29 November 2014

À rebours



It's been some time since I've written much about John Glassco, whose life consumed seven or so years of mine. A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of the man, was published by McGill-Queen's in 2011. Last year saw The Heart Accepts It All, a selection of his letters I edited for Véhicule Press. I've since been working on other projects, but Glassco is forever in the background. The last few months have brought reviews of the biography from Robert Edison Sandiford (The Antigonish Review) and the letters from Bruce Whiteman (Canadian Notes & Queries). The former is available online. Here's an excerpt:
Busby’s biography is as much forensic exercise as literary reclamation. He is only interested in the facts of Glassco’s life and work that can be corroborated. The level of cross-checking he had to do must have been drink-inducing. But it pays off with a book that gives a lively and accurate account of a Canadian writer who was at one point one of the country’s most significant translators and who remains iconic because of his famous fictionalized memoir.
Speaking of fiction, this past Hallowe'en morn my eyes were drawn to this Margaret Cannon review on the Globe & Mail website:


Glassco died young? As I creep up in age, seventy-one no longer seems so ancient. But still.


I've always meant to read Murder in Montparnasse, if only to see whether Glassco, Taylor, Callaghan, McAlmon and other fixtures of that time and place feature in its pages. I had no idea that the protagonist of the 1992 mystery is based on Glassco; no one else has ever made the connection.  To be honest, nothing in Ms Cannon's writing convinces me that this is so. You'll forgive me, I hope, for pointing out that she botches the title of Glassco's memoirs.

Still, I'll make a point of reading Engel's mystery.

A decade or so ago, when I began work on what would become A Gentleman of Pleasure, a fellow writer cautioned. "Do this and Glassco will always be with you," he said. "The biographer's subject haunts."

He himself had written the biography of a man whom he'd come to despise.

His experience is not mine.

I leave the second to last words to Sandiford:
Busby may be overly sympathetic at times, which is understandable given his subject, but there is something all of us – artist and not – can understand of Glassco’s very human doubts that he may be merely a “trifler, dilettante, petit-maître.”
Indeed, in all of us.

Cross-posted, with minor variations, at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

28 November 2014

Judging Covers



Any magazine that looks like that has got to be great. The new Canadian Notes & Queries – number 91 – is just that. Between Seth's wrap-around cover you'll find contributions by Kamal Al-Solaylee, Donald A. Bailey, Emily Donaldson, Stephen Fowler, Keath Fraser, Michael Harris, Finn Harvor, Jesse Jacobs, John Miller, Anakana Schofield, Derek Sharpton, Leanne Sharpton, Tom Smart, Meaghan Strimas, Bruce Whiteman and Nathan Whitlock.


This issue's collectable takes the form of an excerpt from David Constantine's forthcoming novel In Another Country. A limited edition, numbered chapbook, it's available to subscribers only. So, subscribe already.


My contribution looks at the career of Montreal's Ronald J. Cooke, a man remembered (not really) for the 1949 novel The House on Craig Street. Harlequin's seventh book, its sales prompted News Stand Library to produce an edition for the American market.


Both covers are by D. Rickard. Aren't they swell?

An industrious writer, Cooke was quick with a second novel, The Mayor of Côte St. Paul (1950), but it didn't do nearly as well. He spent the remainder of his career publishing industry magazines and booklets with titles like How to Clip Newspaper Articles for Big Profits. Each indistinct in their own way,  the literary historian finds relief in The House on Dorchester Street (1979), a late third novel that tries to capture something of past success.


It failed.

One can find fault with publisher Vesta's shoddy production values, but blame really belongs to Cooke himself. The House on Dorchester Street is both horrible and forgettable; in this way, it marks a significant departure for Cooke as a novelist. The House on Craig Street is a bad piece of writing, but lingers in one's memory. The Mayor of Côte St. Paul, though only slightly better, has elements so interesting and strange – rumrunning, stalking, drowning, death by darts and Lunenburg lingerie – that I've encouraged its reissue as part of the Ricochet Books series.

Look for it early in the New Year.


I think the cover is swell.

