Why You Shouldn't Feel Bad about the 100 Novels That Make You Proud to Be Canadian List (and why the CBC should)

"Depressing how few of these I've read," writes a friend. Minutes later, others begin chiming in with similar sentiment… and the list is shared. Such is the power of Facebook. The grey gloom generator is CBC Books' "100 NOVELS THAT MAKE YOU PROUD TO BE A CANADIAN".

Novels that make me proud to be Canadian? Do I really need help? After eight years of Harper Government™ rule, perhaps I do. But this isn't going to do it:

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A remarkably democratic list, is it not?  No author is represented more than once except Margaret Atwood because… oh, I don't know… because she's Margaret Atwood? That fifty titles are by women and fifty are by men is, I am certain, no happy accident. Modest effort has been made toward regional balance, and the Canadian mosaic appears well in evidence – that is, until one realizes that there are only six French-language titles.

Six? And not one is The Tin Flute. What gives? The list's all too brief introduction may provide an explanation:

I see. Canada has a wealth of writers, and they're telling today's tales, and they're revisiting our past.

So, it's contemporary writers only then. Got it.

But wait, what's Hugh MacLennan doing on the list? And Robertson Davies? And Mordecai Richler? And Carol Shields? They're not "telling today's tales." Hell, Stephen Leacock is so long dead that his books have been in the public domain for nearly two decades.

(About the "novels are all in print" bit: Was that a criteria? Could this explain Margaret Millar's absence?)

Eaton's, Montreal, 1947

For anyone considering "everything from cultural impact and critical reception to reader response", The Tin Flute is an inescapable add. Such was the acclaim that the Toronto Eaton's – the Toronto Eaton's –advertised and sold the book in French. It won a Governor General's Award and the Prix Femina. It has been published in fourteen languages, adapted to film, is taught across the country and has never gone out of print. Go ahead, name another novel that has had greater cultural impact, name one that had greater reader response.

How about Anne of Green Gables?

Anne of Green Gables isn't on the list.

The muddled became muddied when guest host Suhana Meharchand opened discussion about the list on Cross Country Checkup. Forget all that stuff about  novels to make you feel proud, this was now "100 must-read Canadian novels", a list of "great Canadian novels" through which one would "become an expert in Canadian fiction [emphasis mine]". Ms Meharchand was then joined by CBC Books producer Erin Balser who revealed it to be nothing more than a list of 100 Canadian novels some CBC producers think everyone should read. She went on to say that the goal was to present "a balance of classic and contemporary books because we wanted to represent the whole history of Canadian literature."

If we're to consider novels written by those who "call or once called Canada home", the first up is Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague. It was published in 1769, one hundred and forty-three years before Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, the oldest book on the list. A further thirty-three years pass before we encounter another.

Ms Balser's words to the contrary, there is no "balance of classic and contemporary". Over half the books on the list were published between 2000 and 2013 (there are no titles from 2014). Seventy-nine of the books were published in the last twenty years. Eight of the books were published in 2009 alone, more than the 'sixties and 'seventies combined.

"We all know that readers love lists," enthused Suhana Meharchand. True enough. Here's mine:

SIX NOVELISTS WHO "CALL OR ONCE CALLED CANADA HOME" NOT FOUND ON THE 100 NOVELS LIST

Saul Bellow

Mavis Gallant

Malcolm Lowry

Antonine Maillet

Brian Moore 

Gabrielle Roy

It was hoped that "100 NOVELS THAT MAKE YOU PROUD TO BE A CANADIAN" would "start a dialogue in this country", but this list is another opportunity wasted. Messy and poorly presented, it is nothing more than a grab bag of recent novels peppered with a few CanLit course mainstays. Predictably, for this is today's CBC, most of the Giller and Canada Reads winners are included.

For the record, I've read nineteen of the hundred.

That number doesn't depress me in the least.

An explanation (of sorts):

There's actually two Margaret Atwood novels. The second one is Handmaid's Tale [sic]. So there are only two because we felt there should only be two – even though we all love Margaret Atwood deeply.

– Erin Balser, Cross Country Checkup, 29 June 2014

Errata: A sharp-eyed reader points out that Joseph Boyden also has two titles on the list. Thank you, Edith!

