Showing posts with label Maclean's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maclean's. Show all posts

04 March 2024

Too Soon?



Son of a Meech: The Best Brian Mulroney Jokes
Mark Breslin, ed.
Toronto: Ballantine, 1991
113 pages


News of Brian Mulroney's death last Thursday did not hit hard. I was no admirer. As a young man, I dismissed Mulroney as Ronald Reagan Lite. Simplistic, but not wrong. In 1984, the year he led his party to the second greatest electoral victory in this country's history, I was distrustful and skeptical. It came as no surprise when his government began selling off Crown assets at Fire Sale prices.

The Mulroney government spanned the better part of my twenties. He hung onto power, forcing the game into overtime, only to leave the political arena when it became clear he could not score a third victory. Mulroney all but destroyed the Progressive Conservative Party, leaving Kim Campbell and Peter Mackay to ensure its end. 

Nostalgia.

As I say, I was no admirer, though I've come to recognize the man's achievements. He somehow managed to convince Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that Apartheid was wrong, which was no small feat. He wasn't quite as successful in pushing Reagan on acid rain, but he did get a treaty through with the first President Bush. Mulroney really was our "greenest prime minister," a title included in most of the obituaries.

That he holds it still, three decades after he stepped down as PM, is a sad commentary on his successors.

Son of a Meech
Andy Donato
Toronto: Key Porter, 1990
Son of a Meech is so obvious a pun that Breslin's book is the second to use it as a title. The Meech Lake Accord was Mulroney's greatest gambit, and his greatest defeat. I was against it at the time but have since changed my position. I won't go into my reasoning as it would add five thousand words to this post. I'd much rather focus on this collection of "The Best Brian Mulroney Jokes" because it anticipates the hate, homophobia, and misogyny spread by Ezra Levant, Jeff Ballingall's Proud pages, and the Conservative Party itself.

And so, a warning to the reader, I will be quoting from this book.


Let's begin with stand-up comedian Mark Breslin's brief introduction, in which he describes how Son of a Meech was born:
After each show, members of the audience would approach me with jokes about [Mulroney] – vicious, mean, brutal – my kind of jokes. They weren't, as my literary sensei Jack Kapiica observed, the usual anti-government barbs, but personal ad hominem attacks on the man's most private self. These jokes stepped over the line of good taste, and I got interested.
Are these amongst the jokes he collected? 
Canadians no longer believe in the theory of trickle-down economics.
   Mulroney's trickled down on them long enough.

Not that the prime minister is crooked...
   But last week he swallowed a nail and it came out a corkscrew.
Perhaps not. They don't step over the line.

Variations of the trickle-down economics joke can be traced back to Reagan's first term. The corkscrew joke has iits origins in an insult General Sir Gerald Templer delivered to Lord Mountbatten.

The most interesting part of Breslin's introduction suggests that the jokes provided by his fans weren't quite so numerous as he claims:
The collection got bigger, so I turned to Martin Waxman for help. He researched volumes of comedy material of all eras for jokes about despots and cruel or incompetent leaders. Sad to say, they fit.
And so, we get these:
Did you hear the new Mulroney stamp has had to be recalled?
   People kept spitting on the wrong side.

What's the difference between the prime minister and yogurt?
   Yogurt has culture.

Why would Mulroney never be eaten by cannibals?
   Because he's too hard to swallow.

What do you call an Irish Canadian with half a brain?
   Mr. Prime Minister.
Take a tired old joke, insert a reference to Mulroney, and you're pretty much done, but not always. This one was made contemporary with a reference to yuppies:
What's the only mediocre product yuppies will buy?
   Brian Mulroney.
This one proved too difficult to update:
What's the difference between Howdy Doody and Prime Minister Mulroney?
   You can't see Mulroney's strings.
There are even a couple of blonde jokes:
How do you make Brian Mulroney laugh on Monday?
   Tell him a joke on Friday.

Looking to bolster his stodgy image, the P.M. spent the night at a rock club. And not wanting to be perceived as a square, he even snorted Sweet and Low. 
   He thought it was Diet Coke.

Tame stuff, lame stuff, these can't be the "vicious, mean, brutal jokes" Breslin says he likes.

I've given an imprecise depiction of this book's content, choosing to not share jokes involving bestiality or golden showers. There's also a fair amount of racist and homophobic writing, the most extreme being a joke that combines the two and involves the PM receiving a black coffee enema. I won't be sharing it either, but because I feel there should be at least one example of Breslin's vicious, mean, brutal jokes, I present this:
What's the difference between Rock Hudson and Brian Mulroney?
   Brian's aides have not killed him yet.
Mark Breslin's book is unlike earlier Canadian political humour books. It has little in common with Sex and the Single Prime Minister, The Naked Prime Minister, I Never Promised You a Rose GardenP.E.T., or even Andrew Donato's Son of a Meech, which seem gentle ribbing in comparison. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its treatment of the prime minister's wife, Mila Mulroney, to whom Breslin dedicates the book.


Of the dozens of jokes in which she figures, this is the most tame:
Over dessert at 24 Sussex, Mulroney whispered to Mila, "Drinking makes you absolutely gorgeous."
   "I don't drink," Mila replied.
   "Yes, but I do."
The others feature fellatio, anal sex, adultery, and descriptions of a variety of sexual positions. Plumbers feature in four of them. 'The Unity Issue,' eighth of the book's ten sections, focusses exclusively on Brian and Mila Mulroney's sex life.

Mark Breslin was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2017.

Was Brian Mulroney Canada's worst prime minister as Breslin claims? Of course not. The most recent Maclean's ranking had him in eighth spot, just below Jean Chrétien, which seemed about right. But then I remembered that Mulroney accepted bribes and was a tax cheat. How about we place him in the very middle, just below eleventh place John Diefenbaker, but above Alexander Mackenzie.

Seems more than fair.

Is Breslin's Canada's worst joke book?

Beyond a doubt.

Martin Brian Mulroney
20 March 1939, Baie Comeau, Quebec
29 February 2024, Palm Beech, Florida

RIP

Object and Access: A slim mass market paperback, I found my copy two years ago in a Kemptville, Ontario thrift store. Price: $1.00.

Son of a Meech is held by seven Canadian libraries, the most surprising being the Legislative Library of British Columbia. St Francis-Xavier University, Brian Mulroney's alma mater, does not have a copy. 

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01 January 2024

Start the Year with Stringer!


The 1924 New Year's edition of Maclean's. What is suggested? A year of excitement? Terror? Is there not something disturbing in this child's expression? That is a child, right? 

The issue's lead article, 'Saying "Success" With Flowers,' concerns T.W. Duggan, who "took hold of a bankrupt business — and made it worth half a million." The very thing one would expect in a periodical founded as The Business Magazine. After that comes fiction by Henry Holt, W. Michael Edwards, Stanley J. Weyman, and Canada's own Norma Phillips Muir. I was much more interested in this tempting advert. 

I was reminded again of how much I enjoyed Arthur Stringer's 1915 novel The Prairie Wife, which I read last February. And it makes me think of giving the author another go this year. I don't know about The Wire Tappers, Phantom Wires, and The Gun Runners – I've never been much for Stringer's adventure novels – but maybe something else. After all these years, I still haven't read The City of Peril. As a title, Are All Men Alike intrigues, in part because it lacks a question mark.

Rhetorical?

Wishing everyone a year of good books and fine reads!

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01 March 2021

Madge Macbeth's Great Gold Rush Hoax



The Long Day: Reminiscences of the Yukon
W.S. Dill [pseud Madge Macbeth]
Ottawa: Laurentian Press Syndicate, [c. 1926]
245 pages

I can't claim to have read every book by Madge Macbeth – her history The Lady Stanley Institute for Trained Nurses (Ottawa: Lady Stanley Institute Alumnae Association, 1959), isn't anywhere near the top of my TBR pile – but of those I've tackled The Land of Afternoon (Ottawa: Graphic, 1925) is by far my favourite. A scandalous political roman a clèpublished in the midst of a federal election, she kept herself well hidden under the pseudonym "Gilbert Knox." Conservative MP Alfred Ernest Fripp did his best to hunt down the author's true identity, as did Parliamentary Librarian Martin Burrell, but it wasn't until after Macbeth's death, four decades in the future, that all was revealed.

I expect Madge Macbeth didn't feel the need to be so cautious with "W.S. Dill."

The Long Day presents itself as a reminiscence of the Yukon Gold Rush as written by a man who witnessed it all. Dill didn't exist, Macbeth didn't visit, and yet this reader, steeped in Gold Rush lore owing to a great-grandfather who served in Skagway as a customs inspector, found little by way of fabrication. The author draws frequently and liberally from those who were there. Four pages come from boxer Frank "Paddy" Slavin's 1926 autobiography The Sydney Cornstalk. Another boxer, Jack Kearns is quoted at length from a wire service piece published in the 6 July 1926 edition of the Ottawa Journal


Macbeth finds her richest vein in William Ogilvie's Early Days on the Yukon (Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1913), retelling Ogilvie's stories in a way that verges on plagiarism. Consider this passage from The Long Day:
During the winter of '96-7, disturbing news—Queen Victoria was critically ill—Pope Leo the Thirteenth lay at the point of death—War between England and Russia was imminent, and, perhaps more agitated than all of these to the camp was the prospect of a prize fight between James J. Corbett and Robert Fitzsimmons, scheduled for the spring.
Now, here's Early Days on the Yukon:
During the winter the last arrival from the outside who brought any newspapers, brought dire intelligence indeed. According to the papers, Queen Victoria was critically ill; Pope Leo XIII was at the point of death; war was imminent between England and Russia; and, more exciting to the camp, a fight for the championship of the world was coming off some time in the spring between the star pugilists, James J. Corbett and Robert FitzSimmons [sic].
Tracking Macbeth's sources is good fun, but it does distract. After a bit, I abandoned the chase and settled back to enjoy the stories she'd chosen to tell. My favourite involves Charles Carbonneau — Macbeth has his Christian name as "Jules" — a Montreal barber who reinvented himself as M le Comte Carbonneau, representative of French wine merchants Messieurs Pierre Legros, Freres et Cie. A rogue of the highest order, he woos trouser-wearing miner Belinda Mulrooney, "the richest woman in the Klondike," marries her, builds a chateau in France, and then makes off with her younger sister.

