At Work Upstairs

I’m not a historian by training so when I read histories I find myself swinging wildly between grasping the overall flow of events and hunting out tiny details.  This makes reading books like Michael Petrou’s Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War especially pleasurable.

On the one hand reading Petrou’s meticulously documented account reveals the vistas of my ignorance—take Morocco, for example. I had no idea that Franco’s coup began in Morocco and that many of the Nationalist troops were from North Africa.  I was also surprised, but probably shouldn’t have been, to learn that much of the Spanish Civil War was trench warfare. Being sent into an International Brigades disciplinary unit (euphemistically referred to an engineering, fortification, or labour battalion) meant night work repairing often too shallow trenches and a very high casualty rate. Hard to tell if disappearing into one of the Republicans’ secret, extra-legal prisons—Prevention Houses—was a worse fate. Hugh Garner ended up in a labour batallion for attempted desertion but accusations of Trotskyism could also have near fatal results.

Detail from photo taken near Teruel, probably in January or February 1938

On the other end of the scale, there are tiny details derive ultimately from Petrou’s work with Comintern records and in other archives.

Petrou’s research turned up this photo from the Imperial War Museum—an ambulance named after Tom Ewen (also known as Tom McEwen), father of Jean and of two sons who fought in Spain.

It also turns out that Stewart “Paddy” O’Neil—one of the leaders of the On-to-Ottawa Trek—was born Stewart Homer. (He died on July 6, 1937 during the Brunette offensive.)

Like O’Neil many of the Canadians fighting in the International Brigades had spent the early 30s as itinerant workers and logged time in Bennett’s work camps. Having lived rough for many years, the Canadians were unlikely to leave their bedrolls or shovels behind because they were too heavy. They left that particular mistake to those they dismissed as “New York ice cream boys”. Not surprisingly the American and Comintern officers of the International Brigades thought the Canadians had an attitude problem.

Over the last three years or so I’ve become interested in the people whose lives were shaped by the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). (Three shelves of books dealing with Edwardian Antarctic endeavours testify to my attraction to somewhat obscure bits of history).

Doug Smith’s Zuken: Citizen and Socialist lacks of notes and bibliography but it filled in a few gaps in my understanding of Winnipeg history and the lives of a few people involved in the mid-20th century CPC.

Joe Zuken, a lawyer and CPC member, was a long-time Winnipeg school board and city council member. What’s stuck with me the most is Zuken’s work in defending the people arrested in 1940 under the Defence of Canada Act Regulations. Passed in September 1939  (and subsequently revised to limit some of its draconian measures), the Act permitted the arrest and indefinite detention of people perceived to be a threat to national security.  The state swung the net wide and caught up members of political, religious, and ethnic groups. Many of those detained did not go through any formal court process (most notably Japanese Canadians).

Those that did go through the court system found the process lacking in a few niceties. Those passing through R.B. Graham’s court in Winnipeg discovered that the judge had a habit of sentencing people in public court to jail time and then when the paperwork was being drawn up adding an additional qualification of hard labour. Tom McEwen was one of those sentenced in November 1940 to this combination of jail time and hard labour.

Joe Zuken in 1940

Graham’s hard labour additions led to legal challenges, not the least of which was that the Defence of Canada Act didn’t have provisions for hard labour.  Graham’s sentencing practices were curtailed but Joe Zuken, acting as McEwen’s lawyer, did some diligent legwork and discovered that Graham and jail officials had tried to tidy up after themselves by crossing out the phrase “hard labour” in one or more copies of the warrants that sent McEwen to jail. Worse the warrants would sometimes be re-typed to remove the offensive, extra-legal sentence of hard labour.

Zuken’s persistence led to the September 1941 filing of a writ of habeas corpus for McEwen.  After a period of judical review, McEwen was released in October 1941. He was free the length of time it took to walk out the door of the Headingley Jail.

The RCMP immediately detained him and interned him first in Petawawa and then in the Hull Jail before the shifts the war led to a release of most of the Canadians interned for being Communists.

I’m trying to wean myself off of murder mysteries. For years they’ve been at the heart of the bulk reading I use to cope with stress.

Photo: xxrobot

I started reading mysteries in graduate school. Mysteries stood outside the prescribed reading routine and were something I could enjoy without having to be too serious or analytical about the texts. Other popular genres didn’t appeal.

