The Pan Jalna (and the Careening Jalnawagon)

The Whiteoak books represent the idealized portrait of Canada, which all English people have. Life is hardly ever painful at Jalna. It's comfortable, it's exciting, there are domestic dramas going on. I think that Englishmen like to believe that anywhere abroad life goes on as it used to go on in England. We always like to think that life for our parents must have been wonderful and life for us is horrid. Englishmen reading about the Whiteoaks think that life is lived that way now, and we know that life is not lived that way in England – or in Canada.

– Lovat Dickson

In the final pages of his 1966 biography, Mazo de la Roche of Jalna, Ronald Hambleton remarks on the very different reception the author has been accorded by her "three most important audiences". American acclaim, brought when Jalna took the 1927 Atlantic Monthly Award for "novel of the year", faded as the series progressed. Canadians cooled as that it became apparent that de la Roche's focus was on a country that had long passed. Hambleton concludes, "in Britain her reception continued and continues to be warm."

By the mid-sixties, Pan, de la Roche's British paperback publisher since 1948, had sold more than two million copies of the series' titles. Things were still balmy on 20 May 1971, when The Whiteoaks of Jalna began filming. In The Secret of Jalna, the enthusiastic Ronald Hambleton writes of "the careening Jalnawagon, whose pace as a literary phenomenon has showed no signs of slackening since Mazo de la Roche pencilled the first lines in late 1925."

In 1972, Pan issued tie-in editions that featured stills from the series and did one more revamp. Now, the Jalnawagon runs no more... at least not for Pan. Toronto's Dundurn Press publishes the sixteen books of the Whiteoak Chronicles with a cover image of "Benares", the Mississauga home upon with Jalna was modelled. They're attractive enough, but I much prefer the Pan editions of the 'fifties and 'sixties. A visual feast:

Jalna panned:

The Globe & Mail, 7 January 1972

Related posts:

Jalna's Dirty Little Secret Exposed! (Part I)

Jalna's Dirty Little Secret Exposed! (Part II)

Jalna's Dirty Little Secret Exposed! (Part II)

This second part of my review of Ronald Hamilton's The Secret of Jalna now appears, revised and rewritten, in:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

The Globe & Mail, 3 March 1972

Related posts:

Jalna's Dirty Little Secret Exposed! (Part I)

The Pan Jalna (and the Careering Jalnawagon)

Jalna's Dirty Little Secret Exposed! (Part I)

The Secret of Jalna

Ronald Hambleton

Toronto: PaperJacks, 1972

175 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:

Jalna's Dirty LIttle Secret Exposed! (Part II)

The Pan Jalna (and the Careering Jalnawagon)

Max Braithwaite's Bawdy Book

Humorist Max Braithwaite was born one hundred years ago today in Nokomis, Saskatchewan. His Why Shoot the Teacher was one of the very first Canadian novels I ever read... and the 1977 film adaptation, starring Bud Cort, is a favourite.

So why is it that I haven't so much as picked up another Braithwaite novel?

The titles have something to do with it. The Night We Stole the Mountie's Car and The Commodore's Barge is Alongside gave off a folksy ring that had me covering my ears.

McClelland and Stewart's cover treatments neutered titillating titles...

...or rendered them dull and humourless.

So I passed on his books, offered in plenty at garage sales, thrift shops, and church bazaars, until last week I happened upon this, the one Braithwaite novel McClelland and Stewart did not publish:

Not bought at a church bazaar.

Sexy Stuff from Bizarro Superman's Creator

Touchable

Les Scott and Robert W. Tracy [pseud. Alvin Schwartz]

New York: Arco, 1951

184 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

The Highest Compliments of the Season

Now in the final month of the year, tradition dictates that I offer holiday gift suggestions – this time accompanied by bits and pieces published one hundred years ago today in the Globe.

Of the twenty-eight neglected books reviewed here this year, the three most deserving of a return to print are:

Hot Freeze by Martin Brett (né Douglas Sanderson)

The Pyx by John Buell

Four Days by John Buell

By coincidence, not design, each deals with the Montreal criminal underworld of decades past. Used copies of are available through online booksellers for as little as a dollar ($5 in the case of Hot Freeze).

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?

Macmillan of Canada, 1984/Anvil Press, 2011

I'll be so bold so to make this final gift suggestion: my own A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator and Pornographer, published this past April by McGill-Queen's University Press. Seven years in the making, at long last a biography of this country's most unusual writer.

Right now, the least expensive copies – C$25.17 – come through Amazon.ca. Would that I could compete. The best I can do is offer signed copies, gift wrapped in Anaglypta (heavy embossed paper) and postage paid to any destination, at the retail price of C$39.95. Kind souls can make contact through email at my blogger profile.

Once a bookseller, always a bookseller.

A Post-Victorian Christmas (w/ Frank L. Packard)

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?

