26 February 2013

Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's



Or maybe not:

The Globe & Mail, 10 April 1910
I was familiar with Three Weeks – it was, after all, penned by scandalous semi-Canadian Elinor Glyn – but I have Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney to thank for bringing Cynthia in the Wilderness and The Yoke to my attention. Both products of the fertile mind of Hubert Wales, they'll soon be added to my library.

What sold me were these solid synopses found in David Trotter's The English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (London: Routledge, 1993). Of Cynthia in the Wilderness, he writes:

Cynthia's husband, Harvey, revered her spirit and is consistently unfaithful to her body. She meets a man who appreciates both. They become lovers. However, the increasingly brutish Harvey catches them in the act and beats her lover over the head with a golf club. The lover survives. Meanwhile one of Cynthia's friends has self-sacrificingly poisoned Harvey and taken the rap. Cynthia returns from the Wilderness to marry her lover.

And of The Yoke, which Prof Trotter describes as "Racier still":

Angelica Jenour, still a virgin at forty, realizes that her twenty-year-old ward, Maurice, is awakening sexually, and fears that he will resort to prostitutes. One of Maurice's friends contracts venereal disease and commits suicide. Angelica decides that she will save Maurice from a similar fate, and herself from the "yoke" of repression by becoming his lover. After educating him in love, and in "racial health", she passes him on to his future wife.

Two years after the raid, Albert Britnell was convicted of knowingly selling indecent and obscene books. He was later acquitted. The appeal can be found online in Canadian Criminal Cases, vol. XX (Toronto: Canada Law Book, 1913).

The novels themselves are available gratis to all online, Torontonians included: Cynthia in the Wilderness, The Yoke, Three Weeks.

Meanwhile, Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney spin in their respective graves.

Albert Britnell, 241 Yonge Street, Toronto
Stationary & Office Products 1911
(cliquez pour agrandir)

25 February 2013

Freedom to Read Week: On Burning Comic Books



Young minds are so very impressionable, aren't they? How fortunate then that we have dedicated souls like Father B.W. Harrigan and Len Wynne, head of Vancouver's Junior Chamber of Commerce youth leadership committee, to serve as role-models. That's Mr Wynne above adding to a bonfire of comic books, bringing to an end a month-long campaign dedicated to moulding juvenile reading habits:

The Globe & Mail, 11 November 1954
(cliquez pour agrandir]
I wonder if Mr Deschner managed to organize that "meeting of all major Canadian book publishers". If so, he must have left feeling disappointed; later news stories have it that the cost of the exchange books came out of Junior Chamber of Commerce coffers.

Apparently, Messrs Deschner and Wynne hadn't thought to speak to the Vancouver Public Library. Director E.S. Robinson found their proposal abhorrent and refused participation. His opinion was echoed in editorials from the country, the harshest of which came from a hometown paper. "The public hangman burned books in the Middle Ages," said the Vancouver Sun, "Hitler's youth were encouraged to burn them in our day."

Hitler Youth? The Jaycees? Yikes.

Victoria's Junior Chamber of Commerce cancelled its own book burning, deciding that the whole idea smacked of "Hitlerism and communism". Mayor Fred Hume also backed away. The torch was passed to Alderman Syd Bowman, who on 11 December 1954 set 8000 comic books alight at Strathcona Park.

"It may have been a slightly melodramatic gesture," allowed Mr Wynne, "but drastic action seemed necessary to bring young reading habits to parents' attention."

Yes, young minds, so very impressionable...

The Ottawa Citizen, 3 December 1956

24 February 2013

Freedom to Read Week: Father Harrigan Moves to Protect Ontario's Girls Against 'Love' Comics



The Calgary Herald, 18 August 1950
Ah, "love" comics... much better than "sex comics", the term Father Harrigan and the OCPTA had been using. There had been such unfortunate headlines:

The Globe & Mail, 12 April 1950
The Globe & Mail, 18 January 1950
Father B.W. Harrigan turns the first sod for the Holy Rosary Parish Hall and School, Burlington, Ontario, c.April 1950.

19 February 2013

Much Ado About Anne



A friend asks why I've not weighed in on the Anne of Green Gables cover controversy. To be frank, I feel I've said all I have to say about wretched print on demand product – but more than this is the simple fact that the controversy is a media creation. I won't play along.

Let's be clear, hardly anyone noticed Blonde Anne until Greg Quill brought it to readers' attention in the Toronto Star. What he presented wasn't news but an invitation:
Remember when Anne of Green Gables leaned back on the barnyard fence, ran a hand through her shimmering blond hair and tossed off a sexy pout? You don’t? 
Then join dozens of other outraged readers of the 1908 Canadian classic who have let Amazon.com know that the most recent edition of L.M. Montgomery’s coming-of-age text got it all wrong in the cover art department.
A few hundred answered the call, littering Amazon's site with "customer reviews" that were just as silly and ill-informed as the cover being criticized.


The offending volume has since been removed from sale, the image has been scrubbed from Amazon's site, yet the outrage continues.


There have been other ridiculous print on demand Montgomerys – Rila of Ingelside [sic] is a favourite – but this depiction of our dear Anne seems to have offended so very personally. Where, one wonders, was the outrage over Toddler Anne...


Tough Anne...


Witness Protection Program Anne Edith...


or Goth Anne?


Of course, what really troubles those who've taken offence isn't the depiction of Anne as blonde or buxom, but as a sexual being. Best not acknowledge that the girl introduced in the opening pages of Anne of Green Gables is a college graduate by novel's end. In Anne of the Island, third in the offending three-novel set, Anne becomes engaged to Gilbert Blythe. They'll go on to marry and have seven children together.

Yep, Anne and Gilbert did it seven times.

At least.

Which isn't to say that I don't think the cover sucks.

17 February 2013

Jazz Age Castaways in a Lost Film



Following Friday's post:

Released under the title Half a BrideWhite Hands was the third of five Arthur Stringer novels to be adapted to the screen. I mean "adapted" in the strictest Hollywood sense. There's a Mr Winslow who lives in certain comfort with a daughter named Patience, but it's there that similarities between book and film end.


The American Film Institute provides this synopsis:
Thrill-seeker Patience Winslow hears a radio program on companionate marriage and enters into a trial marriage. It is never consummated, however, because her father breaks up the ill-advised union by kidnapping her and taking her aboard his private yacht. She escapes from the yacht in a launch, but Edmunds, captain of the yacht, jumps overboard after her. A storm arises and they are cast ashore. During the weeks of privation that precede their rescue, Patience learns to love her fellow castaway. Her previous marriage annulled, she marries, with parental enthusiasm.
Yes, but was it any good?

Hard to say. IMDb records ratings by eleven anonymous people who claim to have seen Half a Bride – four rate it 10 out of 10 – but Silent Era lists it's survival status as "unknown", while film historian Arne Andersen places it on his list of lost films. Who ya gonna believe?

Reviews of the day fairly rave:
"...a sure cure for jaded movie appetites."
– Rochester Evening Journal
"...a clever, entertaining picture."
– Evening Independent
"...a frank and entertaining treatment of the now important marriage problem... gives to the screen one of the greatest epics of all times.
– San Jose News
Montreal's Gazette not only provides the lone dissenting voice but the most detailed description of the film:

The Gazette, 10 September 1928

Whether Half a Bride was ever truly important is a question best left to academics studying trial marriage. I suspect not.


The beautiful Esther Ralston has faded from public memory; the trajectories of her career and fame aren't dissimilar to those of Arthur Stringer. Yet, Half a Bride lives on in print, if not film, due to the casting of rising co-star Gary Cooper as Captain Edmunds.


The movie poster doesn't do Esther Ralston justice, as this promotional photo for the film indicates.


Reviews tell us that the island on which Patience and Edmunds become stranded is located just off our West Coast. So, what's with the palm trees?

I don't suppose we'll ever know.


Related post:

15 February 2013

Curing the Flapper; or, Tough Love in the Jazz Age



White Hands
Arthur Stringer
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927

Imagine returning to your spacious Manhattan mansion after having spent five months away on business. It's after midnight, the place is unlit, sleeping servants do not serve, and your daughters – Patience ("Paddy") and Janet ("Jinny") – are nowhere to be found. Cocktail glasses, cigarette butts and a half-emptied carton of dried fruit have made a mess of the library. Your reading-table is covered with mauve-jacketed French novels. Paddy's room smells like a Turkish harem. Amongst powder-boxes, lip-sticks, rouge, mascara and "unidentifiable war-paint" you find copies of Ulysses and Casanova's Homecoming. The floor holds "a scattering of slippers, satin and suede and serpent-skin, some buckled and decorated with brilliants, vivid-colored and incredibly small and bewilderingly gay-looking, even in their careless disorder, as though they had been kicked aside by tiny feet tired of dancing , tired of the moan of saxophones and the throb of drums and negroid music that once pulsed along the banks of the Congo."


This is the scene that confronts widower John Winslow, the millionaire Pulpwood King. His nightmare worsens some time after two when Jinny – cold, beautiful Jinny – finally returns home:
"Where is your sister Patience?"
   His daughter's small shoulder-movement, insouciant and defiant, did not escape him.
   "Probably Daniel-Booning through the black-and-tans," was the deliberately callous retort.
   "Does she still sleep at home?" he demanded, prompted to match savagery with savagery.
   "When she sleeps," was the laconic reply.
Paddy does show up eventually, bandaged and brought home by young Peter Summers, the Winslow family doctor. Seems she's totalled yet another automobile, this time running into a baker's wagon carrying cream puffs.

What's a father to do? How to save his girls from becoming "empty-headed and selfish-spirited sensation-hounds?"

Winslow's answers come through his consideration Jinny's hands:
He could see the soft white skin over the phalanges, the skin that had been so carefully protected from wind and weather, from the casual blemishes of toil and time. They were futile and helpless hands, openly proclaiming their aloofness from manual labor, a symbol of her character, an index of her soul, a tribal advertisement of incompetency.
This, he realized, runs against nature. Those white hands were meant "for grasping, for intricate and cunning movements, for the accomplishment of womanly tasks."*

The Pulpwood King's plan is to install Paddy and Jinny in a rustic cabin at Adananak, his private island in Northern Ontario. A place without "beauty parlours and padded limousines and saxophone-bands and night-clubs and pink teas and putrid farces," he'll ground the girls by grounding them down, forcing them to live a life similar to their great-grandmother.

The sisters have some help in silent Indian Pierre Pecotte, who brings the odd morsel of food and instructs both in the fine art of moccasin-making.

You know, like great-grandma used to make.

How do the girls do? Well, Paddy has more than enough pluck to make a go of it, but Jinny is just too hardened.

Aside from Pierre, the only other contact with the world outside Adanak Island comes in the personages of Chief Black Hawk and brash bush pilot Casey Crowell. Like Pierre, the latter is a stereotype, but not so Black Arrow. A self-described Carlisle Indian, educated at Dickson College and Oxford, he became something of a hero in serving as a sniper during the Great War. "Then came a different kind of a fight," he tells Jinny. "I had an offer or two of inside work, after I got my discharge in Winnipeg. But I couldn't stand being shut up between four walls." He tried his hand at cow-punching, horse-breaking, but found himself turning increasingly to drink. Tired of it all, he made a decision to return to the ways of his ancestors.

Jinny is smitten by Black Arrow and her romantic vision of the noble savage. Such are her own charms that she woos the war vet into taking her back to the world he'd rejected. What happens next is all very exciting, with Casey Crowell, Peter Summers and John Winslow taking to the sky in order to save Jinny's virtue.

They needn't have worried.

Jinny might have fantasies about showing off Black Arrow at swanky Manhattan dinner parties, but beads of sweat form on his brow and body odour builds as he paddles and portages, carrying her southward. The romantic dream dissipated, Jinny strikes off on her own, gets lost and collapses, only to be rescued by Black Arrow. Unfortunately, her ill-fated trek has led both to the wall of an advancing forest fire. Black Arrow carries Jinny to safety – quite literally – but dies in the process.

Jinny learns of Black Arrow's death only after she's found by young Doctor Peter in the final pages. Any sadness and trace of guilt is swept away in what might be, before The Last Canadian, the very worst ending to a Canadian novel:
"Poor Dad," said Jinny, as Peter took her up in his arms. "I s'pose he's lost about empty million dollars' worth of timber in this awful fire."
   "But he's got you," Peter reminded her.
   "Will he want me?"
   "Well," said Peter, breathing a little heavily as he carefully lifted her over the cock-pit side, "if he doesn't, I do."
   But she wasn't listening to him. She was looking down at her hands, her sun-reddened and briar-scratched and work-hardened hands.
   "He won't be ashamed of 'em now, will he?" she said with a catch in her voice.
   You're talking too much," growled Peter, as the turning propeller flashed in the pallid sunlight. "I want you to keep quiet."
   "I won't," asserted the blanketed woman nested so close in his arms.
   "You'll have to," commanded Peter.
   "Well, I won't unless you kiss me," conceded Jinny. 
THE END
No, not Ulysses. Not even Casanova's Homecoming.

Object: My copy, fairly fragile and lacking jacket, was purchased last December at a London bookstore located just two kilometres from the author's second childhood home. I'm guessing that it's at best first edition, second state, coming after copies bound in red cloth with gold lettering.

Access: The Bobbs-Merrill edition appears to have been printed as a split-run with McClelland & Stewart. A cheap A.L. Burt reprint followed, which in turn was followed by nothing. The novel is in the public domain in Canada, but I'm not about to suggest that any publisher take it on.

Anyone wishing to add the Bobbs-Merrill White Hands to their collection will find plenty of decent jacketless copies going for five dollars and less. Expect to pay six times as much for the uncommon McClelland & Stewart Canadian edition. The only first edition – American – listed with dust jacket is going for US$165.

The novel is found in the public libraries of Chatham-Kent and London, as well as eleven of our university libraries. Once again, Library and Archives Canada fails.

* See: Case 90 in Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis.