Back-Door Neighbors Edna Jaques Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1946 |
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A JOURNEY THROUGH CANADA'S FORGOTTEN, NEGLECTED AND SUPPRESSED WRITING
"Great Chief! Great Chief!" said she, "I pray thee desist! Go I from you forever to be Maid of the Mist! From this rocky ledge to you torrent I go. To dwell eternal with the Manitou in the Falls below. And my spirit wafted upward on yonder haze, eternal shall be for men always to gaze! As I leave you forever I bid you goodby! Stand and watch my soul rising on yonder mist high!"You can't write this stuff, but Launcelot Cressy Servos did.
The McGill University Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 1983) |
The McGill University Magazine dedicates itself to the preservation of those of McGill's ancient traditions still extant, and to the revival of those now lost. Without its customs, a university is merely a machine for teaching, indistinguishable from its rivals; with them, it is a great and thriving institution that extends across time to unite our ancestors and our posterity in common enterprise.Three more principles follow: the demand for academic excellence, the rejection of public funding for higher education, and the peculiar insistence that the prosperity of the university take priority over that of the country. Something about the protection of private property appears tacked on as an afterthought.
RF: No, we don't.And on it goes for another page and a-half, ending with this:
MUM: But you do, you really do.
RF: We certainly don't give a tenth of our coverage to the gay community, which if we were to be fair is what we would give.
MUM: Wouldn't it seem to the other 90 per cent of the campus that you are ignoring their interests?
RF: No. To the minority who are homophobic, there is a problem. That have a dangerous bigotry. This is the problem with reflecting student opinion. If student opinion is bigoted, should we reflect that? I don't think so. The intolerance encouraged by what I would call the Right, these days represented by our Student Society and some of their publications, is really quite pathetic.
MUM: We are not questioning the right to print what you want, but we wonder whether your commitment to letting other sides be heard is as strong as it should be.
RF: I think the Daily is the most accessible publication I have ever seen. There's no doubt about it. We have a number of people whose politics are vastly different from the rest of the staff's. They are accepted. Sure, the majority of the staff have left-leaning views.
MUM: Why then, for example, do we not see any articles against McGill's divesting from South Africa?
RF: Something like divestment is a thing where even our most right-wing staffers don't disagree.
MUM: You wrote an editorial denouncing the right of a representative of a group called the South African Foundation, John Chettle, to speak at McGill...
RF: I don't think people who deny free speech to others should enjoy free speech themselves.
Roly said, "I agree with George. I still see the thing just the way we had it figured out before. You two girls are just jealous of Estelle."
Rita said,"Humph! That blowzy sex-bag? Nothing between her ears and everything between her..."
Roly said, "Rita!"
"Well, it's true. Just because she's got a lot of blonde hair on her head and sticks out in all the right places you dopes figure she couldn't possibly be mixed up in a murder."Meanwhile, the cops are so convinced of George's guilt that they don't really bother to investigate and are blind to strong evidence that might clear the writer.
My father, born Thaddeus Kimball McIlroy II (I'm "III"), was a dual citizen, born in New York City to an American father and a Canadian mother.Kimball McIlroy's only other published novel was The Fertile Four-Poster (New York: Crown, 1969). "Nothing came of it," writes Thad, "in particular: no paperback, not many copies sold."
He went to elementary school in Canada and high school in the U.S. Then he mostly lived in Toronto and enlisted with the Canadian army, becoming a captain with the Royal Canadian Artillery and posted overseas. He stayed on in Europe after the war writing the official history of the Artillery in the 2nd War. He wrote for Saturday Night and for Esquire. He had radio plays performed on CBC.
When he married my mother and started raising a family he moved over into public relations (as many journalists did, and do) in order to secure a steady income.
In spite of his obvious weirdness I found myself liking him. When he launched into a diatribe, which he did often, he would become intoxicated by his own rhetoric, then leap up bellowing and, like an actor, pace the store as though it were the stage of a theatre. He was, perhaps, the first person I ever met whose voice merited the word stentorian.
– David Mason, The Pope's BookbinderHow did I come to have this? A response to an advert in Books in Canada, perhaps. When it landed at my Montreal flat, sometime around the death of Doug Harvey, this catalogue was like nothing I'd ever seen. The bookseller seemed to be daring customers to purchase.
There isn't very much Canadian literature, and most of it is garbage. It is the junk literature of a junk age. It is beneath those who care about anything.The attacks begin with item #6, Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Anansi, 1982):
Having spent considerable time wandering 2nd hand bookshops, it recently occurred to me that the only people ever overheard congratulating or recommending this author are teen-aged girls of the least promising variety. Our animosity is, in this case, genuine. The more quickly this author is forgotten the better it will be for Canada. In the meantime we are optimistic in regard to selling our stock of copies to unpromising customers, Any regular customer who orders it may expect to be dropped from the mailing list.I was not a regular customer; in fact, I never bought a book from William Hoffer. Spoiled terribly by Montreal's low book prices and the indifference paid things Canadian in New York, I found his prices high. Here Hoffer asks $75 for the Canadian first of Brian Moore's The Emperor of Ice-Cream (McClelland & Stewart, 1965), a book I'd bought for $2 in a Sherbrooke Street bookstore not three years earlier. I was lucky; another store had it for six.
Dear old Bizarre! It was an oasis back in the dreary fifties. Yes, I remember the wonderful photo of Mlle. Polaris, the Queen of the Wasp-waists, in her extraordinary corset, which John Willie unearthed and reprinted. I contributed a letter to his correspondence column. He was a Pioneer.This sent me on a lengthy hunt through the 1824 pages of The Complete Reprint of John Willie's Bizarre (Taschen, 1995). I'd hoped to come across something credited to Miles Underwood, S. Colson-Haig, Silas N. Gooch or any of Glassco's many other pseudonyms. When nothing turned up, I started reading the letters themselves, thinking that I might just recognize something in their style and content.
