| Be Still My Love June Truesdell Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1950 |
| Be Still My Love June Truesdell London: Boardman, 1948 |
Four years ago, while driving home from a grocery run in Kemptville, Ontario, I happened to tune into North Country Public Radio, Canton, New York... then pulled onto the shoulder of County Road 43 and phoned my wife.
The station was broadcasting a live report of a violent assault on the American Capitol.
Two weeks ago, the man behind that failed insurrection was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America. On the very same day that felon, who treats his oaths of office as he has his marriage vows, pardoned men and women who had assaulted police officers. The Capitol Police stood by their oaths; had they turned away, it is entirely possible that Members of Congress, Senators, and the Vice-President would have been killed that day.
Senator Josh Hawley, who'd urged on the insurrectionists, ran for his life like a little boy as Officer Daniel Hodges served to protect him.
Paul Williams lookalike Patrick McCaughey III is one of the insurrectionists who very nearly killed Officer Hodges.
Judge Trevor N. McFadden, a Trump appointee, found McCaughey guilty of:
- three counts of aiding or abetting or assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers, including one involving a dangerous weapon;
- one count of obstruction of an official proceeding;
- one count of interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder;
- one count of disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon;
- one count of engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon;
- disorderly conduct in a Capitol Building;
- committing an act of violence in the Capitol Building or grounds.
On April 14, 2023, McCaughey received a seven year and six month sentence. The felon apologized to the police officers, adding that he was unworthy of the rights he'd once enjoyed.
On January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump restored those rights by pardoning McCaughey and more than 1500 other tried and convicted insurrectionists.
Tolerable Levels of Violence takes place over a period of several days in the summer of 1999. The setting is not far from where I live in the Ottawa Valley. John Cobbett, professor of English at National University ("what had been known as the University of Ottawa"), is burying the body of a man who'd managed to elude his family's security system. The intruder's head was blown off by Anne, John's pregnant wife, who'd walked in on the attempted rape of her nine-year-old son. Care is taken in disposing of the body; the dead man's friends will soon come looking.
John and Anne's mornings begin with CBC reports of violence forecasts:
It will be another day at least before public transportation begins again and schools and theatres reopen. The National Capital Region computer forecast for today remains at Unacceptable Levels of Violence. But we're only one point below that red line, and I think we can promise our audience a socially active day tomorrow... and probably for a few days after that, with Tolerable Levels of Violence for the rest of the week.
This optimism counters the trend. Economic crisis and declining living stands have spurred violence and lawlessness, bringing an end to parliamentary democracy. Canada and the United States have been in decline for well over a decade. Their combined populations – no one pays much attention to the border anymore – is officially 120 million, with a further 35 million roaming the continent grabbing what they can and doing what they want.
When conditions are deemed tolerable, John commutes to Ottawa as the as part of an armed convoy. He's as dedicated to his profession as he is to securing the family home. When possible, he works on his latest essay: "Moral Illusions in Renaissance Literature." Anne what she can to contribute to the household income by writing optimistic children's books featuring young brothers named Tony and Toby.
The Cobbett family lives in Braeside, an unfortified hamlet roughly fifty-six kilometres west of what was once Parliament Hill. The church is a ruin, as is its gas station; most neighboring homes are burnt out shells.
In his 10 December 1983 Globe & Mail review, published three weeks to the day before 1984, William French writes:
The chilling message of this futuristic novel is that Orwell and the other doomsayers were wrong in predictions of man's fate. It's not the tyranny of totalitarian governments we have to fear, or the prospect of nuclear wasteland, but merely the escalation of the kind of random violence and terrorism that are already established throughout the world.
I was a young pup at the time, steeped in the music of Bertolt Brecht, Pete Seeger, Neil Young, Gang of Four, the Mekons, and Heaven 17.
I'd read George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, John Stewart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and watched SCTV religiously. Even then I knew that William French, for whom I have great respect, was all wrong; totalitarianism, random violence. and terrorism are an unholy trinity, as evidenced by Trump's release of Enrique Tarrio, Stewart Rhodes, and even so insignificant a figure as Patrick McCaughey III.
This past Sunday, after another grocery run, this time to Brockville, Ontario, I looked across the St Lawrence to Morristown, New York. You could see its scattered houses quite clearly, not two kilometres across the water. Morristown was so close that I could make out the green letters on the water tower.
I hope to visit the United States again in 2029.
I have no idea what to expect.
About the author: The jacket provides scant detail – "Robert G. Collins is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. This is his first novel." – but there is a photo.
Object and Access: A deceptively slim hardcover bound in off-white boards, anyone familiar with much-missed publisher Lester & Orpen Dennys and its much-missed International Fiction List will remember the format. Tolerable Levels of Violence was #16 in the series, sandwiched between D.M. Thomas's Ararat and Childhood by Jona Oberski.
Though there was no second printing of the Lester & Orpen Dennys edition, the novel enjoyed a second life in 1985 as a Totem paperback.
I rolled my eyes at the cover, but I now see that it is faithful to the novel. The Cobbetts do indeed live in something that looks like a Confederate plantation house. I don't know whether it is based on an actual residence, but do recognize that Braeside has some unusual dwellings, the old Usborne residence being a prime example. My only complaint is that the motorcycle should be purple.
The Weird World of Wes Beattie
John Norman Harris
New York: Harper & Row, 1963
216 pages
Wes Beattie was born with a Woolworths spoon in his mouth; father Rupert's came from Birks. The vast difference in fortune is best explained by youthful folly and libido. Rupert had been the favourite son of Toronto's wealthy Beattie family until he had the misfortune of attending a stag party during his sophomore year at Trinity College. There he met a sixteen-year-old tap dancing accordion player named Doreen. She was so unlike the Rosedale girls he'd grown up with that he couldn't help but be captivated. Within nine months, Mr Maggs, Doreen's dad, came calling at the opulent Beattie home demanding money. Ever the romantic, Rupert thwarted the wishes of both sets of parents by marrying Doreen. She gave birth to a baby girl, and Rupert went from golden child to black sheep. Disowned, he became a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman and Doreen turned to drink. When war was declared in 1939, he was only too happy to enlist and be shipped overseas. Son Wes may have been the result of a fond farewell.
Wes Beattie never met his father, though he'd come to know all sorts of very nice servicemen who visited his mother. After Rupert was killed in Italy, his remorseful mother gave Doreen a nice payout and brought the her grandchildren into her home. Jane, the baby girl whose existence had caused the rift, rebelled, while younger brother Wes just wanted his mummy.
About the author: The life of John Norman Harris (1915-64) is worthy of a biography; consider the introduction to the John Norman Harris fonds housed at the University of Toronto. Is the "Wooden Horse" escape from Stallaf Ludt III not enough?
The author died alone on 28 July 1964, not one year after The Weird World of Wes Beattie was published, suffering a heart attack during an early morning walk in rural Vermont. This brief bio, attached to the 13 October 1963 Star Weekly bowdlerization of The Weird World of Wes Beattie hints at what we missed.
| The Globe & Mail, 14 March 1964 |
It was at 45 Nanton that Harris wrote The Weird World of Wes Beattie, though you wouldn't know that from the Globe piece:
In 1959, it was owned by John Norman Harris, a writer who was also a public relations officer for the Canadian Bank of Commerce, which was poised to merge with the Imperial Bank to form the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
Mr. Harris offered the home as a venue for the secret negotiations, and the deal was signed in a large second-floor bedroom in 1961.Bankers in bedrooms! Meeting secretly! Do tell!
Object: A solidly constructed hardcover with burgundy cloth and pale orange boards. The endpapers remind that this is a HARPER NOVEL OF SUSPENSE, which explains why the back jacket features no author photo, rather promos for other novels in the series:
Love in Amsterdam - Nicholas FreelingThe Fifth Passenger - Edward YoungA Dragon for Christmas - Gavin BlackIt's Different Abroad - Henry Calvin
Two weeks into 2025 and I'm only now starting in on my first novel of the New Year... and so late in the day!
I've wanted to read The Weird World of Wes Beattie for some time, but forays through the used bookstores of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia brought frustration. Exhausted from the chase, I resorted to online booksellers, which explains how it is I ended up with a copy of the Harper & Row first American edition purchased from a bookseller in New South Wales.
It took longer than expected to arrive.
I like to "follow the flag" – The Weird World of Wes Beattie was published in 1963 by Macmillan in Canada – but the expense could not be justified. A rare book, the Canadian first edition was a split run with the American Harper & Row. Publisher names aside, it is pretty much identical, the only other exception being the price. Harper & Row's front flap lists the price as US$3.95, while the Macmillan is not so base as to mention cost. For the record, the Canadian price was $4.95.
From what I've read so far, it was a bargain either way.
Both the Macmillan and Harper & Row editions share the same James Kirby jacket illustration (above). Does it not suggest whimsy?
I ask because the Faber & Faber's first British edition strikes a very different tone:
A novel of suspense with all the ingredients of a Hitchcock thriller... A new talent in detective writing... if Harris can keep this up, Gardner has a formidable rival.Sadly, tragically, in 1966 Harris was in no position to "keep this up;" he'd died in 1964, not twelve months after The Weird World of Wes Beattie arrived in bookstores.
In my twenties, the 'twenties – by which I mean the 1920s – seemed the height of art, film, decadence, glamour, and romance.
I'm not sure I was wrong.
The decade also saw the the height of the novel, though perhaps not in Canada. My CanLit profs assigned works by Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove and Martha Ostenso. How they paled beside Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Forster, Hemingway, Joyce, Wharton, and Woolf! But then, what might one expect from a country of a mere nine million?
Time has passed, during which I've come to recognize that the keepers of the canon have messed up in so very many ways.
As we're now half-way through the 2020s, I present this list of the nine best Canadian novels of the 1920s. Not one of the authors received so much as a passing mention in my CanLit courses.
By no means definitive, I've limited the list to nine titles because I've yet to read Douglas Durkin's The Magpie (1923) and They Have Bodies (1929) by Barney Allen (Sol Allen). From what I know of the two, it's likely that at least one would round out a top ten. I'll be making a point of reading both this year and will keep you informed. But for now: