The Poetic Martin Brett

Cast your eyes on what is surely the most elegant Douglas Sanderson item. Printed with a Vandercook SP-15 press on St. Armand Old Master Rideau paper, In The Darkness is the work of J.C. Byers.

Mr Byers gives us extracts from four of Sanderson's Martin Brett novels "presented so as to highlight the poetic elements of noir novels."

The above, drawn from the opening of Hot Freeze, is a favourite, but the one that really got to me comes from The Darker Traffic:

This was a night
When I needed a friend,
In case I opened my eyes
In the darkness
And had nothing
     intimate and
     familiar and
     trivial
To talk about,
To make me stop
     remembering
That the little kid
With the big eyes
Was dead.

In The Darkness was produced in an edition of twenty numbered copies. I'm told that this is just the first in a series and that the hard boiled epigrams of David Montrose are next.

Those hoping to add a copy to their library can contact J.C. Byers through Wollamshram's Blog.

The photographs do not do it justice.

Thirty Years After Thirty Years at Stratford

Thirty Years at Stratford
Robertson Davies
Stratford, ON: Stratford Festival, 1982

Christopher Plummer left town a few days ago, signalling the coming end of Stratford's sixtieth season. Oh, the shows will go on – some for two more months – but the crowds will thin, temperatures will fall, and the ladies will begin wearing shawls and wraps. It's my favourite part of the season.

Delivered thirty years ago yesterday, the day after the great man's 69th birthday, this lecture is a souvenir of a familiar time – one in which the festival was fighting for funds, and against declining ticket sales. Be not deceived by its title, this not a history – "Shakespeare has reminded us in many passages of the tediousness of the oft-told tale", Davies tells us – rather it's an attempt to properly place the festival within the history of Canadian theatre.

Dry stuff?

Not at all.

I ramble a bit, but then so does Davies. The Festival Theatre crowd that night was treated to the raising of the ghost of Sarah Bernhardt, a tender tickling and ribbing of puritans, and the drawing of parallels between Beautiful Joe, Little Lord Fauntleroy and E.T. I'd have fallen off my seat.

At its heart Davies' lecture is a celebration of Stratford, a lively schooling of those who attack the festival as being something somehow not Canadian. But at the end I found my mind returning to Davies' opening remarks about the "oft-told tale":

Of course, the story of the very long chance that at last romps home with the prize is one of the best stories in the world, but insofar as it applies to Stratford, you have heard it.

Yes. Yes, I have. As those ladies in shawls age, and I find my middle-aged self counted amongst the youngest patrons, I wonder if it isn't time to let the younger generation in on it.

A personal note: "Canada has had a theatre ever since it had good-sized towns," writes Davies, "and it says something about our ancestors – something we often forget – that they regarded a theatre as a necessary part of a good-sized town."

Sure enough, at the centre of my adopted town of St Marys, seventeen kilometres south of Stratford, rests this magnificent opera house:

It's a mere fine-minute stroll from the inn at which Plummer stays when he plays Stratford.

Object: Sixteen glossy staple-bound pages with card covers. I purchased my sun-bleached copy for $1.50 last year in Montreal. A festival price sticker indicates that it originally sold for $2.50.

Access: A rare item, only three copies are currently listed by online booksellers. The cheapest, in Fine condition, is going for US$25. At US$30, the most expensive is offered by a confused bookseller who pitches "signed at back", then adds "hard to tell if it is printed or signed." Hard to tell? How absurd. Here's my "signed" copy:

Believe me, you can tell.

Collecting Norman Levine (Arts '48)

A collector writes today in response to my column in the new Norman Levine issue of Canadian Notes & Queries: "You mentioned that you asked Levine if you could use one of his stories in an anthology. Was it ever published?"

Indeed it was. The story in question, "My Karsh Picture" was included in Classics Canada, Book 2 (Prentice-Hall Canada, 1994), the second of six ESL textbooks I co-edited with Patricia Brock.

Looking it over all these years later, I see that the story appears between Daniel David Moses' "King of the Raft" and "April Fish" by Mavis Gallant; selections by Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Irving Layton, bonnet-babe Susanna Moodie and a bunch of other CanLit names also feature.

Must admit that despite my great admiration and appreciation, I've never really collected Levine's work myself. I have only five of his books, my favourite being a copy of the Porcupine's Quill Canada Made Me, which he inscribed nineteen years ago at Westmount's Double Hook Bookstore.

My most cherished Levine items are those I inherited from my father: the 1947 and 1948 issues of Forge, McGill's University's literary magazine.

These three issues feature some of Levine's earliest published work, most of it uncollected: the poems "Myssium", "Circles", "It Was a Dull Day", "Autumn" and "A Dead Airman Speaks"; the short story "Our Life is to Be Envied"; and "Prologue", which would today be described as creative non-fiction. Levine served as Poetry Editor in the 1947 issues and was elevated to Editor for the lone 1948 number.

Old McGill '48

He and my father attended McGill at the same time and were in the same faculty and graduating class. I don't know that they ever encountered one another. I like to think so. Both R.C.A.F. vets, they had a good deal in common.

Old McGill '48

Advertising Norman Levine

Jack McClelland never tried to hide his dislike for Norman Levine's Canada Made Me; that his house acted as Canadian distributor was the result of an early promise made to its UK publisher. McClelland & Stewart took 500 copies, shipped 300, sent a further thirty or so out as review copies and sat back. There were no ads.

The above, put together by my daughter Astrid for the current issue of Canadian Notes & Queries, was inspired by a 12 December 1958 letter Levine sent Jack McClelland:

Writes Levine: "Do you mind me suggesting the kind of ad I'd like to see appear in those Canadian papers."

No question mark.

I think he knew the answer.

Astrid followed Levine's text and rough layout, all the while considering these McClelland & Stewart ads from 1958... four decades before she was born.

The Gazette, 1 November 1958

The Gazette, 15 November 1958

The Gazette, 13 December 1958

More in the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries.

Subscribe today!

Recognizing Norman Levine

The new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries landed in my mail box on Friday – a few days late owing, I suspect, to an ill-tempered sorting machine.

My heart sank... until I discovered that everything had arrived intact. Now I boast: "officially repaired". How special is that!

I always look forward to Canadian Notes & Queries, but this issue was more eagerly anticipated than most. Its focus is Norman Levine, a writer who has never received anything close to the attention he deserves. Happily, this issue goes some way in redressing the deficit, with:

"Kaddish (A Sketch Towards a Portrait of Norman Levine)"
by John Metcalf
"All the Heart is in the Things: Mapping Levine-land" by Cynthia Flood
"Chasing Norman: A Book-collector's Memoir" by Philip Fernandez
"Remembering Norman Forgetting" by T.F. Rigelhof
"Fiction, Faction, Autobiography: Norman Levine at McGill University, 1946-1949" by Robert H. Michel

and

Ethan Rilly's adaptation of Canada Made Me, episode six in his "The North Wing: Selections from the Lost Library of CanLit Graphic Novels"

Much more modest, my contribution covers correspondence between Levine, Jack McClelland and Putnum's John Huntington relating to Canada Made Me.

Further riches are found in a new short story by Lynn Coady, poetry by Mathew Henderson and a piece of creative non-fiction by my old pal Andrew Steinmetz.

You'll also find my review of Fraser Sutherland's Lost Passport: The Life and Words of Edward Lacey.

And finally, there's this issue's limited edition collectable, Signal to Noise, an excerpt from C.P. Boyko's forthcoming collection Psychology and Other Stories.

My copy is number 159.

The collectables are only for those with subscriptions.

You know you want one.

Here's the link.

Saturday Night with the Alpha Jerks

Montreal's beloved Alpha Jerks – Dan Babineau, Thomas Bachelder, James Malloch and novelist manqué Daniel Richler –  caught on film as "The Eatables", from the 1980 Alison Burns' film of the same name.

Related post:

One Band Wonder?

Les Anciens Québécois

Le Nom dans le bronze
Michelle Le Normand [pseud. Marie-Antoninette Desrosiers]
Montreal: Éditions de Devoir, 1933

Well, didn't this turn out to be a timely read.

A short novel, Le nom dans le Bronze seems at first a light and pleasant love story. Our heroine, Marguerite Couillard, is the youngest daughter of a bourgeois family in the Quebec town of Sorel. Steven Bayle, the object of her affection, doesn't quite qualify as our hero, but he's not a villain either. Frankly, he's a pretty swell guy and a bit of a catch; even for Marguerite. Though an anglophone, Steven appears entirely at home in French Canadian society; were it not for his pesky Protestant faith one might even consider him assimilated. However, as their love grows, storm clouds gather in the ciel lourd that opens the novel. Family and community shudder at the possibility of a "marriage mixte", pressing upon Marguerite "la différence de sang et la disparité de religion".

An intervention disguised as an invitation to visit friends in Quebec City brings an abrupt change in genre. What began as a romance novel becomes a Micheline guide, with Marguerite taking in the sights as friend Philippe fills her in on the history of the city, the province and her own family. "Il y avait à Québec deux générations de Couillard, quand on construisit cette chapelle", he says before the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, so named after the respective defeats of Englishmen William Phips and Hovenden Walker. "Mais en 1759, l'ère des Victoires était passée et la chapelle fut incendiée par les bombes de Wolfe. Ce sont encore les mêmes murs, toutefois..."

The pressure put on Marguerite is relentless and none too subtle. "Rien n'est plus affaiblissant pour notre peuple que ces marriages mixtes", she's told by her father. "Justement ce matin, je m'irritais de constater combien des nôtres, pendant la guerre, ont épousé des Anglaises d'outre-mer..."

The coup de grâce comes when Marguerite is taken to see the statue of Louis Hébert, and its plaque bearing the names of Quebec's earliest settlers. She not only learns that she is a decedent, but sees that she bears the same name – Marguerite Couillard – as one of her ancestors. Le nom dans le bronze. Says Philippe, "Marguerite, épousez un homme au nom aussi respectable, et appelez votre premier fils: Couillard..."

And Bayle? Really, how respectable is that?

Their love is doomed. Sacrifices must be made for one's "race".

Le Nom dans le bronze is a work from a different time. Times change, but we see remnants in the chronic xenophobia that plagues Pauline Marois' efforts to become the next premier of Quebec. Surrounded, as she is, by her base, she cannot see that her words alienate more than just those she considers les autres. And so, we have an election in which a scandal-ridden, disgraced and very tired Liberal government is still in contention.

What Ms Marois fails to recognize is that her brand of bigoted, frightened nationalism began dying decades ago, and that a much younger, more confident generation – what Chantal Hébert astutely refers to as "the Arcade Fire generation" – want nothing to do with her kind.

Trivia: The name "Marguerite Couillard" really does feature on the plaque in question (though, sadly, it can't be made out in this image).

Object: Rather bland paper wraps cover what is an otherwise attractive book. My first edition copy was bought last year from a bookseller in the village of St-Malachie, some 50 kilometres south-east of Quebec City.

Access: Though reprinted no less than three times in the 'fifties, Le Nom dans le bronze is surprisingly hard to come by. Four copies are currently listed for sale online, only one of which is a first edition. Leather-bound, signed, inscribed and dated, this is the one to buy – a bargain at US$97.75.