I’d had my fill of popular novels dominated by romance plots in my adolescence when I read my mother’s copies of Helen MacInnes, Jean Plaidy, Mary Renault, and others. Science fiction didn’t attract me strongly since the technology-dominated and hyper-masculine stories were off-putting.

I was too stubbornly interested in rationality and realistic plots to be able to suspend disbelief and enjoy fantasy novels.  Mystery novels, though, suited me: mostly realistic, plot-driven, puzzle-based, and, if I chose carefully, strong female characters.

My pattern in television watching was much the same, with a larger dose of science fiction and fantasy given the company I keep. That started to shift earlier this year as we were getting ready to put the television away for several months. Often I’d catch myself noticing that I was only watching a murder mystery because I was bored.

A common enough experience but one day I stopped long enough in the noticing to ask myself what exactly was entertaining about watching fictions founded on watching someone’s pain. To relieve boredom I was treating cruelty and death and assault as a form of entertainment.

The television’s been packed away for many months now. Occasionally in a fit of frustration or boredom I’ll watch a crime show online but I’ve more or less eliminated the genre from my view.  Reading material is a different matter and I’m making much slower progress there.

Last year’s reading total was made up of 18% mysteries. This year I’m looking at 21% so far.  The reason’s not hard to discern: at the library my hand still goes to formulaic mystery novels. The branch I use has a large mystery collection, a good-sized romance collection, and a smaller collection of literary fiction: that’s what suits the majority of its users.

I’m not sure what I’ll shift to for light reading. Romance novels and plots still don’t interest me much. Not interested in adding more fear into my life with horror fiction. I’m more open to fantasy than I once was and I’m slowing reading through Terry Pratchett—slowly because I am going to run out soon. I’m not particularly drawn to vampire/werewolf/zombie fiction. Military or imperialistic fantasies disguised as space opera won’t do it for me. Short stories are, well, too short.

I’m difficult.

And in need of reading suggestions. Basic requirements: light reading that passes the Bechdel test, has a good plot that doesn’t pose marriage as the solution to the characters situations, and doesn’t position conquest, pain, or death as the key entertainment. Bonus points for comedy.

Photo by spacmonster / CC

The number of books I read a year has held steady for the last two or three at just over a hundred—usually weighted toward recent “literary fiction” with dollops of comics, mysteries, history, and work-related stuff. I’m happy enough with the volume and the proportion: sometimes the bulk reading threatens to get out of hand — always a sign of too much going on at work —  but this year I’d like to try make some headway with books bought but not read.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was a gift that languished on my to-be-read shelves for little more than a year. I think I’d pop it into a light-reading category but it held my attention longer than I thought it would. It’s an epistolary novel and the switching between multiple points of view is done well. It’s a bookish book full of conversation about books and reading. The tone is buoyant if glowingly nostalgic. And as long as you don’t think too hard about the back story (war, concentration camps, slave labour, collaboration, resistance), it’s a good way to read away some hours, especially on a dreary day.

Suggested reading: Anne’s House of Dreams

Suggested counter reading: The Tiger Claw

First snow here today. Roofs are whitening. Pavements are damp and dark. A moment’s sunlight will return us to autumn dryness.

The snow has put me in mind of one of my favorite blogs: Antarctic Conservation. Recently they’ve been working on paper restoration and have confessed to being somewhat distracted by the interior of objects like this well-used copy of the Illustrated London News.

I’ve always been curious about what the Edwardian explorers read. Expedition accounts frequently mention the reading habits and materials in passing. Lawrence Oates’ reading, for example, of Napier‘s multi-volume history of the Napoleonic War was a matter of comment on the expedition and is often noted in historical accounts,  sometimes with a note of surprise.

In Ponting photographs, books of one sort or another often peek out of the background.

I’ve often wanted to know is whether there’s a list of all the printed material taken along on the Edwardian expeditions. Oh wait. Conservators. Of course there’s a list. I wonder if there’s a publicly accessible list.

Heather

Mixing categories

When I bought Whiteout I knew that it would fit into two sets of (book and mental) collections–Antarctica and comics–but the whole DTOWF connection was a hoot out loud surprise.

(Apparently Kate Beckinsale plays Carrie in the upcoming movie version. Strikes me as odd casting.)

There’s a nice MA thesis waiting for someone out there who looks at the tendency of fictions set in Antarctica to focus on murder. (Preliminary bibliography here.)

Heather

I sometimes save the bits of paper I find in library books.

This I found in Cheri.