I am fascinated by your magazine because, even though I am in my thirties, this is the first time I have been able to avail myself of the sincere, uninhibited thoughts of others regarding leather and bondage. So, due to Bizarre, I know my hidden desires are not quite so isolated as I had feared.Now, Glassco didn't live in New England, but twenty kilometres to the north; he was also a few inches short of six-feet and would've been in his forties at the time. But then these sorts of letters are invariably replete with lies, exaggeration, camouflage and masquerade, aren't they?
An attractive girl, clad in snug, well-tailored jodhpurs or breeches which are well reinforced with suede or some other soft, resilient leather at the seat and the inner sides of the legs is certainly a lovely sight. And the thought that such a girl might entertain the desire to put me in bondage, or that she might enjoy giving me some discipline, is encouraging to say the least.
But it is frustrating, here in staid old New England, to find the company of such a person. To be sure, I attend horse shows and ride often at nearby stables, but with no success, despite many conversations with attractive girls.
So, why not suggest that those whose thoughts are similar to mine put a little circle of white paint on each of their riding boots, and at the rear, just where the heel is stitched to the soft leather? By so doing we could identify others with whom we have ideas in common.
But, at any rate, I enjoy using your magazine as a "clearing house" for thoughts from other readers, one of whom might be intrigued in having a six-foot, 170-pound bachelor for her prisoner.
J. FOSTER
"You know me, Alf. I'll take so much and that's all. I don't care who it is... I'll take just so much shit and that's all. Am I right or am I wrong? Am I right or am I wrong, Alf?"You expect some rough stuff in crime fiction, but here the language is particularly coarse and the violence extreme.
"I'm a Canadian. Jack. I don't give a dog damn whether you're a Scot or a Britisher or a Hungarian or a Chink. I'm a Canadian and that's what it said on my shoulder when I went overseas and this is Canada and if you don't like itoff back to lower Slobbovia where you come from."
"Ha, ha. A Canadian? What was your father... an Indian? This place might be called Canada, lad, but you're either an Englishman or a Frenchman or God knows what. The only Canadians here are the Indians, and if you're an Indian, they shouldn't be serving you in a beverage room. It's against the law."This may be hell of a sort, with brimstone that smoulders to this day, but it's a whole lot better than Kingsville Penitentiary. Behind its impenetrable walls, Chris shares a cell with a man who is descending into madness. You see, cellmate Trent Richards, just can't deal with the knowledge that Shirley, an old flame, once attended a petting party.
He screamed once as a bullet smashed against bone and then another bullet struck him full in the face and the red liquid made a hideous mask of his features. Only the eyes remained discernible and they were frightfully unhuman, wide open, staring as if at some nameless horror.I won't reveal the victim's name, the identity of the assailant or the twist that brings this all about – don't want to spoil everything – but I can't resist sharing the novel's abrupt and absurd ending.
I haven't any faith in God anymore, how could I have, but in case there is something, maybe the devil, I'll ask him for a special request. Let me find you two together, naked in each other's armsthe way you've been doing all this time. Oh, God, I hope I find you together . I'll kill you first Eric with Baker's gun... not easily... in the stomach so you can know how it feels to have an ache in your guts that won't come out and then I'll take care of you Helen. I know exactly what to do with you. I'll rape you first, you dirty bitch. A husband should have his wife when he returns from such a long absence, so I'll rape you while you're listening to my brother cough his blood and entrails all over the bed. And then I'll tear out your hair and slap you in the face with the bloody roots and then I'll put some bullets into you where they should go.Chris is handed a near-perfect opportunity to escape, but chooses not to because Baker says something about trusting him as much as he does his wife. This makes the imprisoned man reconsider his own lack of trust, thus sparing Helen from horror. More reevaluation takes place when the warden introduces him to Shirley, Trent's old girlfriend. Seems she behaved herself at that petting party and can't quite understand why her old beau won't believe her. Enter smug prison psychiatrist Dr Ferguson, who between bemused chuckles explains that all Trent needs is a trusted person to tell him that Shirley is as chaste and true as she claims. It's Ferguson's opinion that Chris Benedict is just the man for the job:
He welcomed the task before him and knew he would be successful. His thoughts went to his wife Helen and he blessed her name... He had the vision of Helen's face before him. It was sufficient.Now, I don't pretend to know much about the mysteries of the human mind, but I do question that Trent's psychosis can be so easily cured. Frankly, I'm not convinced that there isn't something more to his issues with Shirley and the petting party.* Doctor knows best, I suppose, but what with his mad (albeit internal) monologue and his dead or dying cellmate, it seems to me that a psychiatrist would detect something amiss in Chris. I don't know, call all it a "torch of violence".
FIN
"You know me, Alf. I'll take so much and that's all. I don't care who it is... I'll take just so much dirt and that's all. Am I right or am I wrong? Am I right or am I wrong, Alf?"More trivia: The novel contains what just might be the longest sentence of any book covered in this blog:
A night breeze came over the north wall in gay contempt of the guard towers, stirred the dusty sand of the prison yards, climbed the sheer stone side of the prison and thrust little inquiring fingers of fresh air into the rows of barred holes that broke the blankness of the stone, then recoiling at the heavy breath of the imprisoned men, the fingers withdrew as if from the touch of death and the breeze slackened, dropped lower, moved faintly across the prison yard and tried to scale it to the freedom of the night, then fell back and died in little swirls of dust above the flat emptiness of the prison yard.Object: A poorly produced mass market paperback, this is typical News Stand Library, except that it tends to fall apart more easily than most.