominion. Eaton's story is remarkable on so very many levels, beginning with her birth in 1875 Montreal to an English silk merchant turned landscape painter and his Chinese wife, herself the orphaned child of circus performers. One of fourteen children, Winnifred grew up near poverty, yet managed to become one of the wealthiest Canadian writers of her day. No doubt some inspiration was derived from her older sister Edith, who in recent years has been described repeatedly as the 'mother of Asian American literature'. Winnifred's own literary career began at the age of fourteen with the sale of a short story to Montreal's Metropolitan Magazine. By the fin de siècle she'd embraced Japonisme and, as Onoto Watanna, arrived in New York, where she presented herself as the daughter of an Englishman and a Nagasaki noblewoman. Her second novel, A Japanese Nightingale (1901), sold over 200,000 copies, was adapted to the Broadway stage and inspired a silent picture.

There is a great deal more to Eaton's story, including a career in Hollywood and her return to Canada as the wife of a wealthy Alberta rancher, but it's unlikely that you'll find any trace at your local public library. The Canadian Encyclopedia has no entry on Eaton, nor does she figure in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. However, she is the subject of a very fine biography, Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton (2001), written by her granddaughter. There's also a biography of her sister, Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton (1995). Both published by the University of Illinois Press, they're part of an a revival that has seen number of Watanna books reprinted in the United States. To these I recommend the University of Virginia Library's Winnifred Eaton Digital Archive, which features a growing number of her fiction and non-fiction writings. The biographical sketch provided by the site makes no mention of Canada. Perhaps we deserve nothing more.

A good many ugly-looking books have been featured in this blog; consider this small sampling of Watanna titles an attempt at redressing the balance.

A Japanese Nightingale

New York: Harper & Bros., 1901.

The Heart of the Hyacinth

New York: Harper & Bros., 1903.

Daughters of Nijo

New York: Macmillan, 1904.

Tama

New York: Harper & Bros., 1910.

Pay No Need

Canadian Bookman, March 1922

Gay and Withdrawn

Gay Canadian Rogues: Swindlers, Gold-diggers and

Spies

Frank Rasky

Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1958

Bought for a buck twenty years ago, Gay Canadian Rogues has stayed with me from Montreal to Vancouver to Toronto, then back to Vancouver and, finally, the picturesque town of St Marys. Cover and title have ensured its survival during those nasty culls that invariably accompany moves.

It's a fast read, not much more than a collection of disjointed chapters, each dealing, more or less, with the sorts of folk described in the subtitle. They're not particularly gay, in any sense of the word, nor are they necessarily Canadian. A few fail to meet any definition of the word 'rogue' – and it is here that the author may have dug himself into a bit of a hole. In 1000 Questions About Canada, John Robert Colombo writes that Gay Canadian Rogues was withdrawn by Thomas Nelson & Sons 'within weeks of publication':

The publishers were responding to the threat of legal action. The author of the book, journalist Frank Rasky, had devoted one chapter to Igor Gouzenko, the Soviet defector. Gouzenko did not object to the innocent use of the word 'gay' in the title – it had yet to take on other connotations – but he did object to being lumped in with rogues, swindlers, and gold-diggers. Once withdrawn from publication, the book was never reprinted.

Hmm... Not to quibble, but Rasky devoted two chapters to Gouzenko, and the book was reprinted... by Harlequin... that very same year... with a cover that owed everything to the original.

Assuming Colombo is correct about the withdrawal of the first edition, I'll add that it really is a shame; particularly since the Gouzenko chapters – 'Gouzenko, and Whisky, and Wild, Wild Spys' and 'Gouzenko's Escape from the Red Atom Spies' – rank with 'Dog Detectives of the R.C.M.P.' as the weakest. There's much better payoff in reading about Cassie Chadwick or the author's account of the time he infiltrated a farcical gang of Vancouver juvenile delinquents. Readers of Canadian literature are directed to Rasky's writing on Red Ryan, the criminal cause célèbrewho inspired Morley Callaghan's More Joy in Heaven. The author tells us that Ryan had been signed to write Crime Does Not Pay, a biography that was left unfinished when he was gunned down by members of the Sarnia Police Department. I wonder where that manuscript is today.

