skip to Main Content

Dusty Old Books

Above the staff computers in the fourth floor workroom, which is on the 1st floor and has been for months and months – the library has contractors – are two shelves of old and rather drab books.

We often find ourselves reaching up for some of these and taking one down to examine. To say why is not easy.

What we have is a collection popular novels, not from last year or from the last few decades (The Age of Sydney Sheldon) nor even from the forties and fifties (The James Gould Cousinonian Era), but from about 1930 back to about 1885. One of our sister libraries had begun the collection and then left off, The Toronto Public Library  inherited it, and now it sits in the fourth floor workroom, here on the first floor, waiting for cataloguing.

The word to mark is “popular.”  There are no classics here, no significant monuments of fiction. These are the books, people, mostly Canadians, bought to read, and to set aside, and to forget. Others like them can be found in the very back shelves of the older sort of used bookstore and in your grandfather’s library and at estate sales, and sometimes flea markets.

Some  titles:

The Smoking Flax [1926]

The Pretender [1914]

The Viking Blood [1920]

The Gun Runner [1909]

The Diary of Delia (Delia is an Irish maid and the whole thing is in dialect) [1907]

The Westerners [1902] (Adventures of a villainous half-blood, or “breed” who comes to a sticky end and serves him right too, the degenerate scum.)

Wedded for Pique [1888] (this one puts us back in the time of Victoria, when people used words like “pique.’

The covers are faded red or blue, sometime with printed designs. No dust covers.

When you open one of these volumes, you are looking at pages that may not have been read for seventy years. The paper is usually a faint tan. These are not items of fine workmanship produced on the sort of press Franklin used. These books were produced on industrial presses, cheaply and on paper that was the next step up from newsprint.  Only being closed all that time has kept them from crumbling.  The pages have a faint dusty odour.  The typefaces are old fashioned.  Some we have looked at seem to be in courier or century type.  There are often illustrations, usually black and white plates.

The stories we have looked at are highly edifying.  There are many young men, stout fellows, making their way in the Canadian North West (it is a Canadian collection.)  Sometimes the s.f.’s are the younger sons of British aristocrats, and therefore suitable for the Heroine, who is always pretty, often  blonde, and always, always chaste. Often there is the Unsuitable Girl who gives up the hero because she loves him, often dying in the process.

Secondary parts are filled with picturesque trappers, who talk in patois, noble Indians, Mounties, missionaries to the savage tribes and so forth.

Let us have a little of the prose.

From The Westerners by Stewart Edward White (friend of Theodore Roosevelt and spiritualist) 1901:

The half-breed had in the past two years reverted almost to the type of his more savage parent.  His hair was long and worn loose, after the Sioux fashion. The upper part of his body was naked.  About his neck hung a string of bears’ claws. Paint streaked his countenance. White buckskin leggings, ornamented with beads, covered his legs.  Only the shifty character of his eye and a certain finer modeling of the bold lines of this face differentiated him from the full-blooded Sioux at his side . . .

From The Diary of Delia, by Onoto Watanna, 1907:

He retired behind his paper agin, and Mr. James cum wistling into the room.  Hes very cheerful these days is Mr. Jimmy.  He gets app, he ses at 5. A.M. in the morning to cut the lons.  The tax he ses at that wiching our is anchanting . . .

Sic indeed.

From The Pretender by Robert W Service (yes, that Robert Service) 1914:

During this black month I only saw Lorrimer once.  It was on the Boul’Mich’ and he was in a great hurry, but he stopped a moment.

“I say, Madden, was it you who sent me the Dago Skirt? Where did you dig her up?  She’s a good type and makes a splendid foil to Rougette.  I’ve changed my plans and begun a new Salon picture with both girls in it . . . ”

From the opening of The Story of the Foss River Ranch, a tale of the Northwest, by Ridgwell Cullum, 1903:

It was a brilliant gathering – brilliant in every sense of the word.  The hall was a great effort of the decorator’s art; the people were faultlessly dress; the faces were strong, handsome – fair or dark complexioned as the case might be; those present represented the wealth and fashion of the Western Canadian ranching world.  Intellectually, too, there was no more fault to find here than is usual in a ballroom in the West End of London.

Now we ought to think that there is nothing on which one cannot philosophise, so let us ask: how does looking at this…stuff make us… wiser?

An easy point first: It is not difficult to notice the differences between what these novels assume, what they take for granted, what is so obvious to their authors that it doesn’t need saying, and what are the home truths of our own dear popular fiction.

The casual racism makes the hair prickle. There is an unquestioned premise that the Anglo-Caucasian slice of the human race is not only running things, but doing so quite rightly. After all, we did have the Maxim gun.

No premium on dissent for its own sake. Very few modern heroes are not kick-over-the-wagon rebels (in a nice way). In these novels, whatever the particular plots, the heroes and heroines were on the side of their society.

Now all this is all true enough, but let us strike a little deeper, if we can.

After all, we could probably find evidence of these (unfortunate) assumptions and premises in the classics from the era, in Conrad, James, and even Hemingway.  So is there anything we learn from the valleys of literature, that we don’t get from the peaks?

What are we after when we read the classics?

A likely answer is insights, that is, conclusions which although drawn from particular circumstances are meant to be more or less widely applicable, advances in wisdom, if we are lucky. Classics are classics because the writing is exceptionally good and the author has thought exceptionally well.

What can we get from re-reading popular and forgotten fiction that was at best mediocre and never really aspired to do more than provide two or three hours of diversion? The original readers got the diversion. We have modern diversions. What can we get from this thoroughly stale bread?

We would suggest, with deference, strangeness.

The author of a piece of popular fiction, or fiction that he hopes will be popular, must above all please.

This amounts to telling the reader what the reader already knows, and confirming that what the reader believes true or hopes is true, is in fact true. The expectations of the reader must be met, even if those expectations are poorly articulated. Even such shocks as are provided must be shocks within what the reader will accept and enjoy. Little Nell may die, but you may not be feed her into a woodchipper. The reader doesn’t like it.

Now the point is that the author in such cases dares not allow any gap between himself, or herself, and the essence of those for whom he or she is writing.  What the author means to present to the reader, is the reader’s own face, and the face of the known world, albeit presented as the 1810s, the colonial period, or even the Elizabethan age.

If we look at it this way, in reading popular fiction we are meeting the readership and in reading old popular fiction we are meeting the dead. Classics provide insights; this stuff reawakens the past.  It has something in common with watching old black and white movies and watching not the actors but the dusty roads and highways against which they move.

But If it is strangeness we are after, what do we get from that?

This is a dodgy point, and certainly no place to be dogmatic. Ask yourself: what would we get if we really and truly could travel in time? What would we get if we could for ten minutes actually meet our great-grandparents?

Perhaps it would be to sense, experience, that the mundane world in which we operate second to second, has a dimensional depth we are apt to miss. We can of course talk about this but experience way out-does analysis as anyone knows who has cleaned his own fish.

Strangeness is the reaction to meeting radically unfamiliar truth face to face.  In these old novels, we can get the flavour of the radical oddness of the universe. Could it be that the strangeness of which we speak is a species of philosophical wonder? And the wonder of it all, as Leibnitz noticed, is that there is anything at all.

Avatar photo

Max Arnott is an independent scholar living in Toronto and has been a reader of Voegelin for many years.

Back To Top