The Dusty Bookcase: A Journey Through Canada's Forgotten, Neglected and Suppressed Writing

By Brian Busby

Largely drawn from his columns for Canadian Notes & Queries and entries in his popular blog by the same name, Brian Busby's The Dusty Bookcase explores the fascinating world of Canada's lesser-known literary efforts: works that suffered censorship, critical neglect, or brilliant yet fleeting notoriety. These rare and quirky totems of Canadiana, collected over the last three decades, form a travel diary of sorts—yet one without maps. Covering more than 250 books, peppered with observations on the writing and publishing scenes, Busby's work explores our cultural past, questioning why certain works are celebrated and others ignored.

Brilliantly illustrated with covers and ephemera related to the titles discussed, The Dusty Bookcase draws much needed attention to unknown writing worthy of our attention, and some of our acclaim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Aug 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781771961691

Brian Busby

Brian Busby is a literary historian, independent scholar, and writer. He has written two books: Character Parts and A Gentleman of Pleasure. He is also the editor of In Flanders Fields and Other Poems of the First World War and War Poems.

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Copyright © Brian Busby, 2017

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FIRST EDITION

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Busby, Brian John, author

The dusty bookcase : a journey through Canada’s forgotten, neglected, and suppressed writing / Brian Busby.

Issued also in electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-77196-168-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-169-1 (ebook)

1. Canadian literature--Miscellanea. 2. Literary curiosa. 3. Canadian literature--History and criticism. 4. Books and reading--Canada--History. 5. Canadian literature--Censorship. 6. Censorship--Canada--History. I. Title.

PS8219.B87 2017 C810.9 C2016-907970-8

C2016-907971-6

Edited by Emily Donaldson

Copy-edited by Allana Amlin

Typeset by Chris Andrechek

Illustrated and designed by Seth

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

For Stanley Whyte and Chris Kelly

As you know…

Introduction

We didn’t read Canadian literature in Allancroft Elementary School. The books assigned at Beaconsfield High School were by John Steinbeck, Jack Schaefer, James Vance Marshall, William Golding, John Wyndham, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Georges Simenon, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. One class—not mine—got to read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.

My introduction to the country’s literature came through scanning the racks at the local Kane’s Super Drug Mart. They weren’t at all difficult to spot. William C. Heine’s The Last Canadian was obvious. The cover of Bruce Powe’s Killing Ground promised a novel about The Canadian Civil War. Others had maple leaves somewhere on their covers. This is how I came to read Richard Rohmer, whose Ultimatum, Exxoneration, Exodus/UK, and Separation were bought with money earned delivering our local newspaper. Somehow I discovered that Arthur Hailey was kind of a Canadian. I expect I’m one of a small number of people to have tackled all 440 pages of Airport as a pre-teen. Over time, I came to recognize that many of the books I was buying bore the Pocket, PaperJacks, and Seal logos. Using them as my guides, I added Hit and Run by Tom Alderman, Joy Carroll’s Satan’s Bell, and something called Some Canadian Ghosts to my collection.

In tenth grade, my Canadian book buying came to an abrupt stop. I’d like to say girls were the reason, but in truth it had more to do with the realization that nothing I read was much good. This confirmed the unspoken lesson learned in school: when it came to writing, Canadians weren’t worthy of attention. The assigned reading for that year’s English class included Shane, The Pearl, Walkabout, The Chrysalids and, predictably, Lord of the Flies. Of these, my favourite was The Chrysalids, in part because it takes place in post-apocalyptic Labrador, as opposed to, say, nineteenth-century Wyoming.

Make of that what you will.

Whatever remaining interest I had in my country’s literature was kept alive through an American magazine, National Lampoon, which had just begun publishing something called the Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors.

Written by Sean Kelly, Ted Mann, and Brian Shein, purportedly with financial assistance from Bombardier, its format was simple: brief entries followed by a rating on a scale of one to five skidoos.

The first to be so honoured was Margaret Atwood (one skidoo). This brief excerpt provides a fair example of the guide’s style:

She is best known for advancing the theory that America and Canada are simply states of mind, the former comparable to that of a schnapps-crazed Wehrmacht foot soldier and the latter to that of an autistic child left behind in a deserted Muskoka summer cottage playing with Molson’s Ale cans, spent shell casings, and dead birds hung from the light fixture, who will one day become aware of its situation, go to college, and write novels. She is better known, among Margaret-watchers, for taking gross offense at the suggestion (in a crudely dittoed literary periodical) that she may have sparked an erection in a considerably more talented Canadian author who shall here remain nameless (see Glassco, John).

That last sentence would’ve been my first encounter with Glassco’s name. The incident described is one that demanded particular care when writing A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of the man. Rosalie Abella, the lawyer Ms Atwood hired to go after the crudely dittoed literary periodical, now sits on the Supreme Court.

And here’s Glassco again in the entry for Callahan [sic] , Morely [sic] (two skidoos):

Callahan, Morely (1903– ) Callahan’s reputation rests largely upon his memoir of Paris in the twenties, That Summer in Paris, which can almost be put on par with a considerably more talented Canadian author’s memories of the same period (see Glassco, John). The other foundation of Callahan’s repute is a trio of endorsements from Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. As for Wilson, who could trust a man known to Unity Mitford as Bunny? Hemingway thought Knut Hamsun was a genius, and with all respect to Joyce, who could take one Irishman’s word about another?

The reference source appeared sporadically through 1978, then returned five years later. I was then at university, palling around with two of Sean Kelly’s kids. It was a coincidence worthy of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay (not covered in the guide). Much more predictable was the presence of Frederick Philip Grove on my reading lists. The magazine’s April 1983 issue, which marked its return, brought this well-timed entry:

Grove, Frederick Philip (1879–1948) As a young European aesthete, Grove (or Greve, to use his original German name) formulated an ingeniously decadent plan: to forsake stimulating companionship, rich culture, and the avant-garde of twentieth-century art in order to bury himself in a tedious and meaningless existence as a rural schoolteacher on the Canadian prairies, an existence he was to recount in a series of equally tedious books. His career as a novelist and essayist can thus be seen as a perversely protracted jeu d’esprite [sic], carried out with an unfortunate combination of Teutonic wit and Canadian flair for the dramatic. But not even Grove’s dullness was equal to that of his public: when a scene in Settlers in [sic] the Marsh (published in 1925, three years after Ulysses) vaguely hinted at nocturnal marital activities, denunciations of the novel as pornographic caused a mass of Canadian readers to virtuously refuse to buy, let alone read it, often smuggling themselves out of the country wearing false jackets in order not to be considered found-ins.

Grove’s lone skidoo may have been an act of generosity. Sensitive Canadians all, Kelly, Mann, and Shein left no writer empty-handed. Farley Mowat rated two snowshoes; Mazo de la Roche received two bags of cash. There was also some playing around. Notably, George Jonas and Barbara Amiel, then Canada’s most formidable literary spouse-and-spouse team and toast of Toronto’s propeller set were awarded one skidoo humping another.

Every bit as relevant as The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, and at times just as funny, I’ve held onto the issues in which the Bombardier Guide features.

University was a bit of a wash. I entered as a directionless Canadian Studies student well versed in Rohmer, Heine, Hailey, Powe, Alderman, and Carroll. As I remember it, Some Canadian Ghosts was the only work of Canadian non-fiction I’d ever read.

I lie. I’d also made my way through the Amiel/Jonas collaboration By Person’s Unknown: The Strange Death of Christine Demeter. It was a Seal paperback, you see.

A course titled Introduction to Canadian Literature introduced me to the New Canadian Library and the concept of a canon. The class took place on Wednesday evenings, which fit well with my job stocking seven-inch singles at Sam the Record Man. We studied four novels: James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), Thomas H. Raddall’s The Nymph and the Lamp (1950), Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch that Ends the Night (1958), and Brian Moore’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960). Each was better than the last, suggesting progression.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey was so good that much of the summer that followed—the summer of Prince’s When Doves Cry—was spent reading Moore’s other novels.

The following September, I began a Canadian literature course of which I remember nothing other than the fact that we students were required to keep a record of our personal baggage—biases that skewed our reading of the texts. Again, this was a course taught at a university… a university attended by adults who could vote and drink and drive. At this university—this Canadian university—one could graduate with a B.A. in English without taking so much as one course in the country’s literature.

Canadian literature came to dominate my reading. I took other CanLit courses—studying Margaret Atwood, Morley Callaghan, Frederick Philip Grove, Margaret Laurence, and L.M. Montgomery, among others—but these only led me to question the canon. My extra-curricular reading was unguided, yet so much of what I read was superior. I learned there were other Brian Moore novels—early work that he’d kept hidden—and so sought them out. A course on American expatriate writers of the twenties led me to read Glassco. The discovery that he’d written a banned book of faux-Victorian erotica sent me on the hunt for that, too. I began scouring outdoor dollar bins—a habit that continues to this day—looking for the out-of-print and obscure.

The books covered in these pages in no way represent the best of the forgotten, ignored, and supressed in our literature.

We should read the forgotten because previous generations knew them well. My father read the works of Ralph Connor, as did his. Reading Connor myself has brought me a better understanding of the times these men experienced.

We should be curious about the ignored because recognition is so often a crapshoot; too much depends on publisher, press, and good fortune.

We should read the suppressed for the very reason that there are those who would deny us the right.

Looking over these reviews, I see my failings exposed:

I’ve spent perhaps too much time reading post-war pulp, in part because I’d hoped to find undiscovered novels by Mordecai Richler or Norman Levine, but also because they cover a reality that’s all too absent in the polite Canadian hardcover fiction of their day.

I’ve focused too long on Basil King and Arthur Stringer in the hope of finding novels that were as intriguing as their very unusual lives; it’s no coincidence that the titles I’ve chosen to review here are about as close as either man got to writing an autobiography.

Books by women are very much in the minority, and yet they rank amongst the most enjoyable. The same can be said about novels from French Canada. I honestly didn’t recognize this until writing this book. I feel no shame at all for the focus on Grant Allen. The late Victorian’s novels are amongst the most quirky I’ve ever read. And I do like quirk.

Consider this personal baggage.

This book is not meant as a criticism of CanLit profs three decades past, nor those who once taught at Beaconsfield High School or Allancroft Elementary School. It is a partial log of one reader’s unguided journey. More than this, it is a plea to look beyond the canon, the latest award winners, and the grotesque gong show that is Canada Reads. Our literature is more interesting, more creative, more diverse, and much greater than the industry behind these things would have you believe.

ALLEN

Grant Allen’s Wicked Novel

For Maimie’s Sake is equally bad as art and as morals. Maimie is a young woman who has a penchant for falling dead in love with all the married men she comes across. This is called innocence by Mr Allen, but it would be very easy to call it something else. Our opinion of For Maimie’s Sake, briefly, is that it is a mischievous and nasty book, unrelieved either by mental insight or humour.

–The American,

February 13, 1886

It’s said that Grant Allen forbade friends from speaking of his commercial fiction, with the exception of For Maimie’s Sake, which he considered superior to the rest. True, the novel was written with an eye on filthy lucre, but it was just one eye. Allen, who knew the market better than anyone, recognized that it was too off-colour for serialization or lending libraries. Writing publisher Andrew Chatto, he described For Maimie’s Sake as a wicked novel, one that young women would find both shocking and appealing. I break with conventional criticism here to suggest that it was written tongue in cheek. ’Tis a farce, for goodness sake: For Maimie’s Sake? A Tale of Love and Dynamite?

Maimie is Maimie Llewellyn, the bewitchingly beautiful, forever flighty product of an English seaside town. Despite her twenty years, the locals see her as an innocent child. That Maimie gives kisses so freely to Oxford tutor Adrian Pym and his visiting students only confirms their belief that she is naive and pure. In short, Maimie knows no better.

An unconventional upbringing is meant to account for her behaviour. Allen, the atheist son of a clergyman, tears a strip off his fellow non-believers through his portrayal of Maimie’s father, a half-cracked sea captain who believes in Reason only and worships at the altar of Thomas Paine. In this early scene, the captain is reacting to his daughter’s declaration that a visit to London would be just heavenly.

Just what? the Captain cried, in a sharp tone of astonished exclamation.

Just heavenly! Maimie repeated, unconscious of her crime.

There’s no such thing, the Captain burst out, reddening in the face. There’s no such place. There’s no such land at all on the Admiralty chart. There’s no such world; there’s no such existence anywhere as heaven. And even if there were, it wouldn’t in the least resemble London.

Maimie does make her way to London, but only after her father drowns at sea. Now adrift, so to speak, she ends up living in lovely Regent Park with celebrated painter Jocelyn Capriani and his wife, Hetty. What the young women of two centuries past made of this arrangement I cannot guess, but these worldly, somewhat jaded eyes quickly recognized the Capriani marriage as open, the term kisses used euphemistically. Eventually, Maimie and Jocelyn’s smooching becomes a cause of concern for Mrs Capriani. For the first time in her marriage, she fears losing her painter husband to a paramour, and insists that he sever ties.

But who will care for innocent Maimie?

The Caprianis set their sights on Sydney Chevinix, the very same man Adrian Pym—Remember him? The Oxford tutor?—had suggested Maimie marry. Adrian himself can’t marry Maimie because, as an undergraduate, he wed—secretly—a buxom barmaid named Bessie. Rendered bloated and unwholesome from much drink, she dies before the novel’s midpoint.

So, yes, Maimie and Sydney. And why not? What with his wealth, education, and breeding, Sydney is pretty much the most eligible bachelor in the country. There is, however… well, privileged Englishmen do have their eccentricities, don’t they?

A former surgeon, since inheriting his uncle’s vast estate Sydney has devoted time and fortune to the obsessive pursuit of a silent explosive. To this end, he’s hired a Polish nihilist as his assistant. On the very day of their long-sought breakthrough, whilst walking on Primrose Hill, Maimie chances upon Adrian. Passion is rekindled: ‘Adrian,’ she said, ‘dearest Adrian, I have loved a great many men in my time—almost every man I’ve ever met with: but I’ve never loved anybody yet as I love you, my darling.’

Kissing ensues.

Maimie returns home, where Sydney shows off the product of his many years work: a silent pistol. She shoots once at a target, then accidentally on purpose at her husband: ‘Sydney!’ she cried, looking straight in his face, simple and truthful and direct as ever. ‘You will never forgive me. You can’t forgive me…’

Of course he can. As life leaks out of Sydney, and Maimie tells him of her chance meeting with Adrian, he takes pen to paper and composes a suicide note, then turns to his wife:

There’s nothing to forgive, Maimie! It was the impulse of a moment. I know what you are, darling! A child, a dear little simple, innocent child, Maimie. If everyone else would only look at it as I look at it, they’d kiss you, so, and forgive you easily.

For Maimie’s sake, for Maimie’s sake… the phrase appears more than three dozen times in this 232-page novel. The title is apt. Sydney’s faux suicide note is just one example of the lengths to which its characters will go. For Maimie’s sake, a servant drives herself to an early grave, a hospital ward is set ablaze, a man kills himself in the Thames, and a nation is denied a discovery that would’ve secured its world dominance.

Allen was correct in describing his novel as wicked; it is also wickedly funny. Should further evidence be required, I point out that one character dies by exploding cigar.

Victorian Psycho

Mohammad Ali is the hero of this story; its greatest villain—there are several—is his friend Harry Chichele. Men of medicine, both were trained at London’s Middlesex Hospital, at which the latter cultivated a keen interest in bacteriology.

As luck would have it, the pair find themselves in the Cornish town of Polperran (read: Polperro) at the very moment a yacht carrying two cholera victims comes into view. Ali and Chichele set out to rescue and minister to the infected, but it becomes quickly apparent that Chichele is not so much interested in saving lives as using them as case studies:

Now, you couldn’t possibly have two nicer or more typical cases than these; because the boy’ll die and the man, I expect, will pull through somehow. So, if nothing untoward intervenes to prevent it, I shall have a splendid chance of seeing the course of the disease in both directions—death and recovery.

The fortunate survivor turns to out to be celebrated painter Ivan Royle. The two doctors care for their patient at the local manse, each—and here I include Royle—falling in love with Olwen Tregallas, the clergyman’s pretty daughter.

Mohammad Ali considers himself out of the running. Though strikingly handsome, highly educated, and wealthy, he’s aware that his skin is not of the right hue. And what would the townsfolk think of the reverend’s daughter marrying a Mussulman? Such is Ali’s devotion to Olwen that he encourages Royle to propose. His greatest fear is that the English rose will marry Chichele, who he has begun to believe is a bad seed.

But Chichele proposes first, and Olwen accepts. The clergyman’s daughter looks forward to wedded bliss as her betrothed returns to his collection of bottled germs at Middlesex Hospital. He’s hardly had a chance to sit down when a violent drunk of a woman is admitted with lodging-house fever. Chichele leaps from his seat, aware that her post-mortem will provide the final piece of evidence required to complete his revolutionary theory on the advancement of the disease.

Oh, happy day!

However, Chichele’s visions of wealth and glory—a knighthood for himself, a ladyship for his future wife—are quickly dashed as the wretched woman begins to rally.

Confound her, Harry murmurs to himself. He tells Ali it’s better that she die, considering:

"The valuable lives that would be saved for humanity! The wrenches that would be spared to parents and children? The hold we should gain over epidemic diseases! Why, our entire principles and practice of hygiene would be revolutionized offhand. Fever would be banished, cholera dispelled, diphtheria and scarlatina held at arm’s length! Earth would become a really habitable planet, and the triumphant germ who now walks up and down this oblate spheroid of ours like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, would have his fangs drawn and his claws pared by the calm, cool, dispassionate prevision of prophylactic science! All these good things would come to mankind—and I should be able to marry Olwen Tregellas! But no! That bloated, pasty-faced drunken old reprobate, lying in bed in her sins upstairs there, stops the way for all future progress!

So, Chichele kills her.

The doctor commits this ignoble act in an ingenious way, so is never under suspicion by anyone save his Mussulman colleague. Chichele will move to murder again; he is, as I’ve said, the greatest villain. He joins the others as the most interesting characters in the novel. My favourite is the child Lizbeth Wilcox, the waifish daughter of the drunken old reprobate. Rescued from a life of poverty and misery, Lizbeth defies Dickens in proving herself truly evil. Her actions bring death, though the victim is not the one intended.

George Bernard Shaw thought The Devil’s Die shocking. The impact was such that he drew upon Chichele in the creation of Dr Paramore in The Philanderer, his 1893 comedy. Shaw saw Allen’s novel as flawed, but acknowledged the strength of its story.

Who am I to disagree with Shaw?

The plot is indeed riveting, though I will say that I found the last third a bit of a mixed bag. For reasons I won’t describe—that would be spoiling things—Ali travels to the United States in search of Ivan Royle. There, he encounters prejudice unlike anything he has experienced in England. In New York, Ali endures the ignominy of segregated hotels and dining rooms: If this was the treatment he received in New York itself, the enlightened and civilized metropolis of the Atlantic seaboard, what sort of reception might he expect to obtain from the wild westerners among whom Ivan Royle had pitched his tent on the rough and rugged slopes of the Rocky Mountains?

What sort of reception? The sort offered by lawless men who believe in Caucasian supremacy and Aryan culture. These men of the American west don’t mean to allow no more niggers, nor Chinamen or any sort. They’ll kill both with keen enthusiasm.

I’m wrong. Harry Chichele isn’t the novel’s greatest villain.

Wings of Delusion

There is only one fully realized character in Michael’s Crag, but he is so interesting that the whole novel is carried on his non-­existent wings. Michael Trevennack is an elderly English civil servant who spends his holidays on the Cornish coast staring out at a rock formation known as St Michael’s Crag. Fifteen years earlier, a hundred or so feet below, he and his only son were struck by falling rocks. The boy was killed, while Trevennack was left with a blood clot in the brain that has him convinced he’s the archangel Michael. Irascible and egotistical, the one thing that prevents the paper pusher from revealing his true identity is the love and counsel of a good wife.

As the only person aware of her husband’s descent into madness, Mrs Trevennack works hard to keep all hidden until their daughter, Cleer, is wed. After all, no one in their right mind would marry a girl whose father is in the madhouse. The novel opens at about the point where Cleer meets and becomes betrothed to young engineer, Eustace Le Neve. Unfortunately, the fiancé just happens to be a good friend of Walter Tyrrel, the man responsible for the Trevennack boy’s death. He confesses his guilt to Le Neve, describing what amounts to a boyhood act of misbehaviour. Though Le Neve breaks no confidence, the faux archangel figures it out and comes to see Tyrrel as a pawn of the Devil. Or could it be that Tyrrel is the Devil? Mad Michael is a bit confused.

In actuality, Tyrrel is just about the finest person one could hope to meet. Haunted by the death of young Trevennack, he does everything he can to advance Le Neve’s career, thus enabling his friend to marry Cleer. He even goes so far as to bribe respected engineer Erasmus Walker into supporting his friend’s plans for a railway viaduct. In doing so, Tyrrel fairly mortgages his future to a mysterious man who is known to scramble after every penny. What can a man like that want to pile up filthy lucre for? Tyrrel asks. The novel provides no answer; Allen teases, but he never delivers. After giving Walker the money, the now impoverished Tyrrel is plagued with uncertainty: Would Walker play him false? Would he throw the weight of his influence into somebody else’s scale? Would the directors submit as tamely as he thought to his direction or dictation? But no, all turns out just fine; Le Neve is awarded the contract without so much as a hiccup.

This happy news comes none too soon for Mrs Trevennack, who recognizes that her husband is becoming increasingly unstable. However, her hopes that Le Neve, now financially secure, will quickly marry Cleer are dashed when the engineer becomes entangled in work. Months pass. Tension builds. Will her husband manage to conceal his strengthening delusions? Yes. What about at the wedding? No problem. Even when Trevennack spots Tyrrel hiding in the church? Don’t give it a second thought. Okay, but how about when the delusional man spots his enemy on the street? Nope, still nothing.

All these roads leading nowhere and still I expected the climax to feature a confrontation between Trevennack and Tyrrel.

Never happens.

Instead, Trevennack, wandering the Cornish hills, encounters a ram he believes to be Satan. A long struggle ensues in which the old gent manages to kill the poor creature. Victorious, he throws himself off the cliff, trusting that his wanting wings will carry him home.

I didn’t see that coming.

Romance Turns Russian Nihilist Reluctant

The beginning of Under Sealed Orders, a nineteenth-century novel of espionage and intrigue, reads like