Vancouver Shakedown

Rebound
Dick Diespecker
Toronto: Harlequin, 1953
224 pages

Handsome Stoney Martin and his plain wife Jane leave Toronto on a train bound for Vancouver. In middle-age, they've decided to make the West Coast their home. Toronto just didn't take.

The long journey back affords Stoney a good amount of time to reflect upon the past, his memories spurred on by a chance encounter with his alluring ex-wife, who just happens to be travelling aboard the very same train. He casts his mind back to 1928, when he and Jane were neighbours in a boarding house not far from Burrard Inlet. Stoney was a reporter for the Morning Standard back then, as was fellow boarder Lon Welch. Chunky, hard-working Kurt Pelzer would join them at the boarding house dinner table, though his presence was invariably overshadowed by Susan Niles:

     Susan Niles was blonde.
     Or brunette.
     Or red-headed.
     Depending on the fashion of the time and her mood.

A fashion illustrator, Susan had a beautiful figure and really knew how to dress and make herself up. What Jane, a bookkeeper, lacked in looks she made up in personality and a wholesome philosophy of life. Stoney was in love with her. If he'd been making $30 a week, instead of $25, he would have proposed. As it was, Stoney was happy to take Jane out on Saturday nights... until the Saturday night she'd agreed to a date with chunky Kurt.

Stoney didn't take it well, got drunk, and ended up in sexy Susan's bed. The next morning, Jane caught him sneaking out of the fashion illustrator's room.

The corner of Granville & Hastings, Vancouver, 1928

Claude Bissell, who seems to have been the only person to have reviewed this novel (University of Toronto Quarterly, April 1954), describes Rebound as a "piece of naturalism."

It is.

Stoney's tumble with Susan has some effect on the plot – they marry because she thinks she's pregnant – but the journalist's fate is governed more by history. Stoney's stock rises with the market as the Morning Standard gives him a front page column and several salary increases. When Susan's  loveless marriage proves baby-less, Susan leaves and sets out to take Stoney for all she can get:

"You don't want a divorce? Why not, for God's sake? Do you mean you like living this kind of bloody life?"
     "No, I don't like it any better than you do. And I'm not going to continue it any longer. I'm moving out this afternoon. But I don't want a divorce."
     Stoney was losing his patience and his temper.
     "What the hell are you raving about?" he demanded.
     Susan lit a cigarette and blew out a long plume of blue smoke before she replied. Then, not looking at him, but staring straight in front of her at the blank wall, exactly as she had on another memorable and terrible occasion, she said, "This is what I'm raving about, as you put it. I've taken more from you than I've ever taken from any man before, or ever will again. You've insulted me and browbeaten me and made me cheapen myself because I loved you."
     "I don't believe that," grunted Stoney.
     "I don't care a damn whether you believe it or not. It happens to be true. I did love you, or I wouldn't have done the things I did. and yet you, with your sickening moral hypocrisy, were wiling to accept the physical aspect of our relationship, but nothing more. You pretended you wanted to call the whole thing off, and yet the minute I made a pass at you, you were right back in bed with me. And when you were faced with the prospect of assuming some responsibility for your actions, you called me filthy names.
     "Well, Mr. Martin, I've been saving these things for you. You have a few debts to pay off, and you're going to pay them... with interest."

Then comes Black Tuesday. Stoney's salary is cut, cut, cut, cut, and cut, until the newspaper goes under and he joins the ranks of the unemployed.

Recognizing there's no more to take, Susan takes up with Lon, but still won't give Stoney a divorce. Doesn't matter, really, since he doesn't have money for food, never mind a lawyer. After days without a meal, Stoney manages to find work selling insurance. "The depression is a godsend to us," says his new boss. "There are more burglaries and holdups. So we sell more burglary and holdup insurance. People are more afraid of accidents and sickness, because they are afraid they'll lose pay from being away from their work... or perhaps even lose their jobs."

Stoney scrambles to make unrealistic sales targets, lying to customers and bending the rules, in a desperate attempt to please:

It was always the same. A shameful crawling and pleading, like a beaten dog begging to be allowed back into the good graces of its master. After a while Stoney became, like many of his fellow drudges, inured to the hopelessness of the situation. They simply did not care any more. Tramping through the streets in the fall and winter rains, with cracked and broken shoes, their suits wrinkled and their cuffs frayed, they gave up trying. They worked of half a day, perhaps on for an hour, attempting to sell without enthusiasm, or more important, trying to make collections.

It's Diespecker's depiction of Depression-era Vancouver and the struggles endured by Stoney and others that make Rebound worth reading. The novel loses strength with the coming of the Second World War. Curiously, there is less drama, less conflict, and the atmosphere of despair dissipates.

