Still Strange (if a little less so)

The Gynecologist

Sol Allen [pseud. Barney Allen]

New York: Pyramid, 1969

I imagine publication of The Gynecologist provided considerable relief to Sol Allen enthusiasts. Sixteen years earlier, Toronto Doctor, his previous novel, had ended abruptly. Just as handsome gynaecologist Guy Fowley and winsome patient Eleanor Hollis started in on what had all the makings of a revelatory scene, the reader was met with a note:

There was no Toronto Surgeon, but I'm certain that much of what the author intended for that unrealized book appears in The Gynecologist. For one, the novel "picks up the thread of the story in Guy's office" – albeit fourteen chapters in.

The first seventy pages of The Gynecologist are little more than rewrites and revisions of bits and pieces from Toronto Doctor, including the very passages that so disturbed fourteen months ago. The reader new to Allen will find the sudden swarm of characters and relationships without benefit of backstory confusing. The enthusiast, I am one, will be confused by threads cut, rearranged and brought forward ten or more years. Episodes that had taken place in the months following the Second World War now happen in the dying days of the Diefenbaker government. The effect is disorienting, much like the peculiar advertisement Allen placed in the 11 March 1949 edition of The Canadian Jewish Review.

Readers new and old benefit from a gentle narrative arch, though it achieves no real height. The most important event, the appointment of a new Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at fictitious Metropolitan Hospital, much anticipated in Toronto Doctor, is first mentioned here on the day the announcement is to take place.

Guy gets the post, though this isn't to say that he's the main character. Just as Toronto Doctor isn't about any one Toronto doctor, no single practitioner dominates. The spotlight darts between each man – and they are all men – resting occasionally on a wife, daughter, son or secretary. Things are very much as they were in the previous novel, switching between the tension of the operating theatre and dramas played out in drawing rooms. Dinner parties continue to be held, only now wives begin to cheat on husbands, and husbands begin cheating on wives. Unhappy marriages become more so. One character's death proves beneficial to another, while another achieves sudden wealth. But throughout it all, babies are born. Babies are born.

Such is life.

Favourite passage: 

She was a big woman, but well proportioned; and he could see the pangs of life swelling in her axilla, which was shaven but not very clean, in the veins of her strong neck, in the flux of her bosom. With a soundless cry, he moved toward her.

Trivia: Where I'm not sure I've so much as met a gynaecologist, Allen counted several amongst his friends, including Benjamin Cohen, Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, who is thanked for "placing the inmost details of his vast clinical and personal experience at my disposal." Contributions by the living are also recognized, though only through initials: "J.G., S.S., S.C. and Wm. A. C."

How hard could it have been in 1965 to identity Toronto gynaecologist "Wm. A. C."?

Object: A 318-page mass market paperback consisting of very small, dense type. My copy, the second Pyramid edition, includes this:

Having died the previous year, Allen was not a resident of Toronto. He wrote four novels, though not one was titled The Black Sheep. It would appear that Sex and the H Bomb was never published. Pity.

Access: I first spotted The Gynecologist on a shelf at the Central branch of the Vancouver Public Library. The Toronto Public Library also has a copy, as do seven of our universities.

The first Pyramid edition can be had for as little as one American dollar. The less common second edition, featuring hot cover by Frank Kalan, will set you back at least US$4.95.

Allen put out two editions of The Gynecologist – both in 1965 – through his own Rock Publishing. Copies in dust jacket are scarce, with only one currently listed for sale online. A Very Good copy of the second edition, at $50 it's a bargain.

Related posts:

Our Strangest Novel?

Our Strangest Novelist?

Our Strangest Book Advertisement?

Milton Douglas, Canadian Author?

Sin for Your Supper
Milton Douglas
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Milton Douglas was a friend of John Glassco. If one is to believe the poet – and I don't – the two met briefly as young men in Paris, then recognized each another on a street in small-town Quebec several decades later. Again, I don't believe it, nor do I believe that the author of Sin for Your Supper is the same Milton Douglas.

The time spent reading this cheap paperback, something so clearly beneath me, is part of a renewed effort to uncover unrecognized Canadian novels. My method is simple: look into titles and authors that were published by Toronto's News Stand Library and no one else. Might these authors be fellow countrymen and women?

The great hope, of course, is that something – anything – might be familiar. Lest you think this is folly, consider Ted Allan's pseudonymous  Love is a Long Shot (1949), the News Stand Library title recycled in the 1984 Leacock Medal-winning novel.

