Abebooks as Wikipedia or a Lame Joke?

Nine decades ago, Frank L. Packard was giving Stephen Leacock good chase for position as Montreal's bestselling author. Today, his novels are all but forgotten, but I'm not so sure they're forgettable. Populated by con men, gangsters, faith healers and dope fiends, they look to be gritty, entertaining summer reading. I'm betting that each is more fun than his rival's Hellements of Hickonomics.

I've been meaning to give Packard a read for some time now – say, two decades – but where to begin? No one I know has read the man. W.H. New's Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature is of no help; it's entry consists of just two sentences, including: "Packard practiced as an engineer."

All is to explain how it is that I came across this very peculiar Abebooks listing:

So, we're meant to believe that the man who wrote both Pawned and this book...

also acted in this...

and is the same Frank Packard who directed this...

which was originally released as this...

a few months after his hundredth birthday.

...

"Obviously a joke", said my wife.

"But the seller is a member of the ABAA. They do have standards... and a Code of Ethics."

"No, it must be a joke. It's so over the top."

"But—" And it's here that I realized it doesn't matter nearly so much as our need for a new eavestrough.

Not that the recognition prevented this post.

Avert Your Eyes, Children!

Legends of Quebec: From the Land of the Golden Dog

Hazel Boswell

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1966

Hazel Boswell seems to have led such a charmed life. A direct descendant of the first Marquis de Lotbinière, she spent much of her childhood at the Seigneury de Lotbinière on the south shore of the St Lawrence between Quebec City and Trois Rivières. When her grandfather, Sir Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, was appointed Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, she moved into Victoria's Government House, where she spent six years living off the public purse. I can find no evidence that Miss Boswell worked so much as a day in her life, though she did study art under Horatio Walker and Percyval Tudor-Hart.

Miss Boswell was a mere fifty-six years old when Viking published her first book, French Canada: Pictures and Stories (1938). A very slim volume, it features glimpses of Quebec life and folklore, accompanied by the author's very pleasant colour illustrations.

The Christian Science Monitor thought it a "lovely picture book", while Montreal's Gazette found it "charmingly illustrated... in gay colour, reminiscent of the French Canadian's own hooked rug pattern [sic]."

Miss Boswell dedicated French Canada to "the children of the Province of Quebec". Most had children of their own by the time Legends of Quebec, her second book, was published. On the surface, it's more of the same: a collection of folk tales with paintings by the author. However, Miss Boswell seems to have undergone some changes in the twenty-eight years between books. For one, the octogenarian had been robbed of much of her ability as a visual artist. Quebec, too, had changed, a fact recognized by the author in her Foreword: "These folklore stories have come from the years long past when French Canada slept its enchanted sleep amongst its apple orchards and maple groves, and time was measured by the chime of the church bells."

It's an odd statement, evoking a gentle, idyllic time that is better reflected in French Canada than Legends of Quebec.

The first of the book's ten tales, "The Feast of St. John the Baptist", moves the saint's story to an ancient kingdom that is said to have once existed somewhere north of the St Lawrence. There are reveillons and tortières, but all is otherwise familiar... until Salome straps on her skates. A vain and careless creature, she ignores warnings of thinning ice and tumbles into the drink:

As she fell, she struck a great block of ice floating down the lead that was widening. The jagged edge of the block was as sharp as a razor blade, and as it struck the Princess, it sliced off her head just above her collar. In a moment her body sank out of sight, but her head on the great block of ice went drifting down the lead before the horrified eyes of her friends.

In Legends of Quebec, bad things happen to bad people, but also to the not so bad. Here a man is crushed by a tree after dismissing stories of the White Owl as a bird of ill omen.

In "Felix the Obstinate", a farmer who tends to his farm rather than attend Good Friday mass finds that the sap coming from his maple trees has turned to blood.

And then there's Cléophas Ouellet, the wealthiest farmer in Ste Rose des Pins, who loses his temper over some inclement weather and takes a shot at a wayside cross.

In an instant, Cléophas is paralyzed. Able only to move his eyes, it seems he is doomed to spend eternity standing in his potato field, unable to say an Act of Contrition... or get off a second shot.

Enchanted sleep? Bloody nightmare is more like it. Thank God French Canada woke up.