On reflection, maybe it isn't so curious; Susan Niles is all but absent during the war years, and it is she who brings passion and excitement to this novel. This seems to have been recognized by the unknown hand who wrote the back cover copy. Susan's presence in the novel is played up, and the devastation she brings is exaggerated. Stoney isn't really "a man who had to wrestle with his very soul until the end of time" – and even if he were, he'd have only himself to blame.

Even femme fatales deserve fair treatment.

Object and Access: A surprisingly thick mass market paperback, published once and never again. The copyright page is interesting in that it blacks out Harlequin's claim of ownership. My copy was a gift from Bowdler of Fly-By-Night. I'd been hunting for ages!

Rebound is held by Library and Archives Canada and six of our academic libraries.

Uncommon.

Mrs Lowry's West Coast Murder Mystery

"Malcolm Lowry has an entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia, so why not wife Margerie?" This is the question I pose in reviewing Margerie Bonner's 1946 novel The Shapes That Creep for the new Summer edition of Canadian Notes & Queries. As I point out, Bonner lived in Canada just as long as her husband, and published three novels during the couple's Canadian years. The Shapes That Creep, the first, is set in motion by the discovery of a murdered recluse in a community modelled on Deep Cove, British Columbia.

My review of The Shapes That Creep – with argument for Bonner's inclusion in the Encyclopedia – is the subject of my Dusty Bookcase column. Over at the What's Old feature, I recommend reissues of two Canadian classics, Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes and The Black Donnellys by Thomas P. Kelley; along with Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal, a new Gray Seal adventure written by fan Michael Howard.

This being the Genre Issue, Deborah Dundas writes on her relationship with romance novels, Rui Umezawa looks at Enter the Dragon, and Robert J. Wiersema considers Stephen King's It as a work of empathy. Gemma Files, Sandra Kasturi, David Nickle, Andrew Pyper, and Robert Rowe dare revisit their first monsters.

Seth provides a cover that can double as a Halloween mask.

All is overseen by guest editor James Grainger, who also contributes an excellent piece on the disturbing 1972 horror/comedy Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. Other contributors include:

Myra Bloom

Daniel Donaldson

Justin Donnait

André Forget

Chris Gilmore

Alex Good

Camila Grudova

Sandra Kasturiit

Sibyl Lamb

Annick MacAskill

David Mason

Patricia Robertson

Keven Spenst

Jay Stephens

JC Sutcliffe

Drew Hayden Taylor

and

Bruce Whiteman

As always, things wrap up with Stephen Fowler. This issue he exhumes the Civil Defence Health Service's Casualty Simulation (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1955).

The horror! The horror!

Related post:

Late of the Bowery

The Dustiest Bookcase: G is for Gotlieb

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

They're in storage as we build our new home.

Patience, please.

O Master Caliban!

Phyllis Gotlieb

New York: Harper & Row, 1976

244 pages

A childhood enthusiasm, I gave up on science fiction at about the time this book was published, which pretty much explains how it is that I had no idea Phyllis Gotlieb wrote sci-fi novels. Before coming across a copy of her first, Sunburst, at last fall's Friends of the St Marys Public Library book sale. I knew her only as a poet. I've never read her verse, but the fact that it had been published by Oxford University Press holds considerable weight.

O Master Caliban! was Gotlieb's third novel. I found this pristine, seemingly unread first edition one cold January day at Attic Books. The price - $3.00 - encouraged purchase, but I hesitated after reading the first sentence of the front flap:

Esther, an intelligent, articulate, motherly gibbon; Yigal, a large, grumpy white goat who talks; and Sven, a moody young man with four arms, are the protagonists of this fast-paced and delightful novel.

Oh, dear.

I bought it just the same, but can't bring myself to start in on the thing. The cover of the 1979 Seal mass market paperback all but guarantees I never will.

The Promise of a Man, a Mother in So Much Pain

Blencarrow
Isabel Mackay
Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1926
307 pages

The author's final novel, published two years before her death, Blencarrow begins in a sunny, lighthearted manner:

Euan Cameron, aged twelve, sat upon the fence and bent a darkling eye upon his father at the woodpile. The woodpile was in the Cameron's back yard, and the Camerons' back yard was in Blencarrow, and Blencarrow was a small, but exceedingly important, town somewhere around. So now you know exactly where Euan sat.

Do not be deceived. Blencarrow fits in with Mackay's other novels: The House of Windows (1912), dealing with child abduction and worker exploitation; Up the Hill and Over (1917), about mental illness and drug addiction; and The Window-Gazer (1921), in which post-traumatic stress disorder and racism figure.

(I've yet to read Mackay's 1919 novel Mist of Morning.)

Named after the fictitious town in which the action is set (see: Woodstock, Ontario), Blencarrow focusses on four children as they grow into adulthood. Euan is the least interesting. I blame his family.

 The worst that can be said about the Camerons is that grim patriarch Andrew finds no contentment in his achievements. Contrast Euan's home life with that of best friend Garry, who is being raised in the Anglican manse by a benevolent uncle, Reverend James Dwight, and housekeeper Mrs Binns. Garry's mother is dead; there's no mention of his father. Euan and Garry's sometime friend Conway de Beck – Con-of-the-Woods – lives with his aunt, a Theosophist, who is something of an outcast in Blencarrow. Con doesn't care; he's happier in the woods, hence the nickname.

All three boys are attracted to Kathrine Fenwell. She isn't the prettiest girl in Blencarrow – that would be her sister, Gilda – but she has by far the strongest character. Kathrine needs this as the daughter of the town drunk. Owing to his good looks and pedigree, Blencarrow had once considered her father, Gilbert Fenwell, a man of great promise. Shortly after the death of his own father, the respected Colonel Fenwell, Gilbert took his healthy inheritance to the big cities, where he invested in "Big Business." He married Kathrine's mother, Lucia, and began construction of what was to have been the grandest house in all of Blencarrow:

It was not so much a house as a half-house, the front half benign-existent save as a tracing on a blue-print. The back half, arrested abruptly in its normal growth, had remained fixed, as by some strange enchantment, in all the ugliness of outraged proportion. At first, scaffolds had decorated it, but, bit by bit, the scaffolding had disappeared and nothing had taken its place. No steps below, no eaves above, broke the wide flatness of is face. The front door was not properly a front door, but a door leading into a hallway that was not there. The windows were not windows really, but glassed-in entrances to dining-rooms and drawing-rooms – which lived and had their being in a fourth dimension.

The lengthy description, one of my favourite Mackay passages, ends:

It stood well back in its neglected garden, the ghost of something once new and fresh and promising, On its strange, flat face was a negation of all hope. It was a house which had given itself up.
     Blencarrow had given it up also. While the scaffolding still stood, Blencarrow had pointed it out to strangers as "the unfinished Fenwell place." But this they did no longer, for a thing which never will be finished is the most finished thing of all.

The odd appearance of Gilbert Fenwell's house, "the town's only curiosity," serves as a reminder that Big Business "wiped him off the financial map as a child rubs out a name on a plate." Work stopped,

The Globe & Mail
14 December 1926

 and he returned to Blencarrow as a man who had left his money and promise behind: "Gilbert Fenwell, as a possibility, had ceased to be, but Gilbert Fenwell, as an actuality, lived on."

If only he hadn't.

Gilbert doesn't figure nearly so much in Blencarrow as Kathrine, Euan, Garry, and Con-of-the Woods, but his influence on the plot is greater. As a young child, Gilda is sent away to live with her aunt after having being beaten by Gilbert. Her forehead bears a scar that she hides with her long red hair. He takes his failings out on his family. He beats Lucia. He beats Kathrine. His poison is pervasive. All too real, I can't think of another character like him this early in our literature, nor can I think of anything similar to this exchange between Kathrine and her mother:

"Gilda doesn't care for anyone in any way – except you, of course," she added hastily, as she saw the tightening of her mother's face.
     Lucia laid down her sewing. Into her eyes had come the strange blank look which Kathrine had grown to dread.
     "No," she said softly. "You can't have it both ways. If Gilda cares for no one, why would she care for me? And that is justice, too. I hated her you see."
     "You hated Gilda?" – in wonderment.
     Lucia nodded. "Before she was born I hated her. I would have denied her life if I could. I had come to hate life so! To pass it on seemed a horrible thing... horror... all horror –" 

A remarkable passage in a remarkable novel, it leads me to ask again how it is that we've forgotten Isabel Mackay.

Bloomer: As in life, there's humour to be found in even the darkest of tales. Blencarrow is no exception. Its plot is governed by effects wrought of domestic violence, and yet there are chapters reminiscent of Stephen Leacock. My favourite involves the decision of the Presbyterian Ladies' Affiliated Societies of Mariposa Blencarrow to organize a "Festival of Nations." However, the greatest laugh comes in the form of a bloomer found on the ninety-fifth page. This occurs as young Garry begins religious studies with the goal of becoming a celibate Anglican clergyman like his Uncle James. In this pursuit, he finds a role model in Prof Adam Harmon, leading to this, um, exchange, which begins with Harmon's words of advice:

"Keep your mind clear as long as it is clear... Fill it with the spiritual things you love. Hold fast through everything to the decision you have made. Nothing can conquer you – except yourself."
     "Oh, I think I've got myself well in hand," said Garry cheerfully.