The Baltimore Sun, 17 September 1906

It's a sad and sordid tale, told in such detail that you'd think W.S. Dill had borne witness to the courtship, attended the wedding, and had had a glass or two at the celebration that followed. In taking on the persona of her creation, she adopts a voice and writing style that is nothing like her previous books.

The first readers saw of W.S. Dill — as "Willard S. Dill" — came in 'Over the Chilkoot to Eldorado,' published in the 15 September 1926 issue of Maclean's. That initial article, the first in a series of three, brought considerable response, as relayed by editor H. Nigel Moore:


I have no idea whether Moore was in on the hoax. What I can say is that The Long Day was well-received. "Mr. Dill has produced an interesting book and one that will be appreciated by those who knew the gold country in the early days," said the Kingston Whig-Standard (14 February 1927). The 15 January 1927 edition of the Montreal Gazette describes it as "most interesting and instructive," concluding "the book is well worth reading. Anyone who has ever been to the Klondike should not miss it."

I recommend it myself, even to those who have never been to the Klondike. Macbeth has an eye for entertaining tales and a talent for telling them. I finish my own review with the observation that no critic noted this: W.S. Dill doesn't once feature in his book of reminiscences.


Trivia: Madge Macbeth's own reminiscences, Boulevard Career (Toronto: Brunswick, 1957), lists The Long Day as one of her titles. The Land of Afternoon remains hidden, despite Fripp and Burrell being long dead.


Object: A strange-looking thing, isn't it? The raised images and lettering reminds me of nothing so much as old university annuals.

The Long Day was first published in 1926 by Ottawa's legendary Graphic Press. In  his essay "Graphic Press and the Bibliographer" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada XVIII), David B. Kotin describes the Laurentian Press Syndicate as an imprint, which applied fresh title pages to sheets used in the Graphic-branded edition. The last pages of my copy list other Graphic titles, including Macbeth's The Day of Afternoon and Shackles.

My copy once belonged to Dr Bertram Reid MacKay (1885-1981), who served over four decades with the Geographical Survey of Canada. 


Doctor MacKay's Carling Avenue house is said to have begun sinking, such was the weight of his immense library. Sadly, for a man who was an early advocate for the preservation Ottawa's heritage buildings, that house was eventually razed. This architectural marvel stands in its place.


Access: Nine copies of the novel are currently listed for sale by online booksellers, none of whom recognize its true author. They range in price from US$20.00 to US$69.00. All are Graphic Press editions. Of those, the one you'll want to buy — price: US$40.56 — is offered with dust jacket by an Ottawa bookseller. 

Twenty-six Canadian libraries hold copies. Yukon Public Libraries does not have a copy.

Related post:

24 December 2020

'Old Lady Christmas Shopping' by Edna Jaques



Edna Jaques, Poet Laureate of the Home, as captured by J.W. Tetlow for the 1 September 1951 issue of Maclean's magazine. This poem comes from Back-Door Neighbors (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1946).


23 June 2020

Arthur Mayse: The Gift of His Extraordinary Life


 

At ten, The Beachcombers consumed a steady portion of my week – one half-hour each Sunday evening – and yet Arthur Mayse's name meant nothing to me. Truth be told, I never paid much attention to the show's credits. Mayse wrote four of the early episodes; they followed more than sixty short stories, novellas, and novels published in Liberty, Argosy, Collier's, Maclean's, and the Saturday Evening Post. They also followed three novels, including 1952's Desperate Search, a Post serial and Sears Book Club selection, which was adapted to the screen in a film starring Howard Keel and Jane Greer. IMDb has the trailer.


Arthur "Bill" Mayse was a Manitoban, born amongst the Swampy Cree to Baptist missionaries, though he lived most of his life in British Columbia, the province in which most of his fiction is set. A newspaperman, Mayse wrote for the Vancouver Sun, the Province, and was for thirty years a columnist for the Victoria Times-Colonist. His obituary appeared in the same edition as his final column.

I moved from Montreal to Vancouver not long after Arthur Mayse died. In my fifteen years in British Columbia – eight of which I served on the Executive of the Federation of BC Writers (two as Vice-President, two as President) – I never once heard anyone mention his name.

How can this be?