Michael P.J. Kennedy has a very good article about the similarities between Waste No Tears, which Hugh Garner (a/k/a Jarvis Warwick) published with News Stand Library in 1950, and his short stories "The Yellow Sweater", "Lucy" and "Mama Says to Tell You She's Out".

(After more than six decades out-of print, Waste No Tears is again available. You'll find more info here. Yes, that's a plug.)

Mine is a summer project…  begun before summer. The first book read in the pursuit of heretofore unrecognized Canadiana was Stephen Mark's Overnight Escapade (1950). Was Mark Canadian? Vancouver, Prince George, Saskatoon, Halifax and Ronald J. Cooke's Craig Street figure in his fiction, but then so too does the segregated American South.

Gerry Martin's Too Many Women (1950) was second. It takes place in Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Buffalo and some undisclosed location on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Toronto is mentioned.

I recognized nothing in the writings of Mark and Martin, and am pretty sure that neither is W.O. Mitchell or Earle Birney. But really… Stephen Mark, Gerry Martin and now Milton Douglas. Those names have gotta be fake, right?

Sin for Your Supper is set apart from Overnight Escapade and Too Many Women in that Canada is barely mentioned. The action takes place almost entirely in  Manhattan, where ne'er-do-well Jimmy Martin – there's another of those names – preys upon rubes, drunks and harried cashiers. More than a grifter, he carries a gun and is not afraid to shoot a woman in order to get what he wants. Or so he says.

I don't think I've ever had less to say about a book – which is good because this post risks running long. Sin for Your Supper drifts aimlessly with Jimmy moving from scheme to scam and doll to dame. On a whim he kidnaps leggy Betty McGregor. Threatening with his Luger, he forces her to drive out to the country, then changes his mind. They become lovers because, I suppose, she has a thing for bad boys. That same evening, over drinks at the Hunt Club, Betty asks Jimmy why he does what he does.

"I don't know," Jimmy explained. "It's just something inside of me. I think the main reason is that it isn't boring."

But it is boring. Jimmy's unpredictability becomes predictable, actions lead nowhere, and the prose is pedestrian. To be fair, there are times when the author really tries, as in chapter ten, which is reproduced here in full:

What more can be said? Well, early in the novel we're treated to the step-by-step process through which Jimmy parleys a dollar bill into a room and steak dinner at the St Moritz.

That was pretty interesting. More than the sex scene, at least.

I suppose I should point out that the real name of Glassco's friend was Milton Kastilo.

Object: Another News Stand Library book – and you know what that means –  this one in particular is poorly produced in that the back cover has a faint print overlay bearing the stylized title for Shack-up Girl (NSL #48).

Access: One of the News Stand Library titles that had separate Canadian and American editions. The cover for the latter is interesting in that features… well, there's no telling which one of Jimmy's women that's supposed to be. A bait and switch, it hints at lesbianism, right? Perhaps that's just me.

WorldCat records just one copy – the American – which is held at the British Library.

I don't see any copies of the Canadian being offered online right now, though there are six of the American, running from US$4.00 and US$22.00. Condition explains everything.

RMS Empress of Ireland: 100 Years

For the day, glimpses of A Package of Postcards and a "Wireless", published in 1907 by Canadian Pacific Railway as a means of promoting sister ships RMS Empress of Ireland and RMS Empress of Britain. Subtitled A Bride's Story, it's told in the form of postcards sent by newlywed Kate to her dear mother.

The first is mailed from Montreal's grand Place Viger Hotel, in which one presumes the marriage was consummated, as the couple are "leaving for the C.P.R. train for Quebec." There they stay, of course, at  the railway's Château Frontenac.

The photograph that follows hints at marital discord, though Kate's postcard suggests otherwise.

Still, does she not look a bit lonely here?

A pricey wire home describes a "marriage without a ripple".

Husband Jack spends his honeymoon with the boys, then begins putting on postnuptial pounds.

Five days in it looks like the honeymoon is over.

Kate and Jack disembark in Liverpool, then take the "C.P.R. Empress Special" to London. They spend the weeks that follow visiting Ireland, France and the Netherlands, then return home on RMS Empress of Britain.

Seventeen pages in all, the only thing not written by Kate comes in the form of this concluding note:

Not seven years later, 29 May 1914, the very advantage offered by the Canadian Pacific Empresses would lead to the loss of 1012 lives. It remains our worst maritime disaster. Nothing else comes close.

