Posts Tagged ‘Memoir’

Review: The Family Nobody Wanted by Helen Doss

Posted in 1950s, Read in 2013, tagged Biography, Memoir, Religion, Social Commentary, Vintage on September 6, 2013| 16 Comments »

The Family Nobody Wanted by Helen Doss ~ 1954. This edition: Little, Brown & Company, 23rd printing. Hardcover. 267 pages.

My rating: 6/10

Well, this was an interesting read, and I’m still trying to decide what my personal reactions really are.

On the surface it is a simple feel-good memoir about a young childless couple adopting twelve children in the 1940s and 1950s, but there are deeper currents to the tale, especially from a half-century later perspective. In particular, there is a damning sub-text of racial intolerance which is very much a part of why and how this family came together.

I didn’t yearn for a career, or maids, or a fur coat, or a trip to Europe. All in the world I wanted was a happy, normal little family. Perhaps, if God could arrange it, Carl and I could have a boy first, and after that, a little girl.

God didn’t arrange it.

In fact, as our doctor regretfully informed us, Carl and I couldn’t have any children of our own. No children, no sticky fingerprints on the woodwork, no childish tears and laughter, no small beds in the other bedroom. Just barren, empty years, stretching aimlessly into a lonely future…

So Helen’s husband Carl, driven to distraction by his wife’s continual bemoaning of her barren future, suggests that they adopt a baby. Helen loves the idea, and the two optimistically prepare a room and trot off to the nearest orphanage, where they learn that it isn’t quite as simple as all that. Most of the babies in the orphanage were simply not available, being only in temporary care, or waiting for relations to take them in, and the adoption agencies which are the next resort are not particularly helpful either. Helen and Carl are informed that waiting lists are years long, and that each baby must match its potential parents perfectly in ethnic makeup and family background. And of course the parents must be financially stable, as well as sterling characters in all other aspects.

Carl and Helen are sure their characters are good, but the money thing is definitely an issue, and the waiting list situation seems cruelly stressful. So they set aside their ideas of forming a family and instead decide to pursue other interests. Both enroll in college, Helen to study literature and writing, and Carl to pursue a long-held dream to become a Methodist minister. And then, miraculously, one more attempt at adoption through an agency results in a beautiful blue-eyed baby boy. Helen is ecstatic; Carl more reserved. They can barely feed themselves, so this new addition is a challenge in more ways than one.

Young Donny thrives and grows, and all is well for a while, until Helen starts to brood over the loneliness of the only child. “If only he could have a little sister…” But another child is an impossibility, declares everyone they contact. “Just be happy you managed to get the one.” Unless, of course, they would consider a mixed race child. Lots of those were languishing in adoptive limbo, and, three years after Donny’s adoption, Filipino-Chinese-English-French Laura joins the family. And, only two months later, frail and sickly Susan, undesirable because of her weak constitution and a tumorous red birthmark on her face.

Helen is still thrilled, though she finds three children something of a challenge, but all three thrive, and Helen starts thinking again. Maybe just one more, a brother for Donny…

Eventually, with increasingly strident resistance from Carl, Helen collects a round dozen of children, six boys and six girls. She writes about the family’s experiences, and the tragedy of mixed race children being seen as undesirable by families otherwise desperate to adopt a baby; even though the Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Malayan, Burmese, Spanish, French and American Indian children she and Carl eventually acquire are accepted by family and neighbours, a constant refrain is “As least they aren’t Negro!” Carl and Helen do attempt to adopt a part-black child from a German orphanage, child of black American GI father and a German mother, but the transaction is strangled by red tape; their families and friends are loudly vocal in their relief, and one of the most passionate chapters in the book strongly condemns this attitude, and addresses the degrees of racism inherent in American society, and its effect on innocent children along with its part in much greater societal ills.

Helen and Carl come across as truly sincere in their attitudes that colour means nothing, and that human is human; Helen starts writing articles about their “United Nations” family, and the Dosses catch popular attention, being interviewed, photographed and featured on radio and television, as a kind of shining example of American acceptance and tolerance, though in reality the very existence of their family group has come about through blatant American racial discrimination. These are, after all, the children that nobody wanted.

The book ends only twelve years after that first baby, Donny, is adopted, and the tone is happily optimistic, but there are undertones that perhaps all may not be so well in future. Carl is a reluctant participant in the continual enlargement of the Doss family, though he is very willing to tout its benefits for interviewers; Helen persists in collecting children in the face of Carl’s outright “No more” plea, time and time again. The news that the Doss marriage ends in divorce in 1966, twelve years after the publishing of this bestselling book, comes as no surprise, though it is sad; one hopes that the children – some at that time well into adulthood, one must admit – weathered their family breakup with a minimum of trauma, though one doubts that would completely be the case.

Knowing several cross-culturally adopted children who now, as adults, are seeking diligently to reconnect with their birth parents’ heritage, I wonder what happened to those twelve children as they grew up, and what they each personally made of their inclusion in this unique family, and of the publicity which their parents’ outspoken willingness to discuss their adoptive choices attracted.

I do think, both from the tone of Helen Doss’s memoir, and from other reports on the Doss family I read on the internet, that their intentions were, once they started adopting, only the best. And, also, I do tend to think that children deserve a loving family versus being institutionalized, and that if the only fit possible is cross-cultural, so be it. If it were more widely accepted (as it wasn’t in the 1940s and 1950s) then at least the “novelty factor” would not be such an issue.

I’ve tagged this post with a “religion” designation, because it is also very apparent that Helen and Carl Doss were motivated in a great part by their Christian faith. Carl Doss is quoted as saying that

…The whole idea of Christianity is radical (a)nd the whole idea of democracy is radical. Think how really it is to say that all men are created equal, and that all men are brothers – and that the individual is important!

Conflicted as Carl seems to be by his wife’s acquisition of child after child, once they are brought into the family he apparently embraces his fatherhood fully, being as full of latent paternal affection as he is of “radical” Christian ideals.

A thought-provoking memoir, and, as I said, a bit uncomfortable to consider more deeply, given that a whole lot must have been left out. Though I was interested and pleased to see that Helen Doss was very frank about her own motivations of needing children to “complete” her idea of true womanly fulfillment; the ideal of a happy, multi-racial family group seemed to develop as her circumstances changed.

I did my usual look-around the web, and was interested to see how highly this book was rated on Goodreads; a large number of people apparently read and loved it in their school years; the reviews are by and large quite glowing.

It is very readable, and provides a truly fascinating (though superficial) glimpse into the mid-20th Century’s social dilemmas and attitudes towards both adoption and racial and interracial societal division lines. It is also frequently very funny; Helen Doss’s anecdotes of her children’s doing are downright adorable, and well targeted at the sentimental readers who have obviously embraced it as a “sweet tale”. It is a sweet tale; it is also an indictment of the bitter evils of racial discrimination; and a strong advocate of true Christian behaviour; and a revealing portrait of a marriage not without deep personal conflicts, despite its publically positive façade.

For more on the Doss family, these links will be good starting points.

Helen Doss – Obituary

Adoption Topics – The Family Nobody Wanted

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Review: Honeymoon in Purdah by Alison Wearing

Posted in 2000s, Canadian Book Challenge #7, Read in 2013, tagged Canadian, Canadian Book Challenge 7, Memoir, Travel on September 1, 2013| 6 Comments »

Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey by Alison Wearing ~ 2000. This edition: Vintage Canada, 2001. Softcover. ISBN: 0-676-97362-0. 319 pages.

My rating: 9.5/10

In 1995, a decade and a half after the revolution which resulted in the deposition of the Shah and the establishment of the Islamist fundamentalist government led by Ayatollah Khomeini, a young Canadian woman and her male partner entered Iran on tourist visas. Their official reason: a honeymoon journey. The not so official reason: for Alison Wearing, the chance to explore a country and culture vilified in the Western world as impossibly backwards and more than slightly dangerous for touristing. For her partner Ian, Iran is a second-choice destination. He really wanted to go to Bulgaria, but a fear of travelling alone and, one suspects, Alison’s more focussed drive and tenacious personality, have resulted in this joint trip.

Before taking this trip together … we would spend hours poring over maps, planning long, arduous treks through desolate corners of the earth or road trips across continents.

The only problem was my strong belief in travel as a solitary pursuit. And Ian’s fear of travelling alone… We settled on Iran because it was the only place I couldn’t imagine going on my own. And for a whole stack of other reasons that had nothing to do with our relationship.

The year before we met, I had made my fifth trip to Yugoslavia. I went, in part, to visit friends trapped in the middle of war, but also because the media’s portrait of the place – full of barbarians and void of humanity – made the world seem unlivable. I refused to believe that such a place of unalloyed evil truly existed, that that was the end of the story. I went because I believed that there had to be more. And because I like to look for saints where there are said to be demons.

Iran became our destination for the same reason.

I’m going to share a major spoiler here, one that comes part way through the book. (I don’t feel particularly bound to keep this a secret; it is something of a “first line” in many of the internet reviews I’ve read.)

I have a confession to make. Ian isn’t my husband. We aren’t even lovers, just friends. We forged a marriage certificate just before leaving Montreal using photocopies of his brother and sister-in-laws document, and that is what we are using to get ourselves into hotels. Most proprietors don’t ask and of those that do, two have scrutinized the paper very seriously while holding it upside down, so we needn’t have worried so much about its appearance of authenticity. The thing we should have worried about, perhaps, is the effect that photocopying and whiting out of names on a marriage certificate might have had. By the time Ian and I had reached Iran, his brother’s marriage had collapsed.

…

So Ian, my fussy, gay roommate and I are romping around Iran quite illegally. And not altogether happily, if only because our interests are not as parallel as we had grown to believe. He is primarily concerned with dead things (history, buildings, wars), and I primarily with living things. Sometimes I find myself wishing he would evaporate, which isn’t to say I don’t still find him endearing. It’s just that our differences have become painfully obvious under this desert light…

So that is the explanation of the double entendre title of this exceedingly revealing (yet not quite forthcoming) travel memoir. The author has been rattling around the world quite independently for some time already, a seasoned traveller indeed. But this trip called out for a partnership, because of the difficulties inherent in a woman attempting to move about unchaperoned by a male relative in a very strictly policed, Islamic fundamentalist country. It is doubtful that, alone, Alison would ever have been permitted to cross the border, with only “tourist” as her declared motivation. A honeymoon journey, while raising some eyebrows, is accepted as a valid excuse, especially when Alison, whenever necessary, willingly dons full traditional garb: manteau, headscarf, and all-enveloping chaador.

First of all, there is no such thing as “wearing” a chaador. There is only “managing to keep one on.” And I don’t say this as a frustrated novice, but as an observer of scores of women who have been dressing with it most of their lives.

The chaador is a living, wriggling entity, whose preferred habitat is the floor. Any woman trying to cover herself is not only fighting the true nature of the fabric, but also gravity, which has been in cahoots with the chaador since the beginning of time. The moment the chaador is on, wrapped in just the right way, covering all the right things, it begins its dogged descent, squirming along the sleek surface of the hair, hoping to make a clean leap to the neck, where it can secure a foothold for its plummet off the shoulders. An astonishing portion of the wearer’s energy and concentration goes into minimizing the creature’s progress, herding it back into position around her face, leashing it to her fingers and fists, or clamping its skin between her teeth. It doesn’t enjoy being corralled in this way. Thus the constant wrestling. The creature prefers damp, humid surroundings and feeds on sweat.

The literal translation of chaador is “tent”, but from my own camping experience this seems a poor translation. The sack-shaped coat and scarf I have on right now are the tent. The chaador thrown overtop feels more like the fly.

Alison Wearing fully embraces the experience of going – literally – undercover in Iran. Though she is deliciously sarcastic and witty throughout, she is also good-spirited and gracefully positive, describing her impressions on every aspect of her travels from the clothes to the food to the various characters she encounters to her long-suffering travelling companion Ian, whom, incidentally, we don’t really get to know, aside from a few brief vignettes here and there. It is rather as if Alison has chosen to shield Ian from examination, focussing instead on her own emotional and physical journey. It would be most interesting to read a parallel account of the Iranian episode from Ian’s point of view; one suspects his inner voice would consist predominantly of one long, high-pitched scream, triggered by Alison’s continuous flittings off and nonchalant eventual returns: Ian seems to (understandably) spend much of his Iranian time in a state of high anxiety. Alison must have been an utterly exhausting partner for their five months “honeymoon” in Iran.

All criticism aside of the self-indulgence of relatively well-heeled Western travellers sightseeing in troubled Eastern countries – and Alison addresses this dichotomy in her narrative numerous times – this book is an excellent example of a modern travel memoir. It opens a window into a very different culture, and it educates and informs as much as it amuses. And it is very amusing. And poignant, and heart-rending, and – this goes without saying – thought provoking. Well done, Alison Wearing.

Many years have passed since Alison took her Iranian journey and wrote about it so wonderfully well. In the meantime she has married, had a son, and pursued numerous other interests, including the successful production and performance of a one-person stage show based on her childhood, adolescence and young womanhood, much of it centered around the situation of her father’s “coming out” as a gay man – albeit one with a wife and three children – in the 1970s, in conservative Peterborough, Ontario. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is Alison’s second memoir, published just this year, some thirteen years after her first book. I am looking forward to reading it with anticipation; I had thought to add it to my Christmas wish list, but I suspect I will acquire it long before then.

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Review: Hello to Springtime by Robert Louis Fontaine

Posted in Canadian Book Challenge #7, Read in 2013, tagged Canadian, Canadian Book Challenge 7, Humour, Memoir, Vintage on August 20, 2013| 3 Comments »

Hello to Springtime: A Personal Memoir by Robert Louis Fontaine ~ 1955. This edition: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1955. Hardcover. 246 pages.

My rating: 8/10

As those of you who have been following my blog for any length of time will know, I have fondness for memoirs, particularly those of never-been-famous “regular people” or now-forgotten public figures. Their personal stories are always fascinating, and, if well-written – as they frequently are – wonderfully readable for their occasional poignancy and frequent humour. The glimpses back into times gone by and their unique perspectives on historical events are an added attraction. Hello to Springtime is a good example of this particular biographical niche.

Robert Louis Fontaine was a minor celebrity in his time. Born in 1911, he was a working journalist, a best-selling author of short stories and novels, a public speaking humourist, and an occasional actor.

At the tender age of three, Robert Fontaine accompanied his mother and father by train from Massachusetts to Ontario, where his father had been offered the position of conductor and first violinist of an Ottawa vaudeville theatre. From snippets of memory, from looking at old photographs, and from the accounts of his parents, Robert pieces together a child’s-eye account of the highlights of that trip, and of the years which came after. As his memories solidify, the book progresses into fully formed, detailed anecdotes of the strange and wonderful world of boyhood and adolescence.

Robert tells of his bemused response to the celebration on the streets of Ottawa at the end of the Great War, and of his increasing awareness that life was not simply the ever-present Mama and the away-much-of-the-evening Papa, and listening to the strains of violin practice coming from his father’s room, and playing in the street. It soon broadened to include school, and the usual childhood friends and enemies, as well as beloved and feared teachers, and, inevitably, the maddening but adorable charms of the opposite sex. As well, the Fontaine family was an extended one, and a number of Robert’s relations were French Canadian; visits from various aunts and uncles gave plenty of scope for humorous remembrance in later years.

Just before his final year of junior college, Robert and his family returned to the United States; the increasing popularity of “talking pictures” and the subsequent demise of the vaudeville and music hall phenomenon left his father scrambling for employment; the Canadian days were over.

The author was a strongly opinionated man; he holds forth with vigour on a wide array of topics, from the paradoxical moral standards governing young people and sex, to the evils of compulsory schooling, the complications of organized religion, and the various foolishnesses of civilized society in general. Often didactic in tone, Fontaine’s laying down of the law as he sees it is neatly tempered by his cheerful willingness to poke fun at himself; I was never truly offended by his rather outrageous pronouncements, but found myself frequently (though not invariably) in complete accord.

My initial mild enjoyment steadily increased as the narrative progressed and I became more and more caught up in Robert Fontaine’s reminiscences of his early youth and teenage years, and in his anecdotes about his family. I turned the last page with gentle regret; I could happily have kept going. An insidiously appealing read, this one.

Robert Louis Fontaine is perhaps best remembered for his connection to a popular 1952 feature film, The Happy Time, based on his 1945 fictionalized memoir of the same title. The Happy Time was made into a successful stage musical in 1968. Incidents in all three versions of The Happy Time are also detailed in Hello to Springtime; the author assures us in the forward that “these are the facts”.

I am also in possession of one of Fontaine’s best selling fictional novels, based on the antics of one of his actual relations, 1953’s My Uncle Louis. This was among my late father’s books, and I recall reading it as a teenager with not much enthusiasm; I remember thinking it rather silly. After my enjoyment of Hello to Springtime, I am now keen to revisit My Uncle Louis with fresh eyes. Perhaps the several decades of life which have gone by since that first reading will bring me to a new appreciation. We shall see.

While I wouldn’t recommend that you immediately run out and search for Hello to Springtime, I would encourage you to give it a whirl if it crosses your path, especially if you, like me, enjoy these glimpses into the past via good-humoured personal memoirs.

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Review: Hi, There! by Gregory Clark

Posted in 1960s, Canadian Book Challenge #7, Read in 2013, tagged Canadian, Canadian Book Challenge 7, Essays, Memoir, Vintage on July 29, 2013| 6 Comments »

Hi, There! by Gregory Clark ~ 1963. This edition: McGraw Hill-Ryerson, 1968. Softcover. ISBN: 0-7700-6026-9. 228 pages.

My rating: 9/10. There is absolutely nothing to dislike – well, aside from, if one wants to get really nit-picky, the odd era-typical comment, such as Mr. Clark referring to his wife and presumably at least one daughter in a paternally misogynistic way as “my women” – and much to like.

This was one of my father’s books; I remember buying him other Gregory Clark titles as birthday and Father’s Day gifts; I am now wondering just where those might have ended up, as Hi, There! has piqued my interest; I’d happily read more of these pleasant (though possibly just a bit dramatized) memoirs.

These are short, 4 to 5 page, mostly humorous, meticulously well-written anecdotes and essays on various low-key topics, from winter driving (a truly Canadian focus of interest) to neighbourhood feuds to amusing encounters with all sorts of people, including a carload of bank robbers disguised as a wedding party.

Gregory Clark has a stellar backstory as an extremely well-regarded journalist. He was the recipient of both the Order of the British Empire and the Order of Canada for his war reporting, as well as receiving the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour for his collection entitled War Stories.

From The Canadian Journalism Foundation biography:

Greg Clark – Journalist 1892-1977

It was once said that in the years leading into the Second World War, more Canadians would recognize Greg Clark on the street than the prime minister or the movie hero of the day.

During the 1930s, Greg Clark was the most widely read writer in Canada, crafting features for the Star Weekly with cartoonist Jimmie Frise. His popularity continued through the late 1940s and into the early 1960s as a writer and most notably back-page columnist, for Weekend Magazine.

Nineteen books of Greg Clark’s writings, ranging from everyday life to the horrors of war, have been published. His output of stories about real people living real lives was phenomenal.

Craig Ballantyne, editorial director of Weekend Magazine, once described Clark as “a man so Canadian that no other land could possibly have produced him.” [Ernest] Hemingway, in 1920, called him the best writer at the Toronto Star.

Clark entered journalism in 1911 at the Toronto Star, where he worked for 34 years before joining the Montreal Standard, which later developed into Weekend Magazine.

He is often remembered as a columnist, but his feature and column work had been forged by years of front-page reporting. He covered the Moose River mining disaster, royal coronations, papal coronations, the death of FDR, and the founding of the UN, to name a few. He was a [frequently frontline] war correspondent in World War II, after serving in WWI, which he entered as a private and left as a major.

His contributions to journalism are many, but his most important is what his work can show other journalists about storytelling excellence. All Clark’s writings, from columns to hard front-page news, are guides to how journalists should tell stories that interest and inform readers.

His writings are real life with human touches. They have been described as “rapid, full of rhythm, unimpeded by digression.” His work was positive in the darkest situations, while still laying out the full facts and describing reality. This is an approach worth study in a time when the public feels journalism is far too negative…

More glowing biographies are here:

The Canadian Encyclopedia – Gregory Clark

4th Canadian Mounted Rifles – Biography of Capt. Gregory Clark

Gregory Clark. Perhaps now a forgotten author in this new century? Fellow Canadians, remember the name for your used book store explorations; you might be very well pleased to make his acquaintance.

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Review: River for My Sidewalk by Gilean Douglas

Posted in 1950s, Canadian Book Challenge #7, Read in 2013, tagged Admirable Women, British Columbia, Canadian, Canadian Book Challenge 7, Memoir, Nature, Vintage on July 21, 2013| Leave a Comment »

River for My Sidewalk by Gilean Douglas ~ 1953. Originally published under the pseudonym Grant Madison. This edition: Sono Nis Press, 1984. Softcover. ISBN: 0-919203-41-8. 132 pages.

My rating: 7/10, after some consideration. Some of these short anecdotes and essays are solid 10s, some are not.

I’ve been slightly sidelined with a minor virus these past few days, and the upside is that while I’m just feeling sub-par enough to take a break from most of my more strenuous everyday chores, I’m perfectly able to putter about in the garden, do some gentle weeding, tomato-staking and pruning, watering, and definitely take advantage of the down time to read and type. So, having ambitiously started a number of reviews, I may just get a few more than usual launched in the next day or so. Or perhaps I’ll take advantage of the WordPress feature which allows us to schedule posts for future dates, something I’ve never yet had to do, as there is definitely no backlog of things ready to share! If anything, I frequently post before all of the final tweaking is done, catching typos and awkward phrasings after I’ve hit the “Publish” button. Luckily there is an “Edit” feature, too…

I picked up this particular book at The Final Chapter in Prince George last week, while browsing the excellent Canadiana section. Being rather partial to memoirs in general and British Columbia rural and wilderness settings and history in particular, River for My Sidewalk‘s back cover blurbs pretty well guaranteed my purchase.

About the Author

Gilean Douglas has been a newspaper reporter, copywriter, editor, columnist and, throughout and still, a freelancer. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals both here and abroad, including Chatelaine, Saturday Evening Post, Canadian Business, Audubon, the New York Times and, by actual count, 144 other periodicals. She has five volumes of poetry to her name, one of light verse, and three nonfiction titles. Four of her poems were set to music and published by Schirmers and others received choral settings and have been performed at [various venues] and in concert. She edited Modern Pioneers for the B.C. Women’s Institute after holding local, district, provincial and national office in that organization.

Gilean Douglas now [in 1984] resides on Cortes Island, where she is a Weather Observer with Environment Canada (receiving four awards for her work) and a Search and Rescue Agent. In her spare time she raises plants, produce, and bulbs.

About the Book

Gilean Douglas spent close to a decade living alone in a small wilderness cabin in the Cascade mountains. River for My Sidewalk, first edition, was originally published…in October of 1953, under the male pseudonym of Grant Madison. The reading public of that time would have doubted the authenticity of a woman managing in the circumstances described. But Gilean Douglas did more than manage, she thrived in the isolation and completeness that solitude brings. Well before the days of liberated females, Ms. Douglas chose, lived, survived, and savoured a self-sufficient existence in an area that is still considered wild and inaccessible. Her story is timeless and the observations are lyrically clear…

Gilean Douglas: Naturalist, feminist, farmer, poet, author.

Well, I’d never heard of the woman myself, but who could resist finding out more? And, after reading River for My Sidewalk, I did just that. What an absolutely fascinating woman Gilean Douglas must have been! And not just fascinating, but, for all of her quirks and her unhappy history with husbands, apparently much admired and beloved by her friends and neighbours. Here is an excerpt from a longer biography in B.C. Bookworld:

Gilean Douglas, author of River for My Sidewalk (1953), was a female Thoreau of Canada. A loner from a well-to-do family, she retreated to wilderness cabins and became an environmentalist before the word existed, leaving four marriages behind her.

Gilean Douglas, born in Toronto in 1900, was orphaned at age 16 and soon became a reporter. She travelled extensively prior to her arrival in B.C. in 1938 where she first lived in a cabin on the Coquihalla River. She then moved to an abandoned miner’s shack on the Teal River near Duncan, B.C. “It was the great moment of my life when I waded the Teal River,” she wrote, “with my packboard on my back and stood at last on my own ground. I can never describe the feeling that surged up inside me then. . . I felt kinship in everything around me, and the long city years of noise and faces were just fading photographs.” Subsisting mainly on produce from her garden, Douglas began to write about her adventures but could not find acceptance as a woman writing about outdoor life. Adopting the male pseudonym Grant Madison did the trick—and she published River For My Sidewalk, her best-known book.

Gilean Douglas continued to use her male name until 1983 when she revealed herself in a Vancouver Sun interview. Douglas next moved to Cortes Island, near Campbell River. “I have spoken many times of ‘my land’ and ‘my property’, but how foolish it would be of me to believe that I possessed something which cannot be possessed,” she once wrote. Along with seven poetry books, she produced two more meditative memoirs, Silence is My Homeland: Life on Teal River (1978) and The Protected Place (1979). The latter describes life on her 140-acre homestead on Cortes Island where she was employed as an Environment Canada weather observer and a Search and Rescue agent. Her cottage was situated at Channel Rock on Uganda Pass. For nine years she served as the Cortes representative on the Comox-Strathcona Regional Board. Gilean Douglas also contributed a nature column called “Nature Rambles” to the Victoria Daily Colonist (which became the Times Colonist in 1980) for 31 years, from 1961 to 1992, a longevity for a B.C. columnist that places in her in the company of Eric Nicol and Arthur Mayse. She died on Cortes Island in 1993.

And for a much longer and much more detailed biography, Andrea Lebowitz’s well-researched and fascinating article, Narratives of Coming Home: Gilean Douglas and Nature Writing, is a must-read.

Well, this is all well and good, but how does River for My Sidewalk measure up to its author’s infinitely intriguing promise?

I must say that I had high expectations, just from reading the cover material and from my quick perusal of the contents before I purchased the book. And I did enjoy reading it, though it went in a little different direction than I had anticipated.

Something about the tone of the narrative voice struck me as a little bit odd, and occasionally forced, and it wasn’t until I twigged to the fact that the author was carefully phrasing her passages to make the book appear as if it were written by a man that the penny dropped. I had started out assuming that the reader was aware that the writer was indeed a woman, and once I revised this assumption and allowed for the time of writing and publication, the late 1940s and early 1950s, the rather coy slant was understandable, and therefore much more acceptable.

Gilean Douglas writes in a strongly opinionated manner. She lays down the law as she sees it, unapologetically critical of mankind’s abuse of nature, and eloquently defensive of the way in which she has chosen to retreat from the mainstream world. She never condemns the city dweller as such, acknowledging that it would be an impossibility for all to strive for her type of lifestyle, but she has little patience for the squeamish and feeble-hearted visitor to the bush who quails at the thought of coming across a cougar or bear, or of crossing a river on an open cable car, or of hiking miles for a casual neighbourly visit.

Much of the book is an enthusiastic tribute to the natural world, phrased in glowing and effusive tones. Possibly just a little too glowing and effusive? The style frequently seems a bit dated even for the time of writing, being perhaps more typical of the century before; it reminds me of those rather stilted memoirs one frequently comes across hiding behind ornate covers in the antique books section of the better second hand book stores.

Example:

The day is my friend. I meet it with outstretched hand and use every moment of it to the utmost. Sitting in the house I have partially built I eat the food which I have grown for myself. I have tried to learn everything there is to know about the trees, flowers, birds, animals, insects and rocks which are all around me. It has taken me years and will take more years, but I feel that every grain of such knowledge brings me closer to the great harvest of the universe.

The night is my love. Dusk comes with the benediction of the thrush and the darkening of river water. The clearing is all shadow and the forest dim with mystery. The shade climbs higher and higher up the mountains which ring my valley, leaving only the peaks crested with sunlight. Everything becomes slower and more silent as the dusk deepens into night. Then stars burn silver in the sky and sometimes the moon sails a midnight sea to a port beyond the tall evergreens of Home Wood. This has been the way of night in the wilderness for untold eons. How few living now have ever known it as I do! Campers, fishermen, hunters come in here bringing their shouts and drinking and luxuries. They go home to boast of their wilderness adventures, but all they take away is a paste jewel in a plastic setting.

And then there are the passages like these:

Spring has swept away the last patch of her snow with her green-twigged broom and hung out the clouds to bleach…

and

When burning … fir and hemlock have their swan song of beauty… as needles become rosettes of flame which shimmer and fade along the twigs, transforming each one into a garland for some fire queen’s shining hair…

But for all the occasionally purple prose there is much beautifully phrased and sincerely presented, as Gilean Douglas documents the thoughts of her long solitudes. I buried all my qualms when I read this:

We are all strangers here, but no one more so than the person who is out of step with the time. If you are that person you will be understood – and then only imperfectly – by just one or two of all those you know and perhaps by none at all. To the others you will always be suspect. The timid will be afraid o be seen with you; the bold will say they cannot be bothered with anyone who is more interested in the future of the world than in whether today’s market is going up or the price of tomorrow’s whisky going down.

Most of this ostracism will bother you very little for there is nothing you like better than quietness and privacy. But not every moment of your life. In books you can find the comradeship and understanding you are denied by living men, but even so you are hungry for a good heart-to-heart talk with someone who comprehends you intellectually and emotionally. If you are lucky you will come across one or two people with whom you can exchange ideas, and if you are luckier still you will marry one of them…

…[An] urgent sense of the shortness of life, perhaps more than anything else, distinguishes the man out of step with his time from his fellow beings. He sees time wasting everywhere around him and he is disgusted and alarmed. He knows that it is all wrong; that life is precious and should be used for precious things. Not that he believes in all work and no play, but simply that his idea of play differs from the bridging, gossiping, clock-watching, pulp-reading average. To him play is a change of occupation – perhaps from writing to splitting wood – while relaxation is letting go completely in sleep, laughter or lying on a summer hill watching the clouds drift over and “growing soul”…

An unusual and admirable woman, this Gilean Douglas, and one whom I will be seeking to acquaint myself with more deeply through her other writings. Apparently the two 1970s memoirs are not quite so gushing, and are more contemporary in tone, though they are not as well known (relatively speaking) as River for My Sidewalk.

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Review: Enchanted Summer by Gabrielle Roy

Posted in 1970s, Canadian Book Challenge #7, Read in 2013, tagged Canadian, Canadian Book Challenge 7, Memoir, Nature on July 19, 2013| 1 Comment »

Enchanted Summer by Gabrielle Roy ~ 1972. Published in French as Cet été qui chantait. This edition: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Translated by Joyce Marshall. Hardcover. ISBN: 0-7710-7832-5. 125 pages.

My rating: 8/10.

This is a slight and delicate compilation of short (some very short) vignettes written by the esteemed francophone author during one of her summers residing in a little house she had purchased in 1957 in the rural village Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, Charlevoix County, Quebec.

People come and go throughout Gabrielle’s summer; her husband Marcel Carbotte, various acquaintances from far and wide, her local friends, and, most frequently, her closest neighbours, Berthe and Aimé, with whom she peaceably shared a fenceline.

Many of the vignettes are fragmentary glimpses of nature and landscape, snapshots of a moment captured in words. Gabrielle and Berthe walk along the railroad line to a small pool inhabited by a responsive bullfrog, Monsieur Toong; Gabrielle ponders the wild garden which grows on an uncultivated bit of farmland; the intellectual capabilities of Aimé’s placid cows are considered; the gentle life of Jeannot the crow is captured in words as he sways in the wild cherry tree, and his sad fate is documented.

Wildflowers, birds, domestic animals are all considered and watched with interest and the author’s observations are gently and humorously related to the reader. The beauty of the landscape is frequently detailed, and the sights, sounds and fragrances of what seems to be a time of great peace and contentment; even the occasional storm does not break the mood of repose. These summers by the river were Gabrielle’s time of retreat and (relative) solitude, in which she refreshed herself from the busy social life of her winter residence in Quebec City, and from the cares of her family – two ailing sisters in Manitoba were often visited – and a time of concentrated writing.

Most of these small stories are centered on animals, but the two most poignant, and to my mind the most memorable, involve people.

Elderly cousin Martine comes for a two weeks’ visit in the country; living in a small city apartment and frail to the point of immobility, she longs for a glimpse of the river of her childhood. One day, without telling Martine’s sons what they are planning, Berthe and Gabrielle laboriously support and carry her down to the river, where for a while she revisits her long lost youth.

For my part, the more I looked at her the more I was reminded of those pilgrims of the Ganges in Benares, whom one sees with loincloths tucked up, frighteningly thin but their faces illuminated with fervour…

…Suddenly, barefoot on the rim of the summer sky, she began to ask questions – doubtless the only ones that matter.

“Why do we live? What are we sent to do on this earth? Why do we suffer so and feel lonely? What are we waiting for? What is at the end of it all? Eh? Eh?”

Her tone was not sorrowful. Troubled perhaps at the beginning. But gradually it became confident. As if, though she didn’t quite know the answer, she already senses that it was good. And she was content at last that she had lived…

And, in a remembrance of a long-ago month as a substitute teacher in a very small, poor, rural Manitoba settlement, Gabrielle recounts her visit to the house of one of the school pupils, who has just died of T.B. The other schoolchildren, who have been apathetic towards their temporary teacher, unbend as they tell her about the sadly fated Yolande. With sudden inspiration, Gabrielle suggests they pick the wild roses growing in the clearing outside Yolande’s cabin, to give tribute to their friend.

On our return we pulled them gently apart and scattered petals over the dead child. Soon only her face emerged from the pink drift. Then – how could this be? – it looked a little less forlorn.

The children formed a ring around their schoolmate and said of her without the bitter sadness of the morning, “She must have got to heaven by this time.”

Or, “She must be happy now.”

I listened to them, already consoling themselves as best they could for being alive.

But why, oh why, did the memory of that dead child seek me out today in the very midst of the summer that sang?

Was it brought to me just now by the wind with the scent of roses?

A scent I have not much liked since the long ago June when I went to the poorest of villages – to acquire, as they say, experience.

As I said early on, this is a slight and quickly read memoir, but one that has a decided charm and a strong sense of atmosphere and place. Very well suited to a peaceful summer afternoon read, preferably in the shade of your own particular tree, with birdsong and dancing shadows for counterpoint.

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Review: Cornish Years by Anne Treneer

Posted in 1940s, Read in 2013, tagged Biography, Memoir, Vintage on July 14, 2013| 1 Comment »

Cornish Years by Anne Treneer ~ 1949. This edition: Jonathan Cape, 1949. Hardcover. 284 pages.

My rating: 8/10.

This is the second volume of Cornish writer and poet Anne Treneer’s trilogy of memoirs. The first, Schoolhouse in the Wind , was such an unexpected treat that I immediately decided to track this author’s other works down. I did all of the usual searches, and decided my best bet was to order the re-released trilogy published by the University of Exeter Press in 1998, under the (slightly altered) title of the first book, School House in the Wind.

Imagine then my delight upon finding this first edition copy of the second volume in a tiny antique store in the micro-community of Barriere, B.C. on a quickie road trip last week. We were out in our old Spitfire convertible, investigating promising narrow, winding (and must be paved – not a given in this part of the world) side roads in the Kamloops area, and were ready for a break from the wind and sun when a sign in the window captured our notice: “Used Books”. Well, that was irresistible, so I pulled a quick U-turn (an easy feat in a tiny little Triumph) and in we went. Lots of china and glassware, but the promised used books were only a shelf or two, quickly scanned and dismissed. However, as I made my way carefully out through the shelves of fragile treasures, something caught my eye in the showcase beside the cash register. There, side by side, were this book, and another, The Angels’ Alphabet by Hilda van Stockum, a first edition picture book by another author-illustrator I’m mildly interested in.

I’m guessing these were featured because of their intact dust jackets and general “vintage” appearance? Anyway, for well under twenty dollars I walked out of the store clutching my treasures with ill-disguised glee. And that proved to be the bookish highlight of the day, as our subsequent visit to our real destination, Kamloops’ excellent At Second Glance Used Books, source of so many wonderful finds over the past ten years, left us standing in bemusement peering through the windows of an empty store front.

“They’ve moved!” I said optimistically to my husband. Across the street to the Kamloops Art Gallery we trotted, and upon inquiry we were stunned to hear that the bookstore had indeed closed just a few months ago. “So many people are asking about it, and they’re all so disappointed,” said the helpful girls at the admissions counter.

Turns out that a steady decline in sales over the last few years had left the owner debating the state of the used book business. She sold off as much as she could in a series of escalating sales, and at the end had dumpsters brought in, and binned the remainder.

I am very sad. What a dismal ending to such a grand bookstore.

Two more of my local used book sources, Nuthatch Books in 100 Mile House, and The Final Chapter in Prince George, are also debating closure, as their margins are steadily decreasing. Every bookseller I’ve spoken to has blamed e-books for the decline in the print book business.

Meanwhile the charity shops are overflowing with books – most, admittedly, the epitome of “trashy” (in so many ways) – which may indeed be an indication of shelves being cleared as people embrace the new technology.

There is no adequate substitution for a well-established, well-organized used book store staffed by fellow book lovers. I tremble at the thought of more of these dying out, much as I understand the seduction of having your reading material to hand in a compact electronic format.

But used book sellers have grocery bills too, and once the point of too-little return is reached, what options do they really have? I know many are turning to internet sales, but to do that properly is a job in itself, and the competition is fierce unless you are prepared to vigorously establish a lucrative niche market of some sort, often not a very viable option for those in small communities with limited book-sourcing opportunities…

Ah, well. It is what it is. Back to this book.

*****

Cornish Years decidedly lived up to my high expectations. Ann Treneer continues her life story of the years between 1906 and 1932 with cheerfully pragmatic anecdotes about her own doings, and affectionate reminiscences of the places and people she rubbed up against. As in Schoolhouse, the narrative is never twee or gushing, but it is cheerfully positive in tone, and the mood feels genuine throughout.

As much as it is a personal narrative, Cornish Years is also a loving ode to place, both Treneer’s home region of Cornwall, and places farther afield. Anne Treneer spent time as an adult student pursuing studies at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, and her memories of those days are beautifully evocative and full of love and appreciation for her experiences there.

The snippets of Anne Treneer’s poetry in Cornish Years – she was a published poet from an early age – show much more style and polish than those in School House; I wonder if she has included these small samples of her work in some sort of chronological order? If so, I would be most interested to see what the third volume of memoir, A Stranger in the Midlands, contains, both in the way of poetry and in the continuation of Anne’s personal story.

As I can’t count on bookish serendipity to bring me the third book as it did the first and second, I have taken things into my own hands and ordered the 1998 trilogy. And if I do come across an old copy of Stranger, I will of course be more than happy to add it to the bookshelf.

In my internet travels, I came across an interesting reference to Anne Treneer at this blog, The After Life of Books, written by Gillian Thomas, an English literature teacher and resident of Cornwall. She writes about the experiences of her parents and grandparents in relation to the books they read. (Fascinating website, well worth a look-around.)

She (Gillian’s mother) was particularly proud of having a personal connection with another Cornish writer, Anne Treneer, author of the childhood memoir, Schoolhouse in the Wind, and Cornish Years, a reminiscence of her college education and early years as a schoolteacher. Treneer had been my mother’s English teacher at the local grammar school and, as well, had rented a cottage from my grandparents. They, along with other villagers, appear in one of the chapters of Cornish Years, and both my grandmother and mother often proudly mentioned these references. They were flattered to find their names in a book, even as faintly amusing village “characters.”

My mother’s pride in the Treneer connection may have originated in the prestige of a personal aquaintanceship with a published author, but it was sustained by her fascination with Anne Treneer’s apparent independence from conventional restrictions. During the time the author taught at the grammar school she used a motorcycle to explore the area, a detail which always figured in my mother’s recollections of that time as well as in Treneer’s happy reminiscences about her Velocette in Cornish Years. Similarly, my mother recalled visiting her former teacher years later and finding her fuelling the fireplace in her rented seaside cottage with an enormous driftwood spar that she had just scavenged from the beach. In all these reminiscences Anne Treneer seemed to embody an insouciant air of independence, a relishing of her own solitary company and an unconcern about conventional behavior. In the letters and postcards from her that arrived from time to time throughout my childhood, she always seemed free to travel at will. We imagined, I think, that this apparently carefree independence, came with the role of being “an author.” It was, of course, mainly made possible by Treneer’s generally frugal tastes and habits. Also, it’s likely that travel funds came from the author’s older brother, Maurice, who had emigrated to the US and become senior chemist at Miles Laboratories in Elkhart, Indiana. He is credited with creating the original formula for Alka-Seltzer, a product whose launch was fortuitously timed to coincide with a flu epidemic as well as the end of Prohibition. While he does not seem to have personally owned the patent to that lucrative cure for hangovers and other malaises,a number of other patents in his name, as well as his salary as head chemist at Miles Laboratories, would have enabled him to be generous in funding holidays for his sister…

And here, as another side note, is the Wikipedia page regarding the Velocette motorcycle, one of which Anne Treneer tenaciously learned to master and rode about on with undisguised joy, which she so eloquently described in Cornish Years.

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Review: The Shout and other stories by Robert Graves

Posted in 1960s, Read in 2013, Short Stories, tagged Memoir, Short Stories, Vintage on July 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The Shout and other stories by Robert Graves ~ 1965. This edition: Penguin, 1978. Paperback. ISBN: 0-14-00.4832-4. 300 pages.

My rating: 7/10.

A generous and widely eclectic sampling of Robert Graves’ short stories and personal anecdotes. While a bit uneven, as might be expected in an anthology spanning some forty years or so of one man’s writing career, but there is enough excellent reading in this book to make it a certain keeper.

The stories are grouped under three broad headings: English Stories, Roman Stories, and Majorcan Stories, but the first and third categories show quite a wide range in style, settings and topics. The three Roman Stories are the tightest grouping, theme-wise.

I enjoyed reading most of these, and came away feeling keen to continue to develop my acquaintanceship with the prolific Robert Graves. I do believe I might be ready to tackle his ambitious I, Claudius. If it is anything like the three Roman Stories in this collection, it will be very good indeed. I’ve been holding out for a better edition, as mine is a fat paperback with a cracked spine and tiny print (these unreliable middle-aged eyes are giving me grief lately), but I think I will dip in and see how it goes. If I like it I’ll upgrade to a physically nicer edition. Anyway, I’m straying off topic. Back to the volume at hand!

*****

From the author’s Introduction:

The first of these stories, The Shout, was written in 1924; and the last, Christmas Truce, in 1962. Most of them, including such improbable ones as Kill Them! Kill Them!, The Whitaker Negroes, Old Papa Johnson and A Toast to Ava Gardner, are true, though occasional names and references have been altered. Nor can I claim to have invented the factual details even of She Landed Yesterday, or An Appointment for Candlemas. In fact, a correspondent who read She Landed Yesterday reproached me for not mentioning the two French copper coins found in the coffin-doll’s pocket; and An Appointment for Candlemas brought members of the revived British witch cult to my door in search of information about flying ointments and such like. Pure fiction is beyond my imaginative range; I fetched back the main elements of The Shout from a cricket-match at Littlemore Asylum, Oxford.

ENGLISH STORIES: A variety of anecdotes and stories, most with some sort of “twist”.

The Shout ~ The otherwise seemingly normal resident of an insane asylum claims he has the power of the “terror shout”, which brings madness and even death to anyone within hearing range. Occultish and dark. Not one of my favourites, though it is memorable enough. 7/10.
Old Papa Johnson ~ “Old Papa Johnson” was once Crown Agent on Antarctica’s Desolation Island. His solitude is intruded upon by two uninvited guests, with dire consequences. 6/10.
Treacle Tart ~ In this short anecdote, eight-year-old Lord Julius Bloodstock unexpectedly descends upon a surprised prep school, but runs afoul of dietary rules, refusing his treacle tart and sparking something of a minor rebellion among the schoolboys. 6/10.
The Full Length ~ A portrait artist is asked to paint a picture of a recently deceased young lady whom he’s never seen, and who has never had her photograph taken. His solution is quite clever, and rather improbably lucky. 5/10.
Earth to Earth ~ A macabre little tale of an interest becoming an obsession. Dedicated composters, take warning! Queasily humorous; I laughed out loud with horrified glee at the ending. I *hope* this one was not true! This story would be right at home in a Roald Dahl (adult) story collection. 7/10.
Period Piece ~ A humorous little tale of a marital misunderstanding. 6/10.
Week-End at Cwm Tatws ~ Still channelling Roald Dahl at his darkest, Graves tells the story of a visit to a dentist gone very, very wrong. 6/10.
He Went Out to Buy a Rhine ~ A mysterious suicide turns out to have an esoteric explanation. 5/10.
Kill Them! Kill Them! ~ A poignant remembrance of a young man killed in the war. 6/10.
The French Thing ~ Gloriously funny tale of village life. Beware the vicarage daughter! Unexpected. Loved it. 10/10.
A Man May Not Marry His… ~ An odd little theological, medical and ethical debate about the implications of sex change operations. (I think.) 4/10.
An Appointment for Candlemas ~ An interview with a modern witch. Cheeky and funny. 8/10.
The Abominable Mr. Gunn ~ Memories of a sadistic schoolmaster. 6/10.
Harold Vesey at the Gates of Hell ~ An ironic little tale of village life. Nicely done. 7/10.
Christmas Truce ~ Christmas in the trenches, World War I. Enlightened commanders from the German and British sides arrange a temporary truce. 10/10.
You Win, Houdini! ~ The rise and fall and rise of a crooked minor magician turned army officer. 8/10.

ROMAN STORIES: That would be ancient Rome. These were all humorous in tone, and all excellent.

Epics Are Out of Fashion ~ Falling afoul of Emperor Nero is never a healthy idea, especially when one is a poet writing a thinly veiled mockery of that vindictive lord himself… 8/10
The Tenement: A Vision of Imperial Rome ~ This was my favourite story in the collection. An episode detailing daily life in ancient Rome. Brilliantly done; very funny, despite the tragic sudden ending! 10/10.
The Myconian ~ A provincial visitor from the island of Myconos is made acquainted with the dramatic and sporting diversions of Rome. Another 10/10.

MAJORCAN STORIES: Written during Graves’ long residence in Majorca, Spain.

They Say…They Say ~ gossip in the marketplace. 5/10.
6 Valiant Bulls 6 ~ An epistolary episode detailing Spanish bullfighting, from “Margaret” to “Dearest Auntie May”. Not quite sure about this one; didn’t quite hit all its attempted high notes. 6/10.
A Bicycle in Majorca ~ The author’s personal anecdotal tale about civil bureaucracy in relation to the importation and retention of his sons’ British bicycles in Spain. Rather good. 8/10.
The Five Godfathers ~ Here’s Margaret gushing on to Auntie May again, this time detailing a confusing christening. Sort of amusing, but perhaps not as much as the author intended. 6/10.
Evidence of Affluence ~ A tale of revenge. This one works out very well, though I guessed the ending from a long way off. 8/10.
God Grant Your Honour Many Years ~ A misunderstanding and a happy resolution. Another amusing personal anecdote, well presented. 8/10.
The Viscountess and the Short-Haired Girl ~ A humorous tale of three Spaniards involved as witnesses in a slightly nefarious divorce case. In the end, everyone gets what they want. Complicated, but funny. 9/10.
A Toast to Ava Gardner ~ An appreciation of Ava Gardner, whom the author knew personally. Goes off on a divergent tangent or two. Rather sweet. 9/10.
The Lost Chinese ~ Another complicated tale, this time of playwrites and mistaken identities. Diverting. 7/10.
She Landed Yesterday ~ A nobleman commits suicide after dabbling in the occult. Love, betrayal and wounded pride move the narrative. 9/10.
The Whitaker Negroes ~ A horrifying portrait in an Irish antique shop leads back to America, and to a very strange story – part truth, part fable. 9/10.

*****

Note: Robert Graves is also the author of the recently reviewed Antigua, Penny, Puce, which I stumbled upon recently and subsequently found very diverting. A writer of broad range, well worth exploring.

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Review: Schoolhouse in the Wind by Anne Treneer

Posted in 1940s, Read in 2013, tagged Biography, Hidden Gem, Memoir, Vintage on July 3, 2013| 2 Comments »

Schoolhouse in the Wind by Anne Treneer ~ 1944. This edition: The Travellers’ Library, 1950. Hardcover. 221 pages.

My rating: 8/10.

A slight memoir which leapt into my hand as I was quickly browsing the back room bookshelves housing the “collectibles” during a recent visit to Hope’s lovely used book store, Pages. I’d never heard of Anne Treneer before, but I am so pleased to have made her unexpected acquaintance.

Intrigued initially by the title, and wondering rather why this volume had been shelved among the back room “treasures”, I had no idea what to expect, but a brief dipping-into let me know that this was one of those personal memoirs of childhood which can be such appealing reading, capturing as they do the very essence of an individual’s earliest memories, and frequently memorable glimpses of long-passed time and much-changed place.

*****

He panted to escape but I

As he was winding thin

And narrowly was slipping by

Gasped and drew him in.

~On Catching the Breath

Anne Treneer was born in 1891, in the small village of Gorran in England’s Cornwall (hotbed of so many writers and creative types), the very much unplanned-for sixth child of the family, born after the family of four boys and a longed-for daughter, Anne’s older sister Susan, was thought complete. The baby carriage had long been given away, so Anne was trundled about by her older brothers in whatever other conveyance was handy:

My brothers say they brought me up in a wheelbarrow, and that this accounts for certain bumps in my forehead and generally scrappy appearance. When I was small they used to tell me that old Mrs. Tucker brought me one winter night in a potato sack and left me on the front step; and that I squalled so loud that my father said to my mother, ‘For God’s sake bring the little Devil in and see if she’ll stop that noise’. So in I came and stayed…

Anne’s father was the local schoolmaster, and Schoolhouse in the Wind is an affectionate, humorous and occasionally poignant evocation of a small corner of Cornwall at the juncture of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Gorran School, with a house for ‘master’ glued to it, stood strong and symmetrical, without beauty but not mean, triumphantly facing the wrong way. It might have looked south over the distant Gruda and the sea; but this advantage was forgone in favour of presenting a good face to the road. Master’s room in school, the big room as we called it, caught the north wind while the closets at the back caught the sun. I have heard that Mr. Silvanus Trevail, the architect, who designed many Cornish schools, committed suicide in the end; but whether out of remorse for his cold frontages I do not know.

That last comment at the end of the book’s first paragraph filled me with quiet glee – obviously this was not to be a completely sweetly sentimental memoir, but something with a bit more bite! – and I read on with high expectations. Those expectations were well met and frequently exceeded.

A young Anne Treneer.

I could go on and quote many excerpts of Anne Treneer’s rather delicious writing, but I won’t. This book was recently (well, in the late 1990s, “recent” in the used book world, I feel) reissued along with its two companion memoirs, Cornish Years and A Stranger in the Midlands, as a one-volume trilogy. It should be fairly readily available in libraries – at least in British ones – and there are a number of copies available through ABE.

A young Anne Treneer (seated) with her father & sister Susan

I recommend it on the strength of this first volume of the trilogy, and I will be buying the combined memoirs for my personal library. The first chapter of Schoolhouse in the Wind sets the stage, as it were, introducing the physical setting of the chapters of reminiscence to follow, and though it will perhaps be of greatest interest to those familiar with the area, even to me, a reader who has never visited England, the picture it draws is vivid and memorable. Also vivid are the character portraits the author paints of her family; with a few well chosen words they come alive on the page.

An internet search brought up a very few references to Treneer. Though she is described as a “prolific” writer, there appear to be few of her titles now available, aside from Schoolhouse in the Wind and the other two memoirs. Schoolhouse is also full of brief snippets of poetry; one assumes these are samples of the author’s work. Some are quite lovely; others seemingly aimed at perhaps a juvenile audience, which is understandable as Anne Treneer spent many years as a schoolteacher.

Anne Treneer

Anne Treneer never married, and seems to have led a happy and rather individualistic single life, pursuing her many interests with passion and good humour. She died in 1966.

I will leave the subject of Anne Treneer, at least for now, with this excerpt of a short biography from Maurice Smelt’s 2006 book, 101 Cornish lives.

Anne Treneer pulled off a difficult trick; she wrote an autobiography that succeeds in enthralling despite its almost relentless happiness. Most writers would not even try, reminding themselves that ‘happiness writes white’. It came out as three books over a period of eight years – Schoolhouse in the Wind, Cornish Years, and A Stranger in the Midlands – and it runs from her earliest memories to a day in her late 50s when she went to America to visit her brother.

From her father’s village school she went to St Austell County School, then to a teacher training college in Truro and then taught in various schools in Cornwall. Ambitious to read deeper and wider she took an external course at London University during the First World War, later spent a year at Liverpool University, later still took a postgraduate degree at Oxford as a mature student. Her longest spell at any one school was a seventeen-year stint at King Edward’s in Birmingham, ending in 1946 with a year’s sabbatical leave. She had by then already written Schoolhouse in the Wind two years earlier, and her future was to be a writer, exiled but coming to her beloved Cornwall when she could. In those twenty post-war years she lived mostly in Devon. She was never married and died in 1966.

One reason why her life seems so tranquil is that she was so eccentric, and at the same time so commonsensical that she records what she did as if doing it were the most obvious thing. For example, she loved air with a passion. It is a word of power in her books, her poems especially; there it is, in slight disguise, in the title of Schoolhouse in the Wind. Hence her whizzing about the country in her young days on a Velocette motorbike, the air streaming past her nose like high-speed champagne. As a teacher in Birmingham she spent a summer term commuting (by Velocette) from a tent in Shropshire on Clent Hill. Tents also feature in later summer holidays in Gorran with her sister Susan – three tents, one for each of them and one for the saucepans… Her outdoorsness gave her the keenest eye for the particularity of place, and she could see several worlds in a single Cornish parish.

She claimed to hate crossings-out and third thoughts, but one would never know it as her books are easy reading, usually a sign of art concealing graft…

“Art concealing graft”… what an intriguing comment that one is, as well!

So, if you stumble upon anything by Anne Treneer in your travels, pick it up and peruse it. She has a lot – happily wry and generally unsentimental – to say.

This one gets a “hidden gem” tag.

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Review: A Doctor’s Pilgrimage: An Autobiography by Edmund A. Brasset, M.D.

Posted in 1950s, Canadian Book Challenge #6, Read in 2013, tagged Biography, Canadian, Canadian Book Challenge 6, Memoir, Vintage on June 27, 2013| 12 Comments »

A Doctor’s Pilgrimage: An Autobiography by Edmund A. Brasset, M.D. ~ 1951. This edition: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1951. First Edition. Hardcover. 256 pages.

My rating: 8/10.

What a great little autobiography this was! Totally unexpected. This was one of the books I picked up in Hope’s fabulous Pages bookstore recently; so far my eclectic selection of books from that source have been overwhelmingly rewarding.

A Doctor’s Pilgrimage covers only a small portion of the life of Nova Scotia physician Edmund Brasset’s life and career, and it appears, from a fairly involved internet book search, that this was Brasset’s only literary endeavour. One can only assume that the man was too busy with his career and family to continue writing, but this lone work is interesting and well written and gives a wonderful portrait of both the man and the time and place he was writing about.

From the inner flyleaf:

The book consists of anecdotes of medical school, internship and work as a novice doctor in rural Nova Scotia, first in poverty-stricken Canso and later in a variety of other communities, ending in the almost utopian Acadian community of Little Brook, a posting which changed Dr. Brasset’s focus for the continuation of his medical career. Dr. Brasset never talks down to his readers; medical terminology is used with great abandon, but never to impress, merely to inform. Character portraits abound, as do retellings of local legends – a mysterious case of spontaneous combustion; the morning discovery on shore of an unconscious man with both legs recently amputated; a woman who believes that she is surrounded by ghosts – as well as asides referring to the author’s strong faith in both the goodness of humanity and the existence of a benevolent God. A very individualistic and opinionated (in a very good way) memoir.

A grand little book, in its happy minor key.

From the back cover, more on the author. (Aren’t these old dust jackets great?)

And last but not least, the Kirkus Review entry for A Doctor’s Pilgrimage, from September of 1951.

A lively, likable record of a doctor’s rewarding if unrewarded first years in practice, and a little black bag full of fascinating cases, Brasset’s story starts when he left Halifax and the ambition to become a brain surgeon behind for Canso in Nova Scotia, where there was only fish and fog. After two years in Canso and a rising debt of several thousand dollars, Brasset was forced to leave for New Waterford where he married Sally, and his obligations increased in spite of a grateful mobster’s attempt to drum up business. A year on the staff of a mental institution widened his experience but did not increase his income, and finally he found a good practice in the remote French-Canadian village of Little Brook. Later given the chance to become a neurosurgical specialist, Brasset found the indifference and institutionalism of working with cases, as against people, less satisfying, made the decision to return to his country doctoring in Little Brook… A record of service which has warmth and humor.

The family eventually moved to the United States; during my internet research I found mention of Dr. Brasset’s son Paul, who is now a successful winemaker in California’s Somona Valley, even naming his winery after his childhood home: Bluenose Wines . (What an interesting little side note I found this to be. One reason I love the internet – such an abundance of rabbit trails one can happily follow!)

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