Untimely death

of Blackwood’s
ends the feast

BLACKWOOD’S magazine
is dead. Vancouver Public
Library says so.

So does the friendly, obliging
lady at the British Consulate, who
has never heard of Blackwood's,
poor friendly obliging soul that
she is.

So passes glory. Unnoticed. It
just fades away, like old soldiers.
We look around us and suddenly
they’re gone and even their names
are hard to remember.

All this is said with some sense
of shame, because I let my
subscription to Blackwood's lapse,
so f must have contributed to the
death.

That is why magazines perish.
People don’t renew subscriptions.
Their time has been taken up with
something else.

Blackwoad’s lasted many gen-
erations, but it failed to find a
place in this new age, as did other
masculine magazines such as True,
Argosy and Blue Book.

But like Blue Book and the rest,
Blackwood’s may have gone out
of style but it never was without
relevance. It was a monthly feast
of splendid snort stories.

They were written, typically, by
Brits who had been in their coun-
try’s foreign service.

They usually wrote under a pen
name, so the government wouldn't
chop off their pensions for telling
the truth about colonial life.

They were stories about realities
of life — honor and villainy,
treachery and heroism, jealousy,

Paul
St. Pier

PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES

one called The Same Voice. To
my shame, | have forgotten the
author’s name, but it was proba-
bly a pen name anyway.

This one was a British commis-
sioner in the tropics who survived
some large adventures during the
colony’s transition to self-rule.

His houseboy, a man of
own age who was just as strong a
personality, stayed with the com-
missioner dur’; 3 times of consid-
erable danger.

(Yes, in Black wood’s, colonial
servants could be called boys. Ed-
itors didn’t care if it was political-
ly correct. What mattered was
that it truly reflected the colonial
mentality of that age. It was real-
istic, like the use of the word nig-
ger in Mark Twain's works.)

4&4 In the middle years we are too busy
making money and covering ass to think
of such matters, and we set them aside,

losing part of our soul as we do. ¥9

betrayal, foolish ambition and the
pursuit of honor.

It was about those qualities of
life that we appreciate best in
boyhood and old age.

'n the middle years we are too
busy making money and covering
ass to think of such matters, and
we set them aside, losing part of
our soul as we do.

Blackwood’s Magazine was not
like today’s publications.

When I last looked, a typical
New Yorker magazine story began
with a family that lived in a
brownstone house in New York,
all of them dull, uninteresting
people.

In the morning they set off in
the family car and picnicked on
Long Island, where nothing
whatever happened to anybody.

At the end of the day they
drove home, still the same dull
clods they had been in the morn-
ing.

Somerset Maugham would not
have been up to New Yorker
standards.

He held that a story should
have a beginning, a middle and an
end and that he liked to be in-
trigued by it.

“tT have a weakness for a
point,’’ he said. ‘‘! realize that my
view is not popular with the liter-
ary elite. I endeavor to bear that
misfortune with fortitude.

New Yorker, Altantic and Pen-
thouse short stories are pale, cot-
ton candy stuff.

They read like class exercises
prepared by writers-in-residence
at universities, as some are.

Black wood's stories were all
good beef and you could chew on
them.

Among the unforgettable was

The commissioner once asked
his boy why he remained loyal
and was told ‘‘Because you talk in
the same voice.’'

No other explanation was of-
fered until the da the two men,
both elderly now, parted for the
Jast time. What, said the commis-
sioner, had that same voice state-
ment meant?

‘Because, when you talk to me,
your voice is the same as when
you talk to another commissioner,
or one of your friends, or the
governor.

“You talk to me in the same
voice. You have always talked to
all us servants in the same voice.””

Those few words, which could
only have originated in real life
and from such a situation, have il-
luminated human relationships for
me every since.

Pecpie of good manners address
everyone they encounter in the
same tone of voice.

The boors and the ignorant talk
down to the servants, peopie in
menial jobs, people of other races,
any whom they fancy to be their
inferiors.

They speak to such people in a
very different tone of voice from
that which they use to address
those they consider their social
equals or their superiors.

The Queen, who, unlike her
husband, often sets our bench
mark for good manners, has that
same capacity to speak to
everybody with the same courtesy.

She may be a trifie stiff, a little
distant, but she speaks always in
the same voice. I wonder some-
times if she was a Blackwood’s
subscriber.

EEDA EERE