27 December 2013

Christmas with Neil Young's Dad



Home for Christmas and Other Stories
Scott Young
Toronto: Macmillan, 1989

Seventeen stories by sportswriter and sometime hired pen Scott Young, this is pleasant enough stuff. "Bread-and-butter articles" to borrow the words of one character, most were written for the Globe & Mail, many dating from the days in which the newspaper published a Christmas edition. The best of the lot, those spared the jam and jelly, touch on the autobiographical. In "Once Upon a Time in Toronto" he shares memories of his first Christmas as a married man. "The Night After Christmas" is about the unforeseen, rather surprising consequence of a festive wartime party. My favourite, "A Prairie Boy's Christmas, 1933" is as much about the holiday as it is about the author's rough childhood. It's the author's favourite, "Early One Christmas", that disappoints. Rewritten as "Glad Tidings from the Paper Boy", it begins:
Once there was a boy of 13 who had The Globe and Mail paper route on Brookdale Avenue in North Toronto, between Yonge Street and Avenue Road. He was a tall and thin boy who did not like getting up at six every morning…  
Young has placed some distance between himself and the 13-year-old, whom he never names, removing much of the warmth. Here's the beginning to the original, published in the 25 December 1964 Globe & Mail. Enjoy!
Almost everyone has his own favorite Christmas story. I believe that I am particularly lucky in that my favorite concerns one of my sons. He is 19 now, a little taller than I am and a lot thinner. But this story happened six years ago when he was 13 and delivered a Globe and Mail route on Brookdale Avenue in North Toronto.
     I used to hear him almost every morning at six when he wakened. Usually the two hours after he left were my soundest sleep of the night.
     On the rare occasions when he overslept, this built-in alarm mechanism in my mind brought me awake about the time he should have been moving. When I could not hear him I would tiptoe to his room and say, "Neil".
     "Yes," he'd say instantly, sitting upright in bed, wide awake.
     "I guess you overslept."
     "Guess I did."
     But on this Christmas morning of 1958 he was up on time and, like all other Globe and Mail boys up that morning, rose when the world was black and cold.
     He made the blind trip to the bathroom and sleepily began to pull on his clothes.
     Downstairs, he stood for a moment and looked at the stacked and laden Christmas tree, did the slow march past it, stopped to shake a parcel or two and stood like a robin to listen, and then went on.
     A glass of milk and a brief forage in the refrigerator, and then on with his ear-covering cap and his scarf and parka and overshoes and mitts, on that ice-cold bicycle seat and down the driveway to pedal into the morning alone.

Object: A compact 117-page hardcover in red boards with twenty-four illustrations by Huntley Brown. I bought my copy eleven years ago from a Vancouver bookseller. Price: $1.99. It's a signed, first edition. There has never been another.


Access: Twenty-four years after publication, it's not too hard to find in public libraries. Dozens of copies are being offered online with prices ranging from US$0.01 to US$7064.57. Condition does not factor.

Long out-of-print, as Home for Christmas it can be read as an ebook. This is the "cover":


Chindigo and Amazon.ca for $9.99. Amazon.com charges US$10.78 because… oh, just because.

Related posts:

23 December 2013

Christmas Comes Early



My newest acquisition:

Maria Monk's Daughter: An Autobiography
Mrs. L. St. John Eckel
New York:
Published for the Author by the United States Publishing Company

21 December 2013

X is for Xmas Spex (Why Not?)



It's true, every family does buy a present for the Old Folks. Hell, in good times mine'll buy two or three. No one likes to see Old Folks fighting.


I first came across this pamphlet as a student. Until then, I hadn't thought much about what a delightful and useful present a pair of modern spectacles or eyeglasses would make. A quarter-century later, I've still never given glasses at Christmas. Not to say I won't.


Advertisers Jas. Pequegnat & Son didn't date their pamphlet, but I'm going to suggest that it's about a century old. As evidence, I present this ad from the 7 December 1913 Toronto World:


Again, delightful and useful. So, why not?

Remember kids, that's Xmas Spex, not:



19 December 2013

Cousin Basil's Dickensian Christmas Gift



The Happy Isles
Basil King
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923

I nearly let the year pass without reading any Basil King, and started in on this novel only when I remembered that my copy had been given as a present ninety years ago this month.


Not much of a reason, is it.

To be frank, after The Inner Shrine and The Contract of the Letter, I'd had enough of Reverend King's gentle preaching on matters of reputation, flirtation, infidelity, separation and divorce. I was wrong to expect more of the same in The Happy Isles. All figure, of course, but here things edge away from the matrimonial and toward the political.

The novel opens on a splendid spring day spoiled when eight-month-old Henry Elphinstone Whitelaw, of the New York Whitelaws, is stolen from his carriage in Central Park. A tragic event, it calls to mind Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's The House of Windows (1912), which is built around the abduction of a wealthy Vancouver couple's infant daughter. The balance of this novel, however, owes much more to Charles Dickens than Mrs Mackay.

King's abductor is Lucy Coburn. A young woman  "feeble in mind from birth, half-demented by the death first of her husband and then of her child," Lucy took the baby so as to "satisfy her thwarted mother-love."

