Yet for all that, and for all his “disillusionment,” his best work is still very funny, and not just to those traditionalists familiar with the term “Upper Canada.” (So funny, in fact, that Robertson Davies records that at Leacock’s readings, people in their seats laughed so hard that “small but significant personal misfortunes befell them.”)
It’s interesting to note that, as Legate discovered, “How We Kept Mother’s Day” (a satire on selfish male domestic blindness) was taught in Soviet Russia to millions of student readers. Leacock dealt well with universally understood themes like hypocrisy — for instance when five men who talk a great game about the joys of early morning fishing never actually make it onto the lake in the chill of dawn. Or when the suicidal hero Peter Pupkin tries to throw himself in front of a train (surely an interesting literary theme for those Russian students), but finds that “he was never able to pick out a pair of wheels that suited him.”
Peter Pupkin, of course, features in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, where we find him screwing up his courage to “do a thing seldom if ever done in Mariposa. He would propose to Zena Pepperleigh.” Critics disagree about just how “gentle” Leacock’s humour was; Robertson Davies makes the point that the town contains — by contrast with the novels of Dickens — not a single character that we would like to associate with in real life. Yet most, including Davies, seem to agree that Sunshine Sketches shows Leacock at his best, giving us glimpses of the town, with its “buildings of extraordinary importance” on Main Street.
Vancouver Island’s Jack Hodgins, who knows about small towns with large portions of self-regard, has written a thoughtful afterword to the classic New Canadian Library edition of the book (published, I’m proud to say, under my aegis at McClelland & Stewart). There Hodgins claims that among the few scenes in Western literature worthy of catching the wide public imagination is the sinking of the Mariposa Belle, in six feet of water, something that even non-literary types recall with relish. It’s worth recalling, too, that the first time the steamboat is mentioned, in the book’s first hundred words, it is “tied to the wharf with two ropes of about the same size as they use on the Lusitania.” Leacock was good at seeing the world through the excited eyes and exaggerated speech of a young boy, a Tom Sawyer, if you like. The title of his posthumous memoir, The Boy I Left Behind Me, may set us whistling, but it may not be true that the boy was ever really left behind.
Then Jack Hodgins raises the puzzling final story of the book, “The Train to Mariposa,” where Leacock’s ironic outsider’s tone changes. Magically, we are transported aboard a little train from the city, where we have all spent far too much time getting and spending, and forgetting the old hometown. Even more magically, as the train moves north, it changes, with the electric locomotive that took us out of the city now replaced by an “old wood engine hitched on in its place.” The inside of the cars change, too, becoming older, and strangers start to chat. And most magically of all, we change, as well: “No, don’t bother to look at the reflection of your face in the window-pane shadowed by the night outside. Nobody could tell you now after all these years. Your face has changed in these long years of money-getting in the city.”
In the end, when we reach the bright lights of Mariposa station, we have reached what Robertson Davies might have called the Land of Lost Content. While some may find this last chapter puzzling, I find it moving, perhaps the most powerful of all his work, worth reading by anyone who now lives far — in time or space — from what they grew up calling home.
Another living part of Leacock’s legacy is the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, given annually to the best humorous Canadian book, as judged by a jury selected by the Orillia organizers. I have a weakness for publishing funny books, so I have been involved with many celebratory dinners down through the decades, featuring my friends Harry J. Boyle (who enjoyed being Mariposa’s Honorary Mayor), Robert Thomas Allen (author of Children, Wives, and Other Wildlife, who was delighted but shy), Donald Jack (who played up to his multi-book character, Bartholomew Bandy, by dressing in a cocked hat), and W.O. Mitchell (who misbehaved, and got into a public spat with a cousin). In 2008 the winner was my pal Terry Fallis, who was such a good friend that he had never once asked me to “take a look at” his then-unpublished first novel, The Best Laid Plans (which later was declared the “essential novel of the decade” by the 2011 Canada Reads panel). When he published it himself, and then went on to win the prestigious Leacock Award, that opened the door to my reading it, and publishing it with pride . . . as I did the follow-up volume, The High Road, in 2010. His win was astonishingly appropriate; Leacock’s own success began with a self-published book, which he placed in outlets like railway stations. By a happy fluke, a British publisher, John Lane, was travelling in Canada and happened to pick up a copy of Literary Lapses to read on the ocean voyage home. The rest is publishing history, with Lane’s firm, the Bodley Head, taking on the new author, to great worldwide effect.