Object and Access: Well-bound, printed on heavy stock, it's saddled with a dust jacket this is thin and fragile. The book isn't common, but it's not expensive either. Four of the eleven copies currently listed online include letters from the author to various members of the media and can be had for under C$40. At the high end we find one Toronto bookseller offering the book – sans letter – for C$75. Condition is not a factor. A Calgary merchant goes even farther in attempting to flog a copy – again, sans letter, and with 'heavy wear on dust jacket' – for C$100. But then, this same bookstore is asking C$2,500 for a 1995 bargain book about cats. No joke.

Late of the Bowery

Much ado in our national press leading to today, the hundredth anniversary of Malcolm Lowry's birth. All this attention by the very same papers that allowed the recent Gabrielle Roy centenary to pass unnoticed. I've never counted myself amongst those who've taken Lowry to their bosom as a countryman. True, roughly a third of his 47 years, certainly his most productive, were spent squatting on our West Coast, but he never did become a citizen. The Globe and Mail reports, 'Mr. Lowry considered himself to be a Canadian and, especially, a British Columbian' – this according to Sherill Grace, editor of his letters. I've not been able to find these declarations in Lowry's own writing.

Two years after Under the Volcano was published, the author complained that Canadian sales had amounted to nothing more than a couple of copies. Doubt it was that small – it needs be said he was quoting a royalty statement – though we were slow to recognize Lowry's genius. When Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place won a Governor General's Award, he was five years dead.

The author is the subject of one of Donald Brittain's finest films, Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. Someone calling himself WelshDragonJason has uploaded the entire thing to YouTube. It'll be interesting to see how long it stays. This segment covers the writer's arrival in Canada and includes some very amusing observations on a Vancouver that is long gone.

Ignoble Pornographie - Translated!

Bitter Bread [La Scouine]

Albert Laberge [Conrad Dion, trans.]

[Montreal]: Harvest House, 1977

A portrait of the artist as a glum man. And why not? Here we have one of the country's first Naturalist writers, a member of the École littéraire de Montréal, yet during his lifetime Albert Laberge's sales were measured not in thousands or hundreds, but in dozens.

La Scouine was nearly two decades in the making. Its title, which has 'no particular meaning, except that it was a vague phrase dating back to the first origins of the language itself', is the nickname of smelly Paulima Deschamps, the youngest member of a farming family. She's a dislikable character, but then so are her siblings... and their parents... and their neighbours... and the local clergy. All live in a rural landscape entirely at odds with the idealized roman de la terre that had for so long dominated French Canadian literature:

The harvest had been underway for a month, but hardly any work had been accomplished due to the continuous rain. The storms recurred every few hours, after brief appearances of a ghostly sun. The sky would suddenly become dark and threatening, and huge, hearse-like clouds would pursue one another on the horizon, explode over the flat, green country, to spill a flood of water that drowned the land.

These words – translated here by Conrad Dion – form the beginning of the novel's twentieth chapter. First published in the 24 July 1909 issue of la Semaine, it attracted the attention of Mgr Paul Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal, who condemned the excerpt as 'ignoble pornographie'. This wasn't the first time Laberge had displeased the Church. As a student he'd been expelled from Montreal's Collège Sainte-Marie after confessing that he'd been reading the works of Zola, Balzac and de Maupassant.

The offending excerpt relates an episode in which Charlot, la Scouine's crippled brother, is seduced by a gin-loving, Irish farmworker:

His thirty-five years of chaste life, his solitary nights on the yellow sofa, lit up his insides at this moment with lustful, urgent desire. This man who had never known a woman felt an imperative, crying hunger that had to be appeased. The whole concantenation of bad dreams, of libidinous visions besieged him, invaded him.

...

Charlot then threw himself on her.

And they made love.

This was his only love experience.

'Il faut couper le mal dans sa racine', wrote the archbishop.

Seven years passed before the reading public was again treated to excerpts. Not until 1918 did La Scouine appear in its entirety – and then only in an edition numbering sixty copies.

Laberge published all fourteen of his books himself: collections of short stories, essays, literary criticism and this, his only novel. Signed editions, not one had a print-run of more than 140 copies. They sell today in the US$200 range, though patient purchasers should be able to grab the less desirable titles for under US$100. Sadly, nearly half a century after his death, most of those currently on offer are uncut, unread.

Object (and a mystery): Issued in both cloth and paper as part of the Harvest House French Writers of Canada series, Bitter Bread is cursed with a horrible cover illustration (first used on the 1972 L'actuelle edition of La Scouine). Dated, yes, and like the 1970 Feast Of Stephen and the 1974 Four Jameses it references the wrong decade. The inside back cover lists as forthcoming Growing Up Barefoot, 'a novel by Félix LecLerc'. To date, no such title has materialized. I'm guessing that the 'novel' was a planned translation of Pieds nus dans l'aube (1946), the chansonnier's memoir of his La Tuque childhood.

Access: Typical. Bitter Bread can be found in academic universities across the country, but public library users are limited to Toronto and Vancouver. Library and Archives Canada holds no copy, nor do the public libraries of Montreal, the city in which it was published. The paper edition shouldn't cost more than C$10 – double that for the cloth. Those interested in the original French are advised to cast aside all dreams of purchasing the sixty copy first edition. Collectors may be drawn to the 1968 facsimile or the 1970 pirated edition; at US$40, I prefer the 1986 critical edition published by the Université de Montréal.

Pauline Johnson's Forgotten Heir

Canadian Poets, edited by John W. Garvin (McClelland & Stewart, 1926)

Since my piece on The Chivalry of Keith Leicester, I've had to endure some gentle ribbing from a couple of B.C. readers. Yes, I have two. Both (Did I mention I have two? At least!) appear to take issue with my insinuation that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay is something less than well-known. Eleven days later, I'm prepared to state boldly that hers is not a household name. As evidence, I cite the sad fact that Mackay's books have been out of print for well over seven decades. I add that The Canadian Encyclopedia and The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature fail to mention the author – though I do recognize that both the very fine Encyclopedia of British Columbia and Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature (edited by Vancouverite W.H. New) feature brief entries.

Mackay wasn't born a British Columbian. A native of Woodstock, her 33rd birthday passed before she first visited – and settled – in the province with husband Peter, a court stenographer. There can be no argument that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay was once well-known. She featured regularly in Harper's, Scribners', Smart Set and other great magazines of the day. Her first book, a collection of verse titled Between the Lights, appeared in 1904. Ten more volumes followed: poetry, novels and a light comedy that placed third in a 1929 American play-writing competition. All are pretty much forgotten. Mackay's lasting legacy lies as the force behind Pauline Johnson's The Legends of Vancouver (1911), published as a means of raising funds for the dying author. After Johnson's death, Mackay not only became executrix, but assumed her role as the leading lady of letters in British Columbia. Her books were published by McClelland & Stewart, William Briggs, Thomas Allen, George H. Doran, Samuel French, Houghton Mifflin and Cassell & Company. The Group of Seven's J.E.H. MacDonald provided 'decorations' for her 1922 collection of verse, Fires of Driftwood.

Mackay was known primarily as a poet, but I find her prose more interesting and inventive. Her first novel, The House of Windows (1912), begins with an abandoned baby in a department store and moves on to create a tale involving kidnapping, white slavery, secret identities and suffragettes. Sex, it seems, is at the centre of The Window-Gazer (1921).

The time has come, I suppose, to add Isabel Ecclestone Mackay to my dusty bookcase. I've ordered an old copy of Up the Hill and Over (1917), which New describes as a novel about drug addiction. What fun! Until it arrives, I'll be dipping into her 1918 The Singing Ship and Other Verse for Children (online here), which includes this mildly disturbing poem.