Showing posts with label Lampman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lampman. Show all posts

18 December 2023

The Globe's Best Books of 1923: 'Canadian Authors Can Be Read With Pleasure, Profit and Pride'


The Globe, 10 December 1923

Three men feature on the first page of the 1923 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' the 'Globe 100' of its day. The first, Paul A.W. Wallace, is recognized for his debut, Baptiste Larocque: Legends of French Canada. The second man, W.J. Healy, wrote Women of Red River, which was "arranged and published under the Women's Canadian Club of Winnipeg by Russell, Land, and Company." Norris Hodgins, the third, was recognized for Why Don't You Get Married.

All three are Canadian and all three are new to me.

I've been following the Globe's century-old lists of best books for nearly a decade now, and so think I know what to expect. There will be a dour pronouncement – in this case, "there is a dearth of outstanding books, especially novels, at the present time" – which will, in turn, be counterbalanced by something of a positive nature:

Under the 'More Canadiana' banner are books by Americans LeRoy Jeffers, Charles Towne, John M. Clarke, Charles W. Stokes, Paul Leland Haworth, and Briton Wilfred Grenfell. The final ingredient in this messy mix is George King's self-published Hockey Year Book. Its inclusion marks the first ever mention of the sport in 'Recent Books and the Outlook.'

I can't imagine how much it would fetch today. 84 Victoria Street itself is worth a bloody fortune.

Despite the flag waving, Canadian writers don't fair all that well in the Globe's 1923 list, accounting for just 46 of the 196 titles featured. As in 1922, poets dominate: 

Ballads and Lyrics - Bliss Carman
Selected Poems - W.H. Davies*
Morning in the West - Katherine Hale
Flint and Feather - E. Pauline Johnson
The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman
Shepard's Purse - Florence Randal Livesay 
 The Miracle Songs of Jesus - Wilson MacDonald
The Complete Poems of Tom MacInnes
The Songs of Israfel and Other Poems - Marion Osborne
The Garden of the Sun - A.E.S. Smythe
The Empire Builders - Robert Stead
Woman - Albert Durrant Watson

That's twelve titles! From a nation of nine million! The Globe informs that the rest of the world produced just five collections of note!

For the second year running, we have the inclusion of The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman, of which there is no record. And so, for the second year, I'll suggest that what is being referred to is The Poems of Archibald Lampman, first published in 1900 by George N. Morang. As Ryan Porter notes, the collection enjoyed several reprints. Still, I see no evidence of a new edition in 1923, never mind 1922. I'll say the same of E. Pauline Johnson's 1912 Flint and Feather. There was a new edition of Robert Stead's The Empire Builders, which just happens to be the only poetry title I own.


Curiously, Wilson MacDonald's The Song of Prairie Land is singled out for mention in the introduction to the poetry list, yet only his The Miracle Songs of Jesus makes the cut.

Our non-fiction writers fare the worst with just four of the fifty titles listed. I don't have a copy of even one, though I am interested in the Marjorie Pickthall, "a memorial volume edited by Helena Coleman," which does not seem to exist.  

Our writers of fiction don't fare much better, contributing just eight titles to the list: 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft - Ralph Connor
Lantern Marsh - Beaumont S. Cornell
Why Don't You Get Married? - Norris Hodgins
The Happy Isles - Basil King
When Christmas Crossed the Peace - Nellie L. McClung
Emily of New Moon - L.M. Montgomery
The Viking Heart - Laura Goodman Salverson
Spirit of Iron - Harwood Steele

There were twenty-one Canadian works of fiction on the 1922 list.

Here are some that made it:

And here are some that did not:

Frank L. Packard's The Four Stragglers is at the bottom of the pile, Stephen Leacock's Over the Footlights is at the top. Between the two is Winnifred Eaton's "Cattle" – or is it Cattle? – which may just be the best Canadian novel of 1923. 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft, which I've not read, is one of my $2 Connors.  

I've long been on the lookout for Beaumont S. Cornell's lone novel Lantern Marsh because it's set in a thinly disguised Brockville, Ontario, which is where I do my weekly grocery shopping.  