Finally, two other examples of how Leacock continued to run my life. One of the most interesting books I ever published came from little Orillia, specifically out of the editorial office of the Orillia Packet & Times — which is not, by the way, a fictional Leacock title. The peaceful little inland town was a most unlikely source for The Corvette Navy, a personal account of the war waged on the wide Atlantic between German U-boats and corvettes manned by amateur Canadian sailors. As the editorial director at Macmillan of Canada in 1977, I was proud to publish this classic war story by James B. Lamb, and several other books from his pen. Later, Jim Lamb paid me the compliment of including a fictional character based on me — “Gib Douglas” is hard to dispute — in a spy novel he wrote, The Man from the Sea. I was, at least in the novel, a source of level-headed advice.
“Level-headed” does not apply to any aspect of the next story. In the summer of 2001 I travelled to Geneva Park, near Orillia, to give a speech to those assembled at the annual Couchiching Conference on globalization and publishing, or something equally grand. At the conference was a member of the board named Jane Bartram, who was to my smitten eyes clearly The Most Fascinating Woman in the World. Our first date was a canoe ride together on Lake Couchiching, where we did not quite reach Leacock’s Old Brewery Bay on the opposite shore. But having brought me to Canada he was still obviously running my life. Jane and I were married within the year.
Keep up the good work, Professor Leacock.
Unlike my relationship with Stephen Leacock, I knew Hugh MacLennan. Knew him as a friend for over twenty years. Knew him as a friend, in fact, long before I worked with him, as his editor, his publisher, and, later, as his anthologist, putting together the selection Hugh MacLennan’s Best in 1991.
The key lies in North Hatley, an idyllic spot in the Eastern Townships, ninety minutes east of Montreal. Set beside Lake Massawippi, North Hatley — or, increasingly, Nord Hatley — was a summer resort for generations of Anglo-Montrealers like the MacLennans, and for East Coast Americans like my first in-laws, the Satterthwaites.
I had met Frank Satterthwaite early in my time at Yale, when he shared tickets to the “Yale Whale,” the elegant rink designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, where I saw my first game of hockey. We hit it off, he took me home to Manhattan, and there was this interesting younger sister hanging around, when she was not attending Vassar, or off winning tennis tournaments. You can imagine the rest, including a visit from Toronto to “Willow Wood,” the lakeside cottage in North Hatley. Eventually we got engaged at Hovey Manor, the ancient inn just up the lake.
In due course Sally and I were married. After a grand New York wedding (which involved hiring a red London double-decker bus from a tour group to transport the wedding party down Park Avenue to the Colony Club reception) we had our honeymoon in North Hatley.
And the first couple-to-couple dinner of our married life was there, as guests of Tota and Hugh MacLennan.
Let me step aside, howeve
r, to tell two stories that spring from that wedding reception. The photograph of Sally and me smiling and waving from the bus deck appeared in the next day’s New York Times. Weeks later a Yale friend visiting London came on the relevant page covering his American host’s kitchen floor, and launched into a fierce rant about the shameless excesses of “the idle rich.” When he happened to stoop closer to the floor, he recoiled, swearing mightily, along the lines of “Christ, it’s Gibson!” It ruined his day.
It’s important for readers of this opinionated book who want to try to understand where this particular “unreliable narrator” is coming from (literally) to know that the Gibsons in Scotland were anything but “idle rich.” No and no. My father’s role at the wedding reception was revealing. During the speeches he was standing chatting quietly with the bandleader, who whispered that he attended dozens of similar events every year, but that this was the very best speech he had ever heard at such an occasion. My father modestly allowed that with my experience as president of the Students’ Union at St. Andrews, I was used to speaking in public. “No, no, not the groom!” hissed the band leader, “his brother, the best man.” This became a very popular story in the Gibson family, especially with my brother, Peter, who had assured the alarmed company that the Satterthwaite parents were opposed to the marriage until they came to see that the match involved not losing a daughter, but “gaining a son-in-law’s brother!”
