The last living members of both women’s immediate families were gone. Now it was “we two” against the world. In the months following her mother’s death, Mazo began to work on her first novel and several plays. She also finished writing the series of stories that would be included in her first published book, Explorers of the Dawn.
The New York firm Alfred A. Knopf published Explorers of the Dawn. In 1922 Explorers of the Dawn was on bestseller lists in the United States.
Christopher Morley, an important American author and editor, wrote an introduction to Explorers of the Dawn. He called the stories “fanciful” as well as “delicate and humorous” and “refreshing and happy.” He compared Explorers of the Dawn to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by James Barrie and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
The main characters in the closely interwoven series of stories are three English boys who wear Eton collars, eat bread pudding, and say things like “bully fun.” The three are brothers who live in their governess’s house because their mother has died and their father is absent on a long business trip. The boys are high spirited and irreverent. To them, every day is a grand adventure, and all adult authority figures are irrelevant bores.
Beneath the merriment and hijinks is unhappiness. The boys’ guardian, their governess, is a kind of wicked stepmother who is as stiff, inhuman, and unloving as the frightening stuffed birds in her parlour. In the end, the boys are rescued and restored to their rightful guardian, their father, who promises them ponies and dogs.
Explorers of the Dawn is very English in many ways. Nevertheless, the stories include details from Mazo’s own childhood in Canada. For example, in one of the stories each boy is given a long red banana by an Italian named Salvator. Mazo remembered the long red bananas peddled by an Italian fruit vendor named Salvator Polito in Toronto.
Hugh Eayrs, the president of the Canadian branch of the Macmillan publishing company, invited Mazo to come and have tea with him in his office. Mazo was excited because she admired the influential Englishman and because this would be her first visit to a publisher’s office.
It was winter. Before she left her house Mazo had to check the coal furnace in the basement to make sure it was working properly. Before going down to the basement, Mazo put on a shabby old grey sweater with a hole in one elbow to protect the pretty dress she was wearing for the big occasion. When she came back upstairs, she forgot to take the sweater off. She put her muskrat coat on top of the sweater and set out.
Hugh Eayrs welcomed Mazo to his office. A typist brought in the tea things and left. Just as Mr. Eayrs was about to help Mazo off with her coat, he was called out of the office and hurried away. Left alone, Mazo decided to remove her coat herself. She was shocked to discover she was still wearing the ugly old sweater.
What to do? Put the coat back on and insist she could not take it off because she was cold? But the office was hot!
Mazo was in a panic. But then she noticed a window was open to the street. Quickly she removed her grey sweater, rolled it up, and threw it out the window.
“What a pretty dress!” Mr. Eayrs exclaimed when he returned to the office.
As she and the publisher had their tea and got acquainted, Mazo could not stop thinking about her sweater lying in the street. She was afraid someone would walk into the office any moment to return it to her.
But Mazo never saw her old grey sweater again.
She did, however, see Hugh Eayrs, who became her publisher. This was the beginning of a very long association between Mazo and Macmillan, which published her next book – a novel.
Caroline Clement in her forties possibly behind St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Innisfil Township at the edge of land she inherited from her Grandfather Clement.
7
Possession, Thunder, and Delight
Looking back over my life, it is borne in on me how much I have walked. Walk – walk – walk – usually with a dog beside me – over city pavements – along country roads.
Mazo was writing a novel. It was her first novel, and it was called Possession. The novel started like this: “On an evening in early May, a young man was walking sharply along the country road that passed through the fishing-village of Mistwell, and following the shore of one of those inland seas, oddly called great lakes, led to the town of Brancepeth, seven miles away.”
The main character in Possession is a young architect named Derek Vale. Vale inherits a farm called “Grimstone” near Mistwell and goes to live there. Through his weaknesses and mistakes, Vale almost loses his farm and does lose his true love.
Although engaged to Grace Jerrold, the daughter of an upper-class English neighbour, Derek Vale seduces Fawnie, a beautiful young First Nations employee. Vale’s union with Fawnie results in a son named Buckskin. Vale marries Fawnie and provides a home for their son, but Fawnie leaves Vale for a First Nations man, and Buckskin dies because of neglect. Although Fawnie eventually returns to him, and Vale remains faithful to Fawnie, Vale is not happy because he loves Grace, not Fawnie.
In writing Possession, Mazo was writing fiction, but she was creating this fiction out of elements from her past experiences. Countless details of Possession correspond to details of Mazo’s real life. For example, the novel’s setting, Grimstone in Mistwell, is a relatively exact rendering of the real Roche farm in Bronte.
Published in 1923 by the Macmillan Company, Possession was widely praised in Canada and abroad. Reviewers over and over again made it clear that they were hailing a novel that said something about Canada.
One reviewer wrote: “Possession is the best Canadian novel I have ever read.”
Another reviewer wrote: “There is no other novel about Canadians that has given us as much pleasure as Possession.”
Mazo soon learned that the success of one novel did not guarantee the success of another. After she finished writing Possession, she travelled to Nova Scotia for a month-long stay. From observations she made of life in that province, she wrote her second novel, The Thunder of New Wings.
Echoing her descriptions of Derek Vale, Mazo described the main character, Toby Lashbrook, as “selfwilled,” often “wrong headed,” but “keen,” and with the “power of seeing his life as a whole.” Like Vale, Lashbrook learns farming. Like Vale, Lashbrook is weak and irresponsible. He has a son by his stepmother, Clara, and his relationship with Clara is not good. He fails to keep his family together, and loses most of his material wealth.
Unfortunately, the novel was unsatisfactory. This time, Mazo did not anchor her fiction with carefully observed, deeply felt material from her real-life experiences. Her knowledge of Nova Scotia was too superficial to sustain a fictional work of several hundred pages.
No publisher wanted The Thunder of New Wings. Although Mazo had spent a year working on it, she flung the manuscript into a drawer and tried to forget it by taking long walks with Bunty.
While Mazo was in Nova Scotia, Caroline, who was still working full time in the provincial government, spent a weekend in a guest house in Clarkson, a little village that is now part of the sprawling city of Mississauga, twenty-five kilometres west of Toronto, on Lake Ontario. In Clarkson, Caroline met Florence Livesay, a translator and journalist, the wife of J.F.B. Livesay, the head of Canadian Press.
After the two women drank tea together, they took a walk in the woods near the Livesays’ house, and Caroline was delighted by the scenery. Immediately Caroline decided that she and Mazo should buy one of the vacant properties adjacent to the Livesays’ home and build a small cottage on it.
Mazo and Caroline called their new summer home “Trail Cottage” because it was located on what had once been a First Nations trail to the Credit River. The woods around the cottage were full of Miliums, blood root, columbines, rare fringed gentian, trailing arbutus, and wintergreen. The rafters of the cottage were unadorned – there was no ceiling – and the walls were of unpainted pine. Trail Cottage consisted of a large living room with an alcove for the kitchen, where Mazo did
the cooking.
After a long cold winter in Toronto in rented quarters, Mazo and Caroline were happily spending the summer of 1924 in Trail Cottage. Mazo, undaunted by failure, was working on her third novel, Delight. This novel would be different from The Thunder of New Wings. This novel would not fail. This novel would be set in Mazo’s home province.
After she finished her writing for the day, Mazo always took a long walk with Bunty through the woods. Then she tidied up the cottage and began to get supper ready. After she and Caroline had eaten in the evening, Mazo read Caroline what she had written that day. If Caroline approved, the words stayed as they were.
The setting of Delight was Brancepeth. Brancepeth had characteristics of Acton, Ontario, but it was set beside an “inland sea.” Since Acton is located thirtyfive kilometres north of Lake Ontario, Mazo evidently borrowed the location of Brancepeth from a town on Lake Ontario, like Oakville or Clarkson or Burlington.
When Mazo wrote Delight she had not been in Acton for thirteen years, so she mixed details from her present, visible surroundings with details from her remembered, invisible surroundings. Then she spiced the mixture with invented elements that helped make the story more interesting and universal. Her creative process was complex.
In Delight, Mazo wrote about a young woman who has inherited only her grandmother’s dishes and must work for a living. Delight Mainprize is the illegitimate daughter of an English chorus girl and a Russian ballet dancer. She has been raised by a lower-class grandmother in rural England. Delight has immigrated to Canada to take a job as a waitress at the Duke of York Hotel in Brancepeth.
Delight Mainprize is a potent combination of beautiful Venus and chaste Diana. She is unconscious of her seductive charms and bewildered by the effect she has on people: men love her and scheme to have her, and women hate her and scheme to destroy her. Delight is a good worker at the Duke of York and a virtuous girlfriend to Jimmy Sykes, but through no fault of her own the other women at work become jealous of her, and Jimmy doubts her virtue.
The women force Delight to leave town. She finds work on a farm where, again through no fault of her own, she is half starved and nearly raped. When she returns to town and begins waitressing at another hotel, the other women try to drown her in the lagoon, and the men try to rescue her.
Delight is tested in love, and she proves to be true. Jimmy Sykes, who wins Delight, is likewise true in love. He is also a good student of nature – hence his knowledge of crows and his fondness for the wild lagoon. As well, Jimmy is the fastest runner among the men who race to rescue Delight.
Jimmy and Delight are naive and powerless. Yet they triumph over adversity. Although Delight contains realistic details from lives of ordinary working-class people, it also contains romantic elements from fairy tales and myths.
When the distinguished Toronto literary critic, William Arthur Deacon, began to read Delight in 1926, he was both excited and shocked by a detail in the following passage: “The men passed into the bar. The noise increased, rising to a hubbub, then suddenly falling to a murmur accented by low laughs, the clink of glasses, the drawing of corks. The smell of dyes, the smell of the tannery, mingled with the smell of the bar. A blue cloud of tobacco smoke formed before Kirke’s eyes. It floated in long level shreds that moved quiveringly together till they formed one mass that hung like a magic carpet in the hall.”
The detail that stood out for Deacon was, as he put it, “the blueish tobacco smoke that drifted into the hall over the swing-doors of the bar.” As Deacon explained, “This phenomenon had to be seen to be believed; and it was a thing almost extinct in Canada.”
Deacon rushed to Jean Graham, an acquaintance of Mazo and the editor of the Canadian Home Journal.
“Where did Mazo see that?” Deacon asked Graham.
“Her uncle kept a hotel in Newmarket,” Graham replied. No doubt Graham’s incorrect answer was based on vague information supplied by Mazo.
Such a specific detail as the floating blue tobacco smoke was and is a mark of excellent writing, as Deacon well knew. Yet frequenting bars was not a socially acceptable activity for a well-brought-up woman, as Deacon also knew. Mazo never told anyone in literary circles about her close association years before with the Acton House, even though the experience had provided her with so much valuable raw material.
Her hotel experiences would remain a secret for many decades, until long after her death.
When Delight was published in 1926, the Canadian reviews were cool. Yet the novel’s reception in other countries was uniformly favourable.
Mazo complained in a letter to a British critic who had reviewed Delight enthusiastically: “Your attitude towards it was so sympathetic and unusual, that I cannot resist letting you know of the pleasure it gave me. The book has not been well received in Canada.”
Mazo went on to explain that Canadian reviewers had said that Delight was tedious, dull, and hedonistic. They also said that the characters were uninspiring.
Luckily Mazo was a strong person now. A weaker person might have given up. Luckily too, the previous year, 1925, Mazo’s play, Low Life, had won several competitions: one sponsored by the Toronto-based Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, and one sponsored by the Montreal branch of the Canadian Authors Association. These wins helped remind Mazo that all Canadians did not dislike all her work all the time.
Ironically, many decades after the hostility of Canadian reviewers wounded Mazo in 1926, Canadian academics would single out Delight for special praise. In fact, many professors would regard Delight as Mazo’s best book ever – a Canadian classic!
Mazo was dead by then.
8
The Winner
From the very first the characters created themselves. They leaped from my imagination and from memories of my own family.
“What advice would you give to girls who wish to obtain success as a writer?” asked the reporter. “Seek solitude, read wisely but not too avidly, and concentrate your mental and physical powers on your work,” replied Mazo.
Mazo was talking to Norma Philips Muir, a reporter for the Toronto Star Weekly who visited her at Trail Cottage in July 1926. The resulting article was titled, “SHE HAS NEVER SEEN A MOVIE.”
Mazo de la Roche at Trail Cottage in the 1920s walking Bunty.
Mazo herself was concentrating her powers on her work. She was seeking solitude at Trail Cottage and writing a novel that she had been thinking about for several years. Two characters had come into her mind: a middle-aged man and his older sister. These characters became Renny and Meg Whiteoak. A house had come into her mind. Actually she had been dreaming about a house over and over again.
In the dream, Mazo was walking alone across a wide stretch of sandy beach by the sea. Beyond the beach stretched a sunny moorland and, at its edge, facing the sea, stood a house, with all its doors and windows open. The house looked cheerful and welcoming, and Mazo could see that it was sparsely furnished. One room had nothing in it but a table and a chair or two. There were no curtains, no pictures, and no one was living in the house. Yet the house was not desolate. A most beautiful and comforting radiance emanated from the house – a luminosity. Yet there was nothing ethereal about the house. It was very real and Mazo was terribly eager to go into it – to live there. Yet always, as Mazo reached the doorsill, the house faded and was gone.
The disappointment of the dream became the satisfaction of the story as Mazo wrote more and more about a big, handsome, red-brick house located on an enormous rural property. In the 1850s, Mazo imagined, Captain Philip Whiteoak had bought four hundred hectares of “rich land.” This land was “traversed by a deep ravine through which ran a stream lively with speckled trout. Some of the land was cleared, but the greater part presented the virgin grandeur of the primeval forest.”
Captain Whiteoak had employed a “small army of men” to “make the semblance of an English park in the forest, and to build a house that should overshadow all others in the county. When completed, decor
ated, and furnished, it was the wonder of the countryside. It was a square house of dark red brick, and a wide stone porch, a deep basement where the kitchens and servants’ quarters were situated, an immense drawingroom, a library…”
Mazo’s new novel would be set in the 1920s. As the novel began, Captain Whiteoak would be long dead, but his widow and descendants would have lived in the house he had built for more than seventy years, or three generations. Similarly the Whiteoaks’ neighbours, the Vaughans, would have lived in their house on the other side of the ravine for three generations.
Caroline had taken the early morning train from Clarkson to her civil service job in Toronto. In Trail Cottage, Bunty was snoozing and Mazo was seated in the rocking chair in which her Grandmother Roche had soothed her baby sons: Danford, William, and Francis. Beside Mazo on the floor was her dictionary consisting of the two massive old leather-bound volumes compiled by the great Dr. Samuel Johnson several centuries earlier. These heavy, valuable books had belonged to Grandfather Roche.
With a drawing board on her knee, Mazo sat straight and wrote with a pencil. When she could not think of the right word, she rocked. When she did think of the right word, she stopped rocking and wrote it down. When she was not certain of the meaning of a word, she heaved up one of the volumes of the dictionary. Often she became so fascinated by other words that she forgot the one she was searching for.
The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche Page 546
