Ex Libris

It was interesting to see Whit Burnett's name appear so frequently in news stories dealing with the death of J.D. Salinger. Burnett is an overlooked figure in American letters – he doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, for goodness sake – yet in his day he held considereable sway and respect. Charles McGrath wrote in the New York Times that Salinger "bragged in college about his literary talent and ambitions, and wrote swaggering letters to Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine." According to McGrath, "Mr. Salinger’s most sustained exposure to higher education was an evening class he took at Columbia in 1939, taught by Whit Burnett, and under Mr. Burnett’s tutelage he managed to sell a story, 'The Young Folks,' to Story magazine."

What does all this have to do with Canadian literature? Not a whole lot, I suppose – though Salinger's influence outside the ever-tightening borders of the United States cannot be denied. And it should be recognized that Story published a small number of Canadian writers, including those old standbys Stephen Leacock and Morley Callaghan.

I'm not sure what to make of the inscription in this copy of Sackcloth for Banner (Macmillan of Canada, 1938), purchased seven years ago from a Philadelphia bookseller. Jean-Charles Harvey was not amongst the Canadians featured in Story, and I can find no evidence of a friendship between the two men. Perhaps it's nothing more than a warm greeting from a writer to an admired editor... a "friend in letters", so to speak.

With another deadline approaching, another change of pace. The next week or so will feature images of books from others' libraries that have somehow ended up in my own... along with a word or two of explanation. Wouldn't want anyone to think I lifted these things.

Some Senators Write (or Say They Do)

News this morning of five more Tory senate appointments, including yet another published author. This time the honour goes to Pierre-Hughes Boisvenu, whose Survivre à l'innommable is, perhaps, the best book penned by a Harper appointee. Not to slight skier and Mars Bar pitch queen Nancy Greene, but her autobiography, published when she was 25, was a tad premature. For one, it contains nothing of her decades of battle against biologists, environmentalists and native groups.

(Honestly, all this fuss over watersheds and endangered species when our millionaires are suffering long lift lines.)

Of the authors the prime minister has sent to the upper chamber, Pamela Wallin is the most prolific. She's also a publicist's dream. Her link at the senate homepage is unique in that it leads away from things governmental to a commercial site: pamelawallin.com. There you can read all about the senator's career, including her three books. You'll remember the first, Since You Asked, which appeared in 1998, at about the time she and the CBC gave up on each other. It seems that a few years later, we were offered something called Speaking of Success: Collected Wisdom, Inspiration and Reflection.

Doesn't ring any bells?

Publisher Key Porter says the book was a bestseller. In fact, they trumpet the accomplishment on the cover of her 2003 The Comfort of Cats, which "explores the bond between Kitty, a creatively named Siamese cat, and the woman who lives with her, Pamela Wallin."

Interested?

The senator provides convenient links to amazon.ca and amazon.com.

(Senator, why do you snub Heather Reisman? After all, how much money has Jeff Bezos given to your party?)

Fellow author Linda Frum can learn a lot from her enterprising colleague. Frum's senate website has nothing about Linda Frum's Guide to Canadian Universities or Barbara Frum: A Daughter's Memoir, and nearly six months after her appointment, her pages seem such skeletal things. Sure, there's that strange speech she gave about her grandmother having been born at home, the recent "Grey Cup match" and other stuff, but the rest is nothing more than a bunch of links. That said, I was interested to see that she presents four that concern Parliament. In these dark days of prorogation, what reassuring words does Senator Frum recommend we read? Well, there's an intriguing sounding article titled "The Parliament of Canada — Democracy in action", but clicking on the link only takes you to this page:

Anyone looking to bring this to the senator's attention will find that her contact page says, simply, "Contact Us".

Us?

The senator offers no hint as to the identity of this mysterious group, but then she offers no address or phone number either.

Senator Frum may be reached by writing:

The Honourable Linda Frum Sokolowski

Senate of Canada
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A4

Disowned and Distant

Unlike Graham Greene, who never disowned his "entertainments," Brian refused to talk about his thrillers and in his later years he vainly hoped that nobody would unearth these ephemeral works or decipher the pseudonyms, I personally could never understand this. From the very beginning it was obvious that he had mastered the genre. The books were immensely readable and his genius for atmosphere, dialogue and plot was everywhere evident, but when I said that to Brian it only irritated him.

— William Weintraub, Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950s (McClelland & Stewart, 2001).