Basil King's novel The Happy Isles is praised as the best since his 1909 breakthrough The Inner Shrine. I do like it, but nowhere near as much as The Empty Sack (1921).

I was once engaged to a woman who knew a woman who had been engaged to Harwood Steele. 

And so it goes.

* Correction: Roger Allen writes, "Are you sure the dozen poets are Canadian? The W.H. Davies nearly everyone thinks of - still in print - is the author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. He only became a poet because he lost a leg jumping on a train in Canada and had to go back to Britain, but that doesn't make him Canadian."

He's correct, of course. I can't explain the error, though it might have something to do with a bottle of Canadian Club sent by an aunt as an early Christmas gift. 

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02 December 2022

Best Books of 1922: Amidst a Flood of Mediocrity


Published one hundred years ago today, the 1922 Globe round-up of the year's noteworthy books doesn't display much by way of enthusiasm. The three pages – previous years had five – begin with a reference to something once said by long-dead Englishman George Crabbe. It really sets the tone:

The trend may be away from fiction, but fiction makes for nearly half of the Globe's list. And I can't help but note that not one science title features.

The newspaper's greatest focus is on "GENERAL FICTION," by which it means fiction that is not Canadian. Babbit is recognized as the year's big title. I can't quibble because I still haven't read it. I have read The Beautiful and Damned, which doesn't feature.

My copies of the first Canadian editions
The big work of "CANADIAN FICTION" is Ethel M. Chapman's God's Green Country, a novel that is new to me. Here's what the Globe has to say:


God's Green Country is long out of print, as is every other Canadian fiction title selected by the Globe:
The Return of Blue Pete - Luke Allan [Lacey Amy]
Flowing Gold - Rex Beach
Chalk Talks - J.W. Bengough
Indian Legends of Vancouver Island - Alfred Carmichael
God's Green Country - Ethel M. Chapman
King's Arrow - H.A. Cody
Caste - W.A. Fraser
Pagan Love - John Murray Gibbon
D'Arcy Conyers - Bertal Heeney
Mortimer's Gold - Harold Horn
The Timber Pirate - Charles Christopher Jenkins
The Bells of St Stephens - Marian Keith
The Dust Flower - Basil King
The Twenty-first Burr - Victor Lauriston
Openway - Archie P. McKinshie
Over 'ere and Back Home - P. O'D
Tillicums of the Trail - George C.F. Pringle
Poisoned Paradise - Robert W. Service
Neighbors - Robert Stead
The Prairie Child - Arthur Stringer
Salt Seas and Sailormen - Frederick William Wallace
The Shack Locker - Frederick William Wallace
Ignore Flowing Gold; a Texas adventure by American Rex Beach, its inclusion is a mistake. Of the twenty-one truly Canadian titles, I've read only Basil King's The Dust Flower.  It may be the author's weakest novel – I have ten left to tackle – but I'm not surprised that it made the cut. What does surprise is the absence of Bertrand W. Sinclair's The Hidden Places, which may just be the best Canadian novel of 1922.

My collection of the Globe's 1922 Canadian fiction titles.
Four that didn't make the list.
In its selection of Canadian fiction titles, the Globe demonstrates a certain preference. Hinted at in the praise of God's Green Country, it is stated plainly in the description of D'Arcy Conyers.* 


We get all too few of such?

Really?

Most Canadian novels dating from this time have rural settings.

More, please?

The Globe is most complimentary in its opinion of Canadian verse, but not before taking a dig at the Mother Country: "In Britain, during the past year, deflation has not been confined to finance, and poetry scarcely rises above the horizon." But Canada, young Canada, imbued with "national sentiment stimulated by the war, receives refreshing satisfaction from the study of the poet's message."

Nine of the fourteen volumes of verse are Canadian:
Jean Blewett's Poems - Jean Blewett
Complete Poems of Wilfred Campbell - Wilfred Campbell
Contrasts - Lawren Harris
Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman - Archibald Lampman
Fires of Driftwood - Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
The Woodcarver's Wife and Later Poems - Marjorie L. Pickthall
Christ in the Strand and Other Poems - James A. Roy
Verse and Reverse - Toronto Women's Press Club
Impressive... until one realizes that Complete Poems of Wilfred Campbell and Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman do not exist. Going by the descriptions, I'm sure what's being referred to are The Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell and yet another edition Archibald Lampman's Poems (first published by Morag in 1900). I own two earlier editions of the latter and a very nice copy of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's Fires of Driftwood. Am willing to trade all three for a first of Lawren Harris's Contrasts.


