Post, November 20, 2003.
The central character of his comic strip is Onésime, a chinless, pipe-smoking, Walter Mitty figure of a man who is married to Zéonïde, an opera-going matron. As Heer points out, Chartier’s subject is rural attitudes, but his style was as modern and cosmopolitan as the cartoons that appeared in The New Yorker of the day.
Chris Oliveros, publisher of Drawn and Quarterly, in Volume 5, fall 2003, devoted more than seventy pages to the reproduction and study of Chartier’s art, which may be compared and contrasted with that of Jimmy Frise, who at approximately the same time drew “Birdseye Center” for the Toronto Star Weekly. Chartier’s audience was at once more rural and more sophisticated than Frise’s.
064. Was Sir Henry Baskerville a Canadian?
Sir Henry Baskerville is the principal character in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). In the Sherlock Holmes mystery, Sir Henry is an Englishman “who had been farming in Canada until he inherited a baronetcy from his uncle, Sir Charles Baskerville, upon the latter’s mysterious death.” The location of Sir Henry’s farm is unspecified in the novel, but Doyle wrote that he bought his boots in Toronto, from a bootmaker named Meyers. (The “Meyers, Toronto” reference led to the founding of the fan group known as the Bootmakers of Toronto in 1972. At the turn of the century, a shoemaker named Meyers had a shop on Wellington Street in the city. Donald Campbell Meyers was a leading psychiatrist at the turn of the century in Toronto.) He returns to the Moors and is confronted with the mysterious Hound! Further details appear in Christopher Redmond’s article “Sherlock Holmes from Sea to Sea” in Lasting Impressions: The 25th Anniversary of the Bootmakers of Toronto, The Sherlock Holmes Society of Canada (1997), edited by George A. Vanderburgh.
065. Was Sherlock Holmes a Canadian?
Enthusiasts of the Sherlock Holmes stories enjoy arguing strange theses and proving odd theories, such as the fact that Dr. Watson was five-times married and the suggestion that Holmes was a Canadian. The latter notion stems entirely from the fact that Canadians have the habit of adding “eh?” to the ends of their sentences. Holmes, it seems, uses the construction a number of times, notably in his first adventure, A Study in Scarlet (1887), where he says to Watson, “I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I ever came across: a study in scarlet, eh?”
066. What is “The Scarlet Claw” all about?
In the Universal Studios movie The Scarlet Claw (1944), Basil Rathbone plays Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce appears as Dr. Watson. It is a propaganda film set in Quebec City and the rural village of “La Morte Rouge.” As Christopher Redmond wrote in “Sherlock Holmes from Sea to Sea,” Lasting Impressions: The 25th Anniversary of the Bootmakers of Toronto, The Sherlock Holmes Society of Canada (1997), edited by George A. Vanderburgh:
Holmes solves a series of murders which are initially being blamed on a monster or a supernatural influence. The film ends with a coy scene in which Holmes and Watson are driving through a forest on the first stage of their journey home to England. Watson says he would like to have seen more of Canada on the trip, and Holmes agrees, speaking in the style of a civics textbook about Canada’s “relations of friendly intimacy with the United States on the one hand and their unswerving fidelity to the British Commonwealth and the motherland on the other. Canada, the link which joins together these great branches of the human family.”
The film appeared the year following the first Quebec Conference in September 1943, which saw the meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
067. Was Richard Hannay a Canadian?
Richard Hannay is a character in a series of popular thrillers written by the Scots novelist John Buchan. Hannay makes his debut in The Thirty-nine Steps (1915) as a South African mining engineer who recently settled in London. In later novels he joins the British Army, rises to the rank of general, and exposes a series of espionage rings, saving England from unspecified enemies on a number of occasions. This Hannay thus has no Canadian connection.
Yet, when Alfred Hitchcock filmed The 39 Steps (1935), described as “adapted from the novel by John Buchan,” he went out of his way to identify the hero as a Canadian. Hitchcock was assuring himself of a North-American market for the film by transforming an Australian hero into a Canadian one. In one of the film’s celebrated vaudeville scenes, Hannay — played by English actor Robert Donat — asks the character Mr. Memory, “How far is it from Winnipeg to Montreal?”
Mr. Memory (played by Wylie Watson) replies, “Ah, a gentleman from Canada. You’re welcome, sir. [Applause from the audience.] Winnipeg, the fair city of Canada and the capital of the province of Manitoba. Distance from Montreal? 1,454 miles. Am I right, sir?”
Hannay replies, “Quite right!”
Buchan’s novel remains in print to this day and is highly regarded by its readers; however, it is Hitchcock’s version of Richard Hannay that most people remember, not specifically as a Canadian, but as an agreeable chap.
068. Who are Ghandl and Skaay and why are they great?
Gandhl and Skaay are the names of two great poets of the Haida people. Their narrative poems would be lost, but were recited in the original Haida language to an anthropologist who transcribed, translated, and annotated them in English. These texts so impressed the British Columbia poet and scholar Robert Bringhurst that he devoted a substantial book to the study of them: A Story as Sharp as a Knife: the Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999). He followed it with Nine Visits to the Mythworld: Ghandl of the Qayahi Llaanes (2000) and Being in Being: the Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay (2001).
Ghandl of the Qaysun Aqyahl Llaanas was born about 1851 and died about 1920. He was christened Walter McGregor and in later years was blind. In 1900 he dictated his narrative poems to anthropologist and linguist J.R. Swanton, who translated and annotated them with the assistance of a bilingual Haida named Henry Moody.
Of Ghandl, Bringhurst writes, “He seems to me a great deal more accomplished — and therefore far more worthy of celebration as a literary ancestor — than any Canadian poet or novelist who was writing in English or French during his time. In fact I know of no one writing in any language, anywhere in North America toward the end of the nineteenth century, who uses words with greater sensitivity and skill. He seems to me not just an exceptional man ... but a figure of durable importance in the history of literature.”
Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay is also known as Robert McKay or John Sky. His vital years were roughly 1827 to 1905, and at some point he was crippled. He also dictated his narrative poems to Swanton in 1900. Bringhurst regards Skaay as “the greatest Haida poet whose work survives.”
A typical narrative by Ghandl or Skaay — long and seemingly discursive — relates a tale of archaic creation or everyday event, timeless or temporal, or both together. It might commence with the words “they say” and conclude with the words “this is where it ends” or “so it ends.”
Bringhurst regards the nineteenth century as the classic period of Haida expression. His work is a “reclamation project” of cultural interest, though it is unlikely that the general public will ever be in a position to appreciate the quality and interest of the narratives of Ghandl and Skaay and other Haida “mythtellers” — not to mention the “mythtellers” of the other indigenous languages of North America.
069. Who were LaFontaine and Baldwin and why are they important?
Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin were lawyers and parliamentarians from Montreal and Toronto who, following the Rebellions of 1837, worked against the British
