The Mysterious Mister Nablo

The Long November

James Benson Nablo

New York: Dutton, 1946

I'm going to step out on a limb here and state, with confidence, that this was one of the most popular Canadian novels published after the Second World War. Evidence? I can offer nothing more than its publishing history, which over six years included three Dutton printings, two News Stand Library editions and a very attractive Signet paperback. And yet, we remember nothing of James Benson Nablo; The Long November, his only novel, has been out of print for over five decades.

Nablo's narrator is Joe Mack, a wounded, unarmed Canadian soldier hiding from Nazis in a half-destroyed Italian home. Don't be fooled, this is not a war novel, but Horatio Alger's nightmare. As Joe waits out the enemy, he looks back on his 34 years, playing particular attention to his efforts to make something of himself. It isn't that Joe cares so much about money, rather he sees it as a means of winning the love of his life, beautiful blonde Steffie Gibson. Like Duddy Kravitz, who would follow, Joe realizes his riches by "borrowing" the last bit of money he needs to achieve his dream – and, as with Duddy, he loses the girl as a result.

The Long November is a rough book, told in a style that resembles tough guy film noir narration; only Nablo uses words that would not pass the Hays Code. In a 1949 letter to Jack McClelland, Earle Birney provides a list: "Jesus Christ, Christ Almighty, By Jesus, for Christ's sake, goddamit, Bugger all, sonofabitch, suck-holing, stumblebum, crap, shacked up, quickie, a lay, shove it up your keister, tired of being screwed-without-being-kissed." May I add that in one of his many moments of self-recrimination Joe describes his work as "of much use as a tit on a spinster"? Writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, John D. Paulus complained: "If this is modern 'realistic writing,' this reviewer will take vanilla."

And I'll take Rocky Road.

Nearly everything that's been written about Nablo is found on the book's dust jacket. Other references to the author are precious and few. In Imagining Canadian Literature, editor Sam Solecki provides nothing more than a fleeting footnote, referring to "J.V. Nablo [sic] (b. 1910)", an author who has not "been traced". Nablo was indeed born in 1910, making him exactly the same age as his protagonist. Here the future author is recorded in the 1911 census, as the daughter of George and Margery Nablo of 8 Centre Street in Niagara Falls.

I've found little else, though I can say that he never published another book. It seems Nablo left the world of letters for a life in film. In 1954, his short story "The Wheel Man" was adapted by a young Blake Edwards as Drive a Crooked Road. The flick has Mickey Rooney as an honest auto mechanic who finds himself driving the getaway car in a bank robbery. Blame it on a dame.

The god-awful A Bullet for Joey (1955) followed. Of the films made from Nablo's stories, it's by far the most interesting. Why? Well, for one it stars Edward G. Robinson as a French Canadian RCMP detective named Raoul Leduc. Need more? It's a Cold War thriller set in Montreal, and features George Raft as an American mobster who is hired by the Reds to kidnap a nuclear scientist. Who can resist?

A Bullet for Joey was followed by a forgotten western, Raw Edge (1956), which starred Vancouver beauty Yvonne de Carlo (née Peggy Middleton). One wonders whether Nablo lived to see it; industry reports from the autumn of 1956 refer to "the late James Benson Nablo".

The writer's executor seems to have had a busy time of it, selling options for Nablo stories like "Morning Star", which was to have been James Cagney's directorial debut. In the end, there was only one more film: a Victor Mature vehicle entitled China Doll (1958). Its release coincided with a "novelization by Edgar Jean Bracco of a screenplay by Kitty Buhler". Published as a 35¢ Berkley paperback, it makes no mention of James Benson Nablo.

Object: A fairly slim hardcover in green cloth with light brown lettering. What makes the book interesting is that Dutton changed covers for the second and third printings – both in March 1946 – replacing the battlefield landscape with an image of Steffie Gibson looking like a well-covered streetwalker.

Access: Fourteen copies are held in Canadian public and university libraries. It seems that the uncommon first edition exists only in rotten condition. The best copy currently listed online is a bargain at C$30; others lack dust jackets or are ex-library. Decent copies of the News Stand and Signet editions can be had for under C$10. I've yet to come across the 1957 Double Flame paperback.

Related posts:

Nablo in Hollywood

Nablo in Paperback

Edward G. Robinson Gets His Man

The Long November in Late August
The Last of James Benson Nablo?

Shorter Shelley

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

Bit of an Edward Gorey feel to it, don't you think?

James McIntyre had such a hard time with names. For instance, there's that tribute to Susanna Moodie, in which he not only messes up her surname, but refers to William Lyon Mackenzie as "McKenzie". Here, of course, "Shelly" is Shelley. Perhaps a good thing that McIntyre didn't include the full name – Percy seems safe, but Bysshe is tricky.

Wildly Wayward Walt Whitman

To Toronto this evening for the launch of my friend George Fetherling's third novel, Walt Whitman's Secret, at Ben McNally Books.

So... in anticipation of this joyous event, James McIntyre's verse about the Good Gray Poet:

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

D'Arcy McGee, All Compliment to Thee

James McIntyre's warm tribute to the great Thomas D'Arcy McGee, assassinated 142 years ago this morning.

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

T.D. MCGEE.

Having been kindly invited as a member of the Mechanics' Institute some 25 years ago by the late Jeremiah O'Neill, Esq., to meet that gentleman in company of a number of our townsmen, when Mr. McGee was rising from the table the chair being new stuck to him and it being near a general election he very wittily remarked that he hoped the people of Montreal would be anxious to retain him in his seat as the people here are. We wrote the following lines at the time, the last verse was added afterwards.

D'Arcy McGee,

All compliment to thee,

The hope of the land

On your lecture so grand.

Though that is your forte,

Oh give us the sport

Of an hour of your chat,

Then we'll laugh and grow fat.

For none but the vile

Could 'ere cease to smile,

When near to thee

So brilliant and free.

Plant of green Erin's isle,

Long in Canadian soil,

May you take deep root

And bear much noble fruit.

Our hopes were in vain,

Alas he is slain,

By a crankish hand

The flower of the land.

Related posts:

'O Martyr'd McGee!'

D'Arcy McGee's Query (with a response)

A St. Patrick's Day Fragment

'IN MEMORIAM! The Hon. T.D. McGee'

A Poet's Angry Word With the Fenian Brotherhood

Funny He Never Married

Ingersoll's 1897 Fireman and Police Banquet. Hardly a woman in sight.

Today's James McIntyre poem is "Lines Addressed to an Old Bachelor". Here the twice married poet does his best to flog the idea of matrimony to one who does not care for female company.

Why not?

Do I read too much into the use of the word "wingle" – slang for penis?

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

McIntyre's Mammoth Ode

Let's get this out of the way, shall we. All seven thousand pounds.

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

Poetry, Pluck and Push

National Poetry Month, a time for balloons, ice cream and marching bands. I risk spoiling the party by pointing out, yet again, that William Arthur Deacon's The Four Jameses remains unavailable and, as if to add insult to injury, not one work by the critic's "monarchs of the quill" is in print. No James Gay, no James McIntyre, no James D. Gillis, no James MacRae... and yet brand new copies of Gordon Downie's Coke Machine Glow may be easily obtained through Amazon.ca.

I devoted last National Poetry Month to James MacRae, the son of Glengarry, whom I followed in adopting the little Ontario town of St Marys as my own. This year I'll be reading verse by Ingersoll's James McIntyre. Of the Four Jameses, McIntyre is certainly the best remembered – not one of the others has a contest named in his honour. So much of this limited recognition has to do with his "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese" and, by extension, McIntyre's reputation as "The Cheese Poet". The furniture maker/undertaker played this up to his own detriment; he had a much greater reach.

One hundred and sixteen years ago, in his tribute "To James McIntyre, the Poet", Ezra H. Stafford wrote:

He does not write at stated intervals.

But when some great truth startles and appalls.

McIntyre's voice has been still for over a century – he died 104 years ago yesterday. His work is finite, but we do have the luxury of reading when the spirit moves. No longer must we wait for the Globe, hoping that it might contain a new McIntyre poem.

So, in celebration of this National Poetry Month – and in recognition of the man's industry – I present one James McIntyre or McIntyre-related poem for each workday, beginning with his tribute to fellow Canadian writer Susanna Moodie.

Pay no heed to the misspelling of her name; this is what we refer to as poetic license.

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

MRS. MOODY.

In giving glance at various Canadian authors perhaps it would be well to commence with that early writer Mrs. Moody. She was a sister of the celebrated Agnes Strickland, author of "The Queens of England."

When this country it was woody,
Its great champion Mrs. Moody,
She showed she had both pluck and push
In her work roughing in the bush.

For there all alone she will dwell,
At time McKenzie did rebel,
Outbreak her husband strove to quell,
Her own grand struggles she doth tell.

Round bush life she threw a glory,
Pioneer renowned in story,
But her tale it is more cheering
When she wrote about the clearing.

Her other sister, Mrs. Traill*
Though eighty-six, she doth not fail;
She now is writing of wild flowers
Grown in Canada's woody bowers.

* Mrs. Traill lives near Peterboro. Mrs. Moody died in Toronto. I sent her a copy of my poems in 1885, and she thanked me through a friend as she was in feeble health at the time.