15 October 2013

Beware the Savage Jaw of 1981



Red Maple:
  How Canada Became the People's Republic of Canada in 1981
Kenneth McDonald
Richmond Hill, ON: BMG Publishing, 1975

A few years ago, Preston Manning published a short piece of fiction titled "2018: The new health care" in the pages of the Globe and Mail. It was a fantasy in which the former Reformer imagined a series of fantastical events leading to the abolition of Medicare. Think of those letters of old to Penthouse Forum: the dorm room was Alberta, cancer gave body to the blonde sorority girl and the Supreme Court was cast as her twin sister. George Pepki ignores the tie hanging on the doorknob and Julian Assange comes in for sloppy seconds.

At the time, I called it porn.

Kenneth McDonald's Red Maple is something altogether different. A horror novella, its Randall Flagg is Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the evil philosopher king who within thirteen years transforms an industrious constitutional monarchy into a lazy socialist republic.

Pierre Trudeau with Margaret Thatcher, 4 October 1981.
Its narrator is Alan Tremayne Jackson, the hardworking son of a hardware store owner. Dad dies, or so we surmise, leaving Al a thriving chain of stores and political opinions that date from the time of the Winnipeg General Strike. Fed by the former, blinkered by the latter, Al outlines the series of steps that resulted in the People's Republic of Canada.

At its heart, this is a political novella, which is not to say it lacks romance:
I met Gail about that time [1955] and though we saw as much of each other as we could I was working almost seventy hours a week and she was working, too, so one way or another it wasn't until 1962, six years after leaving university, that we got married.
Gail will be mentioned later, fleetingly, as a travelling companion. The lone image Al provides of the woman with whom he has shared the past two decades places her at a sewing machine in the family's guest bedroom. "We're very close, in that offhand, wholly Canadian way which avoids putting feelings into words," Al tells us.

The most complex character in McDonald's novella is Lester B. Pearson, but this is largely because Al is inconsistent in his portrayal. The hardware store heir first paints the former prime minister as a jovial incompetent, a man suited for nothing more than a life of drudgery within the civil service. Pay no mind to the opinion of the Nobel Committee, the man was a diplomat, and we all know that diplomats are nothing but parrots who repeat whatever governments tell them. Still, Al blames Pearson for setting Canada on the road to socialism. Could it be that Pearson was hiding his true persona and abilities? Might it be that he was in reality a clever, devious, evil man? Al can't be sure.


Trudeau is more of a cardboard cut-out. A man of immense ego who cares not for country but power, this unholy spawn of Quebec is part of a trinity that includes lifelong socialists Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier. Al considers Red Tories, men like Robert Stanfield and Bill Davis, to be "fellow travellers". Look not to Peter Lougheed as a saviour, he revealed himself as a socialist through the purchase of Pacific Western Airlines and in leveling "crushing royalties on Alberta's resource companies."

For the most part, the truly productive members of society, by which Al means businessmen, are too busy supporting their families to counter the growing threat. Besides, speaking out only draws further attention from increasingly hostile government agencies. True heroes are hard to find in this novella; I counted six, including John Bulloch (who wrote the Foreword to Red Maple) and Winnett Boyd (who joined the author in founding BMG, publisher of Red Maple). Gail should be jealous of the amount of space Boyd takes up in her husband's story.


Those who have read Red Maple – publishing history suggests there are many – may quibble with my description of the book as a novella. In response, I point out the obvious: Claude Wagner did not win the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership race, Bell Canada was not nationalized, the country has never funded guerrillas to fight South Africa's Apartheid regime and our press is not controlled by a government body known as the Ministry of Information. The perceptive reader will note that fabrication is not limited to what at time of publication was the future. McDonald takes liberties with past events and one of the two – and only two – references is simply false. The most succinct example of Al as unreliable narrator might be this: "Canada itself had been at one time a haven of relative labor [sic] peace, particularly in the Quebec of Duplessis."


When reading any work of political fiction it s particularly important to keep in mind that the narrator is not necessarily the mouthpiece of the author. When Al expresses resentment towards those who would apply the word "racist" to Apartheid South Africa, we must remember that he and Kenneth McDonald are not one and the same. Not really. Likewise, Al's description of pre-colonial Canada as "an empty land" should not be taken as the author's. McDonald's BMG Publishing gave us Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow (1977) and Immigration: The Destruction of English Canada (1979), but that is not to say that he agrees with the views of bigoted authors J.V. Andrew and Doug Christie.

Remember, this is a work of fiction.

Best passage:


Object: My copy was a gift from Wollamshram of Wollanshram's Blog. A slim trade-size paperback. Nine of its 117 pages are taken up by an edited list of undergraduate courses offered students at York University in the 1974-75 academic year. "I don't think that I'm oversimplifying to read into the content of these courses an undue emphasis on negative factors," says Al. "There was certainly a shocking absence of constructive approaches."

Here's an example of the type of course that so disturbs our narrator:

 
Access: Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Toronto Public Library and most university libraries have a copy or two.

About a dozen copies are currently listed for sale online, most going for under ten bucks. One hopeful American bookseller is offering an ex-library copy for US$193.70.

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12 October 2013

The Foster Poetry Conference at Fifty


Irving Layton, Milton Wilson, Leonard Cohen, Eli Mandel and Aviva Layton,
Foster Poetry Conference,, October 1963
Off to the Eastern Townships this morning to celebrate the publication of The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco:
Brome Lake Books

265 E Knowlton Rd

Knowlton, QC 
12 October 2013, 2:00 pm
And what better day than today? 'Twas fifty years ago – 12 October 1963 – that Glassco's Foster Poetry Conference opened at the Glen Mountain Ski Chalet. With Glassco, F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, Eldon Grier, D. G. Jones, Leonard Cohen, Leonard Angel, Kenneth Hetrz, Henry Moscowitz and Seymour Mayne, it remains the greatest gathering of Quebec's English-language poets.

Three days of poetry, comradeship and drink, even the most subdued reports paint it as a great success. Scott was so fired by the experience that he pressured Glassco to edit the proceedings for McGill University Press.  


Glassco agreed to take on the project, but soon came to recognize that the contents failed to capture anything of the exuberant nature of the conference. The late night conversations, the raw exchanges, the drinking – almost all that had been informal, spontaneous, and dynamic had been left unrecorded. What's more he found work on the book a "horrible bore." On 4 May 1964, he wrote Jean Le Moyne: "I shall never be an editor again: this is the work for professionals who have secretaries, electric typewriters, photocopy machines, the co-ordinative faculty and endless patience: but the book is now ready for press."


When the galleys arrived Glassco found the quality so poor that the November 1964 publication date had to be scratched. For months the anthology hung over his head as he awaited, with dread, the reset galleys. What arrived was much improved and he moved quickly to clear the sheets from his desk. Then, just when his work appeared to be finished, Glassco discovered that he'd been saddled with the task of distributing payments to the twenty contributors. The irritation was only compounded by the small sums. Leonard Cohen received three dollars, barely enough to purchase a copy of the book.

My work in editing Glassco's letters was much more pleasurable.


11 October 2013

Tonight: Honouring Gwendolyn Graham



All are welcome.

Speaking will be
Norman Ravvin, Associate Professor and Chair, Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, Concordia University
and
Claire Holden Rothman, author of Salad DaysBlack Tulips
and The Heart Specialist.
The Venerable Linda Borden Taylor will officiate.

Friday, 11 October 2013, 6 p.m.

Church of St James the Apostle
1439 St Catherine Street West (Bishop Street entrance)
Montreal

A wine and cheese reception will follow.

07 October 2013

N is for Nablo News



All kinds of activity here this past weekend in preparation of Friday's Gwethalyn Graham plaque dedication and Saturday's John Glassco event, but I somehow managed to slip in a bit of work relating  to James Benson Nablo. I can now report that The Long November, the Niagara Falls writer's only book, will be returning to print this coming spring as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series.

I could not be happier.

Set in Toronto, Chicago, Moreland Lakes (read: Kirkland Lake, Ontario), an unnamed Italian village and the author's hometown, The Long November is one of the most interesting novels of the post-war period. News Stand Library pitched it as "a tale of passion and virile drive". It's all that and more.

One of the unexpected pleasures of this exercise, this stroll through the neglected writing of our past, is that it has often brought contact with the children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces of the writers concerned. It was my good fortune that the daughter and grandson of James Benson Nablo spotted my posts on The Long Novemberthe novel's paperback history and the author's career in Hollywood.


So it is that I spent an enjoyable few hours yesterday reading through five James Benson Nablo manuscripts on loan from Nancy Vichert, his daughter. As far as I've been able to determine, all are unpublished and have no connection with the stories that were adapted by Hollywood: Drive a Crooked Road, A Bullet for Joey, Raw Edge and China Doll.


After the success of The Long November five editions in six years! – the native of Niagara Falls made his way to Hollywood. The duo-tang for one of the of the manuscripts features an address that places him within walking distance of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, not too far from Chateau Marmont:
 

8401 Ridpath Drive, Hollywood, CA
(cliquez pour agrandir)
James Benson Nablo's time in Tinseltown was not long, but he left his mark. Drive a Crooked Road, adapted by Blake Edwards and Richard Quine, was Columbia Pictures' great attempt to turn Mickey Rooney into an adult star. A Bullet for Joey places Edward G. Robinson and George Raft in Montreal as, respectively, a French Canadian detective and infamous gangster.


Nablo's talent was such that further adaptations appeared after his untimely death at the age forty-five.

I'm pleased to be involved with the return of The Long November. It's been more than a half-century. Long overdue.

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