The main point in the story is that Dad was happily chatting, not with any of the glittering guests, but with the bandleader, who might have been dismissed by some as just hired help. Not by my father. I never knew a more determined anti-snob, at ease everywhere. In his job as the timber department manager of the local employer, Howie of Dunlop, he spent his mornings dispatching tough truck drivers across the country to deliver loads of pit props to coal mines or to pick up felled trees from logging sites across the West of Scotland for sawmilling. He himself was a hardy fellow, once the captain of the local Kilmarnock rugby team, and I heard a tale (from one of the work crew, not from him) from his hot-blooded youth when he invited a surly driver to step aside and settle a dispute with his fists. Cooler heads prevailed.
By contrast, his afternoons might be spent sipping sherry with the Duke of This or That while they discussed the best way of thinning trees on the ducal estate. One such noble figure met me on a forestry excursion (steel yourself before shaking hands with foresters, where a good hand has three fingers) and asked me, keenly, if I was “a debater like your father.” The words “outspoken troublemaker” were not actually used. If the duke or landowner was not present for sherry or Scotch, the negotiations might well be with a “factor,” a term for manager that is restricted to Scotland and Canada, where it was inherited from the Scots who ran the Hudson’s Bay Company, in places like, say, Moose Factory.
The most painful question I ever asked my father was about a four-letter word that I had heard when I was seven or eight. What, I wanted to know, was a snob? My father was in anguish, confronted by having to explain the class system he abhorred; any other four-letter word would have been much easier. He did his best, talking about how stupid people might want me to stop playing with my friend Billy because his father was “just a joiner,” making it clear that to be called a snob was the worst possible insult, and that I should govern myself accordingly. To this day I find it hard to pass someone digging a hole in the road without enquiring about his progress. To walk by without a word is to risk seeming snobbish.
How important is this? When Rhona Martin, a friend from my home Scottish village, won the Olympic Gold Medal for curling in 2002, the English reporter (and Scots would see his nationality as important) for the Times described the fit young women curlers on her team as looking like “the wives of electricians.” My Canadian friends, to their great credit, simply did not understand this comment. My father would have exploded in rage to hear it.
To sum up: my background training in this area has been immensely useful in my role as editor and publisher happily dealing with Canadians from all walks of life. Hugh MacLennan wrote about fatherhood in Each Man’s Son. I am my father’s son.
One of the things I liked best about Hugh MacLennan — and there were many things to like — was his easy democratic touch. He loved to tell the story from his earliest days about his household in Cape Breton being wakened by a crowd of men fresh from an altercation. When his doctor father threw up the window to make enquiries, a voice floated up. “We’re sorry to disturb you, Doctor, but the gentleman I was fighting with has bitten off my nose!” (I once told that story in Alistair MacLeod’s presence, and Alistair — a proud son of Cape Breton — was not pleased. I hope he’ll forgive this repetition, with its marvellous use of the courteous “gentleman,” which Robert Louis Stevenson’s Alan Breck would have understood completely, and which Hugh relished.)
He liked and respected real, live ordinary people, disliking, by contrast, the “red tabs and red officer faces” he mentions in Two Solitudes. In his essay “An Orange from Portugal,” he writes affectionately about Halifax in his youth. “In the old days in Halifax we never thought about the meaning of the word democracy: we were all mixed up together in a general deplorability.”
The essay “Einstein and the Bootleggers” gives us an intriguing look at Hugh and that “general deplorability.” Any Princeton graduate student with half a brain would have eagerly collected stories about Einstein on the campus — but how many of them would have hung around with bootleggers? “In those days,” Hugh says, “some of my best friends were ex-bootleggers,” and we learn that these were real, very tough characters who had used baseball bats for other than sporting purposes and had done time in jail. They send an intruding truck driver on his way with threats because he was rash enough to sneer at Einstein, who was, after all, their genius.
