09 May 2011

The Good Soldier Comes to Canada



The Good Soldier: The Story of Isaac Brock
D.J. Goodspeed
Toronto: Macmillan, 1967

With just over a year until the War of 1812 bicentiennial, things are becoming busy in my part of the country. Our cousins immediately to the south are perhaps a just bit less active. What some American historians call "The Forgotten War" is a conflict David Paterson didn't want recognized. In 2009, the then-governor of New York, the central state in the struggle, vetoed the creation of a War of 1812 200th Anniversary Commemoration Commission. Paterson now gone, the body was finally brought into being through a bill passed the month before last. No finances attached.



The commemoration of what was in essence a failed war of conquest should be interesting. I'll be paying particular attention to the treatments of Tecumseh and Isaac Brock in relation to, say, William Henry Harrison.

There is no Tecumseh Street in our little town, but Brock has been so honoured. It's not at all surprising. "If it had not been for Isaac Brock," writes author Goodspeed, "Jefferson's prediction that the conquest of Canada would be 'a mere matter of marching' might well have come true."

Published more than fifteen decades after the man's death, written for the children that followed another war, this book provides an excellent introduction for anyone coming to Brock's life for the first time. Donald James Goodspeed, a lieutenant-colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, Senior Historian in the Canadian Defence Force's Historical section, had a talent for writing clean, clear and concise histories. His book on the Canadian Corps, The Road Past Vimy, covers the rather complicated story in just 185 pages. The Good Soldier is even shorter – 156 pages, punctuated by twenty line drawings – yet it provides not only a remarkably thorough account of Brock's life, but some good background on the causes of the conflict.


Volume #29 in the Great Stories of Canada series, The Good Soldier follows a strict format in that it features no references. Yet, it is possible to identify at least some of Goodspeed's sources: A Veteran of 1812, Mary Agnes FitzGibbon's 1894 life of John FitzGibbon; and The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir Isaac Brock, KB (1845) by Brock's nephew and correspondent, historian Ferdinand Brock Tupper.

Goodspeed limits all comment and opinion to the very last paragraphs. It's here that the lieutenant-colonel mentions Jefferson's prediction, adding: "Thus, in a very real sense, Canada's present independence is the gift of the soldier from Guernsey."

I wonder what that Channel Island has planned.



Trivia: D.J. Goodspeed is my club name.

Object: A slim hardcover in black and red boards, with drawings by sometime Great Stories of Canada illustrator Jack Ferguson (who, the dust jacket tells us, lives on a farm that once served as a campsite for Brock). My copy of The Good Soldier, a reprint of the 1964 Macmillan first, appears to have been issued at the same time as a paper edition.

Access: A couple of acceptable copies of the first edition are available from online booksellers at about $26. As one might expect, the reissue is cheaper. Brock University has a copy, as do a number of other academic institutions. Only two public libraries hold the book in their collections both, sadly, as non-circulating reference copies. In other words, children cannot take this book home to read.

05 May 2011

Dark Blondes



The Darker Traffic
Martin Brett [pseud. Douglas Sanderson]
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954
213 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

02 May 2011

Ignatieff's Ink and Harper's Hockey Book



Election day in Canada. Unless the pollsters are way off, it looks like we'll be passing on the opportunity to have a Booker Prize nominee as prime minister... for now. Yann Martel, perhaps.

It's been pretty interesting having a critically acclaimed, award-winning author as Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, in part because his writing was so often used against him. Ezra Levant, for example, thumbed repeatedly through the Liberal leader's 1987 book, The Russian Album, in search of Ignatieff family riches and misdeeds. Time and again, the columnist told us how Ignatieff's great-grandfather, Nicholas, persecuted Jews in nineteenth-century Russia.

From where did Mr Levant acquire this information? Why from The Russian Album, of course. And who shares in Mr Levant's condemnation of Nicholas Ignatieff? Great-grandson Michael.

Levant was at least familiar with his material. Others not so much. Here's something from Blogging Tory co-founder Stephen Taylor:


And here's a partial list of those seventeen books:
The Russian Album (winner of the Governor General's Award for Non-fiction)
Blood and Belonging (winner of the Lionel Gelber Award)
Scar Tissue (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award)
The Rights Revolution (the 1997 Massey Lecture)
Isaiah Berlin: A Life (winner of the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography)
Virtual War (winner of the George Orwell Prize)
This distance from the world of books might just explain the confusion concerning the roles of author and publisher experienced by other Conservatives. On 23 April 2010, MP Chris Warkentin rose to report this "case of deceitfulness" to the House of Commons:
The Liberal leader claims on the inside of the front cover of his book [True Patriot Love] that the National Post, when reviewing his book, called it “well-written”. But that is not entirely true. What the National Post called it was “a well-written disappointment." This is the type of dishonesty that not even a first-year university student could get away with.
A graduate of the unaccredited Peace River Bible Institute, you wouldn't think the MP would know what a first-year university student could get away with – but then, these words, which appear in Hansard under Mr Warkentin's name, aren't his. He was merely reading from a Conservative Party press release.