Die Deutsch Brian Moore; or, Ginger Coffey in NYC

At once one of the funniest and most depressing novels ever set in my beloved Montreal, The Luck of Ginger Coffey is a favourite. I expect I've seen three or four dozen cover treatments over the years, but the one gracing this German translation, happened upon this past weekend, really caught my eye. More than anything, I was reminded of a travel poster… and, as it turns out, it was copped and cropped from just that.

Published in 1994, Diogenes' Ginger Coffey sucht seine Glück has the only cover I know that focusses on the protagonist's status as an immigrant. Nothing wrong with that, except that Moore never tells us just how Ginger, wife Veronica and daughter Paulie arrived in Canada. We know that they left Ireland by ship. I guess it's possible that they disembarked in New York. Could be that they then caught a train to Montreal. What I can say for certain is that the Coffeys wouldn't have sailed on the Normandie; it was scrapped in 1946.

I'd planned to make this post about the use of the word "ship" in the novel – It appears fourteen times. How interesting is that! – but the cover drew my attention to the many German-language editions of Moore's novels. I had no idea.

Turns out that the Normandie Ginger Coffey sucht seine Glück is just one of several. All use a translation by Gur Bland, but vary in title. It was first published as Das Blaue vom Himmel in 1963 by Rütten & Loening. The Rowohlt 1970 reissue, as Ein optimist auf seitenwegen, suggests a ribald romp, making the Bantam I Am Mary Dunne appear very tame indeed.

And just look at the hot goings on Büchergemeinschafts-Lizenzausg promises with its 1978 edition of Die frau des arztes (The Doctor's Wife).

Sex sells, of course, which explains Diogenes' 1987 Schwarzrock (Black Robe), suggesting a tale of sapphic love set amongst the 17th-century Algonquins.

The publisher is much more honest with its current edition, though I hasten to point out that the men depicted are Abenaki.

Intentional or not, Diogenes seems particularly adept at choosing misleading images. Here it sells a translation of An Answer from Limbo as Die Antwort der Hölle – The Answer from Hell – slapping on a darkened image of René Magritte's Homage to Mack Sennett; in effect transforming protagonist Brendan Tierney into Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb.

The publisher has a curious habit of choosing highly recognizable late-19th-century women as stand-ins for mid-20th-century characters. Its cover for Ich bin Mary Dunne casts Madelaine Bernard in the lead, as captured in Gaugin's Portrait of Madelaine Bernard.

Saturnischer Tanz, Malte Krutzsch's translation of The Feast of Lupercal, uses Manet's Irma Brunner to depict  "boyish, unfinished" Belfast lass Una Clarke.

Dillon, Der Eiscremekönig and Die Versuchung der Eileen Hughes use equally odd details from Edward Hopper paintings. Still, I could match them with their English titles, despite my non-existent German. The one that threw me was Strandgeburtstag, which uses David Hockney's Beach Umbrella.

Strandgeburtstag?

Google translate comes up with "Beach Party".

Beach Party?

Turns out to be Fergus.

Well, Fergus Fadden does live in Malibu.

The first paragraph of The Luck of Ginger Coffey:

Fifteen dollars and three cents. He counted it and put it in his trouser-pocket. Then picked his Tyrolean hat off the dresser, wondering if the two Alpine buttons and the little brush dingus in the hatband weren't a shade jaunty for the place he was going. Still, they might be lucky to him. And it was a lovely morning, clear and crisp and clean. Maybe that was a good augury. Maybe today his ship would come in.

Related posts:

V is for Vulture: The Bad Luck of Ginger Coffey

The Erotic Brian Moore

Young Mister Richler on the New Canadian Library

Further goodness from the May 1958 issue of The Montrealer with Richler reviewing the New Canadian Library's inaugural offerings. An interesting choice. Richler was no cultural nationalist – never was, as is evident in this piece, written at the age of twenty-seven. He spends the first two-thirds debunking the very notion of a Canadian literature:

Canadian writing is really regional North American writing and not a separate body. English-speaking Canadian novelists obviously have much more in common with their counterparts in the United States than with the French-Canadian writer around the corner.

And Canadian writers:

For my money the man who writes the best prose in Canada is Morley Callaghan. Yet he has surely been more influenced by Hemingway and Fitzgerald than by Frederick Philip Grove. He is an American writer. He just happens to live and write about Toronto just as others do about Boston, New Orleans, or Detroit.