The Fugitive Bertrand W. Sinclair

Following Friday's post...

A couple of months ago, Vancouver's Ronsdale Press reissued The Inverted Pyramid, thus becoming the first Canadian house to in over eight decades to publish Bertrand W. Sinclair. Their choice was apt, I think. Sinclair didn't think of the novel as his best work – that would be Poor Man's Rock (1920) – but, as dedicated biographer Betty Keller tells us in Pender Harbour Cowboy, he'd hoped to be remembered for this "literary" novel.

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.

"The Inverted Pyramid's poor showing in the bookstores had made him cautious about returning to literary novels in a hurry", writes Keller. "He opted to play it safe..." This meant falling back on pulp magazines – wells from which he drew until the 'forties, when they began to run dry.

It's interesting to consider that Sinclair's books, all novels, represent nothing more than a small percentage of his work. The pulps published over two hundred of his short stories; one encounters them from time to time in anthologies like Best Mounted Police Stories and Vancouver Short Stories, but they otherwise remain in the forgotten past.

Reading Betty Keller's very fine biography, one can't help but wish for a collection of Sinclair's stories. Let's not let another eight decades pass.

Sex, Betrayal and the Scars of the Great War

The Hidden Places
Bertrand W. Sinclair
Toronto: Ryerson, 1922

With H. Bedford-Jones and Thomas P. Kelley, Bertrand W. Sinclair must surely rank as one of the most prolific Canadian pulp writers. I know of 246 magazine appearances, and I'm betting there are many more. Whether or not his short stores are worth reading I can't say, but I think The Hidden Places is the best Canadian novel published on the heels of the Great War.

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.

And that's just the backstory.

We catch up with Robert in the winter of 1919, just after his arrival in Vancouver as "a single speck of human wreckage cast on a far beach by the receding tides of war." Though intelligent, educated and healthy, his disfigured face limits opportunity; it's a challenge to rebuild one's life when others will not so much as look at you. Walking city streets, he is "a disagreeable spectacle" from which people turn with brief annoyance. Robert retreats to Toba Inlet, 150 miles up the coast. There, on his lone remaining property, he attempts to make a modest living through logging.

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.

The Hidden Places features a frankness about marriage and sexuality that is foreign to Canadian literature of the time. Never having divorced, Robert is tormented by the secret knowledge that he is a bigamist. He suspects that he has an "overstimulated sexuality" and wonders whether Myra suffers from the same. She left him for another, but this was not the man she married. Now, Robert watches from afar as other men visit in her new husband's absence. Sinclair never paints Myra in anything but a sympathetic light. A woman who is coming to terms with, as she puts it, "the nature I was born with", Myra struggles to remain faithful to her second husband, while nearly running off with another man. Ultimately, she offers herself again to Robert.

Tittilating to be sure, but what I find more interesting about The Hidden Place is its detailed condemnation of the British War Office as an impersonal machine that "would neither know nor care nor tell." Greater still is the indictment of Canadian society, as represented by the men and women who seek to avoid Robert on Vancouver's streets:

A great many men had been killed. A great number had lost their legs, their arms, their sight. They had suffered indescribable mutilations and disabilities in the national defense. These people were the nation. Those who passed him with a shocked glance at his face must be aware that fighting involves suffering and scars. It appeared as if they wished to ignore that. The inevitable consequences of war annoyed them, disturbed them, when they came face to face with those consequences.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that The Hidden Place first appeared in an October 1921 issue of The Popular Magazine. Thus, less than three years after the armistice, comes the damning accusation that Canada has turned away from its veterans.

Plus ça change.

Betrayal by a woman is one thing, betrayal by one's county is quite another.

Trivia: The author errs in placing the Battle of the Somme in "the fall of '17". In fact, it took place the previous November.

Object: A hardcover in dark blue boards, it is typical of its time. The Marshall Frantz frontispiece, a black and white reproduction of the cover image, is meant to depict Doris and Robert at Vancouver's Jericho Beach.

Access: A book by a British Columbia author, The Hidden Places is found only in Ontario libraries: the Toronto Public Library, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Guelph and the University of Toronto. Over eight decades out of print, those looking to buy the book will wade through over one hundred print on demand monstrosities. The most expensive comes from our old friends ExtremelyReliable of Richmond, Texas, which offers an ugly IndyPublish copy credited to "W. Bertrand Sinclair". Cost: US$199.27. Shipping and handling are not included.

As of this writing, no copies of the Ryerson edition – the only Canadian edition – are listed online. One copy of the equally scarce first English edition from Hodder and Stoughton is on offer for US$9.99 from a bookseller in Gateshead, Australia. Two awful copies of the first American edition, published by Little, Brown, can be had for under ten dollars; a third, with dust jacket, is going for US$75. Need I add that this is the one to buy?