New Canadian Library series designs as reflected in the work of Sinclair Ross, beginning way back in 1958 with NCL 4.
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07 February 2011
NCL: Devolution, Evolution and Lateral Moves
New Canadian Library series designs as reflected in the work of Sinclair Ross, beginning way back in 1958 with NCL 4.
02 February 2011
Robert McAlmon's Service to Canada
Recognition of Robert Menzies McAlmon, who died fifty-five years ago today. Though not a Canadian, his contributions to this country's literature were not insignificant. He was an early champion of Morley Callaghan, and more importantly, a great supporter of John Glassco. It was McAlmon who placed Glassco's "Extract from an Autobiography" in the Spring 1929 number of This Quarter, and it was through his encouragement that the Montreal writer returned to print, after a fourteen-year silence, in the pages of The Canadian Forum.
McAlmon had other links to this country. His Irish-born father immigrated to Canada as a youth and eventually married a girl from Chatham, Ontario. They were living in Clifton, Kansas when the future expat was born.
In Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco tells us that on the evening he first met McAlmon the writer revealed that he'd deserted the Canadian Army during the Great War. William Carlos Williams reports the same story in his accurately titled The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. For decades McAlmon scholars took this to be a fanciful fabrication. I did, too... until I found his records while researching A Gentleman of Pleasure.
Should I have been surprised? Perhaps not. After all, McAlmon's fiction relied so very heavily on his life. This, Glassco felt, was the writer's greatest weakness. He once dismissed McAlmon's novels and short stories as "literal transcriptions of things set down simply because they had happened and were vividly recollected. There was neither invention nor subterfuge; when the recollection stopped, so did the story."
McAlmon did have his own champions – Ezra Pound and Kay Boyle come first to mind – but he was never a man who was much read. While his work may be unfamiliar, his influence is evident – not only with Callaghan and Glassco, but in the careers of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and others who benefitted from his generous spirit.
Unrecognized, neglected and weakened by illness, McAlmon lived his final years in near-poverty. He remains much as he was at death: a forgotten man.
Even a deserter deserves better.
Robert McAlmon
Mariette Mills
c. 1923
01 February 2011
The Elusive Diane Bataille
I intend no pun in writing that "DIRT" just about covers this 2001 bind-up (again, no pun intended) of Marcus Huttning's Linda's Strange Vacation and The Whip Angels by our own Diane Bataille. The latter novel is without a doubt the filthiest piece of porn I've encountered in writing this blog.
For two years now I've been keeping an eye out for something – anything – relating to Mme Bataille. The return has been so slight that this amusing cover image, stumbled over yesterday, ranks as a major find.
And so I ask: The daughter of a Russian prince, the wife of Georges Bataille, a model for Alberto Giacometti, how is it that so little has been recorded about this dear lady?
Related post:
29 January 2011
26 January 2011
AL PALMER PLAGIARISM SCANDAL!
There's no question that Al Palmer's Montreal Confidential (1949) was inspired by New York: Confidential! (1947), but who would've expected the ugly accusation of plagiarism? And yet, here it is, as reported by gossip columnist Fitz (Gerald FitzGerald) in the 14 October 1950 edition of The Gazette:
Combing through both books, I find the charge to be entirely unfounded. I add that no two chapters share the same title, though I did come across this:
Someone get on the phone to Gads Hill Place.
Palmer had no need of Lait and Mortimer; he was much more the wordsmith than either New Yorker. William Weintraub recognizes as much in his forward to the recent Véhicule Press edition: "Al is not content to simply talk about attractive women walking down the Street; for him they are 'local lovelies ankling along.'" Beer is "stupor suds", loose women are "trampettes" – and just look at these Montreal Confidential chapter titles:
The Scrambled-Eared GentryThe Broken Leg BrigadeCaprice ChinoisCharacters, Characters – Never Any Normal PeopleThe Younger Degeneration
Any words lifted from Lait and Mortimer's books come from the cover of their follow-up, Chicago Confidential, which appeared at newsstands just a few months before Montreal Confidential. "The low-down on the big town!" says one; "The Low Down on the Big Town!" says the other. Did the pair even write this cover copy? Did Palmer write his? Never mind – no one bothered to trademark the phrase.
I expect that what upset the New Yorkers was the idea of someone honing in on what they believed to be a borderless franchise – one that exhausted itself well before the 1954 death of Jack Lait.
Palmer wrote no follow-up to Montreal Confidential. Given his ill-feelings about Hogtown and its inhabitants, Toronto Confidential was out of the question.
And Ottawa Confidential? Well, that just sounds silly. Even today.
Your morning smile: This small piece on an A.J. Cronin impersonator – I kid you not – from the very same column:
22 January 2011
Parisian French, not Québécois French
French for Murder
Bernard Mara [pseud. Brian Moore]
New York: Fawcett, 1954
With French for Murder, Brian Moore quit Harlequin as a publisher, abandoned Montreal as a setting and put aside his name for more literary efforts. I think the last of these is most important. This is a Bernard Mara novel, the first that the Irish-Canadian penned "pretending to be an American". The writing is much tighter than in previous pulps Wreath for a Redhead and The Executioners, but it is also less interesting. French for Murder is a novel with drive; it moves at a breakneck speed that affords no glimpse of character and little time for atmosphere.
Our hero here is Noah Cain, a luckless American who stumbles drunkenly upon a homicide in an otherwise polite Parisian hotel. Fingered as the murderer – a Hitchcockian "wrong man" – he is soon on the run, sprinting from Montmartre to Marseilles to Cassis in search of the girl who can clear his name.
Straightforward, conventional and bland, in French for Murder there are no real twists or surprises. Sure, the American military policeman turns out to be one of the baddies, but we knew that he was too good to be true. And when Cain is captured by crooks, we and he had sense that it was coming. His escape provides one of the more interesting passages in the novel:
I fired. His gun dropped to the carpet and he dropped on top of it, a pancake stain of blood growing in his thigh. He scrambled for the gun. I fired again. The second bullet hit him in the shoulder. He jerked convulsively and fell, face down, gasping. I felt no emotion. I had stopped him, the way you would shut a gate on a mad dog.
This is as good as it gets – and it's a darn site better than:
Uniformed police burst past me like the Charge of the Light Brigade. They were eager to do their duty.
Harsh? Look, I consider Moore one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. Nearly half-way through his pulp novels, I'm beginning to understand why they were disowned. French for Murder was written for money; in 1954 it's advance on royalties brought in US$2,500. Compare this to the C$227.30 advance received the following year for Judith Hearne.
We all have to eat.
Object: A slim, 144-page mass market paperback blessed with a cover painting by American realist painter Clark Hulings. Fawcett's Gold Medal paperbacks typically had print runs of 200,000 copies.
Access: Non-circulating copies may be found at Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library and eleven of our university libraries. At US$3.00, it's pretty clear that the cheapest copy currently listed for sale online has been thrown up by someone who has no idea that Bernard Mara is Brian Moore. Nearly all the others – a total of sixteen – are hip. We begin with a US$25 "Fair reading copy", then go all the way up to US$200 being asked by two booksellers offering "unread" copies. However do they know?
Related posts:
20 January 2011
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