Purchased just last week, a century or so after it arrived at the news agent, the December 1911 edition of
The Canadian Magazine was hard to resist. Just look at what's on offer: "A Study of Iago" by
Arthur Stringer, some thoughts on winter by L.M. Montgomery, a new Homer Watson and no less than ninety lines of verse from the delightfully quirky
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay.
But what really sold me was "The Mad Player", an uncollected work by Frank L. Packard. Something just less than 4000 words in length, this simple story is reflected in the accompanying illustrations by J.W. Beatty, R.C.A., O.S.A.
The unnamed narrator is a landscape artist travelling somewhere in France. One evening he comes upon a wild looking violinist busking on a village street.
The painter returns to lodgings, where he is confronted by the violinist – as a fellow artiste, he is offended that our narrator put a coin in his cap. Things are becoming quite unpleasant until the eyes of the unkempt musician fall upon the painter's most recent landscape:
"Monsieur will tell me where it was done – where?"
When told, he rushes out. The innkeeper, who is highly amused, fills in our narrator. It seems that the wild violinist is an aristocrat who as a young man lost his mind at the drowning death of his fiancée.
The following morning, the violinist's body is discovered near the spot captured in the landscape. Wracked with guilt, the painter watches the cortege. He returns to the landscape, trying to make sense of the insane aristocrat's reaction. Though it takes some time, he realizes that the violinist viewed the work upside down.
I reversed it quickly – and then I, as he had done, with startled cry, carried it closer to my eyes. At last I understood. The foliage, by some grim freak as my brush had traced it, bore a crude, but unmistakable resemblance to a woman's face, with her hair streaming down touching the river's brink – and to the poor, crazed brain it had been the end of a long search!
FIN
"The Mad Player" is the work of a man honing his craft as a storyteller; it's well-written, intriguing and, ultimately, most unsatisfying.
When the story appeared in The Canadian Magazine, Packard was labouring as a civil engineer; fortune and fame were still in the future. That said, 1911 did see the publication of On the Iron at Big Cloud, his very first book.
Though Thomas Y. Crowell, Packard's publisher, didn't advertise in this magazine, a whole lot of houses did. Macmillan, Cassell & Co., William Briggs, Oxford University Press, the Upper Canada Tract Society and Copp, Clark all took out full page adverts, only to be overwhelmed by a pink, four-page spread for the brand new Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
I ask, who wouldn't want to be met like this on Christmas morn?
Praise this year goes to the British Columbia publishers that returned worthy titles to print through the Vancouver 125 Legacy Books Project. Ten books in total, I recommend Class Warfare by D.M. Fraser, Crossings by Betty Lambert, The Inverted Pyramid by Bertrand W. Sinclair and, above all others, Edward Starkins' Who Killed Janet Smith?
First published in January of 1924 by Little, Brown, like The Hidden Places, The Inverted Pyramid is touched by the Great War. It tells the story of brothers Rod and Grove Norquay, and their divergent dreams for a family fortune that had been built on BC timber. Ronsdale describes the book as having been "a best-seller". An imprecise term to be sure, but still I can't agree. Back in 1923, Little, Brown had become so certain that the book would not be a best-seller that it sought to avoid the competitive Christmas market by postponing publication until the new year. There was no second printing, though A.L. Burt did produce one of its cheap editions. One could dismiss the relatively low sales as self-fulfilling prophecy – Little, Brown chose not to advertise the book – but evidence points to an overall lack of interest in this new, higher-brow Sinclair. Despite strong reviews, The Inverted Pyramid became the one novel that his agent failed place as a serialization.
This is not a war novel, but a post-war novel; for its tortured hero, the conflict changed everything. Born raised and educated in Eastern Canada Robert Hollister, was once a man of more than modest means. Before the war, he shared his life with wife Myra, whom he "loved with a lover's passion." But war creates the very worst of long distance relationships. Two years into the fighting, Robert receives a "Dear John letter". Days later, he becomes one of the 24,029 Canadian casualties at the Battle of the Somme, "lying just outside the lip of a shell-crater, blind, helpless, his face a shredded smear". He's saved by German surgeons, and spends the remainder of the war in a prison camp. Upon his release Robert learns that he'd been reported killed in action; Myra, meanwhile, has remarried, taking his money with her.
Coincidence features big in pulp fiction, but I found it difficult to pass this off as mere chance: Myra and her new husband, an Englishman, live on the neighbouring land. Certainly, I thought, something sinister is afoot; after all, Myra is supposed to have known nothing of the Toba Inlet property. But no, it all ends up as a great coincidence. Much more believable is Robert's chance meeting with Doris, a pretty woman who had years earlier lost her sight after being struck by a falling tree on, yes, his Toba Inlet property. Following a whirlwind courtship, the disfigured man and blind woman marry and move into a new house overlooking Myra's modest cabin.
Angeline – referred to as "Angel" on the book's back cover (and nowhere else) – is Angeline Paradis, a beautiful English spy who is sent into the heart of 17th-century New France. Hers, cover copy tells us, "is a tale kept out of school-books". Makes perfect sense; after all, Angeline was the creation of the author, and exists nowhere outside this book. She moves through pages populated by figures from our history... and it is here that this novel begins to falter. There is a supposition that the reader will know these men – they are all men – that is misguided. Frontenac? Yes. Radisson? Yes. But how many of us are familiar with the scandal and intrigue surrounding François-Marie Perrot, who served as Governor of Montreal from 1669 to 1684?
Pity the poor American reader, who I'm assuming has been taught little of the political machinations of New France. After all, it was to these folks that The Governor's Mistress was marketed. Its author, Dyson Carter, a card carrying member of the Communist Party of Canada, hid behind the pseudonym Warren Desmond only so that the novel might be sold south of the border.