We Canadians don't do nearly as well in the rest of the list, nearly falling flat in the "JUVENILE" category – two titles in a list of thirty-four – but we hold our own overall in contributing 47 of the Globe's 167 titles.

Of the forty-seven, Over Prairie Trails by Frederick Philip Grove is in print today as a New Canadian Library title. New Canadian Library being no more, it's old stock now housed somewhere in a Penguin Random House warehouse.

What else is in print?

Nothing?

Oh, Canada.

* In researching Bertal Heeney's D'Arcy Conyers, I stumbled upon the work of British actor, director, and screenwriter Darcy Conyers (1919-1973). Amongst his many accomplishments is the screenplay for the 1961 comedy The Night We Got the Bird. The IMDb summary promises an evening of good fun:
Cyril's family is unaware that he and his cabinet-maker employee are making and selling false antique furniture. It is only when he dies and his salesman Bernie marries his widow Julie that the truth comes out through Cecil re-appearing as a parrot, puzzlingly given as a wedding gift. When a local Brighton heavy realises he's been conned the family band together to try and fix things. 

20 September 2021

'The Modern Politician' by Archibald Lampman


Canadian Illustrated News
28 September 1878

On the day of the 44th Canadian general election, verse from The Poems of Archibald Lampman (Toronto: Morang, 1900). 

THE MODERN POLITICIAN

          What manner of soul is his to whom high truth
          Is but the plaything of a feverish hour,
          A dangling ladder to the ghost of power!
          Gone are the grandeurs of the world's iron youth,
          When kings were mighty, being made by swords.
          Now comes the transit age, the age of brass,
          When clowns into the vacant empires pass,
          Blinding the multitude with specious words.
          To them faith, kinship, truth and verity,
          Man's sacred rights and very holiest thing,
          Are but the counters at a desperate play,
          Flippant and reckless what the end may be,
          So that they glitter, each his little day,
          The little mimic of a vanished king.

01 April 2020

"April Night" by Archibald Lampman



Not as our home looks today, but as it did late last April.

It will again.

For now, this from Archibald Lampman's Poems (Toronto: William Briggs, 1915):

APRIL NIGHT
How deep the April night is in its noon,
The hopeful, solemn, many-murmured night!
The earth lies hushed with expectation; bright
Above the world's dark border burns the moon,
Yellow and large; from forest floorways, strewn
With flowers, and fields that tingle with new birth,
The moist smell of the unimprisoned earth
Come up, a sigh, a haunting promise. Soon 
Ah, soon, the teeming triumph! At my feet
The river with its stately sweep and wheel
Moves on slow-motioned, luminous, gray like steel.
From fields far off whose watery hollows gleam,
Aye with blown throats that make the long hours sweet,
The sleepless toads are murmuring in their dreams.

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01 January 2019

'A January Morning' by Archibald Lampman



A JANUARY MORNING
      The glittering roofs are still with frost; each worn
      Black chimney builds into the quiet sky
      Its curling pile to crumble silently.
      Far out to westward on the edge of morn,
      The slender misty city towers up-borne
      Glimmer faint rose against the pallid blue;
      And yonder on those northern hills, the hue
      Of amethyst, hang fleeces dull as horn.
      And here behind me come the woodmen's sleighs
      With shouts and clamorous squeakings; might and main
      Up the steep slope the horses stamp and strain.
      Urged on by hoarse-tongued drivers—cheeks ablaze,
      Iced beards and frozen eyelids—team by team,
      With frost-fringed flanks, and nostrils jetting steam.

