The Solid Walls of St James the Apostle

A very fine column by Mike Boone on St James the Apostle's Writers' Chapel from yesterday's Gazette:

City's Great Writers Honoured in Historic Church

"Montreal is a city of great writers. And it's fitting that distinguished men and women of letters be commemorated in one of the city's great places of worship", he writes.

How true.

NOT FOR RESALE

Many years ago, a publisher friend told me that he never took home advance readers copies. "Such ugly things", he sniffed. True enough back then, but things have changed considerably since. Where once reviewers, librarians and buyers were presented with objects like the above, they're now just as likely to receive something that might at casual glance be mistaken for a trade paperback. Consider the Chatto and Windus "UNCORRECTED BOOK PROOF" for Barney's Version...

... this ARC of Dennis Bock's The Ash Garden...

...or the ARC of A Gentleman of Pleasure, my forthcoming biography of John Glassco.

(Now, I ask you, who wouldn't want to take that home? Publication date: 1 April.)

Its arrival a couple of weeks ago has had me looking over some of the ARCs in my collection. The most interesting by far came out of McClelland and Stewart in the 'seventies. In those days the company didn't issue many ARCs – not surprising, given its reputation for missing pub dates – but those they did produce garnered attention. Take the "ADVANCE PROOF" of Charles Templeton's Act of God, which featured a cover letter cover inviting the recipient to guess the novel's sales.

Both copies in my collection are signed by Jack McClelland (and Charles Templeton); I've seen others upon which the publisher's name is scrawled by an unknown hand.

Act of God was a great commercial success, though I expect the prediction of 47,300 copies sold in Canada before year's end was a tad high. Ever the optimist that Jack McClelland. How else to explain the very generous $50,000 Seal Book Prize awarded in 1978 to Aritha van Herk for Judith, her first novel?

The news was announced in grand style, as reported by the Canadian Press:

Aretha van Herk, a 23-year-old Edmonton housewife and university student, good-humoredly climbed a ladder in a grimy downtown parking lot in Montreal recently to endorse her cheque – displayed on a massive billboard announcing "Congratulations Aritha!"... The Guinness Book of World Records will be asked to verify that the actual cheque – the billboard – is the largest cheque ever made.

The publisher built on the story by offering a signed ARC produced exclusively for women whose first name was Judith. "We want those who share her name to meet her first", says the cover.

Just how limited was this "limited press run edition"? In Jack: A Life with Writers, James King puts the number at 3500 – adding that the publisher received 4500 requests, including a good number from cheats looking to cop free copies.

I paid $3.95 for mine back in 1990. It still has a place in my home.

The Feast of a Whiskey Priest

"I've taken more than a few swipes at print on demand publishers..." So I wrote here back in 2009, then just kept swinging. Boy, are my arms are tired.

Today I take a break and extend a welcoming hand to caustic cover critic J.R.S. Morrison, whose new Whiskey Priest Books proves that POD technology can be used to produce things of beauty, while resurrecting interesting titles that traditional publishers have allowed to die. This includes Michael's Crag, Ontarian Grant Allen's peculiar tale of a civil servant who believes himself to be the archangel Michael, which until now has been available only in some of most ghastly POD editions ever produced.

I know Allen's novel well, but the other twenty-two Whiskey Priest titles are unfamiliar. Here are just a couple that I look forward to reading this year:

Contemptible
'Casualty' [Arnold Gyde]

"A fictionalised memoir from one of the first soldiers ashore in France with the British Expeditionary Forces in World War One, drawing on his experiences of the horrific Mons campaign."

Boon
H.G. Wells

"Wells’s satire on literature, 'Boon' was originally published under the pseudonym Reginald Bliss; a follow-up to the Fabian-savaging 'The New Machiavelli'. 'Boon' was the book which destroyed his friendship with Henry James."

Though Amazon.ca fails, select titles can be found at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. All are available through the Whiskey Priest Lulu shop.

Well-chosen, attractive and modestly priced, this is print on demand as it should be.

Of Sex and Drugs and Montreal

Hot Freeze

Martin Brett [pseud. Douglas Sanderson]

New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954

246 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:

Ricochet! Ricochet!
Dark Blondes

A New Year

'Te Deum Laudamus" by Francis Sherman

from The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1913), Wilfred Campbell, ed.

Related posts:
Immature Verse for a New Year
An Old Poem for the New Year by Arthur Stringer
Temperance Verse for New Year's Day

In Search of George Pepki, Poet

Yesterday's Globe and Mail featured a short work of fiction by Preston Manning. Titled "2018: The new health care", it's of a particular, peculiar, unnamed genre in which political types imagine a future where their greatest fantasy is realized.

I don't know... let's call it porn.

What Mr Manning does – what all who write these pieces do – is set up a row of carefully chosen dominos, each in itself a fantasy, which when set in motion culminate in the greatest fantasy of all.

Call it a climax.

