Showing posts with label Unpublished works. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unpublished works. Show all posts

18 March 2024

Quick! To the Customs House!


Montreal Customs House, c. 1916

I've been on something of a Constance Beresford-Howe kick this past week, all to do with her 1947 novel Of This Day's Long Journey. It's a remarkable achievement from a young woman who was otherwise working on her MA and PhD. What struck most was the maturity of voice. Written by a twenty-four-old academic, it concerns a twenty-four-year-old academic, yet seems in no way autobiographical. Believe me, I've tried to find some sort of link between Constance Beresford-Howe and her heroine Cameron Brant; my first book, Character Parts, dealt with characters modelled on real people.

One resource I used in my search is Google's increasingly unstable, moribund News Archive.  


As might be expected, clicking "Petite, Pretty, Young Writer Teaches Mcgill Niaht School" brought me to this, in which I learned that the novelist was more than a mere cutie pie:


Beresford-Howe taught "The Art of Shorter Fiction;" Somerset Maugham's "Rain" and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, published just the previous year, were amongst the works discussed. One lecture was titled "Bad Fiction and How to Recognize It."

According to the article, the petite, pretty, young successful novelist was at the time completing her most ambitious project, "Drink Thy Wine With Joy," a historical novel inspired by a 16th-century English divorce. I recognized it as 1955's My Lady Greensleeves:


This Google News Archive link was even more interesting. 


'Facts Tout' brings to mind 'Bonjour Hi!' It's the very thing to get Premier François Legault's knickers in a twist. 

Speaking of knickers, are you not intrigued by "Panties Customs Dust?" I was! Clicking on the link brought some disappointment:

I shouldn't complain because columnist Harriet Hill's focus is Beresford-Howe's first, unpublished novel. In publicity material, publisher Dodd, Mead had teased of this bit of juvenilia, but provided few details. This is the most I've ever read about the manuscript:


Where is "Gillian" today? By the time the manuscript would have landed there, the eight-story Customs House had grown to take over an entire city block. It's occupied today by the Canada Border Services Agency, the descendant of the Department of Customs and Excise. I like to think that "Gillian" is somewhere in that building, perhaps close by seized copies of The Temple of Pederasty and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

Who knows? Given Pierre Poilievre's announced intention to give away six thousand federal buildings to developers, it might just turn up in a dumpster on rue Normand.

23 October 2023

Whither the Canadian American Bestseller?


Earlier this month, I tried to sell a friend on Basil King, as is my habit. I mentioned that in 1909 his novel The Inner Shrine outsold every other book in the United States, adding that he very nearly repeated that accomplishment the following year, and again the year after that. In this regard, King bested fellow Prince Edward Islander L.M. Montgomery, who never once made the annual top ten.

The annual top ten?

I refer here to lists compiled by The Bookman and Publisher's Weekly. The former cobbled together the first in 1895, the year Scotsman Ian Maclaren's Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush was all the rage. It didn't take long for a Canadian to appear. In 1896, Gilbert Parker's The Seats of the Mighty placed third, blocked from the top spot by Francis Hopkinson Smith's Tom Grogan and A Lady of Quality by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which I'm sure you've all read.

Gilbert Parker – later, Sir Gilbert Parker – was a publisher's dream. Scribner's 1912 twenty-four volume Works of Gilbert Parker is a beautiful thing. The more expensive editions come with a tipped in handwritten autographed letter.


And there was more to come! In 1914, Sir Gilbert's The Judgement House ended up as the republic's fourth best-selling book.

Parker is one of eight Canadians to hit the American year-end top ten. What follows is a year-by-year list  of those authors and their titles, beginning with Parker's The Seats of the Mighty. Some may question the inclusion of Saul Bellow and Arthur Hailey. My position on both men is simple. Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec. He was a nine-year-old when his family left Canada for the United States. Arthur Hailey immigrated to this country after the Second World War and became a Canadian citizen.

Long-time Toronto resident John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire, which placed second in 1981, is not included because it wasn't until 2019 that he became a Canadian citizen.