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13 October 2018

Archibald Lampman's 'October Sunset' in October



OCTOBER SUNSET
          One moment the slim cloudflakes seem to lean
          With their sad sunward faces aureoled,
          And longing lips set downward brightening
          To take the last sweet hand kiss of the king,
          Gone down beyond the closing west acold;
          Paying no reverence to the slender queen,
          That like a curved olive leaf of gold
          Hangs low in heaven, rounded toward the sun,
          Or the small stars that one by one unfold
          Down the gray border of the night begun.
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01 October 2018

Archibald Lampman's 'In October' in October


The Poems of Archibald Lampman (Toronto: Musson, 1900)
IN OCTOBER
     Along the waste, a great way off, the pines
          Like tall slim priests of storm, stand up and bar
     The low long strip of dolorous red that lines
          The under west, where wet winds moan afar.
     The cornfields all are brown, and brown the meadows
          With the blown leaves' wind-heaped traceries,
     And the brown thistle stems that cast no shadows,
          And bear no bloom for bees. 
     As slowly earthward leaf by red leaf slips,
          The sad trees rustle in chill misery,
     A soft strange inner sound of pain-crazed lips,
          That move and murmur incoherently;
     As if all leaves, that yet have breath, were sighing,
          With pale hushed throats, for death is at the door,
     So many low soft masses for the dying
          Sweet leaves that live no more. 
     Here I will sit upon this naked stone,
          Draw my coat closer with my numbed hands,
     And hear the ferns sigh, and the wet woods moan,
          And send my heart out to the ashen lands;
     And I will ask myself what golden madness,
          What balmed breaths of dreamland spicery,
     What visions of soft laughter and light sadness
          Were sweet last month to me. 
     The dry dead leaves flit by with thin weird tunes,
          Like failing murmurs of some conquered creed,
     Graven in mystic markings with strange runes,
          That none but stars and biting winds may read;
     Here I will wait a little; I am weary,
          Not torn with pajn of any lurid hue,
     But only still and very gray and dreary,
          Sweet sombre lands, like you.

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01 November 2015

Archibald Lampman's 'In November'


from The Poems of Archibald Lampman
Toronto: Morang, 1905

31 December 2009

On the Year's Last Eve



From The Poems of Archibald Lampman, published by Musson in 1900, the year after the poet's death.

12 December 2009

Mystery at Beechwood Cemetery



Back in March, Jim Prentice introduced legislation recognizing Ottawa's Beechwood Cemetery as the national cemetery of Canada. Amongst other things, the preamble tells us that "Parliament considers a national cemetery to be a worthy final resting place for Governors General, Prime Ministers and recipients of the Canadian Victoria Cross." The bill passed easily, with little enthusiasm and no debate. It seems no one questioned how we'd managed for so long without a national cemetery, or why one was needed at all... and the matter of Canadian unity, given as a
raison d'être for the legislation, was never raised.


I don't think I'm alone in thinking the concept a touch foreign (read: American). That Beechwood is a "worthy final resting place" cannot be disputed, but then the same can be said for a great many cemeteries in this country. I'll add that, given its location, it is a bit odd that 142 years after Confederation just one Prime Minister (Robert Borden) and one Governor General (Ray Hnatyshan) have been buried at Beechwood. Of our 94 Victoria Cross recipients, not one chose the cemetery as their final resting place. What effect the nudging of the 40th Parliament will have going forth remains to be seen.

Even in a country that tends to ignore its literature, I think more associate the cemetery with Archibald Lampman than Messrs Borden and Hnatyshan. Lines from the poet's "In Beechwood Cemetery" grace the entrance, and he is buried on its grounds.


In fact, with Wilfred Campbell and D.C. Scott, Lampman is one of three prominent poets at rest in Beechwood (their number greater than the PMs, GGs and VC recipients combined). I've never visited Scott's grave, but I have the other two. Both have distinctive memorials. Lampman's, a rock with his name cut in the side, is otherwise natural, while Campbell's is in the form of a bench. I've never sat on this memorial, for much the same reason I try my best to avoid walking on graves; I don't like the thought of my feet resting above someone's head. That said, I find it admirable... and wonder that it has fallen into such disrepair. Various lead letters have disappeared, likely due to weather, but the great shame is that its focal point, a medallion, is also missing. This is no recent disappearance. A friend, tells me that the piece was absent when he first visited the cemetery some five decades ago.

And so, a new project: to determine the design of the missing medallion and, with permission, have a replacement cast.


Any inkling appreciated... all tips pursued.

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