Showing posts with label Lewis (Wyndham). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lewis (Wyndham). Show all posts

16 April 2024

Of Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns, and David Richard Beasley


 
Canadian Authors You Should Know is a self-published book written by a man who counts himself amongst those you should know.
   Is that not absurd?
   It was doubly so for this reviewer because I do know David Richard Beasley.
So begins my review of Canadian Authors You Should Know, now available in the Spring edition of The Dorchester Review. Beasley's book is one of the most idiosyncratic works of CanLit scholarship I have ever read. His Canadian authors you should know number eight, of which these are the first seven:
John Richardson
Herman Whitaker
Frederick Philip Grove
Wyndham Lewis
Norman, Newton
Thomas B. Costain
Jamie Brown

The eighth is David Richard Beasley.

I knew six. Herman Whitaker (1867-1919) was new to me. A Brit, he spent spent much of his twenties in Canada before leaving in 1895 for California. The first of his three novels, The Settler, was published ten years later.


I've never considered writers just passing through Canadian, so was more interested in what Beasley had to say about Vancouver's Norman Newton (1929-2011), another author who was new to me.

Just think, all those years I'd lived on Davie Street, immersed in the literary scene, President of the Federation of BC Writers, and I'd never once heard Norman Newton's name.

And so I purchased a copy – sight unseen – of The Big Stuffed Hand of Friendship, Newton's fourth and final novel. 

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969
Black matte with a foil overlay, as an object it hasn't aged particularly well. Never mind. Look closely at the jacket and you will see this:


Oh, Canada.

11 December 2023

Eight Gifts to Last



In past years I've noted gifts and donations to the Dusty Bookcase at the end of the annual list of Ten Best Book Buys. An exception is made here because of the shear volume, and because I wanted to add a personal note. And We Go On seems an appropriate title with which to start.


And We Go On
Will R. Bird
Toronto: Hunter-Rose, 1930

A memoir of the Great War, this first edition was given to me by military historian James Calhoun, with whom I co-authored the introduction to the 2014 Dundurn edition of Peregrine Acland's All Else Is Folly. Note the dust jacket description:
A story of the War by a Private in
the Canadian Black Watch;
a Story Without Filth
or Favour.
Bird's memoir was inspired in part by his disgust at the portrayal of soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front and Generals Die in Bed. He wouldn't have liked All Else Is Folly
 

Outlaw Breed
William Byron Mowery
Calabasas, CA: Cutting Edge, 2023

Novelist Lee Greenwood is doing God's work in reviving neglected novels. He reached out three years ago after I reviewed former Vancouver Sun scribe Tom Ardies' 1971 thriller Their Man in the White House. You'd like it. The novel tells the story of an American president who is beholding to the Russians. Oh, and he has an unusual – I suggest unhealthy – relationship with his blonde daughter. Lee was then in the process of returning all Ardies' novels to print.

Outlaw Breed is not a political thriller. First published in 1936 under the title Black Automatic, it was written by a Buckeye known as the "Zane Grey of the Canadian Northwest." Starring Noel Irving, ex-RCMP, the action begins with a murder in Winnipeg, moves on to Fort McMurray, and then the Northwest Territories.


The Woman's Harvest
Anna Floyd
London: T. Werner Laurie, 1916

An obscure novel by a forgotten English writer, set in England in and around the time of the Great War, The Woman's Harvest has nothing whatsoever to do with Canada, yet I was drawn to it after reading Brad Bigelow's Neglected Books review. I just had to read it, but not a one was listed for sale online. Worse still, the nearest copy is found in the National Library of Scotland. Brad was generous in giving me his. I'll say no more because Brad's review says it all. You'll want to read it, too.
 

Canada Speaks of Britain
and Other Poems of the War
Charles G.D. Roberts
Toronto: Ryerson, 1941

The River St. John and Its Poets
L.M.B. Maxwell
[n.p.]: [n.p], 1946

Two chapbooks donated by my friend Forrest Pass. The earlier, Sir Charles' Canada Speaks of Britain features seven "Poems of the War" (including 'Peace With Dishonour,' which was actually composed in September, 1938), along with three poems from the previous war, and three more poems thrown in for good measure. The longest in the collection is 'Two Rivers':
                     Two rivers are there in hold my heart
                          And neither would I leave.
                     When I would stay with one two long
                          The other tugs my sleeve.
The two rivers are the Tantamar and the St. John, which ties in nicely to The River St. John and Its Poets by L.M.B. Maxwell, LL.D. It consists of a series of biographical sketches and sample poems of sixteen poets, including Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, LL.D., D. Litt.; Theodore Goodrich Roberts, D. Litt.; William Bliss Carman, M.A., LL. D.; and Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey, M.A., Ph.D. I was more interested in plain old Francis Sherman, Charles Boyle, and Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald, whose home I visited last autumn.
 