Related posts:

CBC's Awful List, Radio-Canada's Disheartening List

and Perhaps the Best Book List I've Ever Seen

On the Disgrace That is CBC Books' 100 Young Adult Books That Make You Proud to Be Canadian

Canada's 100 Best Books? 102? 110?

Brian Moore's Canada for Americans – and isn't that Leonard Cohen?

Canada
Brian Moore and the Editors of LIFE
New York: Time, 1963

The LIFE World Library was once found in every third suburban rec room and on one of ten coffee tables. That's what I remember, anyway. Now you can't give them away.

There were thirty-two volumes in all, but Canada is the only one I own. I paid $1.50 – entirely too much – at a Toronto Goodwill fourteen years ago, and have been moving it about the country ever since. Until yesterday, it was one of only two Brian Moore titles I hadn't read; today Murder in Majorca stands alone.

Canada is an odd duck. It's Moore's only non-fiction book and his only collaboration. Just who are those "Editors of LIFE"? One was Oliver E. Allen, who would one day garner praise for New York, New York: A History of the World's Most Exhilarating City and The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall.

Knowing that the Library was sold throughout the anglosphere, and was translated into French, German, Dutch and Spanish, I was surprised to see the extent to which Canada is tailored toward American readers. The Introduction is written by Livingston T. Merchant, former U.S. Ambassador to Canada (1956-58). "For most of us in the United States, Canada is not really a foreign country", writes the diplomat. "And failure to grasp the simple fact accounts for much of the difficulty which growingly attends our relationship." So it is that in Ambassador Merchant's opinion, the book provides a "needed service".

This all sounds dry, but isn't because Moore is a real pro. For evidence, look no further than his chapter on Canadian history: Lief Erikson to Lester Pearson in under 4500 words and he still finds space for the Fenian Raids.

Each volume in the series had a history chapter; it's in the others that Moore really shines. His writing on Quebec, not yet three years into the Quiet Revolution, is as much about how the province is (or was) as how it will be (or is). A chapter on post-war immigration draws on his own experiences and includes this horribly accurate description: "The cities split at their extremities, disgorging long, untidy entrails of new concrete factories, shopping centers and suburban office blocks."

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No chapter is more surprising than "Clubmen and the Other Club", which begins:

There is no such person as Stewart Henderson McMaster, yet he is easily invented. Almost certainly his name will have a Scottish ring. He is English on his mother's side, and his wife, the granddaughter of an Anglican bishop, is also of English descent. He is director of two or more of Canada's dominant business corporations, a university governor, an executive member of the Canadian Manufacturers' Association and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. He sits on the board of more than a dozen charitable institutions.

Moore's "Other Club", composed of members of the intellectual class, is personified by clergyman's son "Gordon Bruce Howard",  a Rhodes scholar who sipped sherry at Oxford with "the brightest minds from all over the British Commonwealth". Although Moore doesn't say, Gordie Howard is just the sort of who would have visited Montreal's Hostellerie, where drink flowed freely and sweaters were bulky.

Canada includes three images of the café. This shot appears to capture a twenty-something Leonard Cohen.

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That's him on the far right, right?

Being a LIFE book, there are photos aplenty. My favourite is this oddly unsettling image of Mme Edmond-Louis Simard and family of Bagotville.

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More than a half-century later, this photograph of hydro workers in Kitimat looks like something from the future.

I'd never seen this photograph of Hugh MacLennan, whom Moore describes as "the only serious novelist of the 1940s".

And here's Morley Callaghan, "for many years a neglected oddity in his native city."

Meanwhile, Harold Town and Tom Onley adopt the painter's pose.

A chicken in every pot and a Moore in every home. Not quite, but it is nice to think that they were once so common. I wonder how many were read. Or did people just look at the pictures?

Did they even do that?

Trivia: Moore wasn't the only name recruited by LIFE. Hammond Innes provided a volume on Scandinavia. Elizabeth Bishop got paid US$10,000 (over US$75,000 today) for her volume on Brazil.

Object: A 160-page hardcover, featuring 104 photographs, six paintings, four illustrations and three maps (four with the endpapers). Loads of copies are available online; pay no more than one dollar. Goodhearted souls who volunteer at library book sales may snag a copy en route to being pulped.

Easily found in academic libraries; less so in public libraries.

Patriotic Verse from the Garden of a Girl's Dreams

For this day, the 147th anniversary of the birth of the Dominion of Canada, patriotic verse by the ever-charming Ethel Ursula Foran. A piece of juvenilia, it leads off Poems: A Few Blossoms from the Garden of My Dreams, her debut collection of "immature verses", published in 1922 by Librarie Beauchemin. "With all their imperfections they must remain just as they were composed", Miss Foran writes in the Preface. In accordance with her wishes, the poem is presented here with typos and misspellings intact.

CANADA 

I love this fair Dominion; my natvie land, all hail!
Its wondrous proportions are on the grandest scale;
Its endless virgin forests, its mighty inland seas,
Its Rockies and its Selkirks, like Alps and Pyranees;
Its vast expanse of prairies, where vision seeks in vain
The limits of the billowy fields of undulating grain;
Its rivers with their volumes, in their majestic sweep,
Through miles of fertile country down to Atlantic's deep;
Its cascades and the thunders of Niagara's giant fall;
The echoes of its vastness that from sea to mountains call;
Its Liberties as precious as the features that we trace,
Its blending of all elements of province, creed and race;
Its every noble aspect that God has pronounced "good,"
'Tis a marvellous mosaic of Canadian nationhood.
Yes, I love this fair Dominion, the grandest land on earth,
'Tis the land of a bright future, and the dear land of my birth.

Related posts:

A 123-Year-Old Poem for Canada Day

Two Hurrahs for the New Dominion

Charles G.D. Roberts' Dominion Day Collect

Immoral Music for a Monday Morning

Pure filth condemned by John Wesley's White in Re-entry (1970), his forty-four-year-old book on Christ's imminent return. Writes Dr White:

Tops of the pops like, "Have you [sic] Got Cheating on Your Mind," "Second Time Around," "Strangers in the Night," and the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spent the Night Together" are deliberately written and sung to promote immorality.

The Oxford PhD has never been very good with titles. I'm sure that by "Have you Got Cheating on Your Mind" he means "Woman, Woman", the Jim Glaser/Jimmy Payne song, which was a hit for Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. But isn't the song about being faithful? Was it really "written and sung to promote immorality"? You tell me.

A #1 single in Canada, "Woman, Woman" did indeed top the pops, but what about "Second Time Around"? Sure, the song was nominated for an Academy Award, but in the words of Frank Sinatra it "never got off the ground". Old Blue Eyes thought it should be a standard and recorded it a number of times, but it was first sung by depraved Bing Crosby in High Times (1960).

The words and music were written by the debauched duo of Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, who are best remembered for obscenities like "High Hopes", "Come Fly with Me" and, of course, "Love and Marriage".

Sinatra bears much of the blame for "Strangers in the Night", which on 2 July 1966 topped the Billboard Hot 100 by bumping off "Paperback Writer". This video captures the singer sixteen years later in performance before an audience of reprobates:

And finally we have the Rolling Stones. Once the most licentious and lewd of all rock and roll combos, they redeemed themselves with this famous performance on The Ed Sullivan Show:

Dr White should recognize.

Related posts:

The Oxford PhD Rambles On

Songs for Sunday Suggested by John Wesley White

Mackenzie King Attends the Funeral of Peregine Acland's Mother & Visits Wilfred Campbell's Grave

I had a half hour's rest after luncheon before going into the city to attend Mrs. Acland's funeral. Went in with Hendy by station car, changed to large car before Rideau Club. At the house on Bronson Ave. was shown to a seat on a couch by Mr. Acland. He looked & was very frail – is 88 (his wife was over 90). He held on to my arm during the service & afterwards I sat with him a short time, while the flowers were taken out, then went with Mary & Peregrine to the cemetery. There was only one other car with some relatives. It was a beautiful afternoon & the scene at the cemetery was quite peaceful. Kind words were spoken by those who had come down. Later Lay and I sought out Wilfrid [sic] Campbell's grave & spent a few moments there. — a beautiful restful spot.

An entry in Mackenzie King's diary, dated sixty-five years ago today, gives evidence of a more civilized Ottawa. The former prime minister was in the eighth month of his retirement from politics when "Mrs. Acland", wife of Frederick Albert Acland and mother of Peregrine Acland, died. The entry gives little sense of the high regard and warmth with which King held the Acland family. Their paths first crossed in 1895 when "Mr. Acland" hired a twenty-year-old Mackenzie King to write for the Globe. Other aspects of their working relationship can be seen in Mrs Acland's Ottawa Citizen obituary (27 June 1949):

During the Second World War, King hired Peregrine, author of All Else is Folly, to act as advisor, press officer and secretary. The younger Acland held the positions until the prime minister's retirement, oversaw the transition to successor Louis St Laurent, then became a manager at a Toronto advertising firm. It's likely that it was he who placed this obituary in the Globe & Mail (27 June 1949):

The prime minister's friendship with William Wilfred Campbell began in 1902 when the poet wrote "H.A. Harper" in memory of King's friend Bert Harper, who had drowned in the Ottawa River whilst trying to save a young woman who had fallen through the ice.

Curiously, throughout King's diaries Wilfred Campbell is referred to invariably as "Wilfrid Campbell"; the influence of that other great Liberal prime minister Wilfrid Laurier, perhaps.

Related posts:

The Great Canadian Great War Novel

Alec Falcon, c'est moi

Remembering Peregrine Acland

Canada's Great War Novelists: Peregrine Acland

A Neglected Novelist's Neglected Grave

Peregrine Acland: Fifty Years

Mystery at Beechwood Cemetery

Mistake at Beechwood Cemetery?

The Oxford PhD Rambles On

Re-entry
John Wesley White
Minneapolis: Word Wide Publications, [1971?]

Just how easy is it to obtain a PhD from Oxford? The question grows with each John Wesley White book read. Re-entry follows Arming for Armageddon and Thinking the Unthinkable as my third. Mine is a scattershot approach: I read 'em as I find 'em. Like the others, Re-entry was found in a Salvation army Thrift Store. Price: 75¢.

In his Foreword, friend Billy Graham plays up John Wesley White's education: Moody Bible Institute (Chicago), Wheaton College (Wheaton), Queen's University (Belfast), Trinity College (Dublin) and, of course, Oxford University (Oxford), at which that Doctor of Philosophy degree was earned. When Re-entry was published, Dr White held the position of Chancellor at Toronto's Richmond College. An institution known today as Canada Christian College, it's currently headed by Charles McVety, Canada's leading homophobe. Wife Jennifer is Registrar.

When writing about Arming for Armageddon and Thinking the Unthinkable, I made much – but not too much – of Dr White's multitudinous mistakes. Fast and furious, they come early in Re-entry, beginning on the very first page. Here the reader finds a warm, brotherly attack on James Pike, the popular Episcopal bishop who had died of a fall in the Judean Desert not two years earlier. Writes Dr White: "As the press put it, he was literally going through 'torments trying to find himself and failed.'"

The words the doctor  quotes do indeed come from the press – the Associated Press, anyway –  but they're in reference to the bishop's eldest son, who had taken his own life at the age of twenty-two.

Was James Pike tormented? I can't imagine anyone recovering from the death of a child. However, Dr White disregards the loss, pointing instead to the bishop's inquisitive nature as evidence of torment, then misrepresents the man's words: "An ironic postscript to James Pike's disavowal of the second coming was provided by the Time cover story of June 21, 1971, entitled 'Jesus Is Coming.'"

Bishop Pike did not disavow the second coming. The issue of Time Dr White cites featured two cover stories: "The Alternative Jesus: Psychedelic Christ" and "Religion: Many Things to Many Men". The cover tag was "THE JESUS REVOLUTION".

There is no article titled "Jesus Is Coming."

That reference to the June 21, 1971 edition of Time is the closest I've seen to an actual citation in any of the doctors's writing read thus far. Re-entry quotes content published in ten magazines, fourteen newspapers,one supermarket tabloid, and a mystery publication identified only as "McLean's", without mention of issue, edition, author or title. There are no footnotes and endnotes, though a Scripture Index does follow.

He can be more vague, more unreliable:

When I was in Africa, I read in a newspaper of a London school in which 5-to-7-year-olds were completely out of hand.

How out of hand?

"Razor blade slashings and hangings were reported."

Oh, those 5-to-7-year-olds.

I don't mean to imply that the good doctor is a drunk, but there are times when his words remind me of an opinionated barfly. He's read something somewhere… or maybe someone told him something once… anyway, he knows what's going on:

A school principal tells me that in one of the community colleges in Ontario, in the literature department, Playboy has become the official textbook!

Name the subject, John Wesley White is Canada's Cliff Clavin.

Publishing: "Science fiction is going out of style because science is revealing so much that once could be thought of only as fiction." 

Seismology: "A Presbyterian minister tells me that there are annually 18,000 earthquakes of a size large enough to be classified as such." 

Aviation: "…the Wright Brothers first test flew an aircraft in California in 1904." 

Physics: "…those who turned and looked back at the Nagasaki conflagration, turned into ash. Inexplicably, others with them who fled with their coats over their heads escaped untarnished."

Education: "Student activists in California form a denomination of devil-worshippers, leaders of which are 'Satan's Ministers who put on 'devil's horn's' and conduct services including nationally televised wedding ceremonies." 

Dr White writes of a monster named "Adolph Hitler", the film star "Sydney Poitier", Broadway's "Melba Moone", and "Dennis Morse", a highly successful, jetsetting film star who has somehow escaped the attention of IMDb.

"The moral depravity which Scriptures indicate God hates most is sexual deviation and perversion, including homosexuality and lesbianism", writes Dr White.

This is not to say that the good doctor doesn't recognize the limits of his knowledge:

Many people ask: "Is there an intimation of television in the Bible?" I do not know. But for centuries and perhaps especially since such books as Professor Urey's (the Nobel Prize winner) Red Lights of the Apocalypse appeared, fascination has centred on Revelation 11.

To be honest, I've never heard a soul ask about television in the Bible, nor do I know anyone who is fascinated by Revelation 11. Could be I'm running around with the wrong crowd. What I do know is that the Harold Urey, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, never published a book entitled Red Lights of the Apocalypse.

Dr White does make mistakes.

There is a very definite rhythm to Re-entry. The author will quote scripture, ramble on for a paragraph or two about, say, the Soviet Union's "hovering space bombs", then finish with "we can be sure that nothing else will remedy this situation but the second coming of Jesus Christ."

The message is simple: There's nothing you can do. Prepare for His coming by saving yourself. Affix your own oxygen mask – pay no mind to the passenger next to you. Proselytize.

Dr White has yet to win me over, but I'm always interested in what he has to say. More than anything, I enjoy his writing on entertainment and the arts, which have had me thinking of the insidious anti-Christian elements of I Married a Monster from Outer Space and Laurie Anderson's "O Superman". "

Where in Arming for Armageddon and Thinking the Unthinkable, condemnation of film and music were often on the menu, here I was surprised to find a mouthful and more about "the clever but sinister portrayal of human hate, sadism and cruelty which pour forth from the pens of playwrights whose minds are grotesquely depraved and twisted." According to the doctor, their output includes "a rash of plays on nudity such as 'Hair,' 'Man's Eyes,' 'The Beard,' and 'Canada's Fortune.'"

Sure, productions of Hair and The Beard have featured the unclothed, but the idea that they are "on nudity" has me reconsidering my understanding. As for Man's Eyes and Canada's Fortune, I'm guessing he really means Fortune and Men's Eyes by Canada's John Herbert.

Again, Dr White does make mistakes.

I see no evidence that the films In the Heat of the Night and Bunny O'Hare incited violence; and judging from the trailer, The Day the Earth Caught Fire isn't about "the terrifying and magnificent aspects of future activity in space."

Brian Jones didn't kill himself. Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Yoko Ono did not "appear in the nude on the cover of a Beatle record". I can find no trace of a Smothers Brothers song titled "What Do You Do, When There's No Place to Hide!", but do thank Dr White for again introducing me to songs that had somehow escaped my attention:

The late Elizabeth Steen, a 28-year-old Richmond, California housewife brought thousands of her fellow Californians to a state of near panic by predicting that on April 14, 1969, a series of catastrophic earthquakes would destroy the coastal area of California. Kooks, cultists and hippies gave the portent maxim mileage with a rash of pop songs like "Where Can We Go When There's No San Francisco" and "California Earthquake."

I'd never heard Cass Elliot's "California Earthquake", which reached #67 on the Billboard Top 100. "Talkin' to Your Toothbrush" was the b-side.

"Where Can We Go When There's No San Francisco" is actually "Day by Day (It's Slippin' Away)" by some band called Shango (featuring Tommy Reynold's, later of Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds!). It made number 57.

Frankly, I see both songs as tearing a strip of off the doomsday kooks and cultists. Maybe it's just me.

Like scripture, all rests on interpretation.

Best passage:

The second coming is good news. For ours is an anguished age, as it is angry. It is both ironic and paradoxical that man should be ripping in half as he is being catapulted upward, slingshot into space by a sophisticated scientism, while he is being savagely sucked from beneath by the woes of warism, the stalking suffocation of pollution, proliferating poverty, raging racism and the ultimate weaponry which beckons impending annihilation. Schizophrenically-split through the middle, he years to get glued together again. So he snatches at any straw of hope.

Object: A 192-page mass market paperback, my copy is an updated "Special Crusade Edition", flogged to television viewers by Billy Graham's own World Wide Publications.

Access: The first edition (right) was published in 1970 by Zondervan. Re-entry enjoyed several printings, the last being in 1975. That same year Dr White published a book titled Re-entry II. What's that all about? I don't know, If I come across a copy at the Salvation Army I'll let you know.

Nearly two hundred copies of Re-entry – in it's various incarnations – are listed for sale online. A signed copy will set you back US$2.50. An optimistic American bookseller is selling a Fine first edition for US$20. Good luck to him.

Where WorldCat lists 177 copies in American libraries, we Canadians have to make do with two (University of Toronto Trinity College Library and Tyndale University College and Seminary Library).

Related posts:

Come, Come, Come - Nuclear Bomb

Same Old Same Old about Armageddon

Songs for Sunday Suggested by John Wesley White

Canadian Womanhood on Parade!

For the day, a few photographs of Montreal's 1931 St-Jean Baptiste parade. Running along Sherbrooke, from Lafontaine Park to Atwater, it ranks as one of the most elaborate; you'd almost think that the city had somehow escaped the effects of the Great Depression. A breathless report in the next day's Gazette captures the event:

Writes the anonymous newspaperman:

Epic in conception and execution, the procession depicted tableaux vivants, not only the eventful story of womanhood in Canada, from the early pioneering days, through the pageantry of historic crests to the present day, but also the larger tale of the Canadienne's lifetime, from cradle to the silvery locks of grandmotherhood.

Jeanne Mance, Marguerite Bourgeoys, Mère Gamelin and Jeanne Le Ber, "first Canadian recluse", were honoured by tableaux, though I would be sacrilege to write that even one bore "the silvery locks of grandmotherhood." The same goes for Sœur Marie Morin, who is here recognized as the "first writer born in Canada":

The parade featured two other floats of a literary nature, the first of which was devoted to Evangeline. About that tableaux the Gazette reporter writes nothing… Maria Chapdelaine, on the other hand:

Then delightful Maria Chapdelaine came on the scene. Snow lay all around. The true, the proven Canadian country girl, she has become a known and idealized type.

Here's another photograph of Maria's float from the 25 June 1931 edition of La Partrie:

The newspaper also provides a photograph of this tableaux commemorating Dame Emma Albani's private performance before Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle:

We fellas weren't left out; the parade featured this float, titled: "Arrivée de Mgr. Laval à Québec".

In truth, Laval arrived at Quebec by ship in 1659 (203 B.F.). I have nothing more to say regarding historical accuracy.

I wish there were more photographs of the floats. I expect they're out there somewhere. More than any other, I'd like to see that honouring Jeanne Le Ber. Whatever can a tableaux depicting a recluse look like?

Bonne Fête!