Freedom for Fanny

Yesterday marked the beginning of Freedom to Read Week; I spent much of it stripping wallpaper. Truth be told, I don't much feel like joining the charge led by the Book and Periodical Council and their Freedom of Expression Committee. Their slapdash "Challenged Books and Magazines List" hasn't changed in over a year – still nothing about Rodolphe Girard, Jean-Charles Harvey, the 1961 RCMP raid on the Vancouver Public Library or the temporary embargo placed on The Satanic Verses. Not even the committee's error-ridden work on Lady Chatterley's Lover has been added. A bit of a surprise, really, since the organization saw fit to spread this misinformation by email last August. An "important legal victory", their researcher noted at the time, adding that it is "poorly documented by the historians of literary freedom in Canada".

Not only poorly documented, but entirely ignored in material being distributed by the council and its committee.

It goes without saying that F.R. Scott's defence of Lady Chatte in Brody, Dansky, Rubin v. The Queen is one most important cases in the fight against censorship in this country... and nearly 48 years after the man emerged triumphant from the Supreme Court we're still waiting for the story to be told. When it is written, I think a chapter should be devoted to the coup de grâce delivered two years later by Fanny Hill.

The Globe and Mail, 2 March 1964

John Cleland's "woman of pleasure" received something of a delayed reception in Canada. She was ignored for two centuries, until November 1963 when local police moved in on a Richmond Hill Coles seizing eight copies. Not to be outdone, two months later Toronto police raided two Yonge Street branches, rounding up a couple of thousand more. It was all laughable; even the staid Globe and Mail thought the raids ridiculous, dismissing the police in a 28 January 1964 editorial as a group of "merry men".

During subsequent court proceedings Robertson Davies testified that Fanny Hill was "a Jolly sort of book". Saturday Night editor Arnold Edinborough joined in, praising Cleland's work as "funny, gay and light-hearted." Oh, but then there was the morality squad's Detective-Sergeant William Quennell, who declared that he'd read the book and had found it to be obscene. On 17 February, Judge Everett L. Weaver sided with critic Quennell: "Jollity in its presentation does not purge it of its pornographic taint." Ontarians who have a copy of Cleland's classic need not worry, that December the decision was overturned by the province's Court of Appeal, securing Fanny Hill a place on the bestseller lists.

Chief Justice Dana Porter, father of Julian, father-in-law of Anna.

So, during a week in which the Book and Periodical Council would have me fret over the anonymous Toronto Public Library patron who in 2003 complained about violence in a Richard North Patterson novel, I'll be watching for real threats... and thinking about the words of Chief Justice Dana Porter in rendering the ultimate decision over Fanny Hill:

The freedom to write books, and thus to disseminate ideas, opinions and concepts of the imagination – the freedom to treat with complete candor an aspect of human life and the activities, aspirations and failings of human beings – these are fundamental to progress in a free society.

Olympic Visitors, Keep Up Your Guard

Homophobic? Heterosexist? Or Just Camp?

An advert parody from the April 1932 issue of short-lived humour magazine Oh-Oh Canada!

Carroll's Canadian Originals

Those adverts at the back of The Last Canadian have had me scouring local thrift shops for Leo Orenstein's The Queers of New York. How could I not? The very idea that a respected director of Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, not to mention Harlan Ellison (The Starlost), wrote a "novel of the homosexual underworld" intrigues. What's more, according to one online bookseller, it features a "gay glossary", a "Yiddish glossary" and "camp pictorial wraps (painted by the author)".

While I can't confirm the bookseller's description, I don't doubt the accuracy. Covers for Pocket's Canadian originals look like they were done on the cheap, so we might expect that the firm appreciated writers who could supply an image. In terms of quality, they're to be all over the map. Series editor Jock Carroll's photo of a faux Marilyn Monroe isn't so bad, but what are we to make of the flower-carrying girl exiting an outhouse?

That is a girl, right?

Daddy's Darling Daughter

William Thomas

1974

"A shocking novel of today's children and their life-style."

Down the Road

Jock Carroll

1974

"Uninhibited talks with Marilyn Monroe and other famous sex symbols. Photos."

Backroom Boys and Girls

John Philip Maclean

1973

"A novel that raises basic questions about Canadian politicians – and sex."

Love Affair

Earl L. Knickerbocker

1974

"The bitter-sweet romance of two young schoolteachers."

Right Now Would Be a Good Time to Cut My Throat

Paul Fulford

1972

"A bawdy sailor adrift in Toronto publishing circles."

At Long Last Lunacy

The Last Canadian

William C. Heine

Markham, ON: Pocket Books, 1974

253 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.