Love Henry she did, moving about Manhattan, forever fearing that someone might identify him as the missing Whitelaw baby. Good thing, too, because Lucy can't quite keep her story straight; even Henry, whom she calls both Tom and Gracie, is confused:
   "I'm a little boy, ain't I?"
   "Yes, you're a little boy, but you should have been a little girl. It was a little girl I wanted."
The early years are the easiest, with poor, damaged Lucy living off her husband's life insurance. When the money runs out, she turns to shoplifting. Lucy's luck ends on 24 December 1904, when she is caught lifting a pair of fur-lined mittens that Tom had hoped would be his Christmas gift. The boy spends Christmas Eve in a children's home. The next morning he learns that his "mudda" has suffered a painful death by downing cyanide.

A Merry Christmas to you, Cousin Ida!

Now orphaned – or so the authorities believe – eight-year-old waif Tom is shipped up the Hudson to an unwelcoming foster family in an ugly little town. After a time – an unpleasant time – he is adopted by an unhappy couple who are suffering from a failing farm and failing marriage. King is on familiar territory here. I set aside all earlier complaints in recognizing the chapters that follow as the very finest in the novel.

There be many troubled souls in The Happy Isles, but not one so well drawn as Quidmore, Tom's adoptive father. An adulterous coward haunted by the road not travelled, he takes inspiration from the story of poor Lucy Coburn in trying to rid himself of a wife, Tom's adoptive mother. Quidmore tries to trick his freshly minted  son into administering the fatal dose. When this doesn't happen the farmer breaks down, as much from relief as failure. Quidmore is a man tortured, troubled and torn until wife Anna learns that he's been seeing the local widow. It's only then that he can summon enough courage to do the dastardly deed himself.

Rejected by the widow lady, who is no fool, Quidmore makes himself scarce. He takes Tom to New York, holing himself in the  very sort of place Lucy would've considered home.

Remember when I described Quidmore is a troubled soul? Well, he disappears, leaving Tom all his money. I think we can all assume that he took a dive off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Orphaned – kinda – for a second time, the boy is taken under the wing of fellow lodger, one-eyed Liverpudlian Lemuel Honeybun. "A rogue, a burglar, an ex-convict," old Honey Lem gives up his thieving ways and devotes himself to raising young Tom.

It's all downhill from here, I'm afraid. Tom, who has already shown himself to be an A+ student, uses Quidmore's money to pay for Harvard. In his very first class, he's seated next to Tad Whitelaw, the brother her didn't know he had. This is one of the more believable coincidences.

The Happy Isles marks something of a departure for Reverend King in that it ends up as less a comment on marriage than society. In its pages the poor suffer, they work hard and they take risks. Honey Lem dies after being is crushed in a workplace accident.

My apologies for that spoiler.

At Harvard, Tom finds himself surrounded by a privileged, spoiled, ill-behaved lot – and here I include brother Tad. There's more than an insinuation that when inherited, not earned, wealth and position lead to ruin. Socialism is spoken of, but only by goodhearted retired crook Honey Lem. Tom recognizes that it's all so unfair, but can see no solution to what ails the nation.

He's chosen banking as a profession, so one can't expect much.

The Happy Isles was King's penultimate novel. The last published during his lifetime, it first ran from March through October 1923 in Harper's Magazine. Advertisements for the finished book described the serialization as having "aroused interest almost if not quite equal to the furore which resulted from the anonymous publication of 'The Inner Shrine' by the same author years ago."

Not true.

In 1907, the furore surrounding The Inner Shrine was front page news in Canada and the United States; discussion of The Happy Isles was limited to book reviews… of which this is one.

Will there ever be another?

Most interesting passage:
Honey never pawed him, as the masters often pawed the boys, and the boys pawed one another. He never threw an arm across his shoulder, or call him by a more endearing name than Kiddy. Apart from an eagle-eyed solicitude, he never manifested tenderness, nor asked for it.
Object: A 485-page hardcover bound in green cloth with gilt lettering. I bought my copy – signed, of course – from a New York City bookseller late last year. Price: US$43.86. I'm blaming the missing jacket on Cousin Ida.

A first edition, it includes four plates by John Alonzo Williams. Knowing there were more, I splurged – ten American dollars! – on the advance copy made up of pages from the Harper's serialization.


With nine more illustrations, it turned out to be well worth the price. The depiction above of a collapsing Quidmore is one.

Here Tom has a chance encounter with a woman he does not know is his mother:


Access: The Harper first enjoyed no second printing, though a cheap Grosset & Dunlap edition did follow. Hodder & Stoughton released a UK edition in 1924. No reprint there either. The Canadian branch of Hodder & Stoughton appears to have released an edition in 1923 – it was advertised in that November's Canadian Bookman – but I'll be damned if I can find a trace.

As with nearly all Basil King items, prices are cheap. Very Good first editions, sans jacket, can be had for US$4.50. Copies of the UK Hodder & Stoughton edition are more scarce, but are only marginally more expensive.

Outside of the Toronto Public Library, we Canadians are served only by our universities.