Arthur Mayse lived a most remarkable life. This early part of his Vancouver Sun obituary (25 March 1992), penned by son-in-law Stephen Hume, gives a sense of what we lost in his passing:
He knew Cowichan shamans, Sointula pukka fighters, tame apes from the A-frame camps, Chinese laborers, unrepentant Wobblies. More than anything, he knew and loved the country. He lived it, breathed it, fished it and sometimes despaired at what was being done to it in the ignorant clamor called progress.
      He was an ace reporter for The Province from the day he was hired out of UBC, a prize-winning poet one course short of graduation. He'd been freelancing pieces at space rates until the managing editor noticed he earned more from his column-inch scale than reporters did on full salary and hired him to save money.
     In 1933, covering the first ascent of Mount Waddington, highest peak in the Coast Range and a notorious killer of climbers, he packed carrier pigeons to the high base camp. Hawks picked them off at the treeline, so he did a solo descent through brutal terrain, bushwhacked his way to tidewater, cat danced the log booms and sweet-talked a tugboat skipper into taking him downcoast to file his exclusive story.
It ends:
When word of his death came, we went outside and looked into a night sky blazing with stars. The Big Dipper wheeled down toward the horizon, the same constellation Bill watched from Cowichan Bay in his dugout canoe (heisted for him by shaman Cultus Tommy) as a boy so long ago. It seemed right that he should escape weary age and sorrow at the hinge of the year. He died just before dawn. It was equinox, the first day of spring. We took his two-year-old granddaughter to a sea-run cutthroat beach –  a child he loved, a place he loved – and gave thanks for the gift of his extraordinary life.
Extraordinary indeed.

It wasn't until this month that I'd read anything by Arthur Mayse. The strength of that work, his debut novel Perilous Passage, sent me off on a tear through the short stories he published in Maclean's. It's sad to think that they came and went with each new issue – none were ever collected – and yet I can't help but appreciate a time in which fiction featured in our best magazines. And I can't help but admire the artists who provided illustrations for his stories.

15 February 1940
1 April 1945
15 May 1945
15 September 1945
15 October 1946
15 March 1951

Does "The Hex-Man of Croacker's Creek" have anything to do with "The Hexman," one of Mayse's Beachcombers scripts?

The question might be addressed in the introduction to a collection of his short stories.

Is the publication of such a thing not overdue?

Related posts:

02 June 2020

Rhyming Leads to Ruin (and a correction)



Ballads of a Bohemian
Robert W. Service
New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1921
220 pages

It would be interesting to see sales figures for Robert W. Service's books of poetry; my feeling is that each sold fewer copies than the last. Ballads of a Bohemian, his fifth, followed Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916), which followed Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912), which followed Ballads of a Cheechako (1909), which followed Songs of the Sourdough (1907). It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Songs of the SourdoughThe Spell of the Yukon to you Yankee readers – accrued more sales than all the others put together.

This is not to suggest that Ballads of a Bohemian was a commercial failure. Far from it! Ninety-nine years after publication, ninety-nine-year-old copies are thick on the ground. I bought mine two years ago for two dollars. It was read last month, along with Service's forgotten 1926 thriller, The Master of the Microbe (the subject of next month's Canadian Notes & Queries column). Both reminded me that when Service left Dawson City for the City of Light, he arrived on the eve of the Great War.

Ballads of a Bohemian is presented as the diary of someone named Stephen Poore, a young American expatriate who, very much like Service, quits secure employment for the life of a versifier. Each entry serves to introduce a Poore poem or two or three. The date of the first – "April 1914" – establishes an ever-hanging, ever-darkening cloud. Poole moves through Montparnasse with the excitement, enthusiasm and optimism of youth, but we people know what's coming.

A few pages in, I began to question whether Stephen Poole can be considered a bohemian. Some cred comes in his claim that he "kicked over an office stool and came to Paris thinking to make a living by my pen," but there's otherwise nothing at all unconventional about the man. Poole demonstrates remarkable discipline and industry. He lives modestly, has no vices, and knows no women. Poole's acquaintances are limited to "short story man" MacBean and a poet named Saxon Dane. The former is appreciated as a mentor, while the latter is described as dislikable and pretentious: "Originality is his sin," writes Poole:
He strains after it in every line. I must confess I think much of the free verse he writes is really prose, and a good deal of it blank verse chopped up into odd lengths. He talks of assonance and color, of stress and pause and accent, and bewilders me with his theories.
Poole's verse push no boundaries. After presenting "On the Boulevard," the tenth of the sixty-six poems bound between these boards, he brags:
I wrote this so quickly that I might almost say I had reached the end before I had come to the beginning. In such a mood I wonder why everybody does not write poetry. Get a Roget's Thesaurus, a rhyming dictionary: sit before your typewriter with a strong glass of coffee at your elbow, and just click the stuff off.
Poole's verse is conventional, sentimental, romantic, melodramatic, and he knows it:
I have no illusions about myself. I am not fool enough to think I am a poet, but I have a knack of rhyme and I love to make verses. Mine is a tootling, tin-whistle music. Humbly and afar I follow in the footsteps of Praed and Lampson, of Field and Riley, hoping that in time my Muse may bring me bread and butter. So far, however, it has been all kicks and no coppers. And to-night I am at the end of my tether. I wish I knew where to-morrow’s breakfast was coming from. Well, since rhyming’s been my ruin, let me rhyme to the bitter end.
Praed? Lampson? Field? Riley? None of those names meant a thing to me. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica informs that Winthrop Mackworth Praed was the author of "brilliant rhythmic trifles." The same edition describes Frederick Locker-Lampson as a poet belonging "to the choir who deal with the gay rather than the grave in verse—with the polished and witty rather than the lofty or emotional."


Field is "Michael Field," the pseudonym of Edith Cooper and her aunt, guardian, and lover Katharine Bradley (above), writers of more than two dozen verse dramas.* James Whitcomb Riley, the lone American, was a "poet remembered for nostalgic dialect verse and often called 'the poet of the common people.'" Encyclopædia Britannica tells me so.

I thank Service for providing an introduction to each. I may just read them one day.

(Am I wrong in being disturbed by the relationship between Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley?)

Ballads of a Bohemian sold well, reaching #1 Bookseller & Stationer's "Non-Fiction" list. According to Publishers Weekly, it reached #6 south of the border. Reviews tended toward the positive, if not the laudatory. I've not come across one that addresses the volume's greatest flaw: Service's inability to write as anyone but himself. I can't imagine that readers Service's previous books would detect any difference between the poetry of the Bard of the Yukon and that of his character.

Might I be too hash in suggesting Service incapable? Evidence suggests that he made no effort at all.


Like the Service books that came before, Ballads of a Bohemian is a haphazard gathering of verse written and published over a period of several years. "The Blood-Red Fourragère" (Maclean's, April 1918). "The Twa Jocks" (Maclean's, May 1918), "Kelly of the Legion" (Maclean's, June 1918), and "The Wife" (Maclean's, December,  1918) weren't presented as anything other than Robert W. Service poems. Similarly, verse from the book published after Ballads of a Bohemian arrived in stores – "Julot the Apache" (Cosmopolitan, March 1921), "The Absinthe Drinkers" (Cosmopolitan, April 1921), "The Death of Marie Toro" (Cosmopolitan, May 1921) – have no accompanying notes about the Poole character.

Service makes one small effort to separate himself from his character, having Poole write about a poem titled "Lucille":
Well, here’s the thing that has turned the tide for me. It is somewhat in the vein of “Sourdough” Service, the Yukon bard. I don’t think much of his stuff, but they say he makes heaps of money. I can well believe it, for he drives a Hispano-Suiza in the Bois every afternoon. The other night he was with a crowd at the Dome Cafe, a chubby chap who sits in a corner and seldom speaks. I was disappointed. I thought he was a big, hairy man who swore like a trooper and mixed brandy with his beer. He only drank Vichy, poor fellow!
Tellingly, this verse "somewhat in the vein of 'Sourdough' Service," is Poole's easiest and most lucrative sale. It begins:
Of course you’ve heard of the Nancy Lee and how she sailed away
On her famous quest of the Arctic flea, to the wilds of Hudson’s Bay
For it was a foreign Prince's whim to collect this tiny cuss,
And a golden quid was no more to him than a copper to coves like us.
Young children may enjoy.

Ah, I'm being too harsh. Something of a sentimentalist and romantic myself, I was moved by "The Wee Shop," "The Pencil Seller," "The Death of Marie Toro" and, more than any other, "The Auction Sale." "The Coco-Fiend" chilled, but not so much as "It's Later Than You Think." I'd never encountered it in print, but I had heard it... and more than once. But where? These are the best of its seven stanzas:
Look again: yon dainty blonde,
All allure and golden grace,
Oh so willing to respond
Should you turn a smiling face.
Play your part, poor pretty doll;
Feast and frolic, pose and prink;
There’s the Morgue to end it all,
And it’s later than you think. 
Yon’s a playwright—mark his face,
Puffed and purple, tense and tired;
Pasha-like, he holds his place,
Hated, envied and admired.
How you gobble life, my friend;
Wine, and woman soft and pink!
Well, each tether has its end:
Sir, it’s later than you think. 
See yon living scarecrow pass
With a wild and wolfish stare
At each empty absinthe glass,
As if he saw Heaven there.
Poor damned wretch, to end your pain
There is still the Greater Drink.
Yonder waits the sanguine Seine...
It is later than you think.
Clicking the stuff off is not enough. Ballads of a Bohemian is a failure for lack of trying, which is not to say that it doesn't have things that may be salvaged. If you read it, you'll find them. The question is whether it's worth your time.

It's later than I think.

Bookseller & Stationer, November 1921

*Correction: Shortly after the above was posted, Daniel H. Grader was kind enough to write, suggesting: "Service's 'Field' can't possibly have been 'Michael Field', whose refined productions have nothing in common with the work of James Whitcomb Riley. Instead, he must have been referring to Eugene Field, the prolific American versifier best remembered as the creator of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod."

I have no doubt that he's correct.

A similar observation was left by reese in the comments.

My thanks to both.
 
Trivia: In 1921, the year Ballads of a Bohemian was published, Joseph Delmont and Hertha von Walther directed a film titled Julot der Apache. I've yet to find a link between it and "Julot the Apache." On the other hand, I've yet to find so much as a synopsis or still.

Julot seems to reappear in The Master of the Microbe... and then turns out to be someone else entirely. I hope this doesn't serve as a spoiler.

Object and Access: Slim, bound in dark green boards. The frontispiece features a portrait of the poet, looking not the least bit chubby.


Copies are common, but not in our public libraries. The book can be read here – gratis – thanks to the Internet Archive. Those preferring paper will find an inexpensive (£3.00) copy of T. Fisher Unwin's first British edition for sale online. At US$139.95, the most expensive copy currently on offer is Barse & Hopkins American first in dust jacket.

Related post:

31 December 2018

An Old Year's Audience with Our Lord



Post-war verse for a year's end by Ida Randolph Spragge, wife of Maclean's editor Thomas B. Costain, from the magazine's January 1919 issue.

THE GIFT OF 1918
            The hour had struck and through the hall
            Echoed the summoning angels call:
            "Enter, your race is run. O year,
            The Lord awaits your presence here." 
            Hastening then to his command,
            Before the Throne to take his stand,
            The old year, tattered, thorn and grim,
            But yet triumphant, knelt to Him. 
            "I laboured long, O God to find,
            The door to Peace for all mankind,
            That hideous war on earth should cease
            And freedom, bound, find swift release. 
            "My task is done Thou bidd'st me do,
            A world from chaos springs anew,
            A world where people worship Thee
            I love and deep humanity. 
            "For when the thundering guns were hushed
            And evil beast were beaten, crushed,
            With bursting heart and brimming eye
            The earth game thanks to Thee on high.
            "So take this gift I bring to-day,
            Nor from it turn Thy face away—
            The hearts of men who worship Thee
            In love and deep humanity."

Related posts:

03 December 2018

Robert W. Service's Revised Christmas Miracle (with the poet's forgotten reading instructions)





Much of this past weekend was spent in preparation for Christmas, but I did manage a couple of hours with the December 1918 edition of Maclean's. The first to hit news stands after the Armistice, it makes for very interesting reading. The opening piece, a column titled "The Business Outlook," reminds that Maclean's started out as The Business Magazine. It begins:
Peace came with a suddenness that has left the world a little breathless. Men of discernment had predicted from the very first that, when Germany once began to crack, the end would follow within a short period. But who was there bold enough at any time before September of the present year to stand out and say that the break-up would have come before the New Year?
I doubt Maclean's editor Thomas B. Costain saw the break-up coming. How else to explain American John J. Pershing instead of, say, Sir Arthur Currie, on the magazine's first post-war cover? Even the advertising department appears to have been caught off guard:


"Now That the War is Won" by Lieut-Col J.B. Maclean, is the only article that looks to have been commissioned après la guerre. And it's very short. Other articles include "An Unsolved Mystery: A Story of Warfare Under the Earth" by Lieut C. W. Tilbrook and an interview with the U.S. Secretary of War conducted by Pvt Harold R. Peat (Mrs Peat has an article of her own in the "Women and Their Work" section). Fiction fairly dominates the issue, with short stories and serialized novels by W. Victor Cook, W.A. Fraser, Allan C. Shore, Arthur Stringer and Alice Muriel Williamson. Sadly, Shore's "Santa Clause in Petticoats" isn't nearly as titillating as its title, but Stringer's story is fantastic.


All this fiction! As the advert suggests, something to take a soldier's mind off the grim realities that he faces:


The same could be said for those on the home front, though neither would've found escape in 'The Wife' by Robert Service, the issue's only verse. I thought I knew the poem, but I was wrong. An unfamiliar note at the end had me hunting for my copy of Service's Ballads of a Bohemian (1921), in which 'The Wife' was reprinted. Sure enough, the note isn't there – and there are other significant differences:


THE WIFE
[Maclean's, December 1918]
"Tell Annie I’ll be home in time
To help her with her Christmastree."
That’s what he wrote. . . Now hark the chime
Of Christmas bells—and where is he?
And how the house is dark and still!
And Annie’s sobbing on my knee. 
The page beside the candle flame
With cramped and cruel type was filled;
I read and read, until a name
Leapt at me. . . Oh! my heart was stilled!
My eye crept up the column, up
Unto its hateful heading: KILLED
And there was Annie on the stair:
"And will he not be long?" she said.
Her eyes were stars and in her hair
She’d tied a bit of ribband red;
And every step was Daddy’s sure;
Till wearied out, she stole to bed. 
And in the quiet of the night
Alone I decked the Christmas tree.
On every little ticket bright,
My tears were falling bitterly;
And in the street I heard them call.
"Another Splendid Victory." 
A Victory! What care I now?
A thousand victories were vain.
Here in my ruined hearth I vow
From out my black abyss of pain,
I’d rather, rather red defeat,
And have my man, my again. 
Aye, cowering by my cold fireplace,
My orphaned child upon my knee,
What care I for their Empire's pride,
Their pomp and power beyond the sea?
I'd gladly see it lost and lost
Could that bring back my dead to me. 
"But come, my dear; we will not wait.
Each tiny candle pink and white.
We'll set aglow—he may be late,
And we must ave all gay and bright."
(One makes mistakes. I’ll tell myself
I did not read that name aright.) 
"Come, Annie, come, We two will pray
For homes bereft of happiness;
For husbands fighting far away;
For little children fatherless.
Beside the shining tree we'll pray:
"'Oh, Father dear, protect and bless. . . Protect and bless. . .'" 
*  *  *  * 
What’s that? A step upon the stair!
A rush! The door thrown open wide!
My hero and my love! He's there,
And Annie’s laughing by his side. . .
I'm in his arms. . . I faint. . . I faint. . .
"Oh, God! Thy world is glorified."
NOTE.—The author wishes it understood that the sentiments expressed with reference to duty and the war are to be taken as an uncontrollable outburst in the first moments of bereavement, and not as in any sense an expression of opinion.

THE WIFE
[Ballads of a Bohemian, New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1921]
"Tell Annie I’ll be home in time
To help her with her Christmas-tree."
That’s what he wrote, and hark! the chime
Of Christmas bells, and where is he?
And how the house is dark and sad,
And Annie’s sobbing on my knee! 
The page beside the candle-flame
With cruel type was overfilled;
I read and read until a name
Leapt at me and my heart was stilled:
My eye crept up the column—up
Unto its hateful heading: Killed. 

And there was Annie on the stair:
"And will he not be long?" she said.
Her eyes were bright and in her hair
She’d twined a bit of riband red;
And every step was daddy’s sure,
Till tired out she went to bed. 
And there alone I sat so still,
With staring eyes that did not see;
The room was desolate and chill,
And desolate the heart of me;
Outside I heard the news-boys shrill:
"Another Glorious Victory!" 
A victory. . . . Ah! what care I?
A thousand victories are vain.
Here in my ruined home I cry
From out my black despair and pain,
I’d rather, rather damned defeat,
And have my man with me again. 
They talk to us of pride and power,
Of Empire vast beyond the sea;
As here beside my hearth I cower,
What mean such words as these to me?
Oh, will they lift the clouds that low’r,
Or light my load in years to be 
What matters it to us poor folk?
Who win or lose, it’s we who pay.
Oh, I would laugh beneath the yoke
If I had him at home to-day;
One’s home before one’s country comes:
Aye, so a million women say. 
"Hush, Annie dear, don’t sorrow so."
(How can I tell her?) “See, we’ll light
With tiny star of purest glow
Each little candle pink and white."
(They make mistakes. I’ll tell myself
I did not read that name aright.)
Come, dearest one; come, let us pray
Beside our gleaming Christmas-tree;
Just fold your little hands and say
These words so softly after me:
"God pity mothers in distress,
And little children fatherless." 
"God pity mothers in distress,
And little children fatherless." 
*  *  *  * 
What’s that? – a step upon the stair;
A shout! – the door thrown open wide!
My hero and my man is there.
And Annie’s leaping by his side. . .
The room reels round, I faint, I fall. . .
"O God! Thy world is glorified."

The original is better, don't you think? The note's disappearance speaks volumes to the differences between wartime and peacetime.

A note of my own: Lest anyone complain that the title of this post spoils the final stanza of 'The Wife,' I point out that this C.W. Jefferys illustration accompanied it's appearance in Maclean's:


26 November 2018

A Man Forgets His Identity (but not his manners)



The Thread of Flame
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1920
351 pages

I raced through this novel, caught up in its plot and hungry for the solution to the mystery surrounding its main character. He's first introduced as Jasper Soames, though he and the reader are well-aware that this is not his true identity:
It was a name that to me meant nothing. Referring it to my inner self, nothing vibrated, nothing rang. It was like trying to clink a piece of money on wool or cork or some other unresponsive material.
Soames, as he's known through most of the novel, remembers nothing of his life before awakening to find himself aboard a ship bound for New York. His cabin-mate, a blind boy named Drinkwater, is of no help as the two are strangers. Soames's search through his modest belongings yields nearly four hundred dollars, but no clues as to his true identity.

For the remainder of the crossing, Soames does his best to hide his amnesia, speaking in vague terms about his past and deflecting questions about himself. In doing so, he becomes a man of mystery and a subject of significant interest amongst the shipboard well-to-do: Boyd Averill, his wife Lulu, and his sister Mildred. Those of the working class accept Soames as is. They do not pry, do not judge, and readily accept him as one of their own. But Soames is not one of their own. Aware that he belongs to a different class, he is offended by their friendliness and gross familiarity, and looks forward to shedding the acquaintance of each just as soon as the ship docks. This doesn't happen as quickly as planned – Soames feels obliged to escort Drinkwater to the boy's new lodging – but soon enough he sets off on a new course.

Soames recognizes New York, and is certain that someone in the city will recognize him. To this end, he passes his days in the lobbies of the finest hotels, hoping that he will encounter an old, forgotten friend:
At any minute I might feel a clap on the shoulder, while some one shouted, "Hello, old Brown!" or, "Why, here's Billy Robinson! What'll we have to drink?"
These daily expeditions are undertaken with some trepidation, because he fears that he may have adopted the Soames name in fleeing some horrible crime.

When finally it comes, the clap on the shoulder is more of a tap:
In the interval too brief to reckon before turning round two possibilities were clear in my mind. The unknown crime from which I was running away might have found me out – or some friend had come to my deliverance. Either event would be welcome, for even if it were arrest I should learn my name and history.
Soames is disappointed in that the man who tapped his shoulder is Boyd Averill, a man who knows our hero – is he a hero? – only as Jasper Soames. Boyd is pleasant enough, but has growing suspicions about his mysterious acquaintance. Meanwhile, Boyd's sister Mildred grows close. She's attracted to Soames, recognizing him a man raised in privilege who is now on some sort of quest. In this way, he is a kindred spirit. The daughter and inheritor of great wealth, Mildred is searching desperately for a purpose in life.


Though the attraction is mutual, Soames begins to distance himself from Mildred:
Falling in love with anybody was no part of my program. It was out of the question for obvious reasons. In addition to these I was in love with some one else. That is to say, I knew I had been in love; I knew that in the portion of my life that had become obscured there had been an emotional drama of which the consciousness remained. It remained as a dream remains when we remember the vividness and forget the facts – but it remained. I could view my personality somewhat as you view a countryside after a storm has passed over it. Without having witnessed the storm you can tell what it was from the havoc left behind. There was some such havoc in myself.
Soames's decision is made all the easier because his "program" is failing. The days sitting in hotel lobbies are proving fruitless, and funds are running thin. With winter setting in, and no money to replace his summer suits, he cuts himself off from the Averill family, and moves into squalid lodgings alongside the very class of people he'd sought to reject.

There's more, much more, of course. I spoil nothing in revealing that Soames never quite regains his identity. Sure, he eventually learns his real name, and the nature of the "emotional drama," but he is forever altered by the event that caused his amnesia and his experiences living amongst the working class.

A wild ride, I very nearly finished The Thread of Flame in one sitting. What slowed my progress were a dozen or so pages near the end in which Soames tries to make sense of the Great War and the new world it created.

There's no fault in this.

I dare say we're trying to make sense of it still.

Favourite passage:
Ernestine, to do her justice, was as tolerant of me as she was of any one who wasn't a flag. The Flag having become her idol and she its high- priestess, she could talk of nothing else. The nation had apparently gone to war in order that the cult of the Flag should be the more firmly established; and all other matters passed outside the circle of her consideration. She knew I had been dead and had somehow become alive again; but as the detail didn't call for the raising of a flag she couldn't give her mind to it. As she could give her mind in no greater measure to Minna's canteen-work or Vio's clothes, I profited by the generous nature of her exclusions.
A mystery quickly solved: The Thread of Flame first appeared as a serial in Maclean's (December 1919 through 15 May 1920), accompanied by twenty illustrations by Charles L. Wrenn.

Maclean's, 1 February 1920
Ten months after publication of the concluding chapters, the magazine included this very strange piece:

Maclean's, 15 March 1921
I admit to having been mystified. The words the con quotes do not appear in the novel, nor do they appear in its serialization. A bit of sleuthing reveals that they come from an introduction that King wrote for Charles E. Chapin's Story: Written in Sing Sing Prison (New York: Putnam, 1920). I haven't read the book, but do remember it being described in The News Game (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1966) by Toronto Star reporter Roy Greenaway as "one of the best descriptions of nerve-shattering newspaper toil ever written." The tragic results of this toil are described in the opening sentences of the publisher's note appended to Chapin's Story:


Object: A bulky hardcover in red boards with white type, the book is made bulkier still by four John Alonso Williams illustrations. My copy, a first edition lacking dust jacket, was purchased just last month for US$9.00 from an Illinois bookseller. As is so often the case, I paid much more in shipping than I did for the book itself.



Access: Library and Archives Canada and fifteen of our academic libraries hold copies of the novel, but not one is found in any library in Prince Edward Island, the province of the author's birth.

Other than the Harper first, the only edition of which I am aware is a cheap Grosset & Dunlop.

The Harper edition can be read online here thanks to the University of Toronto and the Internet Archive.

Related post: