Romance Amongst the Racists

The Window-Gazer
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1921

Lured by the offer of lodging, Great War veteran Prof Benis Harrison Spence has left his aunt's altogether too busy Ontario home for the quiet of coastal British Columbia.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Spence is burdened by several ounces of shrapnel and a nervous disorder, both souvenirs from his time at the Front; rest is just what the doctor – physician friend John Rogers – ordered.

Unfortunately, host Herbert Farr turns out to be an unstable, unlovable charlatan. The man's home is nothing more than a leaky, albeit spacious, cottage shared by daughter Desire and Chinese servant Li Ho. Spence has no sooner arrived when he collapses from stress placed upon his shrapnel-filled leg. Weeks pass, during which the professor is nursed back to health by young Desire.

Make nothing of her name.

Theirs is a platonic relationship with a foundation formed by shared interests and outlook on life. Neither cares much for marriage – "a hideous thing," says Desire. Spence proposes just the same as a means of freeing his newfound friend from her crazy father's clutches. Believing the professor to be the sort who will one day find true love, Desire declines. The quick thinking Spence comes up with a sad story about losing the love of his life, a blonde girl named "Mary", to another, which leads her to reconsider. After all, the professor is not a man to "love twice."

The pair run off to Vancouver, are married, and share a chaste working honeymoon in separate tents on fictitious Friendly Bay. They soon settle in Bainbridge, an Ontario town beset by blonde Marys.

Canadian Bookman, February 1922

Recounting the plot doesn't quite do this novel justice. On the surface, The Window-Gazer is a simple romance, without the cocaine addiction, opium addiction, kidnapping and worker exploitation that are key to previous Mackay novels. The unpleasantness lies below in the twin veins of race and racism that run through the book. The reader will spot this first in Spence, who is studying the "primitive psychology" of Indians. The professor is sitting with Desire when he encounters his subject for the first time:

"A Jap?" exclaimed Spence in surprise.
     "No. He's Indian. Some of the babies are so Japaneesy that it's hard to tell the difference. Father says it's a strain of the same blood."

Spence's aunt allows that she doesn't mind having her luggage handled by Pullman porters, but she does worry that her nephew's new bride might be part Indian. Her concern is shared by the gentile ladies of Bainbridge. "Well, if Indian blood can give one a skin like hers, I could do with an offside ancestor myself!" one writes in a letter.

And then we have Li Ho, who is described by a less than honest boatman as "one of the Chinkiest Chinamen I ever seen." For much of the novel, Farr's servant appears as a stereotype out of… well, something published early last century. He speaks in a manner that will make today's reader cringe – "Me much glad Missy get mallied" – only to be revealed as the most intelligent of Mackay's creations. Indeed, he is the one character to really display character. In the end, Li Ho proves to be the hero of the novel, a fact ignored by reviewers of the day.

I wonder why?

About the title:

When I was younger and we lived in towns I used to wander off by myself down the main streets to gaze in the windows. I never went into any of the stores. The things I wanted were inside and for sale – but I could not buy them. I was just a window-gazer. That's what I am still. Life is for sale somewhere. But I cannot buy it.

Object: A 308-page hardcover bound in blue cloth. The design was shared with the American edition published by Doran. I've not seen a dust jacket for either. I purchased my copy for $3.75 last December from a London bookseller

Access: The Doran and McClelland & Stewart editions enjoyed just one printing each. As might be expected, Library and Archives Canada has neither. Does Interim Librarian and Archivist Hervé Déry care? Perhaps not – after all, the man is an economist, not a librarian or  archivist. Anyway, his position is only interim; it's been only a year since James Moore appointee Déry took over from disgraced James Moore appointee Daniel J. Caron. What's the rush?

Twenty-eight copies of the McClelland and Stewart edition are held by Canadian libraries, though only the Toronto Public Library and Vancouver Public Library serve the… um, public.

Eighty-one copies are listed for sale online, but seventy-seven of these come from print on demand vultures. As is invariably the case, they provide some amusing covers. Tutis has a good one, but my favourite comes from Read How You Want, which not only changes Desire's gender and transports her to Paris, so that she/he might to look over the Rue de Miromesni.

Not one of the other four copies has a dust jacket. At US$25, the cheapest is a Good copy of the Doran edition. Next up in terms of price – US$35 and US$47 – are two passable copies of that issued by McClelland & Stewart.  The Vermont bookseller with the absurd prices is trying to flog a "discoloured from damp" signed copy of the first edition – whether Doran or McClelland and Stewart he does not say. Either way, at US91.98 it is horribly overpriced; no one is much interested in signed Mackay's – except, maybe, me.

L’enfer c’est les autres: Crad Kilodney, 1948–2014

It's my honour to present this guest post, a tribute to the late Crad Kilodney by his friend Ruth Bradley-St-Cyr. The photo of Crad comes courtesy of Lorette C. Luzajic.

Crad Kilodney and I became friends about 1980, the day he walked into the Kentucky Fried Chicken takeout where I worked, looked me square in the eye, and asked, “Do your chickens die in a state of grace?” To a geeky teenager with a quirky sense of humour, this was irresistible. “I certainly hope so,” I replied.

Crad lived in my North Toronto neighbourhood around Avenue Road and Wilson. After I moved to Hamilton, I had a dream about him and wrote to tell him about it. I dreamt that he had moved to a new basement apartment on the south side of Old Orchard Grove, about six houses down from Avenue Road. He wrote back and asked me to pick his lottery numbers for him, because he had just moved, exactly where I had said.

But Crad didn’t need the lottery. Lotteries are for poor people. Smart people invest in the stock market. So when Crad’s Long Island grandparents died and left him money, he invested in gold stocks and told me to do the same. Excellent advice. I wish I had had the money to invest, though I was leery of the social benefits of mining companies.

With his stock market dividends, he moved downtown to a rooming house, retired from standing on street corners, and divested himself of the tools of his trade. One souvenir is an original cardboard sign, complete with the shoelace he hung around his neck, which hangs now on my bookshelf. One side says, “CHANEL DOG ENEMAS $5-$12,” the other, “BOOKS FOR U. OF T. DUMMIES $5-$10.” When he asked me which sign I would like, this one particularly spoke to me, since I went to Glendon and York.

I have all of his books, mostly signed, up until 1992’s The Second Charnel House Anthology of Bad Poetry. A copy of his Worst Canadian Stories (volume 2, I think) was stolen in Nicaragua in 1988 and presumably is still in circulation there. His titles were always provocative, my favourites being Blood-Sucking Monkeys from North Tonawanda and Suburban Chicken-Strangling Stories. My favourite inscriptions are on The Green Book – “To Ruth, Avoid inhaling. Discontinue use if rash develops” – and on Human Secrets: Book Two – “To Ruth, Last copy of this book I will ever sell. Glad you got it.”

Yes, he was cranky. How could he not be? He sold his books not at fancy author signings with self-selected literary groupies, but on the streets of downtown Toronto, exposing himself day after day to the inanity of people who couldn’t even read his signs, never mind his books. “SLIMY DEGENERATE LITERATURE,” read one sign, and some illiterate soul asked if he was selling detergent. But Margaret Atwood talked to him whenever she saw him, and that was something of a balm to his wounded genius.

His best pokes at the literary establishment were two pranks, one of which I helped with. In the first prank, he took selected poems of Irving Layton, put a pseudonym on them, and submitted them to publishers. Nobody, except Layton’s own publisher, picked up on this; the other publishers rejected the work. The second prank, requiring the assistance of his friends, was to submit rather bad stories from great writers to the CBC literary competition. I got to be Maxim Gorky. All the stories were rejected but, again, without anyone identifying any of the real authors.

Kilodney’s style was brooding, raw, and spare. He always struck me as a man already in purgatory. But he was always happy to meet a kindred spirit, and he was not entirely solitary in his publishing endeavours. Besides his own Charnel House imprint, he also published with Black Moss Press, Coach House Press, The Canadian Fiction Magazine, The Carolina Quarterly, Descant, Lowlands Review, and others. Some of his correspondence can be found in The Canadian Fiction Magazine fonds (Box 16, file 131) at the McMaster University archives. But his own extensive papers (26 archival boxes/5 linear metres) he donated to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

Some of his letters – along with his “street tapes,” noir films on VHS, and a couple of vanity press books he had worked on, including one about a barber – is no doubt buried in one of my own bankers boxes of CanLit archives. Crad and I were always happy to run into each other – he kept box 281 at the Avenue Road post office – but I moved away from Toronto a dozen years ago and left him to his gold stocks. His real name wasn’t Crad. I think it was Lou, but I’m not sure now. He had beautiful hands. He claimed not to be a draft dodger. He has a sister somewhere who he never contacted. I’m sure she doesn’t acknowledge him either, but he was a wonderful, unforgettable, eccentric character and Toronto is poorer without him.

Ruth Bradley-St-Cyr
Embrun, Ontario

A Poem for May Day by Gay Page

Image and verse from The Workshops [sic] and Other Poems (Fort William, ON: Times-Journal, 1919) by Gay Page, otherwise known as Florence N. Horner Sherk. All, poet included, come from a not so distant past in which Ottawa saw Canadians as more than mere hewers of wood, drawers of water and bearers of bitumen. It was a time in which the labour of a single worker could "win bread for mother and child". 

Imagine.

Related post:

Christmas Greetings from Gay Page!

A McGill Student's Mild Summer of Love

Expo Summer
Eileen Fitzgerald
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1969

Eileen Fitzgerald's Expo Summer began forty-seven years ago – 28 April 1967 – with the opening of the World's Fair. Mine began the very same day. I was four years old, living with my parents and little sister in suburban Montreal; the author was a second-year McGill student who had just moved into a flat in the city's downtown. I'm fairly certain that our paths crossed.

Expo Summer? Fitzgerald's memoir begins with the solstice more than fifty-five days in the future, yet she manages fewer than 163 pages, a good deal of which have to do with events that occurred in March, during which time she lived in residence at the university's Royal Victoria College.

"Bubbly", says the Province. I wonder what other adjectives they used. The Gazette went with "good":

16 August 1969

Eileen Fitzgerald was not of Montreal, but Eastchester, New York. Her writing in Expo Summer suggests a sheltered life lacking in inquisitiveness. I quote from the pages in which the author and her two girlfriends hunt for off-campus accommodation:

We wandered out of the Guy Street station somewhat lost, since at that time our world in Montreal didn't stretch much further west than Mountain Street.

Now, I point out that Guy is only two stops from McGill. Guy Street itself is just eight blocks west of the university campus. The trio find a flat on Mackay, which is invariably referred to – thirty-two times – as "MacKay Street". The Décarie is "DeCarie" and Cedar Avenue is "Cedar Street". The author's flatmates, Lyn and Gate, are just as clueless:

No one knew the exact location of Place Bonaventure except that it was a Metro stop, so we took the Metro from McGill east to the Berri-de Montigny [sic] transfer, and then back west on the other line until we found ourselves in Bonaventure station. Clearly, it was going to be a lively night.

Expo 67 aficionados, of which I am one, will recognize Place Bonaventure as the venue in which François Dallegret held his pre-Expo Super Party, which featured Lothar and the Hand People, Suzanne Verdal, Tiny Tim, and the Blues Project.  Juan Rodriguez wrote a very good piece on the event here, but Eileen Fitzgerald's is much more succinct:

They finally did show up on the roped-off stage, which looked like a little boxing ring rising out of the crowds of teenyboppers, costumed hippies, young sophisticates and just passers-by. But by the time we had tuned in to their sound sufficiently to tune out the steady roar of the hall, they had already finished playing and had hurried toward the periphery of the Salle Bonaventure.

You really can't expect much by way of observation from a person who doesn't know the name of the street on which she lives.

It's always a mistake for a reviewer to criticize a book for not being what he wanted it to be, but  Doubleday did deceive:

A COLLEGE GIRL TELLS US HOW IT WAS AT THE GREATEST WORLD'S FAIR EVER

Expo Summer doesn't have a whole lot to do with Expo 67. Fitzgerald worked there for a bit selling postcards, and she did visit a few pavilions, but this book is more about getting that first apartment, hassles with Hydro Québec, friends crashing on couches and making meals on a budget. I have my own stories, each every bit as interesting as Fitzgerald's – some more! –  but none worth writing down.

She attaches herself to a band called the Service Entrance, I think because she has something going on with one of the guitarists. For a couple of dozen pages I thought this might lead to something interesting. The band shares the bill one night with Tim Buckley at the New Penelope, but it ends up as their only Montreal gig. Author and guitarist don't so much as kiss.

Still, it's a memorable summer:

A Swiss chocolate ice cream bar stood right across the way from a Brazilian counter where they sold flavors of sherbet which no one who wasn't a Brazilian had ever heard of before, and we couldn't decide what to get, or forget them all and have Dutch ice cream. Seymour had black raspberry, and I had banana, and Lyn had pineapple rum. Mat volunteered to try the Dutch chocolate across the way. And they all were great.

I too ate sherbet at Expo, and though four, had tasted pineapple rum.

The critics rave:

Young Miss Fitzgerald is a student at McGill University and golly, didn't she just practically drool to be in Montreal at Expo time. With her friends Lindsay (the moneyed one) and Gate (no one ever called her Mary) Eileen shares an apartment, works off and on at an Expo postcard palace, and pals with Mat, Josh, Eric, etc., students who were hoping to make a go with their electric rock group, the Service Entrance. Discouragement, and Mat cuts out, but there's a zoomy offer at the close and Mat returns. An occasional cut-up and jolly jape — sneaking into Labyrinth; copping a swim in an alien pool by hopping a rooftop; and the gosh-awful day when Lindsay's mother visits and discovers a boy or two in the bedroom (all innocent as a cub den). Eileen, bless her busy little pen, is undoubtedly the only member of her generation who admits to putting on a "gay summer frock." Dull as dishwater and pure as the drivelling snow.

— Kirkus, 3 July 1969

About the author:

A bonus: Not by Suzanne Verdal, but about her.

Object and Access: A slim hardcover in black and brown boards, my Fine first edition copy was bought in January from a bookseller in Woodbury, New York. At US$20, I did well. As of this writing, just one first edition – price-clipped, Near Fine – is listed for sale online (C$25). After that, you're left with a lone book club edition (US$15), and two less than pristine copies of the uncommon Curtis paperback (C$4 and US$4 – take your pick).

Toronto has the only public library to carry a copy. Eleven of our university libraries come through. Expo Summer is not to be found at  the author's alma mater.

Related post:

The Little People of Expo 67

Related plea:

All these years later, I'm still looking for a copy of Winston Smith's Sexpo '69 (North Hollywood: Brandon House, 1969).

C'mon, someone's gotta have a copy.

Too Many Writers

Too Many Women
Gerry Martin
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

Maurice Bendrix, the main character in The End of the Affair, is a novelist. I'm more than prepared to allow Graham Greene this conceit; in his twenty-six novels Bendrix alone holds the occupation. I have less time for Ronald J. Cooke, who placed novelist protagonists at the centre of the first two of his three novels.

I've not read the third.

Novelists, newspapermen, poets, gag writers and the like are so common in Canadian fiction that you'd almost think everything was set in an alternate universe. My casual journey through neglected and forgotten tomes has led to wannabe novelist Clive Winston (The House on Craig Street), frustrated novelist Dave Manley (The Mayor of Côte St. Paul), washed up novelist William Marshall (Exit in Green), and successful novelists Mortimer Tombs (I Hate You to Death), George Sloan (A Body for a Blonde) and Gabrielle Lubin (The Best Man).

Ron Simpson, the main character in Too Many Women, belongs with Tombs, Sloan and Lubin. His debut, Two Loves Have I, is a best seller, "a book a lot of old maids are crazy about." Tall, handsome and talented – though, let's be frank, that title implies otherwise – he should be living the dream.

So, what's the problem?

Well, first there's wife Sue, who talks on the phone and has the radio tuned to soaps when genius requires silence to write. For goodness sake, she won't even answer the damn door! And let me tell you, those callers are persistent. A kid selling magazines rings and rings, while brother-in-law Arch will hold that goddamned button down for a ten-minute stretch. No exaggeration.

It's kind of a mistake to let Arch in the house. Ron's old college pal, he's part of the reason they were expelled. What's more, the guy's a boor, a braggart and a womanizer. How he ended up married to Sue's sister is a mystery.

Could alcohol have had something to do with it? I'm not so sure. There's more drinking in Too Many Women than in any other novel I've read, yet no one gets drunk. This is not to say that bad decisions aren't made. For example, Ron agrees to an early morning game of golf with Arch, which is something I'd never do.

The next day, Ron takes three swings and loses two "dollar and a quarter balls" to a gully and another to some bushes, then returns to the club house where Arch introduces him to Dell Whitney. She falls for the writer's pouting, petulant ways as he drones on and on about the love he may or may not have for his wife.

(cliquez pour agrandir)

Everything that follows is a bit of a blur; this has nothing to do with alcohol but Martin's inability to handle time and place. The story itself is really quite simple: a man drinks, drives, eats in restaurants, goes to nightclubs and attends parties, all the while going back and forth on whether to leave his wife for another woman. That he ends up returning to Sue at the end seems dictated by page count; had there been room for another chapter it would've been Dell.

The idea that "Ron flits happily from woman to woman, heavily sampling the nectar of each", as cover copy would have you believe, is absurd. Ron doesn't so much as kiss young Cynthia and rejects Maxine outright. Yes, he does. Even though she's got the body of a Grecian goddess… and a gun.

Not to worry, the scene between Ron and Maxine, depicted somewhat inaccurately in Syd Dyke's cover, begins and ends in less than half a page.

Anyone who bought Too Many Women based on the back cover would've been disappointed to learn that there is no "three day [sic] orgy" – in part because there is no character named "Charlie the Greek". The professional party girl is, I suppose, Maxine, though there's no "play and run" talk. The calibre and mark of the gun she pulls on Ron are never mentioned, but then Martin is not one for details.

Hey, the publisher was only trying to sell books. A novelist should understand.

Main Street, Hamilton, Ontario, 1 August 1947.

Trivia: Too Many Women is the first novel I've read that is set mainly in Hamilton, Ontario. Main Street is mentioned. Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and Ron's beach house (location undisclosed) also figure.

Favourite passage:

Ron watched Arch clean the dust off his shoes with a towel.
     "I must admit she's attractive," he said.
     "Attractive hell!" said Arch. "She's good enough to eat."
     "Then how come you never made a play for her?" asked Ron.
     "I'm not her types," said Arch. "She's the queen. I'm only the cat that can look at her. She doesn't like cats. She likes writers…"

Every writer's fantasy.

Object and Access: Could this be the best produced News Stand Library title? There are few typos, no dropped lines and the text is a uniform dark grey.

Published in single printings for the Canadian and American markets, Too Many Women draws a complete blank on WorldCat. Three copies are currently listed online: a Very Good American at US$9.00 and two less than Very Good Canadians (the true first) at C$25.00.

Of Thucydides, Themistocles and Richard Rohmer

Thucydides wrote that Themistocles' greatness lay in the fact that he realized Athens was not immortal. I think we have to realize that Canada is not immortal; but, if it is going to go, let it go with a bang rather than a whimper. 

— Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 30 March 1988

Week fifteen of Reading Richard Rohmer and I admit that we've stalled. Events have conspired, travel has intruded, but more than anything the fun has gone. Seven novels in – PaperJacks would have had me believe it's eight – Rohmer nears something approaching competency. Talk of scheduling, formatting and rescheduling cabinet meetings no longer fill his pages. Where old inconsequential subplots were dropped, the new reach weak conclusion. Facts and figures are few, have relevance, and are repeated less frequently.

Rohmer's first four novels stuck together from being soaked in a sticky syrup of nationalism. They were led by the likes of Colonel Pierre Thomas de Gaspé, an übermensch who might thwart American invasion one month, then launch a hostile takeover of Exxon the next. Indeed, Colonel de Gaspé did these very things in Exxoneration.

And yes, Exxoneration is the title. It was all silly fun… but no more.

Triad follows Balls! and Periscope Red as part of a trilogy that is clearly designed to appeal to the American market. Time was Rohmer risked Canada ending in a bang, but Balls! produces not so much as a whimper (ignore that exclamation mark). The country disintegrates after Quebec votes to succeed, and Prime Minister Peter Lockhard pretty much hands over the keys to the American president. Canada is mentioned twice in Periscope Red,  but only in passing. In Triad, cancon rests with boozer Bud Black, a former Canadian Forces fighter pilot who prostitutes himself as a mercenary. He's no Colonel Pierre Thomas de Gaspé.

I'm stuck at page 130 in Triad, all of which was tackled three weeks ago during a two-hour train trip from Toronto.

Lest you be impressed:

Triad reprints twenty-three pages from Periscope Red. I didn't bother to so much as skim. Rohmer can't be trusted when "attempting to condense and summarize", but is very adept when using safety scissors and paste. His "Note to the Reader"acknowledges an unenviable habit. Separation begins by reprinting the final chapter of Exodus/UK. The very same words appear for a third time in  Separation Two, which is in itself little more than a reprint of Separation. Again, PaperJacks would have had me believe otherwise… so as to grab $3.50 earned through my minimum wage summer job at Consumer's Distributing.

I correct:

In fact, neither province decided to secede from Canada. Quebec does hold a referendum. The "No" side wins.

America is indeed sent reeling by a disastrous natural gas shortage, but it has to do with corporate incompetence and weak government regulation. The Soviets and NATO do not figure.

Rohmer's stab at the American market amounted to nothing. As sales figures slumped north of the border, PaperJacks took pains to remind Canadians of the titles that had once sold so well:

In fact, Richard Rohmer never enjoyed eight straight years of best sellers – and even if he had, it had been done before. All I can claim is two weeks on the Australian non-fiction bestseller list.

Oh, Canada.

Oh, Canada. Remember when we had a prime minister who could speak to Thucydides on Themistocles?

Related posts:

Recycling Richard Rohmer

Richard Rohmer Recycles (Again)

Uncollected Easter Verse by Arthur Stringer

Dundas Street, London, Ontario, c.1905

The Smart Set, May 1903

Related post:
An Old Poem for the New Year by Arthur Stringer
Arthur Stringer Avoids the Word 'Moon'
Arthur Stringer's Recipe for Commercial Success