Object and Access: A squarish hardcover in heavy dust jacket, Legends of Quebec has all but disappeared from our public libraries. Fortunately, decent copies aren't hard to find and begin at about C$9. The most expensive on offer, at C$45, is signed by Miss Boswell.

Back from Dear Old Blighty

Returning to my desk after a very enjoyable and eventful weekend at the Knowlton Wordfest. These photos, taken in nearby Foster, feature what is left of the home of Bill Arnold, one of John Glassco's neighbours. A veteran of the Great War, Arnold called his house "Blighty". The man and building inspired Glassco's 20-line of the same name, which was first published in the November 1952 issue of The Canadian Forum.

See by the tracks, where a sodden shingled roof

Droops on a worn façade, a wilting visor

Over dead window-panes and the lettered board

Where exultation, curled into one word,

Still celebrates a half forgotten war —

That "lettered board", featuring the name of Arnold's house, remained nailed above the front door for nearly nine decades. It was stolen earlier this year.

Related post: Glassco in Knowlton

Before Adobe Illustrator

Books in Canada, December 1983

Amazon Customer Review: 'undescribable and obscene'

Related posts:

Homophobes and Book Burners Weight In

Amazon Customer Review: 'Reading Munroe'

Amazon Customer Review: Michel Tremblay's 'Possible Potential'

Richlers in Gestation

A couple of cover mockups from my years as a book buyer, both uncovered last week while going trough old boxes. Keeping Track was the working title of Richler's 1990 collection of essays and reviews for Viking Canada. It was ultimately published with a much better title and cover as Broadsides. I don't believe Richler ever intended to put out anything called Selected Essays & Reports; if memory serves he was still hunting around for a title when Knopf Canada presented this cover. The collection was published in 1998 as Belling the Cat.

Note the barking Borzoi. A nice touch, I think.

Five years later, Knopf used the same photo of Richler, by Julian Edelsten, on the front and back covers of my own book, Character Parts.

Glassco in Knowlton

A week tomorrow I'll be speaking on my forthcoming biography of John Glassco, A Gentleman of Pleasure, at the Knowlton Wordfest. For almost a decade, Glassco lived on the outskirts of this beautiful Quebec town in a grand house he immortalized in his poem "The White Mansion".

The image above, taken in 1914, isn't quite of his time, but it does capture Knowlton very much as Glassco knew it when he called the town home. The building closest served as the post office during the four years he delivered the rural mail. It was the only job he ever had.

On Writing a Life of John Glassco, “A Great Practitioner of Deceit”

Sunday, 18 July 2010

1:00

Galerie Bistro CarpeDiem

61 Lakeside Road (Knowlton)

Ville de Lac-Brome

Related post: Back from Dear Old Blighty

Americans to the Rescue!

In recognition of this day of celebration in the republic to the south, six American novels I haven't found time to read. Doubt I ever will. If I were to crack open just one it would be Lionel Derrick's The Quebec Connection (New York: Pinnacle, 1976). Why? The cover copy doesn't motivate. Sure, Mark Hardin, the Penetrator, is exciting, modern and deadly, but no more so than his rivals the Executioner, the Destroyer and the Butcher. No, the real attraction here isn't the man, but a plot that has Hardin fighting Quebec separatist hippies who are being used as pawns in a plot to populate the world with dwarfs.

Is that enough?

Elaboration may be in order.

The armed separatists fund their activities by pushing a drug called Ziff, which has been created by a cabal of bitter little people who seek to remake the world in their image. One sniff of Ziff, it seems, alters one's DNA and induces dwarfism in future offspring. According to trash enthusiast Marty McKee of the wonderfully named Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot, all leads to "an amazing climax in which three midgets dressed as Athos, Porthos and D'Artagnan are armed with rapiers and fighting the Penetrator atop the Eiffel Tower."

You can't make this stuff up... but Lionel Derrick can.

Well, not Derrick, but the men behind the pseudonym – in this case Mark Roberts.

The Quebec Connection followed Hardin's first Canadian adventure, Mankill Sport, in which the Penetrator chases a drug dealing American psychopath through our backwoods. I can't explain the sudden interest, though I expect the October Crisis had something to do with it. By my count, in the six years that followed those dark days we were visited by three other American action heroes, all of whom who did battle in Quebec, usually with some sort of militant separatist group:

The Canadian Bomber Contract

Phillip Atlee [pseud. James Atlee Phillips]

Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1971

Hardass CIA contract killer Joe "The Nullifier" Gall comes to Quebec to stop an FLQ splinter group intent on blowing up the American side of Niagara Falls. What the Partridge Family's bus has to do with all this I don't know.

The White Wolverine Contract

Phillip Atlee [pseud. James Atlee Phillips]

Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1971

Joe Gall, again. This follow-up to The Canadian Bomber Contract sees the Nullifier on Vancouver Island, where he fights Chinese villain Victor Li and his private army of hippy and Métis separatists. Gall calls them "psycho rebels".

Canadian Kill

Joseph Nazel

Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974

Billionaire Henry Highland "Iceman" West's hopes of a relaxing holiday in northern Quebec are shattered when his plane is shot out of the sky by the fanatical Next Generation of Man. Cover artist Corey Wolfe does our hero a disservice; he's not really using that woman as a shield.

Canadian Crisis

Don Pendleton

New York: Pinnacle, 1976

The mafia is determined to turn Quebec into the crime capital of the world, but are thwarted by the Executioner, Vietnam vet Mack Bolan.

Am I alone in reading Marc Bolan whenever Mack Bolan's name appears? Electric Warrior kicks more ass than the Executioner every time. Here's the proof.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering. Hardin... the Penetrator... Yeah, I got it.

Thank You, Allid!

Encore!

Une deuxième chanson pour la fête de la St-Jean. Composed by George-Étienne Cartier, "Avant tout je suis canadien" follows his better-known "Ô Canada! mon pays! mes amours!". It was first sung 175 years ago today at a banquet of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and was later adopted by les Fils de la Liberté. A president of the former and a member of the latter, Cartier seems a problematic figure for the Société and its allies. I've twice seen "Avant tout je suis canadien" attributed incorrectly to "les Patriotes". Manfred Overmann makes this mistake, and includes this song by a leading Father of Confederation in his Anthologie de la poésie indépendantiste et souverainiste.

This version is taken from the third volume of Benjamin Sulte's Mélanges historiques (Montreal: Ducharme, 1919).

Related post: A Song for la Fête de la St-Jean

Lost in Translation

The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel [L'épouvantail]

André Major [Sheila Fischman, trans.]

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977

In the latter half of the 'seventies McClelland and Stewart published translations of novels by Marie-Claire Blais, Hubert Aquin, André Langevin, Diane Giguère, Monique Bosco, Jean-Yves Soucy, Naïm Kattan, Jacques Ferron and Gabrielle Roy. Different times, especially for the house that refers to itself as "The Canadian Publisher" (in italics, always italics). The Roys aside, all were issued in hardcover and enjoyed a lone printing; there were no paperback editions. I can't say I've read all of these, but of those I have The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel is the one I'd most like to see returned to print.

Originally published in 1974 as L'épouvantail, the novel begins with our hero, Momo Boulanger, waking up after a severe beating. There will be more to come. Momo is a man very much out of his depth, trying to make sense of the past. Fresh out of jail, he's come to Montreal to confront a red-haired beauty named Gigi. She's working as a hooker out of some seedy place called the Paradise, but short years before, in little St-Emmanuel, she'd been his girl. "If you were any kind of man you'd get me out of this hole", she'd told him. And so, desperate for cash, Momo had robbed a hardware store. Her father turned him in.

Gigi's whine is a cliché, and the plot resembles a pulp novel, but what sets this work apart from the cheap, yellowing paperbacks is Major's use of language. Anyone seeking evidence of Sheila Fischman's formidable talent as a translator need look no farther than this book.

Here's the beginning of chapter three:

He had stopped looking over the tops of the houses that formed an endless wall on either side of the street; there was nothing more to see up there now that night had fallen like a canopy, closing him completely inside a kind of deserted labyrinth where no one would turn around as he went by, astonished or smiling at his black eye and swollen lips; he walked slowly, dragging his feet, a stiffness of muscles of his calves, and for a moment nothing could stop him, not even the uselessness of his wandering, even though it seemed absurd to be walking like that, just for the sake of walking, as though the fabulous sum of his steps would finally lead him somewhere, or at the very least make him discover some goal to be reached, while the one really important thing to do was drink some hot coffee and take some time to rest up and get warm.