But let’s go back to the basic facts about Hugh MacLennan. He was born in 1907 in Glace Bay, a mining town in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and his family soon moved to the province’s capital, Halifax. He studied Classics at Dalhousie and went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. His father, a hard-working doctor, made sure that he was indoctrinated with Calvinist Scottish values, greeting the scholarship news (which might have led to unseemly celebration in the snow) with the words, “Go and shovel the walk, Hugh. It badly needs it.” Doctor Sam, by the way, had earlier gained fame in the local paper by provoking the headline “Doctor Hunts Gas Leak With Burning Match — Finds It!”
After Oxford, Hugh got his Ph.D. at Princeton, where he once came across Albert Einstein gazing at a snowball in his hands with total fascination, and once (as I’ve just mentioned) found him blundering into a bootlegger’s café, to be protectively treated there.
Hugh came back to Canada in 1935, at the height of the Depression. Unable to get a university job, he took one at the private boys’ school, Lower Canada College, in Montreal. There he was a notable teacher. One boy, later a distinguished MP, told me that he was summoned to the headmaster’s study and briskly informed that his mother had just died. Released into the school corridor, he stood there blinking in shock, until one of his teachers, Hugh MacLennan, came up, threw his arms around him, and held him fast, while the macho crowds flowed around them, gaping.
In 1951, by then an acclaimed author, he accepted a position in the Department of English at McGill University. The salary was so low that, in the telling phrase of his biographer, Elspeth Cameron, “Even his publishers were horrified.”
Money was a problem. His first wife, Dorothy Duncan, was stricken by a series of embolisms, and in those days medical care in Canada was ruinously expensive. So Hugh not only taught and wrote books, he took on regular magazine writing assignments, amassing more than 400 essays over the years, and winning two Governor General’s Awards for his essay collections, in addition to his three fiction prizes. After three decades, he left McGill, the university botching his departure so badly that alumni were enraged. Hugh, of
course, refused to make a fuss, despite my urging, and moved out of his urgently required McGill office. Thanks to the intervention of Graham Fraser, the son of a North Hatley friend, a rival university, Concordia, was able to supply him with an office, but his heart wasn’t in it.
He lived quietly at home with his second wife, Tota, spending their summers in North Hatley. He died in 1990. I was informed of his death by the wonderful Doris Giller — after whom the famous literary prize is named. She was at the time a journalist, on deadline, phoning for the Toronto Star, but was so aware of my affection for Hugh that she offered to give me half an hour to compose myself for the necessary interview about Hugh’s career. As for that career, the five Governor General’s Awards speak for themselves, as do the nineteen honorary degrees he earned during his lifetime. As an article in the National Post put it in 2009, he was Canada’s “first world-class writer.”
North Hatley, of course, is where I first met him. It is only vaguely disguised as Ste. Elizabeth (“for the purpose of non-identification”) in Hugh’s essay “Everyone Knows the Rules.” There he summed it up as “a place where everyone loves everyone else. We play tennis and sail together and sit on verandas and are wise about the affairs of the world.” It is also the setting of one of Hugh’s best essays, “Confessions of a Wood-Chopping Man,” which, with its obvious love of the Eastern Townships landscape, is still infectiously good reading. At the cottage Hugh was at his relaxed best, and I got to know him in the round of cocktail parties and visits for drinks and/or dinner that mark the end of a well-spent August day.
I can report that he was a charming guest — in a brief encounter he looked like a gentler version of the British actor Trevor Howard — and was interested in everyone, courteous in a slightly formal way, and always willing to discuss any point raised, whether it was the fortunes of the Athenians, the Jacobites, the local tennis champion, the Liberals in Ottawa, the Vietnamese, the Book of the Month Club, or the Montreal Canadiens. In his elder-statesman role he was willing to hold the conversational floor and become the centre of attention if that was appropriate. But — and here he differs noticeably from some other authors I have known — he was quite happy to lapse back into the audience while someone else held centre stage.
Stories About Storytellers Page 3