The Complete Adventures of Jimmie Dale, Volume Three
Frank L. Packard
[n.p.]: [n.p], 2022

The final volume of Packard scholar Michael Howard's annotated compilation of Packard's Gray Seal novels, this one includes Jimmie Dale and the Blue Envelope Murder (1930), Jimmie Dale and the Missing Hour (1935), and the unfinished and previously unpublished Jimmie Dale's Only Chance. 

But wait, there's more!

Also included are four chapters that were cut from The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1919), the script for the first episode of the radio serial The Adventures of Jimmie Dale, the beginning of the British edition of The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (in which our hero is an Englishman), and a family biography by the late Francis Lucius Packard.  

The author's grandson, Jeffrey Packard, provides the preface. 

All three volumes can be ordered through Amazon.


One last  gift:


Self Condemned
Wyndham Lewis
Toronto: Dundurn, 2010

My friend Michael Gnarowski died on July 27th of this year. He'd taught at three universities, one of which I attended, but I was not one students. Still, I learned a great deal from Michael. We first met twenty years ago when I was working on my biography of of his friend John Glassco, that great practitioner of deceit. He and I were dogged in our pursuit of "the knowable truth." 

Our last days together started over pints in an Ottawa strip mall pub – the fish and chips wasn't terrible – after which we'd move on to apple pie and vanilla ice cream at the flat he shared with his wife Diana. In our second to last meeting, Michael pulled out this slightly battered copy Self Condemned, asking whether I had a copy.

I lied.

This edition is a Voyageur Classic, a series that followed the Carleton Library and the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts series, all of which Michael had overseen. I'd bought each Voyageur Classic upon release, and was honoured when he accepted my proposal to include All Else Is Folly (see above) in the series.

And so, because I lied, I was able to accept his generosity. Michael signed my copy, explaining that his writing hand would not do what he wanted it to.
 
I last saw Michael on Father's Day, which somehow seems appropriate. He ordered the fish and chips, and then we had pie and ice cream.

17 September 1934, Shanghai, China
July 27, 2023, Ottawa, Canada 
RIP


19 August 2013

G is for Glassco



Yes, G is for Glassco. After all, it's not been a week since the launch of The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by yours truly.

Most of Glassco's correspondents were writers – and all but one are writers whose work I've read. The exception is the prolific Geoffrey Wagner, a professor of literature at City University in New York City. The American academic was very important to Glassco's career, playing an advisory role in dealings with publishers of pornography. It was through Wagner's efforts that Glassco was finally able to place The Temple of Pederasty, a work Maurice Girodias had twice turned down.

Wagner's own bibliography is remarkably varied, encompassing titles like Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (Yale UP, 1957), Another America: In Search of Canyons (Allen & Unwin, 1972) and Five for Freedom: A Study of Feminism in Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1973), along with sadomasochistic porn penned under the pseudonym P.N. Dedeaux. His novel of "Prussian discipline", The Prefects (Taurus, 1970), uses lines from Glassco's Squire Hardman as an epigraph.

As I say, I haven't read anything by Geoffrey Wagner, but I think this might be the place to start:


The Heart Accepts It All includes four letters to Wagner, in which Glassco shares his thoughts on Penthouse Forum, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, high school hockey, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, sadomasochism, riding crops and other things equestrian. They're worth reading in their entirety, but for reasons that will become clear I present this small excerpt from a letter to Wagner dated 3 December 1968:
Dear old Bizarre! It was an oasis back in the dreary fifties. Yes, I remember the wonderful photo of Mlle. Polaris, the Queen of the Wasp-waists, in her extraordinary corset, which John Willie unearthed and reprinted. I contributed a letter to his correspondence column. He was a Pioneer.
This sent me on a lengthy hunt through the 1824 pages of The Complete Reprint of John Willie's Bizarre (Taschen, 1995). I'd hoped to come across something credited to Miles Underwood, S. Colson-Haig, Silas N. Gooch or any of Glassco's many other pseudonyms. When nothing turned up, I started reading the letters themselves, thinking that I might just recognize something in their style and content.


