by David Mason
And, of course, it didn’t take long to find the Greeks after that.
When I came on Herodotus I devoured him. The first historian, excluding the Bible, it was a wonderful experience; one of those books where you don’t care if it’s true or not—it should be true, and that’s enough.
When I became a bookseller and a passionate collector, it won’t surprise anyone to hear that one of my favourite collections became one that encompasses every first printing of every edition
of I, Claudius and its sequel (if not quite its equal) Claudius the God. I have quite a few different editions in this collection, including sixteen copies of that same paperback that so affected me when I was fifteen. Every time I see another one I buy it, and I get the same feeling that you and I would get if we could once again be fifteen years old and could again kiss the first girl we ever loved.
Years later, when I also read and collected T. E. Lawrence, of whom Graves wrote a biography (Lawrence and the Arabs), by an incredible stroke of combined luck and coincidence I bought for almost nothing (£25 if I remember) Lawrence’s own copy of I, Claudius from his Cloud’s Hill Library. It’s pretty hard to imagine a finer association copy of that book, at least for me.
Starting with the penny tracts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and gradually evolving to the dime novels and pulps of the nineteenth century and such brilliant innovations as the Tauchnitz editions designed as cheap portable reading for English travellers on the continent, paperbacks really came into their glory when Allen Lane invented Penguin Books, generally acknowledged amongst book people as the true advent of the paperback revolution. Penguin’s astounding success quickly spread to America. It is perhaps not widely known that amongst the earliest paperback books published in America, and in the minds of many (including me) the finest list of paperbacks in America, Signet Books, was originally published as Penguins. For collectors of those early Signets it is therefore necessary to seek the first hundred or so under their original imprint. Later they became Penguin/Signet and then just Signet. I have a serious collection of Signets (amongst several other U.S. paperback series which I largely collect for the cover art, some of which is truly stunning). Much of my early newsstand reading was in Signets, and lucky for me because in spite of their lurid covers they often published important literature, especially in their reprinting of contemporary novelists.
I collect only the first two thousand Signets (which aren’t really even two thousand in number since for some reason the publisher began numbering in the six hundreds as Penguin and didn’t become Signet until they were into the seven hundreds).
The history of the modern paperback evolution is fascinating as it becomes revealed. This, as every antiquarian bookseller and every serious scholar well knows, is both the raison d’être and the only justification needed for the collecting of books. Of course all collectors share the secret which trumps all other justifications: the pure pleasure of the hunt, the search, then the triumph of possession. We covet books like normal people covet money.
Much of the early “Noir” literature was published in these cheaply produced paperback formats, intended to be read and discarded, and what little has survived tends to be scarce and expensive for that reason.
Now, Noir is respectable—as it should be—because many of its practitioners are very fine writers. The books are also morality tales, direct descendents of those medieval tales of brave deeds and lovely ladies later exemplified by Don Quixote, but now placed in the context of modern cities. I didn’t know any of this then of course—I just was an innocent seeker after sex, driven by frustrated lust.
Chapter 2
Respectability Abandoned
With adolescence I began getting into trouble in school; defiance, disruptions in class, general snottiness, which got me sent to the hall regularly and finally barred permanently from two of my grade nine classes. At this time another ominous character trait became apparent: I seemed to have no fear of authority. Ejected from class, sent to the principal’s office, instead of having fear of consequences, I found the confrontations stimulating.
Discovering alcohol, my crowd began to drink on Friday and Saturday nights, getting quickly plastered on the then drink-of-choice, lemon gin (I still marvel at how we came up with such a repugnant choice), which usually ended by us all puking and retching in a field. We would often cause disruptions in our neighbourhood restaurant and the owner would kick us out or, if we were too obnoxious, call the cops. When the cops were called my pals would scatter, but I wouldn’t; when the cops arrived I would be waiting for them on the curb and would harangue them with a passionate lecture about my democratic rights. Naturally the police would take me to the station, where my insufferable snottiness usually got me a few cuffs around the head. Then they would call my father.
“Mr. Mason, we have your son here again, you’d better come down here and get him.” Of course this was humiliating for my respectable father, even worse because he hadn’t a clue why I did these things, nor what to do about it.
This all occurred in Willowdale, where we had moved a couple of years before. I was then in grade nine at Earl Haig Collegiate.
Towards the end of grade nine my parents decided to move back to North Toronto. I suspect it was to get me away from the bad influences that they were certain was getting me in all the trouble. They bought a house near where I had grown up, north of Lawrence Avenue. The move was to occur in November of the next semester. I had failed two subjects in grade nine, but had been sent on to grade ten, where I was expected to make up these two failures.
But unbeknownst to my parents, I went to the office at Earl Haig before the end of June and told them I would be transferring to Lawrence Park Collegiate from the first of the year, not the end of October. In September when school started, I would take the lunch my mother prepared every day and repair to the poolroom, where I pursued my real education. This worked perfectly until sometime in late October, when one day I forgot to take my lunch. My mother delivered it to Earl Haig, only to be told I had moved to Lawrence Park two months earlier. There was a big fuss, of course, and in the end I started at the new school, already hopelessly behind for grade ten, never mind the two subjects from grade nine that I was supposed to be making up.
My form teacher was the Latin teacher. I considered Latin a stupid pointless subject and I quickly managed to get myself permanently ejected from his class too (twenty-five years later I went back to study Latin, at night, at university, since as an antiquarian bookseller I needed to know something of that “stupid pointless subject”).
It was really too late to salvage anything of the year, even if I had wanted to, which I didn’t.
Before Christmas, my antics, now exacerbated by my defiant indifference to consequences and mixed with a hopeless ignorance of everything being taught, got me permanently suspended. I was fifteen years old.
Even my confused parents now concluded that school for me was pointless and it was decided I could leave. Ignored by everyone was the fact that I spent most nights till 2 or 3 am reading under the covers with a flashlight. It didn’t occur to me either that this should have provided a clue to an astute observer. Having not had a single friend or acquaintance, so far, who read books, reading remained my private vice. It was many years later before I comprehended that reading, even then, was saving my life.
The problem was that in those days no one could leave school before sixteen years of age unless it could be established that the family was poor and needed the help of the kid’s income. But my father was not poor and I was only fifteen years old.
I was sent to the headquarters of the Board of Education where a battery of psychologists tested me for a week or so, which resulted in all of them giving up in the face of my obstinate refusal to give them the time of day, and I was allowed to enter the great world—on my own at last. Then began the series of experiences and adventures which led eventu
ally to discovering my vocation some fifteen years later.
Looking at my early years with the perspective of what understanding I’ve acquired since, I continue to be astounded that none of those teachers or principals, or later the psychologists, managed to even notice the connection between this greasy-haired young delinquent whose defiance they couldn’t handle and the imaginative kid who sat up most nights reading incessantly with a flashlight. It’s true that I didn’t get it either, but they were supposed to be smarter than me.
So, I was fifteen years old, exuberant at my release from the drudgery of school and working at Eaton’s, my first full-time job. (I am constantly amazed at how many Canadians I’ve met who also started their working life at Eaton’s.)
My first payday at Eaton’s, I took my $49.00 pay (this was for half a month, hence a bit less than $24.00 per week) and walked south to Burnill’s Bookshop at Yonge and King to buy the first book I ever remember purchasing in a bookstore. I can still remember my feeling of awe at the beauty of all those wonderful shining dust jackets, each promising unknown adventure and the excitement of new ideas. Indeed I still remember clearly the feelings of awe I had at the realization that I could actually own one of those books—it could be mine to take home. It would be mine; I would not need to return it to the library. Using up my entire lunch hour, forgetting to eat, I finally settled on two Modern Library books, Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and a book of Freud’s essays. I don’t think these first two choices were a fluke. They were indicative of the thrust for understanding which goes with youth, an indication of the path all young people should be taking, that search for knowledge and meaning, which never finishes.
But it was another two years before I made another significant step forward in my education. Still buying books, both paperbacks and many Modern Library editions, feeling my way, I had left Eaton’s. I worked a year and some for Dr. Scholl’s, the foot comfort man, as a shipper, packing and mailing thousands of corn plasters, trying to ease the pain of the world even then, I like to say. And yes there actually was a Dr. Scholl; I met him. Every couple of years he toured his extensive domain and we would all be lined up, at a respectful distance, to do homage, as with the Queen.
But then I became bored with factory life and applied for a job at an insurance company. It was there I met my first book friends, who also worked there. Becoming acquainted, I was astounded to find that Alfred Ames and Don Tough both, like me, were avid readers. We quickly became close friends. Don and I rented an apartment on Bloor Street and Al, still with his parents, spent the weekends partying in our apartment. During the week we spent most evenings, often in a beer parlour around the corner on Bay Street, passionately discussing the ideas we were finding through our incessant reading. Even though we were only seventeen and the legal drinking age was then twenty-one we were regulars and were never questioned. At the same time, we spent most weekends drinking at the Town Tavern and The Colonial, where for the price of a beer (45¢) one could see and hear most of the great jazz men of that greatest period in the history of jazz. We were rabid fans and discovering what only became apparent many years later, that the Toronto jazz scene was right up there with New York’s, Los Angeles’s and San Francisco’s.
But as the excitement, both intellectual and social, fermented and I came to have a larger view of the wonder of the world’s potential, my interest in business slipped away. It became harder to take insurance seriously—after all, what we were selling, essentially, was security. But in my reading and in my life I was discovering the excitement of insecurity, of forcing the future, of challenging the status quo. The people were nice enough. Shortly after I had started, they had recognized my potential and started grooming me for better things, moving me up. But the inevitable boredom began to set in and even I was now able to recognize the signs.
That was pretty much the end of my business career; it went downhill from there, and fairly quickly. Within six months I was fired, getting drunk at the company picnic and personally insulting the vice-president. Reporting to work the next morning I was given two weeks’ pay and ejected. I had such a massive hangover it took me two days to realize that I was relieved. It took a few years before I realized that, in spite of my drunken stupidity, some instinctual spark had saved me from respectability.
My youthful rebellion was not against my father but rather against all authority, the whole world, in fact. Shy and timid I might have been, facing what I thought to be a sophisticated and confident world, but I was extremely stubborn in the face of the pressures to conform. About that time I discovered another writer who strongly affected me, a man named Robert Lindner, a psychiatrist famous for a book called Rebel Without a Cause. Hollywood bought Lindner’s book and used only the title for that famous James Dean movie. But another of his books, the one which so affected me, was called Prescription for Rebellion. Its thesis was, essentially, that in an insane society—and the fifties was certainly that—the sane man must necessarily be a rebel. This was the first time I was introduced to the idea that maybe it wasn’t me who was some sort of weird misfit psycho, that maybe I was right in my disgust at and defiance of society. It gave me heart.
Lindner was a friend of Norman Mailer’s, who became an early intellectual mentor of mine. Lindner was attempting to reinstate hypnosis as a respectable medical tool, but he died at the relatively young age of fifty-five, his great promise unrealized.
I have all Lindner’s books in my library, in first editions, many bearing presentation inscriptions, my homage to this man, another of the many to whom I owe so much.
The restlessness initiated by the influence of Richard Halliburton’s travels then caused me to go hitch-hiking across America to San Francisco, and, after a bit, to Vancouver, where I continued my education in real life, this time learning some important truths about poverty.
It was a very bad year economically and there was no work. I applied for unemployment insurance (the only time in my life I ever did, and I still suffer guilt). I got $17.00 a week, and the sleazy room with two cots, a chair and table my friend Don and I rented in a rooming house at Richards and Pender Streets cost $10.00, if I remember. So we had to live each week on what remained. I learned what real hunger is like, not just missing a few meals, but a continual, never-satisfied hunger. We lived on bread and peanut butter, occasionally Cheez Whiz, which we considered a luxury. The hunger was mostly a mental affliction—the proof of this was that we would between us eat a loaf of bread in a sitting, stuffing ourselves, but the constant hunger never let up. The first thing that goes in that state of extended starvation is sex—one loses interest completely. Thoughts of sex are replaced by constant fantasies of food. Meals we had eaten as children would be recounted in obscene detail, our mothers’ cooking praised, arguments arising over the merits of our respective mothers’ special gifts at apple pie or chicken stuffing. Food and eating became an obsession, and stuffing ourselves with six peanut butter sandwiches filled our stomachs temporarily but didn’t eliminate the lust for diversity.
I learned some important truths. I learned, for instance, that the poor are not poor because they drink; they drink because they are poor. The constant worry about money, or its lack, creates tension; the obsession with trying to stretch insufficient funds to cover an entire week causes periodic psychic explosions. The occasional beer, taken as a rare treat, was dangerous. The relaxed expansiveness would cause one to have a second, and then lose all restraint, resulting in a drinking binge and a rare evening of pleasure. But, of course, there are rules—this meant two or three days of no money for food, until the Friday line-up at the pogey office.
Every day we went there looking for work, but there was none.
But books continued to fill the long days without work and the void of constant hunger was forgotten in the wonder of literature. And with no money for movies or any other entertainment, a library card became a passport to civilization.
&nbs
p; Christmas saved us. We got taken on as extras at the post office (that adventure itself worthy of an essay) and afterwards, with a month’s pay in hand, set out for Mexico.
But, being somewhat naïve, we made a few mistakes, the first one being that we bought one-way bus tickets to Bellingham, the first town south of the border. America was also suffering a recession and they were watching for us. Naturally we were unaware that American customs officers were used to having hundreds of kids like us, who claimed to be visiting friends in Bellingham for a few days. It took the border guard about five minutes to see through our stupid story and we were turned back.
Indeed we were turned back at every border point in British Columbia (and I shall ever remember the three days we spent buried in snow, in Osoyoos B.C., unable to hitch a ride).
Finally, we found ourselves in windswept Fort McLeod, Alberta, and realizing we weren’t ever going to talk our way across the border, we decided our only alternative was to return to Toronto.
Still dressed in suits, ordinary leather shoes and topcoats, we were inappropriately dressed for the Canadian Prairies in January and completely unaware of what we were in for.
Just as well.
It took thirteen days to reach Thunder Bay and I’ve never been so cold before or since.
We went into police stations asking to sleep in cells but the RCMP, who were the police in all the towns of the west, didn’t much care when we told them we had been graciously accommodated in jails in the United States. Once after they had turned us away, we demanded to be arrested. They relented and let us sleep on the floor in the stinking urinal of the jail; I guess they didn’t want any non-criminals soiling the blankets in the cells.
Hitch-hiking often means you are let off in the middle of a town, which then necessitates walking right on through the town to get to the highway again. People would come up to us on the street and tell us to get inside. “You’ll lose that nose (or ear) if you don’t.” Once inside, we understood, as we experienced the excruciating pain which comes with thawing. Unlike the RCMP the shopkeepers were friendly and accommodating, even though we didn’t buy anything.