Random reading

One of the pleasures of March was reading the beautifully produced Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist.

Independent scholars come to their books in odd ways: Nancy Goldstein began with a doll. Made of plastic, the Patty-Jo doll stood 18” high and was marketed with her own range of clothes. Manufactured between 1947 and 1949 the dolls were designed and in some cases hand-painted by Jackie Ormes who also included multiple references to the doll in one of her comics.

The most striking and valuable thing about this biography are the dozens of reproductions it includes. It’s clear that Goldstein spent hours in the microfilm room recovering what remains of Ormes work. Paper copies of Ormes’ work are long gone: either suffering the fate of much mid-century newsprint or destroyed by librarians overly enamoured of microfilm. The images Goldstein has found have been patiently cleaned up and carefully annotated.

Jackie Ormes (1911-1986) wrote and drew four separate comic strips—all of which feature African American women or girls. The comics appeared weekly in the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier,  African American news papers with national distribution. Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem, a black and white, three or four panel strip ran from 1937 to 1938 in the Courier.  Candy, a single panel comic, ran in the Defender for several months in 1945. Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger, also a single panel comic, ran in the Courier from 1945 to 1956. Torchy Brown Heartbeats, a full-colour romance comic in the Courier from 1950 to 1954 and was accompanied by a series of Torchy paper dolls and clothing.

What struck me most in looking at the comics was the pin-up style of the drawing of the female characters. While pin-up figures of Torchy Brown or Candy aren’t particularly odd for comics or for the period, the contrast between five-year-oldish Patty Jo’ and her older sister Ginger constantly startled me. Ginger is fashionplate, Vargas cheesecake.  The strong contrast between a hyper-sexualized adult female body with a just past toddler body is more dissonant than the contrast between entirely silent adult and overly-knowing child who comments on the social and political events of the day. Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger is a fascinating combination of fashion and politics.

In the end, Goldstein’s account of Jackie Ormes life is hampered by a lack of primary documentation. While Ormes kept some of the business and social correspondence she received, few if any of her letters or original art survives. Goldstein reconstructs Ormes’ life from family memories, an admittedly inaccurate interview given shortly before Ormes’ death, and some public records.  There are odd elisions—why did the Ormes leave the Sutherland Hotel in 1956 the same year Jackie Ormes stopped drawing comics? And odd gaps—how did Torchy Brown, as a romance comic, compare to others of the period or how did Ormes’ work compare to that of other African American comic artists of her period?

There’s more work to be done in collecting Ormes work and placing her in the social, political, and artist context. But this is a fine beginning, the product of much care and attention.

Some links

• Short film of Ormes in her studio
• Salute to Pioneering Cartoonists of Colour
• Archive of Golden Age Romance Comics (via Journalista)
• Publishers Weekly Review
• Interview with Nancy Goldstein (via Torchbearers)

Heather

Last month I miraculously snagged one of the Early Review books from LibraryThing. And it finally arrived from the University of Michigan Press.

It’s a beautifully illustrated biography: Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist. So far I’ve only peeked at the illustrations and wiggled in anticipation. This afternoon I think I’ll start reading it in earnest.

I’ve made my way through Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out: How Two Million Survived Without Men after the First World War,  wide-ranging survey of a generation of English women.  While Nicholson’s prose is sometimes dull and often repetitive (especially as she transitions from one subject to another), reviews of the book have been mostly upbeat, the result of the strength of the material she’s working with.

As this review point out, Nicholson’s command of historical interpretation is not as strong as might be wished: Nicholson leans too heavily on the millions of "surplus woman" canard.  Demographically there were roughly the same number of "surplus" women before the war as there were afterwards.

Never mind that though. What Nicholson does well is tell the stories of the unmarried women she surveys whether they were clerk typists or engineers. And she has a knack for selecting good photographs–the snapshot of Victoria Drummond holding up her hard-won Chief Engineer’s certificate will stay with me as long as the more formal portrait of a group of grim veterans each with one or more amputations.

It’s the sort of book that is simultaneously annoying and pleasing: annoying because it tells snippets of so many lives and pleasing because it leads in so many directions.  I’ve already ordered a biography of Drummond (how exactly does a goddaughter of Queen Victoria manage to wangle an apprenticeship in a Dundee shipyard?) and wouldn’t mind hunting out more stories about  Caroline Haslett of the Electrical Association for Women or Florence White of the National Spinsters Pension Association

Heather