One sentence, it flies in the face of formula. Major's paragraphs often go on for pages, moving dreamlike between past and present, St-Emmanuel and Montreal. One dark scene follows another; even those depicting Momo and Gigi at the beginning of their relationship disturb. The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel is not a pleasant read, nor is it an easy read, and yet once started it is difficult to put down. It's the finest novel I've read this year.

Object and Access: A slim hardcover, there are plenty of Very Good copies to be had at under C$8. Pay no attention to the Ontario bookseller charging C$10 for a "Fair" library discard. The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel is rare sight in our public libraries, though it is found in most universities. A bit more scarce in the original French, despite having been reissued by Stanké in 1980.

Entirely Off Topic

This blog's descriptor confines, but today I ignore all to draw attention to three paragraphs written by John Gale, an Englishman with no apparent connection to Canada or Canadian literature:

One night this year, on the walk home from the Underground in the falling snow, I had to lean against the wall of the crematorium where my father went up in smoke. I had had a few drinks. The wind pierced the short, old-fashioned black coat that had belonged to my grandfather. When I walked on a little unsteadily in the dark on the creaking snow, a girl passed on the other side of the road, her high black boots gleaming faintly. She looked across at me, and then went on in the bitter cold.
Our three children had measles; Jill was tired. The wind moaned beneath the doors; we were keeping fires going day and night, and the insects cried in the blazing logs. Our house is small, virtually a cottage, among terraced houses built, originally, for artisans; the road is the appendix of the suburb, with wealthier houses not far off. I like our house: scarcely a piece of furniture, not a picture, carpet or curtain did we choose ourselves; all was given or passed on by relatives; all, or almost all, is incongruous, tasteless, but well used.
At times I feel the small house is the centre of the world. It seems a turning-point for aircraft coming in to land at London Airport. Their engines change pitch as they come in from east and west, booming and whining through the dusk, their navigation lights winking hope. When I lie in bed I distrust all aircraft: where are they going? People should stay at home. I prefer the sound of trains far off at night, the clink of a shunting in a cold siding.

The beginning of Gale's 193-page autobiography Clean Young Englishman (Hodder & Stoughton, 1965), the words come courtesy of Steerforth who happened upon the book yesterday. I've ordered my copy: £10. The remaining 192 pages could be blank and I'd still consider the money well spent.

Homophobes and Book Burners Weigh In

Orlando Figes made the news a couple of months ago when the Times revealed that he'd posted a slew of savage pseudonymous reviews of rivals' works on Amazon. "This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published", he wrote of Molotov's Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky, going on to pronounce books by Sovietologist Robert Service variously as "disappointing" and "a dull read". Then Professor Figes' focussed a critical eye on his own book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, writing that it "leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted." Once caught, he sullied himself further by lashing out, threatening lawsuits and allowing his wife to take the fall. At the end of it all, Stalin was to blame; it seems the stunning lapses in judgement can be traced back to Figes' study of the General Secretary's reign, which had led to a "very deep depression". You see, The Whisperers isn't really so uplifting after all.

Sordid, unseemly, this would all be old news were it not for the fact that it had no effect on an Amazon policy that allows would-be reviewers to hide behind cloaks of anonymity and paperless masks composed of silly pseudonyms.

Looking into the newish Penguin edition of The Wars, I notice that Amazon.ca provides 35 customer reviews of the novel, nearly all of which are anonymous or have been posted under noms de plume. Most are complimentary, but a fair percentage are not.

Who, one wonders, are these people?

Well, let's see. Someone going by the name Rudy Patudy claims to be a high school teacher. Here, in just two sentences, the educator not only displays creative use of punctuation and the lower case, but comes up with a whole new definition for the word "trollop":

Then there's Furyman from Coboconk, Ontario, a reader of books on the First and Eleventh World Wars:

That's right, don't you mistake Furyman for a book burner – though his motto, Gott Mit Uns, was used by the Wehrmacht right up to the fall of the Third Reich. No, the true practitioner of libricide is the brave anonymous soul who posted this:

Into the ground? What do I know – I've never been to a book burning.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that these negative reviews were written by rivals – I very much doubt that Rudy Patudy is Jane Urquhart – but has Amazon learned nothing from Professor Figes' lesson? Why allow anonymous reviews? Why encourage reviewers to use pseudonyms? Why not request that people put their names behind their misspelled words? Sure, the deceitful will continue to hide, but it's at least a start.

As it stands, Amazon has no one but itself to blame for such absolute trollop.