W.H. Blake's translation of Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelain, which in 1922 was the eighth bestselling book in the United States is excluded. Though the novel has been described as a "a classic of French-Canadian literature," Hémon was French, not French-Canadian. His visit to this country lasted months, not years. My late friend Michael Gnarowski argued that Hémon would've become a citizen had he not been struck and killed by a train whilst walking the tracks outside Chapleau, Ontario. On this we disagreed.

1896

#3 – The Seats of the Mighty by Gilbert Parker

"A Romance of Old Quebec" with cameos by Wolfe and Montcalm, The Seats of the Mighty was the only Parker novel to been adopted as a New Canadian Library title. It's available today through Wilfrid Laurier Press.


1901 

#4 – The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker

#4The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker

A Montreal melodrama involving amnesia, murder, drinking, romance, and false identity, I raced through The Right of Way last year. Recommended.

Two spots down from Parker – at #6 – we find The Visits of Elizabeth, the debut novel by one-time Guelph girl Elinor Glyn.

1902

#4 – The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker#6 – The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker

The Right of Way again, and why not! It's a hell of a story, as evidenced by the fact that it was adapted for Broadway. Hollywood took it on three times!




1907

#2  The Weavers by Gilbert Parker

"A Tale of England and Egypt of Fifty Years Ago," this one concerns a young Quaker who brings the Gospel to the Land of the Pharaohs. Must admit that each time I see this title I hear "Goodnight, Irene." 


#9 The Doctor by Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon] 

I've not read this Connor, but Ron Scheer did. Sadly, Ron is no longer with us. I miss his scholarship and astute criticism. Happily, his blog survives. Ron's review of The Doctor is a fine example of his work.


1908

#10  The Weavers by Gilbert Parker

The Weavers again, yet unlike The Right of Way, this one never made Broadway, nor was it adapted by Hollywood.

Seems an opportunity.




1909 

#1 – The Inner Shrine by Anonymous [Basil King]

Reverend King's sixth novel, The Inner Shrine was the year's literary sensation. I think that much of the interest had to do with questions over authorship. Did it come from the pen of Edith Wharton? Henry James? How about the daughter of Willian Dean Howells?

 

1910
#3 – The Wild Olive by the author of The Inner Shrine [Basil King]

Publisher Harper maintains the mystery.

I once described The Wild Olive as the best Basil King novel I'd ever read. Ah, but that was seven years ago and I was so young; The Empty Sack and The Thread of Flame are even better.


1912

#2  – The Street Called Straight by the author of The Inner Shrine [Basil King]

Shortly after The Street Called Straight was published, Reverend King revealed himself as the author of all three books. He continued to have success commercially, but his books never again appeared in the year-end top ten.


1913

#4  The Judgement House by Gilbert Parker

Lesser-known today – but then isn't Parker himself? – The Judgement House is set against the backdrop of the Boer War. Apparently, a femme fatale features. You can bet I'll be ordering a copy!
1918

#7  The Major by Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon]

One of Connor's Alberta novels, as expected, it was heavily influenced by the Great War. Germans and their country's imperialist aspirations don't come off nearly so well as settlers establishing themselves on the Prairies.



1919

#5 – The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land by Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon]

A Great War novel, complete with horrors. The author served as Chaplain in the 43rd Cameron Highlanders. I have more to say on this in an old post on New Canadian Library intros.



1927

#5 
– Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

The book that launched the longest running series of novels in Canadian history. Sixteen in total! 







1928

#9 
– Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

Jalna. Of course, Jalna. Do not get me started on the CBC's disastrous The Whiteoaks of Jalna, which at age ten served as my introduction to the works of Mazo de la Roche, and nearly killed my interest in Canadian literature.




1931

#8 
– Finch's Fortune by Mazo de la Roche

Interestingly, Finch's Fortune is the third volume in the Jalna saga; Whiteoaks of Jalna, the second, failed to make the year-end top ten.

