What better way to begin the work week than with Aphrodite? Sadly, it seems that this particular edition of Paul Louÿs' erotic novel of Alexandria was never issued.
All signs indicate that the image above, which comes courtesy of artist Leo Orenstein's family, was commissioned by Toronto's Fireside Publications. Had it been published, this Aphrodite would have competed in the Canadian market with American editions flooding in from the south. Since 1933, the novel had been part of the Modern Library – this is the cover being used in the early 'fifties, when Fireside was in operation:
At $1.25, Modern Library's tasteful hardcover might have challenged Fireside's cheap, pulpy 50¢ paperback, but the real competition would've come from Avon. No one exploited Aphrodite quite like Avon:
1946
1950
1951
1955
Avon was having such a good time that in 1957, Berkley got in on the action with this, the first of their two editions:
But just who is that on the Avon and Berkley covers? It can't be the Goddess of Love, she only appears in the novel as a statue.
No, it must be the beautiful courtesan Chrysis, the main female character. It seems that only Leo Orenstein knew the book well enough to depict her as Louÿs describes: a blonde.
Face-Off Scott Young and George Robertson Toronto: Macmillan, [1971]
It's playoff time in the NHL and who cares? Canada, the nation referred to in the league's name, hasn't had a team in contention since April. The last ice I saw was in February. It's two weeks to the summer solstice, for goodness sake.
Face-Off dates from just about the time things started going south. Pun intended. This is not a literary endeavour, but a bit of hack work described awkwardly as "a novel based on an idea created by John F. Bassett".
That would be the John F. Bassett who was the son of John W.H., father of Carling, and owner of the justly forgotten Memphis Southmen, Birmingham Bulls and Tampa Bay Bandits. His idea – not at all bad – was to turn Love Story into something that would appeal not only to readers of Erich Segal, but Rolling Stone and The Hockey News. The novel would be followed by a feature film and, ultimately and improbably, a delicious chocolate bar.
George Robertson, screenwriter of the unjustly forgotten Quentin Durgens, M.P., was recruited, as was sportswriter Scott Young. The casting of the latter name was particularly inspired; Young had not only penned a few kids' hockey adventures, but was the father of Neil.
The hero here is Billy Duke, a defenceman touted as "the third in a line of Golden Boys" that includes Bobbys Hull and Orr. The hottest of prospects, Billy is about to be drafted when he meets beautiful, talented folk-rock chanteuse Sherri Lee Nelson, a hippy chick who has "a trim, lean figure with everything in about the right amounts distributed in the right places."
A warning to parents: This is no Boy at the Leafs' Camp or Scrubs on Skates. Billy makes mention of his penis on the first page, and the second... and will talk about laying your sister in the third. Though the sex peters out – again, pun intended – this is not a novel for children. Pretty Sherri, an unstable pot-head, will turn to LSD, mescaline and loads of other stuff as things turn sour.
I thought I'd have a field day with Face-Off; everything about it seemed on the surface so silly – "Happy flip-side and all that jazz... Pull up a joint and make the scene", Sherri's manager invites – and yet I came to care for Billy and Sherri and was shaken when the ending, which is set up to be very Disneyesque, turns out to be anything but.
Reading Face-Off has made me want to see the film... and reading about that film makes me want to see it all the more. A commercial failure, it was criticized for focusing too much on hockey; just about half the run time is taken up by footage of games. Like the novel, it skates between fact and fiction; Derek Sanderson, Bobby Orr, Brad Park and Jacques Plante all figure as characters.
Nine – just – when Face-Off was released, I was only dimly aware of its existence. Still, even as a young pup I recognized that it served as the inspiration for SCTV's Power Play, "the Great Canadian Hockey Film", starring William Shatner Dave Thomas, Al Waxman Rick Maranis, Helen Shaver Catherine O'Hara and Hockey Hall of Famer Darryl Sittler John Candy as hot prospect Billy Stemhovilichski.
The parody features in the DVD reissue of Face-Off.
Such good sports.
Object and Access: A slim hardcover in dark blue boards with shiny red type, the Macmillan first edition, with its 6000 print run, supposedly sold out by November 1971. That same month, Pocket Books let loose 50,000 mass market paperbacks, though you'd never know it from online booksellers. Three copies of the Pocket edition are listed at between US$5 and US$21 (condition not a factor). The Macmillan edition is more common online with all sorts of acceptable copies going or about ten bucks.