Here Mr Manning imagines the election in Quebec of a "reform-minded government", the death of the Bloc Québécois, a Wikileak that exposes "media executives, editorialists, journalists and television personalities" as health care hypocrites and a "Nobel Prize-winner [sic]" who has Liberals and New Democrats eating crow. And the greatest fantasy of all? The abolition of medicare, of course:

The House, now enlightened by science and buoyed with Christmas cheer, unanimously approved a motion endorsing the "mixed systems" approach to health care and commending it to all provinces and territories. The motion specifically affirmed that such a system was completely compatible with the Canadian way, since, as all members had always known in their hearts, "mixed systems are the very essence of Canada’s national identity."

God bless us, every one!

As I say, one man's fantasy... but what interests me is the domino that Mr Manning calls "The Pepki Case":

George Pepki was a retired Alberta farmer who suffered from a kidney ailment and was referred by his family doctor to a specialist. While waiting for over four months to see the specialist, George's condition became critical and his family rushed him to the emergency ward of an Edmonton hospital. After waiting there for more than six hours and receiving no help, the family in desperation flew George to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he was diagnosed, treated and released within 72 hours. The family sought to recover the entire cost of the unauthorized trip and treatment from Alberta Health Services, which refused to pay. The Pepkis then took Alberta to court, the case eventually reaching the Supreme Court of Canada about the same time as Quebec was instituting its health-care reforms.

George Pepki is one of only two names featured in "2018: The new health care". The other, Nobel Prize winner Dr Lars Aalborg, is a figment of Mr Manning's imagination, but George Pepki is very much a real person. How do I know? Because Mr Manning has mentioned George Pepki before – from the floor of the House of Commons, no less. Here's Mr Manning on 2 October 1996 debating Bill C-45:

Thinking of the ineffectiveness of bureaucratic action in these areas, the inability of bureaucratic measures and institutions to protect people or to rehabilitate criminals, I am reminded of a poem by the Canadian poet George Pepki, inspired by the children's nursery rhyme "Humpty-Dumpty'':

Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

And what is the moral to this little rhyme?
A moral with meaning for men in our time?
The moral is this, and its lesson is true:
There are certain things that the state cannot do.

If all the King's horses and all the King's men
Cannot put an egg together again,
Is it not a false hope, an illusion, a sin,
To ask civil servants to reconstruct men?

Now, we don't hear much poetry recited in the House of Commons, so you'll understand why this particular poem and the proud Pepki name have stayed with me. But here's the thing: in the fourteen years since, I've not seen another poem by "Canadian poet George Pepki". Not only have there been no volumes of verse and nothing in our little magazines, no more than this morsel from Hansard has made its way onto the web.

When yesterday's Globe and Mail hit the stands I'd all but forgotten George Pepki, but he's now very much front of mind. Has the poet actually suffered a kidney ailment? Did his family fly him down to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona? Was he really diagnosed, treated and released within 72 hours? Is there a case now winding its way to the Supreme Court? Or is Mr Manning simply imagining a future in which these trials will be visited upon George Pepki?

I've written the former Reform leader about the poet George Pepki, but have yet to receive a response.

Update: On 4 January I received a very generous email from Preston Manning in answer to my queries. Mystery solved... for me, at least; Mr Manning has asked that I keep the contents confidential. It's my hope that one day he'll share the secret of George Pepki with the public at large.

The 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired

Published in 1935 by les Éditions du Quotidien, a first edition by one of the most important Canadian writers of the twentieth century. I bought Sébastien Pierre this year for ten dollars. A full 75 years after publication, its pages remained uncut. Three of the 23 illustrations featured are revealed here for the first time.

Such a sad commentary on the country's literature, and yet... and yet this same sorry situation enables souls like myself to amass a fairly nice collection of interesting and unusual Canadiana.

Case in point: Thomas P. Kelley's pseudonymous No Tears for Goldie (1950), which was purchased in February for a mere five dollars. No hits on Worldcat, absent from Abe, nothing at all at AddAll.

Rare, bizarre, but not really worth a read.

Of the obscurities reviewed here these past twelve months, the three I most recommend:

The Long November by James Benson Nablo

The Door Between by Neil H. Perrin

Gambling with Fire by David Montrose

These are not great works of literature, but they are engaging and very interesting. Each depicts a dark, disturbing and gritty Canada found in very few novels of their time.

Financially speaking, my best buy was a very nice first edition (my second) of Tender is the Night (sans dust jacket), which I found just last month for $9.50 in a Montreal bookstore. The year's favourite purchase, however, is of negligible commercial value: a 1926 edition of Anatole France's Under the Rose. I came across this at a library sale, flipped through a few pages, and happened to spot the name Peregrine Acland, a subject of ongoing research, stamped ever so discretely in the front free endpaper.

What luck!

Still no luck, I'm afraid, in tracking down Sexpo '69, that elusive novel of lesbian erotica set at Expo 67. Will I never find a copy?

Of course, I will.

A Happy New Year to all!