Before surprising us all:

Whether or not the series goes further will, I guess, depend on public response. The New Canadian Library certainly deserves support.

Support it we did – though not always willingly. I'm still a bit pissed off about the copy of Canadians of Old I had to buy for a CEGEP course.

Over the decades the NCL has embraced then dumped many more titles than it has kept  – au revoir Jean Rivard – but the first four remain. In fact, all have been subjected to the sixth and most recent series redesign. Expect another before the end of the decade. Here are some excerpts from Richler's review for The Canadian Publisher™ to consider as blurbs:

Over Prairie Trails
Frederick Philip Grove


"It's too bad that the series has begun with Over Prairie Trails, because if there is a book that epitomizes all that is boring, ponderous, and self-important about Canadian literature than [sic] this is surely it."

Such Is My Beloved
Morley Callaghan


"I've got a blind spot when it comes to innocent priests and good whores although Mr. Callaghan, no literary slouch, certainly avoids the more obvious sentimentalities."

Literary Lapses
Stephen Leacock


"It seems to me, that this book is only unevenly successful, is already available in numerous editions – even, I think a thirty-five cent pocketbook – and that this further reprint is a redundancy."

As for Me and My House
Sinclair Ross


I'm much more grateful – maybe because it was completely unknown to me – for Sinclair Ross's As For Me And My House… it is, as Professor [Roy] Daniells writes in his preface, "a genuine artistic achievement."





Richler also quarrels with Frank Newfeld's "singularly unattractive" series format, singling out As for Me and My House: "Mr. Ross, whom I've never met, is drawn here to look like a comic strip detective."

I wonder what he thought about this 1965 Newfeld cover for New Canadian Library No. 45.

A bonus: The "thirty-five cent pocketbook" of Literary Lapses to which Richler refers is almost certainly the 1945 Collins White Circle edition. There had been no other. However, he is mistaken as to availability and price: the imprint ceased to be in 1952; all printings were priced at 25 cents.

The cover is by Margaret Paull, whose work also graces the Collins White Circle Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Related posts:

About Those Ugly NCL Covers

About Those Old New Canadian Library Intros

(with some stuff on Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese)

Devolution, Evolution and Lateral Moves

Checking Out an Attractive 56-Year-Old Montrealer

The Montrealer. vol. 32, no. 5 (May 1958)

I don't remember much of The Montrealer. I was in elementary school when it folded and accept no responsibility for its demise. For a year or two our family subscribed to its successor, Montreal Calendar Magazine. That periodical lived into my university years, but I don't remember much of it either. Never bought copy. You can blame me for that one.

Did I miss out in not reading Montreal Calendar Magazine? I have no idea. A quick go around of old friends finds that not one ever so much as picked up a copy. No one can tell me the first thing about it.

I know I missed out on something with The Montrealer – just look at the names on that masthead: James Minifie, Sam Tata, Hugh MacLennan, Constance Beresford-Howe, Robert Ayre and 27-year-old Mordecai Richler.

Ethel Wilson contributed, as did Joyce Marshall. The Montrealer was the first to publish "Dance of the Happy Shades" and four other stories that would years later feature in Alice Munro's debut collection of the same name.In this issue Richler is the supplier of fiction with "The Balloon", a short story that has never been republished.

The kid returns 23 pages later to weigh in on the brand spanking new New Canadian Library. We've also got  forgotten humorist Norman Ward, Leslie Roberts' unheeded warnings about American imperialism, James Minifie's observations on bumbling Prime Minister Diefenbaker and an uncollected essay by Hugh MacLennan.

Then there are advertisements – lots of advertisements – each a reflection of a Montreal that is no more.

It's all too easy to wax nostalgic about a time in which one never lived. It takes no keen eye to observe that the the city's linguistic minority is all but absent in the magazine's 66 pages. The uncredited "Guide to Better Shopping in Montreal" features just one business with a French name:

May is the month par excellence not only for experiencing Paris, but for re-imagining it, and for the latter pursuit Café Chez-Pierre suggests itself as an ideal locale.

We're in a better place now.

Trivia: I found this copy of The Montrealer, the first I've ever bought, in late March at Brockville's From Here to Infinity. If the mailing label is to be believed – and why not? – it first belonged to Alice Lighthall, eldest daughter of novelist, poet, historian, philosopher and anthologist W.D. Lighthall (Mayor of Westmount, 1900-1903).