The Dusty Bookcase

14 November 2010

Heed Ye the Church Ladies!

Fifty-five years ago today, 14 November 1955, the Catholic Women's League launched its "Decency Crusade", descending on Ontario newsstands, drug stores and bookshops in order to end the sale of "corrupted and salacious" material. Theirs was an imported campaign, one that originated with Chicago's Msgr Thomas J. Fitzgerald, Executive Director of the National Organization of Decent Literature, who provided the ladies with a list of 300 objectionable publications.

What titles did they target? To Have and Have Not was one; John O'Hara's Ten North Frederick was another. Works by William Faulkner, John Dos Passos and George Orwell were also deemed indecent. Which ones? Who knows – the League clutched the list to its collective bosom, making certain that the titles remained secret.

Must say, I find the number of publications on their list – an even 300 – to be a bit suspicious. Why not 317? Where some titles bumped to make room for others?

Chair of the League's Education Committee, Mrs George Davis, revealed what she'd been told about the list in a 29 October 1955 Gazette article:

By this thinking, of course, Lady Chatterley's Lover would have been given a pass – likewise Fanny Hill, which in 1964 so offended the delicate flowers of the Toronto Police Department.

What I find particularly delightful is the image of the robed monsignor – who was also Director of the Council for Catholic Women – watching over a group of ladies ("each of whom must be a mother") as they scanned books in a hunt for salacious material.

It would seem that the Catholic Women's League's efforts weren't appreciated particularly. Their "Decency Crusade" was dubbed "Censorship Crusade" by the press, and it was pointed out that many of the books targeted had not only been "widely read", but were readily available in the local public library. In reaction perhaps, the League revealed the Crusade's new, true purpose. The Canadian Press reported that on the third day women heading out to scour book racks "were told that Communism has a hand in the need for their mission."

The Windsor Daily Star, 17 November 1955

Mrs Davis, who had made no previous mention of the Red Menace, spoke out: "We feel strongly that part of the Communist program is to undermine the thinking of our youth with this low-type literature so that they will become more susceptible to Communist material." The Education Committee Chair added that "exposing a generation of children to this printed smut does not broaden the freedom of our land. It only brings the citizens a step closer to Communism."

It's easy to laugh at the Decency Crusade today – and I do – but it should be pointed out that the League's sway was once significant. This was particularly true in Quebec, where they dictated what sort of bathing suits women could wear.

The Catholic Women's League's Decency Crusade lasted eight days. I imagine they rested on the Sunday.

12 November 2010

Amazon Customer Review: 'I couldn't throw it away or burn it as I would have liked to do'

Related posts:

Homophobes and Book Burners Weigh In

Amazon Customer Review: Michel Tremblay's 'possible potential'
Amazon Customer Review: 'My review has more intelect'

11 November 2010

Remembrance Day

A Canadian Gun-Pit

Wyndham Lewis

1918

09 November 2010

Acknowledging Hugh MacLennan

Hugh MacLennan died twenty years ago today. I never met the man, though I did once nod reverently as we passed each other in an otherwise deserted university hallway. He smiled. I should have stopped. I've since learned not to let such opportunities slip by.

Another regret: I've never seen the screen adaptation of MacLennan's Two Solitudes. When offered the opportunity I chose Superman: The Movie. Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel beat Stacy Keach's Huntly McQueen. This happened back in 1978 when I was still a young pup – shouldn't I be given a second chance? As far as I can tell, Two Solitudes never made it to Beta or VHS or LaserDisc or DVD. YouTube doesn't have so much as the trailer.

Is it any good? All I have to go on is the poster, a publicity photo, Macmillan's movie edition and a handful of contemporary reviews. It seems no one was particularly crazy about the film... "letdown" is the most accurate one-word summation, though Jay Scott provided a particularly detailed and damning review for the 30 September 1978 Globe and Mail:

Stylistically, Two Solitudes is pure Hollywood, Old Hollywood. It is not enough that we make exploitation films for the Americans: now we are copying their ponderous historical dramatizations, employing composer Maurice Jarre, the once-favored treacly symphonizer of those lumpen ethics. It is a characteristically Canadian irony that the dramatizations being Xeroxed no longer exist in their original form. Two Solitudes does not resemble any contemporary American film of quality as much as it resembles made-for-TV novels like Washington: Behind Closed Doors and Rich Man, Poor Man; it's a passionless political soap opera.

A few months later, Scott named Two Solitudes as one of ten worst films of 1978, while pointing to Superman was one the ten best.

Wonder if I'd agree.

05 November 2010

Susanna Moodie's Bloomers

A gift from a friend, this modest booklet became part of my collection just weeks after I was introduced to the bloomer by the ever-informative Bookride. Known first, I think, as "inadvertencies", these are double entendres mined from the Western Canon. The woefully neglected Edward Gathorne-Hardy seems to have been the first to recognize the bloomer when in 1963 he published Inadvertencies collected from the works of several eminent authors. He followed this three years later with An Adult's Garden of Bloomers: Uprooted from the Works of Several Eminent Authors.

And they are eminent. Here's Henry James with a little something from The Wings of the Dove:

Then she had had her equal consciousness that within five minutes something between them had – well, she couldn't call it anything but come.

James, it seems, gave growth to more than his fair share of bloomers. How's this from Roderick Hudson?

"Oh, I can't explain," cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. "I've only one way of expressing my deepest feelings – it's this." And he swung his tool.

"Contributed by the public", like An Adult Garden of Bloomers, A New Garden of Bloomers is oh so English: Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Thomas Hardy...

And then there's Jane Austen:

Mrs Goddard was the mistress of a school – not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems – and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity...

No Canadian bloomers, alas – and yet our soil is so fertile!

I had bloomers on my dirty mind when rereading – yes, rereading – Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush. And that's when I came across this:

At a few miles' distance from our farm, we had some intelligent English neighbours, of a higher class; but they were always so busily occupied with their farming operations that they had little leisure or inclination for that sort of easy intercourse to which we had been accustomed.

Too subtle? Well, it is a start. I'm sure that there are more colourful Canadian bloomers out there.

And what about Roughing It in the Bush? Can a title be a bloomer? Gathorne-Hardy never addresses the matter.

"How many fine young men have I seen beggared and ruined in the bush!" Moodie exclaims in her follow-up, Life in the Clearing. The same book features this reportage of her encounter with a group of evengelicals:

Most of these tents exhibited some extraordinary scene of fanaticism and religious enthusiasm; the noise and confusion were deafening. Men were preaching at the very top of their voice; women were shrieking and groaning, beating their breasts and tearing their hair, while others were uttering the most frantic outcries, which they called ejaculatory prayers.

Not really a bloomer, but I couldn't resist passing it on.

Really, there's a part of me that is still ten years old.