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24 November 2014

The Dreams That Things Are Made Of



Farewell My Dreams [La fin des songes]
Robert Élie [trans. Irene Coffin]
Toronto: Ryerson, 1954 

Farewell My Dreams isn't a title I would've used; "The End of Dreams", the most literal translation, works just fine. No wispy romance, this debut novel is one of the most depressing and rewarding books I've read this year – and there are just thirty-seven more days to go.

Friends in youth, Marcel Larocque and Bernard Guerin enter middle-age connected only through respective marriages to sisters Jeanne and Nicole. No one is happy. Pudgy Marcel, a Montreal journalist, stares too long at his wife's youngest sister and dreams of past infatuations. Privileged Bernard, a lazy lawyer, wanders aimlessly, half-hoping that something will interest. When offered a seat in Quebec City, he goes through the motions, but stops in his tracks at the sign of the first obstacle. Meanwhile, the wives suffer.

Though the plot suggests otherwise, this is much more than a novel of mid-life crises. Démon de midi takes on new meaning as Marcel's mental illness, so very subtle in the early pages, comes to dominate his actions.

Six decades after first publication, La fin des songes remains in print; not so the English-language translation. I doubt this has anything to do with Irene Coffin, though her work is clumsy and talents ill-suited. The language is stilted, her dialogue peppered with words like "shall" and "forsooth".

Yes, forsooth.

Beaver Hall Hill is "Cote Beaver Hall" and Montreal's great commercial street appears variously as "Ste.-Catherine" and "Sainte-Catherine". The biggest gaff of all comes when the translator has Bernard announce that he is looking to be elected federally.

My advice? Read it in the original if you can. Read the translation if you can't. Either way, you'll be both depressed and rewarded.

A coincidence: Remember Douglas Sanderson's The Deadly Dames? Sure you do. That's the thriller in which a woman is killed by a streetcar rounding Peel and Ste-Catherine. Well, the very same corner features in La fin des songes:
He stopped a taxi which took him to the corner of Peel and Ste.-Catherine. The street-cars were making an infernal din and the crowd, as dense as at noon, flowed slowly. He landed in a tavern where smoke and bad lighting gave the beer drinkers a phantom-like appearance. It suited his mood well, but Bernard began to laugh. "I surely am not going to live in the atmosphere of detective stories."  
The critics rave: La fin des songes received the Prix David and has been described as the great novel of la Grande Noiceur. Reception of the English-language edition was enthusiastic – the exception being a critic I know only as "A.G.P.". Here he is in the 4 March 1955 edition of the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph:
When the psychologically sound people must face a reality that continues to be fairly rugged and seek escape through the medium of fiction, to depress them with neurotic maunderings is to substitute a stone for nourishing bread.
The critic later provides these words of advice:
There is an abundance of material in French Canada for more cheerful and more constructive themes. Judged by the standards of Mr. Elie's [sic] literary school these may be less dramatic but, so far as I have been able to feel their collective pulse, the contemporary reading public, by a large majority, want to be amused and to laugh. At the very least, it would be interesting for him to provide this sort of escape by way of change of pace, if nothing more.
A.G.P. makes the mistake of identifying Bernard as "Bertrand". Pay him no mind.

Object: An attractive 213-page hardcover bound in pale blue cloth with burgundy print, my copy belonged to my father. The dust jacket sells other Ryerson novels by Ada Pierce Chambers, Will R. Bird, Gaie Taylor and E.M. Granger Bennett. I'm a proud owner of the Bird title – bought for a buck last year in London.

(Cliquez pour agrandir)
Access: John Glassco once stole a copy of the first edition from the Royal Edward Laurentian Hospital; you'll find it with most of his other books at Queen's University. A total of twenty-three Canadian libraries have copies of the Coffin translation.

Though uncommon. decent copies of the Ryerson edition begin at under ten dollars. One copy – and only one copy – of the American edition, published in 1955 by New York's short-lived Bouregy & Curl, is on offer for US$14,


La fin des songs is currently available from Bibliothèque Québécoise, For some reason, I prefer Fides' earlier  Bibliothèque Canadienne-Français edition, even though the building on the cover does not appear in the novel. I purchased mine through the mail from a Montreal bookseller who claimed it was signed by Élie.

It wasn't… and the condition was much worse than described.

21 November 2014

The Mission of Sex: Canadians, Do Your Duty!


Rev. William Benjamin Basil King
26 February 1859 - 22 June 1928
RIP
A brief follow-up to Tuesday's post on Rev Basil King and his communications with the dead. This excerpt from The Abolishing of Death, King's 1919 non-fiction bestseller, quotes nineteenth-century chemist and photographer Henry Talbot*:

* Later in the book – blink and you'll miss it – Rev King reveals that this correspondent isn’t Talbot at all, but another dead man "well known throughout America and Europe". King explains that he does not feel free to disclose the true identity of his otherworldly communicant. Never mind. "As the interest of these papers is entirely in the nature of the message, the exact name of the speaker is of less importance," writes the reverend. What Henry Talbot thought of all this he does not say.
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18 November 2014

Basil King's Silent Unseen World



I'm not sure just why, but I've come to associate Basil King with the Christmas season. Perhaps it has something to do with my Church of England upbringing. An Anglican priest, this forgotten son of Charlottetown once led flocks in Halifax and Cambridge. It wasn't until failing eyesight brought early retirement that the reverend turned to writing novels. Given the his affliction, it seems an odd decision, though it's very much in keeping with what must surely rank as one of the strangest literary careers this or any other country has ever seen.

I've written here about King before, beginning with this post on the mystery and controversy surrounding his sixth novel, The Inner Shrine (1909), and his sudden elevation to bestsellerdom. He's one of those writers whose life is more interesting than his books, yet I find much more enjoyment reading his work than that of any Canadian contemporary, including his fellow Islander L.M. Montgomery.

Sacrilege, I know.

My favourite King book is The Abolishing of Death (1919). Very much an artifact of the Great War, it assured grief-stricken parents – Arthur Conan Doyle, for one – that communication with the fallen was possible. The reverend, who had neither child nor dog in the conflict, writes that the war dead live on in a psychedelic paradise he describes as "the new Heaven". Blown off limbs have grown back, disfigurement has been erased, and everyone looks simply marvellous.

Not exactly Anglican doctrine.

King had fallen under the spell of an attractive young woman, identified only as "Jennifer", through whom he became convinced he could communicate with those who had moved on to the new Heaven. One such soul, "a woman who had never been married, and in whom we supposed the earthly springs of maternity to have dried up, told him that she was now a mother."

Such joy!

As if a sign that he was on the right path, King's greatest commercial and critical triumph quickly followed with his script for Earthbound, a film  described in the November 1920 issue of Screenworld as "the highest achievement in the history of Motion Pictures."

Motion Picture News, September 1920
San Jose's Evening News was so entranced that it lost the ability to spell.
.
4 April 1921
Frederick Palmer, the Robert McKee of his day, praised Earthbound in his 1922 Palmer Plan Handbook:
"Earthbound," written by Basil King and produced by Goldwyn, has immortality as its theme – life after death. This is perhaps the most fascinating subject that ever engaged the attention of mankind – this greatest of all mysteries. And it will continue to be so until the mystery is solved. Out of the miseries of the late war arose a tremendous heart-hunger for more light – more definite knowledge concerning the hereafter. In response to this feeling such pictures as "Earthbound" were produced. Other photoplays dealing with the same subject but with less dramatic power followed in rapid succession.

That same year – 1922 – Palmer provided this synopsis in his Photoplay Plot Encyclopedia:

(cliquez pour agrandir)
I include Frederick Palmer's dry description because Earthbound is a lost film, and there's no other synopsis so detailed. The movie ranks with A Daughter of the GodsLondon After Dark, Convention City and The Miracle Man as those I most want to see.

But I can't.

Not in this world.

So, I study images such as these:


And I hold out for a Christmas miracle.

Update: Earthbound found!

A bonus: American Robert Bullock was so inspired his movie-going experience that he composed this poem, which was later included in his self-published Voices of Silence (Los Angeles, 1921):


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