 



1933

#7 – The Master of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

The last in the series make the year-end top ten, which is not to say that Jalna was abandoned by the reading public. The surprisingly brief de la Roche Canadian Encyclopedia entry reports: "Jalna novels have sold 9 million copies in 193 English- and 92 foreign-language editions."
 

1945

#3 – 
The Black Rose by Thomas B. Costain

The Black Rose sold over two million copies. I learned this courtesy of The Canadian Encylopedia's entry on Costain, which is even shorter than de la Roche's!

More anon.


#9 
– Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham

The author's second and final novel, I've made the argument that its success had a paralyzing effect. Earth and High Heaven was to have been a film starring Katherine Hepburn, but Gentleman's Agreement, which deals with similar material, put an end to all that.


1946

#8 – 
The Black Rose by Thomas B. Costain

The Black Rose is a historical novel about a young Saxon's adventures in thirteenth-century China. I'm not much taken by the idea, but millions were. To be frank, I'm much more interested in the Hollywood adaptation starring Orson Welles, Tyrone Power, and Cécile Aubry, but not so much that I've seen it.

1947

#2 
– The Moneyman by Thomas B. Costain

Apparently, Thomas B. Costain wrote four unpublished historical novels in high school, one of which focussed on Maurice of Nassau, Prince of OrangeThe Moneyman takes as its inspiration the life of Jacques Couer, royal banker to Charles VII of France.


1949

#7 
The High Towers by Thomas B. Costain

One of two historical novels Costain set in what is now Canada; the other being Son of a Hundred Kings (1950). It was through my father's copy of the 1950 Bantam paperback edition that I was introduced to Costain. and so I share its cover and not Doubleday's bland and predictable jacket illustration.
 

1952

#1 
– The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain

Here Costain enters Lloyd C. Douglas territory with the tale of Basil of Antioch, a sensitive silversmith who is commissioned to decorate the chalice used by Christ in the last supper.




1953

#2 
– The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain

The novel continued to sell, but I wonder whether Costain missed the opportunity to write a sequel inspired by the burial of the Holy Grail on Oak Island by the Knights Templar.




1955

#9  – The Tontine by Thomas B. Costain

Book of the Month Club copies once littered every church rummage sale. The same might be said of many BOMC selections, but what set The Tontine apart was that it was published in two volumes, meaning that there were twice as many seemingly identical books. I never managed to pair volumes one and two. 

1957

#9 
– Below the Salt by Thomas B. Costain

New to me, Below the Salt marked a bit of a departure for Costain. It relies on the theory of reincarnation, linking a modern-day senator (American) to a thirteenth-century serf (English).




1964

#3 
– Herzog by Saul Bellow

How to explain Herzog's presence? It was awarded the National Book Award, but so had The Adventures of Augie March, and so would Mr. Sammler's Planet, and they didn't make the year-end top ten.





1965

#3 
– Herzog by Saul Bellow

In my first year of university I found a very nice first edition in dust jacket. I've carried it from home to home ever since, but it was only in putting this piece together that I saw the face in the cover.

That perfect font is so distracting.

#8 
– Hotel by Arthur Hailey

In Hailey's bibliography, Hotel follows In High Places (1962), a political thriller centred on challenges both domestic and international faced by Canadian prime minister James McCallum. Hotel doesn't sound nearly so interesting, though it did inspire a 1967 feature film and the ABC prime time soap of the same name starring James Brolin. 


1968

#1 
– Airport by Arthur Hailey

The novel that spawned Airport, Airport 1975, Airport '77, The Concorde - Airport '79Airplane!, and Airplane II: The Sequel,  Airport was the second Canadian novel I ever read. I think there were some sexy bits, but I'm not sure. If they existed, they weren't so memorable as the stuff in Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers.


1971

#1 
– Wheels by Arthur Hailey

A novel set inside the Detroit auto industry. Interestingly, the ten-hour five-part 1978 NBC mini-series starring Rock Hudson and Lee Remick is set in the 'sixties. It's a period piece, though you wouldn't know it.  




1975

#2 
– The Moneychangers by Arthur Hailey

The idea of a novel centring on banking, finance and investing doesn't sound nearly so interesting as one about a sleek and powerful car, which may explain why The Moneychangers failed to land at #1. It was kept from top spot by E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime


1979

#3 
– Overload by Arthur Hailey

Here the author whose previous novels were set in the hospitalty industry, the aviation industry, the automotive industry, and the banking industry, presents a 512-page novel focussed on a California utility company.

There will be brownouts!


And that's it.

Arthur Hailey went on to write three more novels: Strong Medicine (1984), The Evening News (1990), and Detective (1997). All were bestsellers, but not so much that they dominated the bestseller lists. He died in 2004, the eighth and last Canadian to have written a book that landed in the year-end top ten.

Between 1896 and 1979 eight Canadians wrote twenty-seven novels in the annual list of top American bestsellers. Six of the twenty-seven titles appeared two years running. These figures are impressive, until one realizes that all happened within an eighty-three-year span, and that it's been forty-three years since any Canadian writer has done the same. Margaret Atwood? Not even The Testaments. Life of Pi didn't make the cut, nor did The English Patient.

Why is that?

All my theories have fallen flat.

Any ideas?

02 August 2021

Shorter Moore



Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories
Brian Moore
[Belfast]: Turnpike, 2020
102 pages

Brian Moore was first and foremost a novelist. He received Governor General's Awards for The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Great Victorian Collection, and was thrice nominated for the Booker. Dear Departed is the first collection of his short stories. Its appearance last year was so late in coming as to be unexpected. The publisher added to the surprise; there was a time in this country when a collection of Moore stories would have been published by McClelland & Stewart or Knopf Canada.

"Grieve for the Dear Departed," lends the collection its name. It was first published alongside Hemingway, Wilder, Frost, Thurber, and Dinesen in the November 1957 centenary edition of The Atlantic. In the story, a recently widowed woman grieves, but the dear departed of the title isn't so much the husband as the son who had left Ireland for a new life in the New World.

The longest and best of these short stories, "Uncle T," is one Moore salvaged and reworked from the aborted novel that was to have followed Judith Hearne. Vincent Bishop, newly married to Barbara, gazes out of their hotel room overlooking Times Square. The two met in Canada, to which he had fled from a future teaching secondary school in an Ulster town, "forty lumps of boys waiting at forty desks, rain on the windowpanes, two local cinemas, a dance on Saturday nights."

As a refuge, Canada was as good as anywhere. Vincent had applied for work as a clerk in the Shan State, a shipping aide in Takoradi, a plantation overseer in British Guiana, ending up teaching secondary school in Toronto. There's unstated irony in this.

Vincent is convinced Toronto is but a stop on the way to much greater things, and has convinced his bride as much. Uncle Turlough, whom he has yet to meet, has offered him a senior position with his New York publishing house.

There are elements of autobiography in these stories, particularly in the troubled relationships between fathers and sons. Moore described "A Vocation," the first story in the collection, as "about the only thing I can consciously remember writing about my early childhood.

Its first two sentences.
 In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was "No."
Biographer Denis Sampson tells us that "Off the Track," easily the darkest of these stories, reflects a holiday Moore and his first wife took to Haiti. "Hearts and Flowers," easily the lightest, was surely inspired by Moore's time at the Montreal Gazette. A Christmas story set in the "Old Bowerie Mission" (read: Old Brewery Mission), it's a mystery that it hasn't appeared in any collection of Canadian Yuletide stories.

Moore published only fourteen short stories during his lifetime, eight of which are collected here. Added to the remaining six are unpublished stories found amongst his papers. 

One hopes Turnpike is considering a second volume. The press is doing God's work.

Object and Access: A slim trade-size paperback. This collector placed an overseas order, hoping for a first edition. Instead, I received his:

Still, I was pleased to see it had done so well in such a short time.

McGill University has a copy.

13 December 2015

Kenneth Millar at 100; Ross Macdonald at 59



Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald: A Checklist
Compiled by Matthew J. Brucolli
Introduction by Kenneth Millar
Detroit: Gale, 1971

Kenneth Millar was born one hundred years ago today. The first recognition of the anniversary I saw came this past May when Linwood Barclay reviewed the new Ross Macdonald Library of America collection for the Globe & Mail.

Library of America. And why not? After all, Millar was born in Los Gatos, California. His Canadian parents returned to their home and native land a few months later, marking the beginning of a confusing childhood that included a variety of addresses and living arrangements in Vancouver, Kitchener, Wiarton, Winnipeg and Medicine Hat. Kitchener is key. He returned repeatedly to the Southern Ontario city, and as a child lived there longer than another other. It was in Kitchener that he first met and fell for fellow Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute student Margaret Sturm. In 1931, their respective short story debuts were published in The Grumbler, the school's literary magazine. His, "The South Sea Soup Co.", suffered a printer's error: "Ken Miller".

After graduation, Millar attended Waterloo College (now the University of Waterloo), the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto. He married Margaret, who had dropped out to become a writer. And she did… they both did. Ken sold stories, poems and reviews to Saturday Night, but Margaret Millar was the first to publish a novel: The Invisible Worm (1941). The year after publication, the couple moved to Ann Arbor, where Ken had accepted a fellowship at the University of Michigan. Visits aside, the Millars never returned to Canada, settling instead in Santa Barbara, some 450 kilometres south of Ken's birthplace.

Measuring such things is a fool's game, but I think it safe to say that Millar is much more American than, say, Vladimir Nabokov, whose work is also included in the Library of America. Millar saw himself as both Canadian and American, and considered his greatest character to be the same.

I make a deal about of Millar's early years – again – because we Canadians don't. Three years ago, I had to convince the folks at The Canadian Encyclopedia that he was worthy of an entry.

Margaret, too.

The greatest value in Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald: A Checklist lies not in the checklist itself, now very much out of date, but in Millar's seven-page Introduction. Here he provides a rather distorted account of that very messy childhood, and the long, agonizing attempts to capture same in "Winter Solstice", an abandoned autobiographical novel. The struggle went on for years, unresolved until "transformed and simplified into a kind of legend, in The Galton Case."

His favourite novel and I still haven't read it.

I've gone over every page in this slim volume, from Matthew J. Brucolli's Compiler's Note ("This checklist is not a bibliography…"), through Kenneth Millar's Introduction ("Having a bibliography put together is in some ways like being psychoanalyzed…"), to the checklist bibliography checklist itself. Introduction aside, the best of it is found in the images.

The end papers are pretty great, though I do wish they were in colour.

(cliquez pour agrandir)
The title pages, also reproduced, provide a nice reflection of the author's decade-long transition from Kenneth Millar to Ross Macdonald:


Millar was just fifty-five when this checklist was published. No one could have known that his career was in its final years. He managed just two more novels before Alzheimer's began taking its toll. Some of the best things about the book are reproduced manuscript pages – five in all – providing glimpses of a keen mind at work… the keen mind that was lost.

(cliquez pour agrandir)
(cliquez pour agrandir)

I'd happily read entire Millar novels this way, beginning with "Winter Solstice". Next Library of America volume, perhaps.

Object and Access: Eighty-six pages in black boards, issued sans dust jacket. I bought my copy two years ago at a London bookstore, a pleasant stroll from the University of Western Ontario. Price: $6.99.


Copies are held by Western and fourteen other Canadian universities. The Toronto Public Library also comes through; Library and Archives Canada does not.

Fifteen copies are listed for sale online, all but one ranging in price from US$12.50 to US$90. Condition is not a factor. The fifteenth, the exception, is inscribed by Millar to his lawyer Harris Seed, and features laid-in "a bookmark issued by the publisher that prints a poem by the author that also bears his holograph signature in ink." Clearly, the copy to present during this season of gift giving. Price: US$1250.

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