Recently, The Massey Murder was announced as our selection for One Book, One Community and I snapped up a copy from the library. The subtitle, "A Maid, Her Master, And The Trial That Shocked A Country", made the book sound exciting, but really, it isn't. The author, Charlotte Gray, is known as a literary nonfiction writer (primarily of biographies of famous Canadians), but this time she wanted to focus on "anonymous, powerless individuals who are swept up by events and currents completely beyond their control". In this case, the powerless individual is the maid of the title, an 18-year-old orphan from Britain, Carrie Davies, who killed her employer; and while this might have been a small scandal, his family name and yellow journalism guaranteed Toronto's attention.
The murder: Bert Massey (grandson of Hart Massey, the incredibly wealthy farming implement impresario and community leader -- how was this the first time I learned the connection between Massey tractors and Toronto's Massey Hall?) was returning home from work. When he approached his front door, his maid burst forth and shot and killed him. Davies then ran up to her room, wrote letters to her sister and friend (the contents of which are never revealed), and when the police arrived, she handed over the pistol, confessing that she had killed her employer in self defence. Although Bert was from a disinherited branch of the family tree (he was a middle class car salesman, not a millionaire playboy), other Masseys came forward to try and hush the scandal, and sniffing a story, Toronto's six daily newspapers pounced.
Putting the murder in context, Gray proceeds to describe, in exhaustive detail, the social strata of Toronto, biographical information of everyone even tangentially related to the case, the workings of the justice and penal institutions, women's service groups, the newspaper wars, and most especially, the day by day reports of the Canadian soldiers who were seeing their first combat in WWI. Sometimes, exhaustive research is just exhausting to read, and especially when it strays from the main narrative. For example, when Davies is first admitted to the Don Jail, she was measured according to the Bertillon method (before fingerprinting, a meticulous recording of measurements was taken with calipers to make a unique identification of convicts), and while this might have been an interesting aside, Gray includes the biographical details of the method's inventor, Bertillion, and its history, use and usefulness -- the constant digressions became annoying to me. Also, it was obvious that Gray had done extensive research and seemed reluctant to not include every last detail, as in:
Chief Justice Mulock had been painted by both of the fashionable portrait artists of the period (J.W.L. Forster and Wyly Grier) and shared his time between a prosperous farm near Newmarket, where he raised prize cattle and Shetland ponies, and an elaborate mansion at 518 Jarvis Street, just down the road from the Masseys. (His son Cawthra lived close by, at 538 Jarvis Street.)Eventually we get to the trial and Carrie Davies can make her defence: She states that her employer had made sexual advances towards her -- even suggesting she try on his absent wife's underwear -- and when she saw him approaching the house the next day, she got the gun and shot him, fearing another attack. When a Doctor is produced who can verify that Davies is, indeed, a virgin, the Judge and jury appreciate the nature of her self defence, and thanks to some fancy rhetoric from her lawyer, the maid is acquitted. It is revealed that Davies' lawyer has a personal challenge and a family vendetta against the Masseys to settle, and while he does speak in great oratorical flourishes, Gray can't help but editorialise on his statements, even using outraged exclamation marks in her asides. In this section, in particular, much is made of the fact that a displaced British orphan was being tried at the same time that Canadian youth were fighting for King and Country against the Hun, and while Gray attempts to conflate the two, it's not backed up by the evidence she provides (I really didn't see how having war reports and trial reports on the front page of the same newspapers had any effect on the jury).
So, it's obvious I'm not a fan of the structure or thesis of this book, but I also didn't like the writing. In the afterword, Gray thanks her husband for reading the manuscript "with a gimlet eye for clichés" (is "gimlet eye" itself a cliché?) but some cutesy phrases were left in, such as The two newspapers involved in the battle for eyeballs in 1915 were the Evening Telegram and the Toronto Daily Star and There was an unholy hubbub outside the building for Act III of the Carrie Davies drama. And I was struck by the phrase "Gradgrindishly pedantic" (I did look it up, and although it got no google results, "Gradgrindian" is apparently an obscure word based on a Dickens character). And there were logical inconsistencies, such as:
Judge Mulock agreed that she could sit as she gave her evidence. And two pages later: In the jury box, the jurors turned their heads first to the tall figure of the defence lawyer as he prompted his client, then to the tense figure standing in the witness box, next to the judge.I really wonder at why The Massey Murder is our community selection and all I can conclude is that there's much irony in examining "Toronto the Good" from a century ago (a city where "policemen spent more time enforcing bylaws about public decency than chasing criminals") and comparing that to the Toronto of today, what with its foul-mouthed, crack-smoking, average Joe mayor (eliding the fact, like everyone does, that Rob Ford has always been a well-connected and wealthy man). I can imagine discussions about celebrity culture and voyeurism and newspaper wars -- but that really doesn't interest me much; as a matter of fact, I am weary of this discussion and, as someone who doesn't live in Toronto, I am weary of discussing Rob Ford. And that brings me to my last complaint: In the subtitle of The Massey Murder it promises to be about "The Trial That Shocked A Country", and that point is never made -- I'm sure it shocked Toronto, but just as in the Rob Ford discussions, Toronto is not Canada, and despite what its citizens might think, their every scandal doesn't affect the rest of us that much.
Since after the last book I reviewed, Suite Française, I mentioned my Grampie and Great Uncle Donnie joining up during WWII, I ought to mention my Great Grandfather (Donnie's Dad) who fought in WWI. I know nothing about his war days except for his intake papers that I found:
And I know that my Dad loved his Gramper very much. As I had said before, my Grammie was pregnant with twins when my Grampie was shipped off, and her father, this Reigh Clifford Robart, was a kind and loving man who built her a house on a section of his property and helped with the raising of the boys until my grandfather returned. My mother thinks that it was resentment about this interference that made my Grampie so hard on my uncles -- like finding cuckoos in his nest. I don't know anything else, but will also link to some info I had put here before about Dave's Great Uncle Ivan who fought in WWI at Vimy Ridge.
What I really wanted to write about here was the spat I had with my brother Ken last night. We've lived in the same city now for 8 years and it's been our habit to go over to his house to play cards and have a few drinks every Friday night. For the past couple of years, though, Ken has spent more and more of every Friday out smoking and drinking, alone, in his garage and watching sports (rarely do we get out the cards anymore) while we hang with Laura, and Dave is getting sick of it (can't blame him there). Ken was in a foul mood all evening, and even with his kids around, he was cursing about this and that, and every time he stomped in, he'd sigh about something, and then he'd stomp out again.
We usually talk about current events at some point and late last night Ken made some joke about a local teacher who has been fired for having sex with her student. He then made the usual point about how it's not as big a deal for a grown woman to have sex with a teenager as it is for a grown man and I said that's a sexist thing to say. He said no, because while it would be tragic for a girl to have sex with her teacher, all the boy is going to get is high fives from his friends, and he started to talk about our grade 9 English teacher and how he wished...
I started to say that it's actually the exact same thing whether the teacher was male or female and Ken cut me off saying, "How's the cock-n-balls working out for you?" I said, "What?"
"Well", Ken says, "if you know exactly what it's like to be a man, then you must have gotten some cock-n-balls. How's that working out?"
I explained that it's just as predatory for a woman in a position of power to have sex with a youth as it is for a man, and from the point of view of the student, it's the exact same -- and actually, it might not be as bad for the girl because she'd be making the decision to have sex with her mind instead of being a slave to hormones like the boy is.
Again, Ken said, "No, you're wrong, it's worse for the girl."
I said, "It's the exact same."
"It's not."
"Then that's just sexist. In both cases, it's just two people having sex."
Condescending tone: "Well, my dear, that's twice in two weeks you've accused me of being something. This week it's sexism..."
"What? What was it last week?"
"Well, this week it's sexism, and sweetheart, you can't always be right."
"What? You're the one who's saying this is black and white and don't want to discuss any difference of opinion."
He sighed heavily, picked up his vodka and diet coke, made a slight bow and said, "Then I guess I'm out of here."
As he walked down the hall -- and maybe I shouldn't have pushed it, but he had been out there in the garage for 80% of the evening -- I called after him, "Of course you are". And then he started cursing and stomping and slammed the door behind him.
Now maybe my stubbornness had something to do with reading this book yesterday -- in which an 18-year-old maid got away with murder because of a threat to her virginity -- but isn't it sexist to value a girl's virginity above a boy's? Isn't that a throwback to medieval societies in which girls belonged to their fathers and their virginity was a commodity? In today's world, aren't both male and female teenagers accorded the same ability to make decisions and accept the consequences? And to be clear -- I think it's just as wrong for adults of either gender to have a sexual relationship with teenagers they have power over.
Sex was on Ken's mind last night because earlier in the evening he was talking about all of the frank sexual discussions he's been having with his 11-year-old son lately. This didn't really feel like any of my business, but it eventually morphed into Ken talking about how since our own parents were innocents until they were 18 or so, they probably thought they had lots of time to have sex talks with him before he became active -- but since he started rutting at 14, he was unprepared for the consequences. Ken always likes to talk about himself having sex or doing drugs as a young teen as though it's a mark of his maturity, but to me it's always been evidence of his piggish nature: any animal can overeat or overdrink or have sex, but self-control is the true mark of maturity; of humanity. To bring it back to the book review, my brother Ken is more Rob Ford than not.
There's no doubt in my mind that Ken is an unhappy person -- he's not sighing and stomping and hiding himself away for no reason -- but it's not the great weight of his humanity that's dragging him down, but rather, in my opinion, his nonacceptance of the bars of societal expectations that are offending his brutish, animal nature; his are the pacings of a bear in a too-small zoo enclosure.