The last time I saw Brian Moore he was sitting alone in a damp bar overlooking Vancouver's False Creek. I felt he was owed a drink. Just thirty minutes earlier he'd completed one of the worst literary events I had ever attended. The reading, from The Statement, had gone quite well, but it was followed by the most cringe-worthy Q & A.

It began badly with a woman who asked about his work habits. This is, I believe, the most common query posed at such events. It's repeated often by those who seek some sort of formula that will magically transform them into writers. In this particular instance, a rough description would not suffice; what this woman wanted were details, dammit. Her follow-up questions – and there were many – invariably began: "So, you're saying I should...."

Next up was a man who had some extremely complimentary things to say about Margaret Atwood. Praise served as preamble. After assuring the author that he and Atwood were very much in the same league, the speaker blamed Moore's relatively low profile on the fact that his novels were published by several different houses. "Your agent should attend to this", the author was advised.

It all ended with an animated, wildly overdressed man, who used the forum to deliver a lengthy speech on Canada as a "rabidly" anti-Catholic country.

"Is Canada an anti-Catholic country?" was Moore's brief, yet polite response.

Filing out, I repeated this question to my companion, a member of the Church of Rome, who countered that our prime minister, Jean Chrétien, was a Catholic (as had been seven of his nineteen predecessors). Though C of E myself, I breathed a sigh of relief.

At some point in all this mess, Moore had happened to mention The Revolution Script, his 1971 novel about the October Crisis. It was, he'd said, a mistake to have written the book. This off-hand remark came back to me while reading The Executioners. Having disowned his pulp novels, had Moore started to distance himself from other works?

Brian Moore was Graham Greene's favourite living novelist, and as one might expect, his bibliography is both impressive and long. Ignoring the pulps, from 1955 until his death he averaged something approaching a book every two years. Here's the list that was included in Moore's 1988 novel The Colour of Blood:

And here's what was printed seven years later in The Statement, the book he was obliged to promote that grey Vancouver afternoon:

Note that The Revolution Script has disappeared, as has Canada (1963), a non-fiction title he wrote for money "with the Editors of Life". I very much doubt that this was an oversight. Once published, the titles had always been recognized in similar bibliographies until Lies of Silence (1990)... when they disappeared, never to included again.

I'd have been proud to have written either.

Murderers Move In On Montreal

The Executioners

Brian Moore

Toronto: Harlequin, 1951

One year later, another Brian Moore pulp. The Executioners was the author's second novel, published just months after Wreath for a Redhead. Not nearly as much fun or as interesting, it lacks the quirkiness and much of the noirish language of his debut. This isn't to say that these are typical elements in the author's recognized oeuvre – there's not much wackiness in Black Robe, and while its nights were dark, they weren't "as black as a showgirl's mascara" – but here Moore's great strengths are also absent.

While the scenario is fairly pedestrian – a group of foreign agents arrive in Montreal with orders to kidnap or kill an exiled leader – the greatest weakness is that the characters have no flesh. The hero, Mike Farrell, seems to have had some background in boxing, and we know he served in the Second World War. What else can we say about Farrell? Well, we're told that he's a native Montrealer – but this comes from the jacket copy, not the author. Small samplings of candy are provided by Janina, the beautiful blonde niece of the exiled leader. She is "everything you want and don't get, and most of it encased in a sheer blue dress", but not much more.

And then there's the leader himself, who Moore biographer Denis Sampson tells us was inspired by Stanislaw Mikołajczyk, the subject of the author's very first piece of journalism.

The statesman is described as a man with a "huge head". Seems right to me.

The Executioners shows signs of a rushed job. The first chapter, which begins in a pick-up joint frequented by buxom joy kids, is the strongest. In fact, the best line, concerning that same night club, appears on the first page: "The vice squad had closed it up as tight as a ballet dancer's pants two months before and I figured the girls had moved their trade." After this, like the joy kids' clients, we encounter more and more padding – in a book of only 157 pages – provided by frequent drives around town, trips out to Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue and talk of detailed schemes that are never put into action.

It's not at all surprising that Moore's agent succeeded in placing Wreath for a Redhead with an American publisher, but failed with The Executioners. I'm betting that the next pulp, French for Murder (1954) is better, but won't know for sure for another year. After The Executioners, it'll be an easy wait.

Object: A typical Harlequin. Printed on cheap paper, reading may lead to destruction. My copy, bought for two dollars at a bookstore that has since been swallowed up by the Palais des congrès, is in rotten shape. I handle it with loving care.

The cover image depicts two of the ne'r-do-wells outside the statesman's safe house, 26 Chablee Avenue. Though the street doesn't exist outside fiction, I think anyone who knows Montreal will agree that the architecture is, to put it politely, atypical.