That version can be found on this post:

Reluctantly Revisiting Canada's Great Virus Novel

Related posts:

Silent, but Deadly

Manifest Destiny
The Sea Lord Unsheathes His Sword

Another Harlequin Valentine

Related posts:

Harlequin: Before the Romance

This Year's Harlequin Valentine
A Harlequin Valentine from Day Keene
Romance... Harlequin Romance

Pauline Johnson's Olympic Moment

From Flint and Feather, published by Musson in 1912.

A Warning for Olympic Visitors

About Those Ugly NCL Covers

A comment left last week had me thinking – obsessing, really – about those horrible old New Canadian Library covers of my youth. That McClelland and Stewart used the series design for ten years begs the obvious question: Why?

It seems no one much liked them. In New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978 (University of Toronto, 2008), Janet Friskney writes that from the start "booksellers, consumers, instructors, and students found the new cover art decidedly unappealing." I think the longevity is explained, at least in part, by those "instructors and students". Ms Friskney places them last, but they were very much at the front of NCL's sales. Captive readers, where else were they going to get The Tin Flute or The Double Hook?

That said, I wonder whether there wasn't something else going on. Ms Friskney tells us that in reacting to the design's poor reception Jack McClelland "balked at the kind of financial outlay another new cover would represent." I may be reading too much into Ms Finskey's use of "cover" as opposed to "design", but it occurs to me that each new cover must have been very cheap to produce. One simply positioned the text in the centre – more or less – of the appropriate box. No need to worry over images, never mind permissions, just choose from the abstracts provided by series designer Don Fernby. It seems any old one would do; the image used for Down the Long Table (above) is also featured on the covers of Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush, Ralph Connor's Glengarry School Days and no less than two Stephen Leacock titles (My Remarkable Uncle and Last Leaves).

The production values were extremely poor. With the new design, printing shifted from England's Hazell, Watson and Viney to our own T.H. Best. Not only did they use inferior paper, the new covers were invariably skewed. Worse still, even the gentlest touch appeared to cause injury. Though younger, some by as much as two decades, they usually show more wear than their earlier counterparts.

I do go on... perhaps because semester after semester, year after year, I was obliged to spend my meagre earnings on these ugly looking things. Yet, for all my complaints, I miss the content of the old NCL books. Offerings were diverse and often surprising. Germaine Guèvrement's The Outlander, Philip Child's God's Sparrows and Percy Janes' House of Hate have no place in the series' current safe and commercially-driven incarnation.

Right again, Joni Mitchell.

Ex Libris: Hugo McPherson

Nothing at all remarkable about the inscription here to critic Hugo McPherson, interest is to be found in the book itself. Nearly half a century after publication, Das Romanwerk Hugh MacLennans still ranks as one of a very few foreign language works of criticism devoted to a Canadian author. Its existence reflects the once great spread of MacLennan's work outside the English speaking world. His novels were translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Swedish, Estonian, Czech, Romanian, Polish and German. In Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Life (University of Toronto, 1981), biographer Elspeth Cameron writes that between 1963 and 1969 the German language edition of Barometer Rising sold over 100,000 copies.

I venture to say that not one of these translations is in print today. Here, in his home and native land, the fall of MacLennan's star has been even more dramatic. Two of his seven novels are out of print, as are every one of his collections of essays. I'd like to think that a revival is on the horizon. In Canadian letters there are so few second acts.

Ex Libris: The Leitchs

Another fine example of the New Canadian Library's incredibly ugly second series design. Thirty-two years ago, this book belonged to neighbours of the Cohen family on Westmount's Belmont Avenue. I bought it in 1991, just as prices for things LC were on the runway about to take off.

Ex Libris: Gérald Godin

Bought for $2.99 in 1990, when Gérald Godin and Pierre Vallières were still with us. How this ended up in such an inelegant place, a warehouse-like bookstore across from Montreal's Central Bus Station, I do not know.

A chance meeting – I noticed it only because the cover reminded me of a Cindy Sherman photo.

All these years later, I'm still not sure what to make of Vallières' inscription.

Ex Libris: Hugh MacLennan

In 1991, six or so months after his death, Hugh MacLennan's personal library was put up for sale through Montreal's Word bookstore. It wasn't exactly a pretty sight. MacLennan treated his books badly, and it was clear that he cared not one whit about fine editions. Looking through the battered volumes made me respect the man all the more. Here was someone who cared for the word, not the vessel. He'd read and reread with great appetite, while I'd worried over sunlight and fragile spines.

I bought a dozen of these worn volumes, including a presentation copy of Alistair MacLeod's As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories and an old 95¢ Signet Classics edition of Robinson Crusoe (my cost: $1.95). All were books I'd been wanting to read for some time, with the exception of The Conscience of the Rich. C.P. Snow's name meant little to me then, but I was amused and intrigued by MacLennan's critique.

Still haven't got around to reading it.

Related post:

Acknowledging Hugh Maclennan