And so it was that in issue #22 I found this piece of correspondence under the heading "WHITE CIRCLE CLUB":
I am fascinated by your magazine because, even though I am in my thirties, this is the first time I have been able to avail myself of the sincere, uninhibited thoughts of others regarding leather and bondage. So, due to Bizarre, I know my hidden desires are not quite so isolated as I had feared.
     An attractive girl, clad in snug, well-tailored jodhpurs or breeches which are well reinforced with suede or some other soft, resilient leather at the seat and the inner sides of the legs is certainly a lovely sight. And the thought that such a girl might entertain the desire to put me in bondage, or that she might enjoy giving me some discipline, is encouraging to say the least.
     But it is frustrating, here in staid old New England, to find the company of such a person. To be sure, I attend horse shows and ride often at nearby stables, but with no success, despite many conversations with attractive girls.
     So, why not suggest that those whose thoughts are similar to mine put a little circle of white paint on each of their riding boots, and at the rear, just where the heel is stitched to the soft leather? By so doing we could identify others with whom we have ideas in common.
     But, at any rate, I enjoy using your magazine as a "clearing house" for thoughts from other readers, one of whom might be intrigued in having a six-foot, 170-pound bachelor for her prisoner.
                                                                             J. FOSTER     
Now, Glassco didn't live in New England, but twenty kilometres to the north; he was also a few inches short of six-feet and would've been in his forties at the time. But then these sorts of letters are invariably replete with lies, exaggeration, camouflage and masquerade, aren't they?

In both style and substance, the words read like Glassco. Could J. Foster and J. Glassco of Foster, Quebec be one and the same? I can't say for certain. What I do know is that they shared proclivities, frustrations and, ultimately, loneliness.

Polaire
(nee Émilie Marie Bouchaud)
1874-1939
RIP

07 December 2010

Many Happy Returns



The Ottawa Citizen, 3 December 1960

McClelland and Stewart's Christmas offerings from half-a-century ago. Only This Side Jordan is in print today. Pity that, Robertson Davies' A Voice from the Attic is a particularly good match for a snowy winter's day. "A witty, robust and wonderfully opinionated book on the joys of reading and the author's own offbeat likes and dislikes." There is truth in advertising.

Which of this fall's McClelland and Stewart titles will be in print in 2060, I wonder. I'm betting against Ezra Levant's Ethical Oil (and even 2009's Shakedown, which I was once told "belongs in the category of Uncle Tom's Cabin".)

My recommendations for this season's gift-giving favours presses that are hard at work mining the neglected riches of our past.

First up, Véhicule, which this fall launched its Ricochet Books series of pulp fiction reprints. (Full disclosure: I'm consulting editor for the series.)

The Crime on Cote des Neiges
David Montrose
The series debut, returning Montrose (Charles Ross Graham) to print after after an absence of more than four decades. Originally published in 1951, this edition includes a foreword by yours truly.

Two blondes, one brunette, a roadster and a whole lotta Dow. It doesn't get much better.


Murder Over Dorval
David Montrose
Foreword by Michael Blair
"In one hand she held a plane ticket to Montreal, in the other a wad of greenbacks. She was a gorgeous looking redhead. For the sake of her lovely green eyes, Russell Teed took the plane and the money. But it wasn't long before h realized that whatever she had offered, it wasn't worth it."


Recognition of Dundurn's Voyageur Classics series is long overdue. For four years now it's been "bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties." This year's titles:

Hugh Garner
Introduction by Paul Stuewe








Scott Symons
Introduction by Christopher Elson







Wyndham Lewis
Introduction by Allan Pero








Grey Owl
Edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski








Note the handy links to the publishers' websites. Of course, all are also available from booksellers, whether online or not, but I'm not playing favourites.

Related post: Books are Best

11 November 2010

08 September 2009

Men Without Anglosaxony



The most recent post at the unfailingly informative and entertaining Bookride concerns Anglosaxony: A League that Works by Wyndham Lewis. Whether or not one considers Lewis Canadian – he certainly did – the pamphlet holds a place in our literary history as the most valuable published by the still-mourned Ryerson Press. What cost 75¢ in 1941 is today estimated at between US$1200 and US$1500. Copies are, it appears, rare as hen's teeth. Blame lies not with Messrs David Bowie and Bryan Ferry – both collectors – but with a disinterested press and unresponsive public. Not that Ryerson didn't try. Below is the company's 1941 Christmas advert, in which we see Anglosaxony sandwiched between war correspondent Leland Stowe's No Other Road to Freedom and They Got Their Man, a collection of mountie tales by Philip H. Godsell.

The Globe and Mail, 6 December 1941

All this provides an excuse to present this link to Tom Hawthorne's very fine profile of Lewis collector extraordinaire Cy Fox, first published in the 27 May 2009 edition of the Globe and Mail.