Object and Access: A bland green hardcover sans dust jacket (which I've never seen), as far as I know it's the only MacKay book to be attributed to "Isabel Mackay" and not "Isabel Ecclestone Mackay." I purchased my copy in 2013 from bookseller Grant Thiesen. Price: US$7.99. In reading it, I came across this bonus:

The Thomas Allen edition was a split-run with Houghton Mifflin. It appears there were no others. Blencarrow can be found at Library and Archives Canada and sixteen of our university libraries. The Woodstock Public Library excluded, Canada's public libraries fail us.

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Romance Amongst the Racists

The Hell That is Retail

Ontario, Opium and Cocaine

The Dustiest Bookcase: F is for Fulford

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

They're in storage as we build our new home.

Patience, please.

Right Now Would Be a Good Time to Cut My Throat

Paul Fulford

Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket, [1972]

pages

The debut novel by Paul Fulford – commonly, "Paul A. Fulford" – about whom I know next to nothing. True, the book's author bio consumes the back cover, but can it be trusted?

Fulford is described as a magazine editor without identifying the publication. He's said to have written magazine articles, but I've yet to find one. Brochures? Speeches? Haven't most of us written these at one time or another?

Fulford is a subject of further research, which is not to say it hasn't begun. I've managed to track down a copy of Should a Scotsman Take Off His Kilt When He Meets a Lady?, published in 1969 by Young & McCarthy.

It was the publisher's only book.

I've also found seven letters Fulford wrote to the Globe & Mail, the earliest (26 March 1965) concerning a crosswalk accident that involved Toronto's Chief of Police. Others focus on problems with parking at the Canadian National Exhibition, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin's 1971 Ottawa visit, the Oak Island Mystery, and humorist and columnist Richard Needham (whom Fulford criticizes as unfunny and lazy). The last, published in 6 January 1973, deals with dogs:

Never mind.

Given Fulford's association with Pocket Books, an American mass market branch plant, this letter published on 6 August 1971, is by far the most interesting:

As far as I've been able to determine, Fulford wrote just one paid piece for the Globe & Mail, "Can Penguins Show How To Solve the Generation Gap" (16 March 1971), an op-ed in which he's described as "a supply teacher at Forest Hill Junior High."

It's every bit as funny as Needham.

Barman, labourer, teacher, farmhand, I don't doubt that Fulford had been them all. Initially, I was dismissive about the claim that written of movie scripts, "Unproduced," I'd thought, until I came across a "Paul Fulford" as one of four screenwriters credited in the 1971 Canadian prison drama "I'm Going to Get You... Elliott Boy" (aka Caged Men Plus One Woman).

"Featuring today's bright young stars Ross Stephenson and Maureen McGill," according to the trailer, "this story was torn from today's headlines and actually filmed inside the walls of a modern and active penitentiary." "It seems a rip-off of John Herbert's 1967 play Fortune and Men's Eyes, which happened to have been released as a feature film in the very same month.

I wonder what happened to bright young stars Ross Stephenson and Maureen McGill, just as I wonder what became of Paul A. Fulford. As far as I can tell, he published only one more book, Who's Got the Bastard Pope [sic] (Markham, ON: PaperJacks, 1978). Surprisingly uncommon, I've been looking for it for years, but this small image spotted online is the closest I've got:

As for Fulford being married to a writer named Dorothy Parker... Well, you can't make that stuff up.

Cheering Mrs Moodie's Misfortune

Related posts:

Susanna Moodie's Bloomers

Homophobes and Book Burners Weigh In

The Return of the Amazon Customer Review

Much Ado About Anne

Red Set: The History of Gang of Four is Launched!

I'm honoured to have been invited to interview author Jim Dooley at the Canadian launch of Red Set: A History of Gang of Four, published by Repeater Books.

Jim's an old friend.

The band is an old favourite.

Because I'm old, I was around to take some of the photos in the book.

It'll all go down in the nation's capital:

Black Squirrel Books and Espresso Bar

1073 Bank Street

Ottawa 

Thursday, July 12, 2018

9:00pm

Ottawa friends and readers, please come by.

No weak men in the books at home!

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A Teenage Rock Photographer Between the Covers

My Career as a Teenage Rock Photographer