Returning to my desk after a very enjoyable and eventful weekend at the Knowlton Wordfest. These photos, taken in nearby Foster, feature what is left of the home of Bill Arnold, one of John Glassco's neighbours. A veteran of the Great War, Arnold called his house "Blighty". The man and building inspired Glassco's 20-line of the same name, which was first published in the November 1952 issue of The Canadian Forum.
See by the tracks, where a sodden shingled roof
Droops on a worn façade, a wilting visor
Over dead window-panes and the lettered board
Where exultation, curled into one word,
Still celebrates a half forgotten war —
That "lettered board", featuring the name of Arnold's house, remained nailed above the front door for nearly nine decades. It was stolen earlier this year.
A couple of cover mockups from my years as a book buyer, both uncovered last week while going trough old boxes. Keeping Track was the working title of Richler's 1990 collection of essays and reviews for Viking Canada. It was ultimately published with a much better title and cover as Broadsides. I don't believe Richler ever intended to put out anything called Selected Essays & Reports; if memory serves he was still hunting around for a title when Knopf Canada presented this cover. The collection was published in 1998 as Belling the Cat.
Note the barking Borzoi. A nice touch, I think.
Five years later, Knopf used the same photo of Richler, by Julian Edelsten, on the front and back covers of my own book, Character Parts.
A week tomorrow I'll be speaking on my forthcoming biography of John Glassco, A Gentleman of Pleasure, at the Knowlton Wordfest. For almost a decade, Glassco lived on the outskirts of this beautiful Quebec town in a grand house he immortalized in his poem "The White Mansion".
The image above, taken in 1914, isn't quite of his time, but it does capture Knowlton very much as Glassco knew it when he called the town home. The building closest served as the post office during the four years he delivered the rural mail. It was the only job he ever had.
On Writing a Life of John Glassco, “A Great Practitioner of Deceit”
In recognition of this day of celebration in the republic to the south, six American novels I haven't found time to read. Doubt I ever will. If I were to crack open just one it would be Lionel Derrick's The Quebec Connection (New York: Pinnacle, 1976). Why? The cover copy doesn't motivate. Sure, Mark Hardin, the Penetrator, is exciting, modern and deadly, but no more so than his rivals the Executioner, the Destroyer and the Butcher. No, the real attraction here isn't the man, but a plot that has Hardin fighting Quebec separatist hippies who are being used as pawns in a plot to populate the world with dwarfs.
Is that enough?
Elaboration may be in order.
The armed separatists fund their activities by pushing a drug called Ziff, which has been created by a cabal of bitter little people who seek to remake the world in their image. One sniff of Ziff, it seems, alters one's DNA and induces dwarfism in future offspring. According to trash enthusiast Marty McKee of the wonderfully named Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot, all leads to "an amazing climax in which three midgets dressed as Athos, Porthos and D'Artagnan are armed with rapiers and fighting the Penetrator atop the Eiffel Tower."
You can't make this stuff up... but Lionel Derrick can.
Well, not Derrick, but the men behind the pseudonym – in this case Mark Roberts.
The Quebec Connection followed Hardin's first Canadian adventure, Mankill Sport, in which the Penetrator chases a drug dealing American psychopath through our backwoods. I can't explain the sudden interest, though I expect the October Crisis had something to do with it. By my count, in the six years that followed those dark days we were visited by three other American action heroes, all of whom who did battle in Quebec, usually with some sort of militant separatist group:
The Canadian Bomber Contract
Phillip Atlee [pseud. James Atlee Phillips]
Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1971
Hardass CIA contract killer Joe "The Nullifier" Gall comes to Quebec to stop an FLQ splinter group intent on blowing up the American side of Niagara Falls. What the Partridge Family's bus has to do with all this I don't know.
The White Wolverine Contract
Phillip Atlee [pseud. James Atlee Phillips]
Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1971
Joe Gall, again. This follow-up to The Canadian Bomber Contract sees the Nullifier on Vancouver Island, where he fights Chinese villain Victor Li and his private army of hippy and Métis separatists. Gall calls them "psycho rebels".
Canadian Kill
Joseph Nazel
Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974
Billionaire Henry Highland "Iceman" West's hopes of a relaxing holiday in northern Quebec are shattered when his plane is shot out of the sky by the fanatical Next Generation of Man. Cover artist Corey Wolfe does our hero a disservice; he's not really using that woman as a shield.
Canadian Crisis
Don Pendleton
New York: Pinnacle, 1976
The mafia is determined to turn Quebec into the crime capital of the world, but are thwarted by the Executioner, Vietnam vet Mack Bolan.
Am I alone in reading Marc Bolan whenever Mack Bolan's name appears? Electric Warrior kicks more ass than the Executioner every time. Here's the proof.
Oh, and in case anyone is wondering. Hardin... the Penetrator... Yeah, I got it.
A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's UP, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