Wall of Eyes is one of Margaret Millar's Canadian novels, by which I mean that it's one of a handful she set in her home and native land. It centres on Toronto's Heath family, a clan that cover copy describes as "decadent" – the word that might first come to mind today is "dysfunctional".
Matriarch Isabel has been dead for some eighteen months, though her influence lingers. Amongst those she's left behind is a cowed, uxorious husband who spends his days holed-up in a third-storey bedroom. Her eldest children, Alice (an aspiring spinster) and John (a heavy-set half-wit with a thing for nightclub singers, dancers and waitresses) are slipping into middle age, yet still haven't left the nest.
Isabel willed the house and every cent of her money to the youngest, Kelsey, a cold and clever girl who is in every way her mother's daughter. Two years earlier, in Isabel's final months, Kelsey lost her sight as the result of a car accident. John was riding in a rumble seat with a cheap date who died at the scene. Kelsey's fiancé, Philip, a middling pianist, survived to play another day.
Philip lives at the Heath residence, but don't get the wrong idea; Kelsey hates her fiancé. As her mother did her father, she's turned her betrothed into an emotional cripple. Oh, every once in awhile Phillip will say he's had enough, but Kelsey knows he's too feeble to ever leave.
Wall of Eyes was Millar's fourth novel and first great commercial success. It's typical of her work: domestic drama and dialogue captivate; psychology, which she studied at the University of Toronto, comes into play. More than one-third of the novel passes before we encounter a body; in this case, poor Kelsey with a wide, deep gash to her breast. "A powerful hand had held the knife, a hand driven by hate or rage."
Kelsey's death brings Detective-Inspector Sands to the Heath residence. A loner, with "no wife or child or friend", he is one of Millar's greatest characters. Sands reappears in what might be her finest novel, The Iron Gates (1945), and the short story "The Couple Next Door" (1954). With him comes glimpses of Toronto's very tame wartime nightclubs, venues that are otherwise almost absent in Canadian literature.
Well... they were tame.
It's always a challenge to write about Margaret Millar – there will be twists and one hates to spoil. So, I'll leave off with a bold pronouncement: This woman, who has never been published in Canada, ranks amongst the very finest Canadian novelists of her generation.
Those familiar with her work know that I'm merely stating the obvious.
Object and Access: The first edition, published by Random House in 1943, is not at all common; five copies are currently listed online, but only one has the dust jacket. At US$95, it is a bargain. Beware of second and third printings.
Copies of the most recent reissue, International Polygonics' 1986 edition, can be had for a buck – others from Lancer and Avon go for not much more. For my money, the Dell edition, with cover by Gerald Gregg, is nicest. Very Good and better copies begin at two dollars and go all the way up to thirty.
Despite numerous mass market reissues, our public libraries almost all fail – our universities don't do much better.
Wall of Eyes has been translated, but less than the typical Millar title. Completists will be on the hunt for the Spanish (Muro de ojos, 1986), French (Des yeux plein la tote, 1990), German (Blinde Augen sehen mehr, 1990) and Japanese (眼の壁, 1998) editions.
Unearthed this past weekend, this little list from the May 1987 issue of Books in Canada. It is as described, a "studiously unscientific survey", consisting only of those readers who cared to respond and sacrifice what was then a 34¢ stamp. Still, I think it interesting enough to comment, thereby risking ridicule and ruffled feathers.
I'll begin by stating the obvious (to me at any rate): The number of respondents was likely quite small, as indicated by the number of ties. And yet I think that the top five authors is an accurate reflection of the time.
Here they are again with what would have been their most recent books:
1. Alice Munro – The Progress of Love (1986)
2. Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
3. Timothy Findley – The Telling of Lies (1986)
4. Robertson Davies – What's Bred in the Bone (1985)
Margaret Laurence – A Christmas Birthday Story (1982)
The unexpected comes with the five names that follow. The presence of Mavis Gallant, whom I maintain has never been accorded proper respect and recognition, is a pleasant surprise, while Janette Turner Hospital, Marian Engel and Audrey Thomas are... well, simply surprises. I don't mean to belittle, but I dare say that they wouldn't figure in a top ten "People's Choice" today.
But then, who would? Carol Shields, whose The Stone Diaries was six years in the future, seems a sure bet. Timothy Findley would be down, if not out. Richler would be up, bucking a trendy decent of the deceased. And here I return to the late Mrs Shields in stating boldly that she would have ranked higher in 2003, when she was still amongst us, than she does today.
How forgetful we are. All but two of the writers on the 1987 Books in Canada list were living. The exceptions, Margaret Laurence and Marian Engel, would have been safely described as "recently deceased".
No authors of another century feature on this "People Choice" – the first half of the twentieth century is unrecognized. Are we Canadians not unique? Imagine an English list without Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontës and Dickens; a French list lacking Balzac, Flaubert and de Maupassant; or an American top ten without Whitman, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
The most important and sad observation one might make about the Books in Canada list is this: francophones do not figure. Gabrielle Roy, perhaps the best hope, is absent, as are Michel Tremblay, Anne Hébert and Antonine Maillet.
Mordecai Richler, A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, the Writers' Chapel, the Seville Theatre and Les Mas des Oliviers figure... as does Fiddler's Green Irish Pub, the establishment that has taken up residence in John Glassco's old Bishop Street pied-à-terre.
Pastor White is a rock 'n' roll revisionist, a fearless man who strays far from conventional thought and expression. Billboard be damned. In Arming for Armageddon (1983), White put it that Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" not only topped the U.S. singles chart, but was part of a satanic effort to lure listeners into accepting the Antichrist.
Thinking the Unthinkable (1992) has Laurie Anderson allied with Kiss in playing the devil's music:
"The Elder", the bands's all-time top album, was "concerned with a group of god-like figures who've watched over the planet since its beginnings in primordial ooze." The Elder is "an orphan boy who, through a succession of events, comes to save the world"*
See... just like Kal-el.
During the nine years separating the two books, White has come to believe that the Antichrist is an orphan (hence the dropping of King Juan Carlos from contention); otherwise the pastor's thinking is unchanged: "Britain's successors to the Beatles were the punk rock groups. Most notorious was Sid Vicious..."
Here White continues to be confused about Sid, whom he describes variously as a man and a band. Eventually, he settled on a the former with a sentence lifted from Arming for Armageddon: "His theme song was "Anarchy in the U.K.", in which he boasted of being an 'anarchist' and 'antichrist'."
I take issue. Sid was no role model, but I can find no evidence that he appropriated "Anarchy in the U.K.", a song he didn't write, performed here by a band of which he wasn't yet a member.
White is never so interesting, nor surprising as when he writes about popular music. I was taken aback in reading that in 1993 teenagers were being drawn increasingly to old chestnuts about ending it all:
Elton John sings about contemplating suicide; Elyse Wineberg says he is mortuary-bound; and British rock group Tin Lizzy belts out 'Suicide'.
Emboldened by the pastor's wavering over Sid Vicious, I challenge his assertion about "British rock group Tin Lizzy" through verse:
Lizzy was thin,
Not made of tin,
And came from Dublin.
Phil Lynott, the man who sang "Suicide", was long dead when Thinking the Unthinkable was published, but not by his own hand.
I admit, Elyse Weinberg was a mystery to me. A bit of digging reveals that Elyse is not a fella, as the pastor believes, but a woman. "Mortuary Bound" features on her 1968 debut album Elyse, which wasreleased on the obscure Tetragrammaton label:
The same album peaked at #31 in the United States, and failed to chart in Canada, which pretty much explains why I'd never heard of Ms Weinberg.
The same album features a song with Neil Young on guitar:
Nineteen-sixty-eight was, of course, the year Young left Buffalo Springfield. He struck out on his own, playing intimate venues like Canterbury House, a small Anglican – sorry – Episcopal chapel in Ann Arbour Michigan.
Pastor White doesn't think much of the Episcopal Church.
Wonder how many people showed up for the free eats.
* The album – correct title: Music from "The Elder" – was a commercial failure. Released in 1981, it holds the distinction of being the worst-selling album in the band's 39-year history.
A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's UP, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