"I'll take the blame from what's between the covers, not for the cover blurbs," Mr Ignatieff responded .

We've heard nothing further from Mr Warkentin – you see, the Conservative Party issued no follow-up press release.


While the monkeys at the keyboards of the Conservative Party have thrown feces at Michael Ignatieff's books, they've ignored titles by the other leaders. There's been no staining of Jack Layton's Homelessness and Speaking Out. Whether the subject is democracy or the environment, they've left the half-dozen books by Elizabeth May alone. Couldn't be bothered? Or is it that they simply "haven't heard of a single one of them"?

And Prime Minister Stephen Harper? He remains the only national leader without a book to his credit. His debut, a history of professional hockey's early days, has been long in the making. Five years ago, he published a 700-word teaser. No original research – nothing that isn't out there on the net – but it's a start. When might we expect to see this tome? In April 2006, Mr Harper told the CBC that he'd planned to finish it within the year. In September 2008, during the last election, the PM informed The Globe and Mail that he needed just three months of uninterrupted time. The two prorogations since, it seems, have not helped in moving the long-promised project along.

That said, if Mr Harper fails to deliver a Conservative majority government today – in his fourth attempt – that uninterrupted time might come sooner than he would like.

01 May 2011

The Wilfred Watson Centenary



The Calgary Herald, 3 July 1956


Canadian poet, playwright and professor Wilfred Watson was born one hundred years ago today in Rochester, England. I don't know what sort of celebrations are being planned at his birthplace, but I'm betting we'll see no acknowledgement in this country. The Calgary Herald will not find space in its sports pages.


"The award was for poetry."

30 April 2011

25 April 2011

One Long, Tedious Suicide Note



Death Be My Destiny
Neil H. Perrin [pseud. Danny Halperin]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

The most interesting thing about Death Be My Destiny is that it begins with protagonist Karel Martin setting himself up as a teenage bellhop/pimp. The misbehaviour and misadventure that follow can be described with fair detail in five sentences. I know this to be true because I did just that in an early draft of this post. Bland and simple, like the novel, the synopsis isn't worth reading.

That Death Be My Destiny followed This Was Joanna, the first Neil H. Perrin book, by just two months, might explain its failings. Like many pulp novels, it starts strongly, then wanders weakly, eventually becoming nothing more than fragments as it crawls toward the final sentence: "Tomorrow you will read in the papers that I died by my own hand." You see, there's a gimmick to all this; Death Be My Destiny presents itself as the autobiography of a man who is about to put a gun to his head.

To reach that messy ending, Halperin – or Perrin, if you prefer – peppers the novel with some pretty good lines, none of which quite fit. "When you cut a friend's throat never use a dull knife," seems clever until one realizes that Karel has no friends. What's more, the advice is used to close a chapter in which no throats not figuratively, not literally are cut.

As with This Was Joanna and the strikingly bizarre The Door Between, the most interesting writing concerns sex:
What happened between us was, technically, absolute perfection. Marcia, in those hushed hours of the night, was mine as completely as she was ever, could ever, belong to anyone. Her little flushed cries of joy were like a sweet oil lavished over my battered ego, and my conceit flowered mightily as, enraptured, she surrendered.
I felt nothing. Her joy was dust in my mouth. Her very real tremors seemed slightly comical to me as if the carnality was a circus with Marcia the fragile clown and I the phony ringmaster cracking his terrible whip.
There is fun to be found in passages like this, but here they are few and far between.

What more to say? Death Be My Destiny passes by like Karel Martin's life, not worthy of mention. So, I leave off – as I always do with Perrin – by recommending The Door Between, that weird and wonderful follow-up to Death Be My Destiny.

Oh, one last thing: Karel's revolver might be loaded, but you'll note that it has no trigger.

Object: I've gone on a bit about News Stand Library's shoddy production standards – here and here and here and here and here and here but this is the worst of the lot. A difficult book to read in more ways than one, the print blurs, fades and at times disappears completely. Good on NSL for spelling the author's nom de plume correctly.

Access: Death Be My Destiny is an uncommon book, but it's also a bargain. The four copies currently listed online can each be had for under fourteen dollars. Of the world's libraries, academic and otherwise, it appears that only Library and Archives Canada holds a copy.

23 April 2011

To the Lighthouse!


Anne's House of Dreams
L. M. Montgomery
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d.

19 April 2011

Margaret's Marriage in Mass Market



Margaret Trudeau: The Prime Minister's Runaway Wife
Felicity Cochrane
Scarborough, ON: Signet, 1978

Anyone needing a reminder of the crap once thrown at Margaret Trudeau need only look to Kate McMillan and the comments made under cover of pseudonym at her Small Dead Animals blog. Revelations of Mrs Trudeau's decades-long struggles with bipolar disorder have brought neither compassion nor reconsideration – but did serve as more carrion to chew, digest and defecate.

Published after the stuff first hit the fan, Margaret Trudeau: The Prime Minister's Runaway Wife is a product of a more civil time. It presents itself as a sympathetic account, while promising to dish the dirt. In the end, however, this is a book that teases, but never delivers. "The full, completely uncensored story of Margaret Trudeau's relationship with the different members of the Rolling Stones," ends up being little more than an overview of the seating arrangements at the 1977 El Mocambo gigs. Felicity Cochrane wasn't there, yet she still manages to paint a memorable scene:
This was the Stones' first club appearance since 1964, and as in the past, Jagger eventually whipped up the crowd into a convulsing hysteria with jerks of his hips, thrusts of his pelvis, and grasshopper-like gyrations guaranteed to induce mass orgasm.
Sounds messy.

The author next provides details of the painstaking preparations made to fête Peter Rudge, "manager of the Stones" (touring manager, actually) on his birthday. Mrs Trudeau didn't attend the party, but never mind.

Want to know why Pierre Trudeau didn't marry until his 53rd year? The cover copy promises the answer. And here's what Ms Cochrane has to say: "It has always been a mystery why Pierre didn't marry. It will always be open to speculation."

Thin stuff for a thin book; there's nothing hadn't already been reported at the time of its August 1978 publication. And yet, the author tells us that she spent "almost a year in interviews and research". Cochrane can't tell us who she spoke to – "for obvious reasons" – but does express appreciation for the Greater Vancouver Convention and Visitors Bureau. I doubt this was reciprocated. Here's the author on Margaret Sinclair Trudeau's birthplace:
Vancouver, where the Sinclairs settled, is a port city in the southwest corner of British Columbia, on what is now called the Pacific Rim. It was discovered by a British naval officer, Captain George Vancouver, in 1792, became a British colony in 1859, and was admitted into confederation in 1871. The original name of the city was Granville, but this was changed to Vancouver in 1886.
I count five factual errors. How about you?

We're also told that Vancouver has a daily called the Providence, its West End is comprised of highways and modern shopping complexes, and that the "famous Lion's [sic] Gate Bridge links West Vancouver to the lower mainland."

Great swaths of this 174-page book are devoted to the Canadian parliamentary system, the office of prime minister, and the early history of Simon Fraser University (also located in the southwest corner of British Columbia, on what is now called the Pacific Rim). Cochrane quotes liberally – no pun intended – lifting passages from dozens of news stories, all the while criticizing journalists for not having been more dogged in their pursuit of scandale.

Strange this, because without the uncredited, unacknowledged work of the fourth estate Cochrane would have had no book. She brings nothing to the table, and yet she had once been a reporter for Newsday. A Progressive Conservative, in the 1965 federal election she challenged veteran Liberal Stanley Haidasz in Toronto-Parkdale. Cochrane placed a very distant second, but made the news anyway by breaking her leg in a fall down some slippery polling station steps on election day.


The Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, 10 November 1965


Cochrane jetted around the globe promoting Canadian honey, cheese and maple syrup for the Federal Department of Trade and Commerce. She also served as chaperone for 1966 Canadian Dairy Princess Gaylene Miller, but I think that the most interesting point in her career began in 1970 with her role as "personal manager" for Dianna – Dianna Boileau – whom she billed as "Canada's first sex change". Two years later, Cochrane wrote Dianna's story, Behold, I Am a Woman. It was published by New York's Pyramid Books, whose copywriters penned this pitch: "The story you are about to read will quite possibly shock you in its brutal frankness and graphic descriptions. It will startle you as it reveals a way of life and a way of sexual being that seem beyond the range of the normal imagination. And it will move you to a new kind of realization of the torments a sexual deviant must suffer in our society – as well as the hope that new medical techniques offer a person like Dianna, to at last find fulfillment."



Margaret Trudeau was Cochrane's second and final book. Not a happy experience, it seems. Even as the paperback was hitting the stands, Ms Cochrane was complaining that Signet's lawyers had made her take out the juiciest bits. Could Margaret Trudeau have been a better book? Had Felicity Cochrane dug up anything new? Shall we give her the benefit of the doubt?

Nearly four decades later, we know that it wasn't Margaret and Mick, but Margaret and Ronnie – both have said as much in their respective autobiographies. Should we have read anything into this?
The following day, a small get-together was held in the Rolling Stones' suite at the Harbour Castle Hotel. Margaret joined the group, sitting on the edge of the bed, and proceeded to watch the hockey game on TV, at the same time playing with Ron Wood's seven-year-old son. One guest who was there recalls that the little boy gave the impression he already knew Margaret quite well.
Object and Access: An unattractive mass market paperback, Signet claimed that the book was reprinted three times, totalling 170,000 copies. I've yet to find a one that indicates it is anything but a first printing. Very few booksellers have listed the book online; it's hardly worth the trouble. They're dreaming of sales ranging from $2 to $6.50. Six copies are held in Canadian libraries, academic and otherwise, but that's it. A French-language edition was published the same year by Éditions de l'Homme.

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