Access: A non-circulating item found in rare book rooms and the like. The cheapest copy on offer, which looks to be in as rough shape as my own, will set you back C$50. There are much worse copies that go for even more. In fact, none of the nine currently listed online can be said to be anything better than Good. Most go for between C$60 and C$75. The most expensive copy – C$128 – comes with a signed slip of paper. An insult to both author and collector.

Related posts:

Brian Moore's True First

Parisian French, not Québécois French

No Lady Before Judith Hearne

No Gun for Gloria

Not Really So Fantastique

One Issue Wonder?

I was going to include this artifact from 1980 in the previous post, but does it not deserve one of its own? Amongst contemporary Montreal music mags Mode & Musik stands out in so very many ways, not the least of which is its use of a typesetting machine in place of a typewriter. I bought this thing as a teenager, but otherwise know nothing about it. Looking at the masthead, only Yves Thériault's name is familiar – but I very much doubt that this is the same man who wrote Agaguk. That said, there is an piece by Jacques Lee Pelletier, who was "New Wave's first cosmetician". How do I know this? Because his article is preceded by one on... Jacques Lee Pelletier.

There's a good deal of mode and muzik here, but precious little Montreal. In mode, M Pelletier is the lone Canadian, presented beside designers Betsey Johnson and Thierry Mugler. In music, there are articles on XTC, the Specials and the Boomtown Rats, but aside from a lone, blurry photograph of sixteen-year-old disco diva France Joli and producer Tony Green, there's not a sign of the city's music scene.

Could it be that they sensed the mirror ball was about to drop?

Something is going on here. Publisher les Éditions Alquint has spilled an awful lot of expensive ink on something called "le Salon Disco" and the awkwardly named "Long Night of the disco... New Wave". Running through the magazine is a peculiar, seemingly desperate attempt to somehow link New Wave with disco and, more than anything else, the discotheque:

The New Wave phenomenon is spreading... in one way or another, it touches almost everyone. But it's still in the discotheques that it finds its natural habitat.

Fashion has been refashioned, clothes becoming as it were the elements of disguise. Anything goes... the wilder, the more outlandish the better! But one can still see blue jeans side by side with the latest New Wave craze like gold and red running shoes.

Clothes... make-up... hairdos... whatever turns you on!

The urge for disguises, to go dancing, to let it all hang out, is slowly but surely infecting the masses...

The hapless reader is told that New Wave is bringing great changes: "Some discotheques have pulled out all the stops to satisfy their clients' taste for the bizarre, some even transforming their dance floors into roller skate-dancing tracks!"

Can't say I remember Andy Partridge or Jerry Dammers on roller skates... but then, I don't remember France Joli on wheels either.

She's perched on stilettos here. Enjoy.

One Band Wonder?

The Gazette, 28 November 1980

I remember Daniel Richler as lead singer of the Alpha Jerks. Did I see them at Cinema V? Was his nom de punk Kenny Lingus? Was Richler in other bands? It all seems a fog. Digging through old Montreal newspapers brings no clarity. Thomas Schnurmacher's little write-up on the Alpha Jerks is unique, an oddity that exists only because the lead singer's dad wrote Joshua Then and Now.

In those days, children – when there wasn't so much as a Montreal Mirror – we old timers relied on our student newspapers for coverage of the alternative scene. But, every once in a while, someone took a stab at starting a local music magazine. I checked these, too. Still no Alpha Jerks!

The first and only issue of Going Underground. No publication date is listed, but reviews of Soft Cell's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and Architecture & Morality by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark suggest the dying days of 1981.

The first issue of Clea Notar's Red She Said, published – photocopied, actually – in August 1982.

The Summer 1983 issue. I'm pretty certain that this was the end.

From 1984, "JUST ABOUT FIVE GOD DAMN YEARS IN THE MAKING", the first issue of Sugar Diet. Belated congratulations to Rick Trembles.

Q: What is Mark Hamill's photo doing in a piece on Fonda Peters (Lindalee Tracey) and the Alpha Jerks?

A: Later in Schnurmacher's column we're told that "the star of Star Wars is filming a comedy with George Burns in the wilds of Vermont, but he occasionally finds the time to party in Montreal." Apparently Hamill had drinks at Disco Charly with owner Johnny Battista, and even asked some girls to dance. How'd he do? "Most of them accepted even though they did not recognize him."

I can find no record of a Hamill/Burns collaboration.
Pity.

Related post:

One Book Wonder?