Linda Leith examines her formative years in memoir
A driving force of Montreal's literary scene delves into formative years in new memoir
In the mid- to late 1960s, anyone driving down Golf Ave. in Pointe-claire, perhaps on their way to a round at the neighbouring Beaconsfield Golf Club, might have noticed something unusual in front of one of the street's well-appointed wooden houses.
Mounted on the steps, on either side of the front door, were marble busts of William Pitt the Younger and Spencer Perceval, British statesmen of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
“Incredible, isn't it?” said writer and Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival founder Linda Leith, who lived in that house as a teenager. It was her father, Desmond, who had gone to the trouble of installing those busts.
“They were slightly bigger than life-sized — far too heavy for anyone to steal, which was the only reason you could risk leaving them outdoors.”
The intent, presumably, was to signal that this household was in some way a cut above?
“It was never discussed,” said Leith. “But certainly my father treated Canada as an outpost of (the British) Empire. He never really understood this country. The only two things he admired about it were ice fishing and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”
“Never discussed” are key words in Leith's account of her early life. Born to working-class parents in Northern Ireland in 1949, she spent her childhood in what she describes as “this extraordinary little bubble that bounced around the world,” as her father's career progress — first as a doctor and editor, then as an executive for pharmaceutical giants Sandoz and Pfizer — took the family on an international odyssey encompassing England, Switzerland and finally Canada.
All the while, some crucial truths were being kept hidden.
“One of the great puzzlements of my youth is that I really didn't know what was going on,” Leith said. “I pieced it together bit by bit, but it took decades. Even when I started to understand it, it was still very hard to put it into words.”
The Girl From Dream City: A Literary Life (University of Regina Press, 304 pages, $21.95) is vivid and compelling proof that Leith has met that challenge. Focusing on her formative years (her early adulthood and the founding of Blue Metropolis are the subjects of 2008's Marrying Hungary and 2010's Writing in the Time of Nationalism, respectively), Leith has produced not only a fascinating social time capsule, but a nuanced memoir of a home life dominated by the need to keep certain things — most notably her father's troubled psychiatric history and former standing as a card-carrying Communist — shrouded in secrecy. In her unflinching portrait of a man she describes as “having many great qualities in addition to being an absolutely difficult father,” Leith has made a significant contribution to the literature of family.
The early '60s, when the Leiths were on their second stint in London after a spell in Bern, was a time when a book like Noblesse Oblige, edited by Nancy Mitford and basically a how-to volume on speaking the Queen's English, could not only be taken seriously but sell in huge numbers. One enthusiastic proponent was Desmond Leith, the son of a shipyard carpenter.
“This was postwar, swinging London,” said Leith, “and yet the hold that class snobbery had on people like my father, people who were trying to make their way in the world, was overpowering.”
(The Leith family's perambulations included an unlikely intersection with rock history in Beckenham, South London. For three years they lived in Haddon Hall, a past-its-prime Victorian mansion divided into flats. David Bowie adepts will know it as the place where the young artist lived on the cheap from 1969 through 1971, writing the songs that would make his name and hatching the plans for his alter ego Ziggy Stardust.)
After getting a taste of life in the cultural hotbed of Hampstead, and having witnessed the onset of English Beatlemania (“my favourite was George”), Leith found relocation to the West Island in 1963 a considerable shock.
“Beaconsfield High School was very dull and stodgy then,” she recalled. “If you walked up the down staircase, you got a detention.”
As it happened, this era coincided with one of Desmond Leith's most volatile emotional periods. Knowing nothing of his manic depression, Leith and her brothers were in the dark as to the sources of his unpredictable outbursts of temper. Some of the domestic incidents recounted in the book are downright harrowing.
While the subsequent appearance at school of a couple of maverick teachers helped open up Leith's world and offered relief from the oppressive atmosphere at home, progressive cultural currents such as feminism were slow to arrive in Pointe-claire.
“I got through honours English and philosophy at Mcgill before I realized that there was such a thing as a woman's point of view in literature,” she said. “As a student, that just wasn't part of the discourse.”
For Leith, an epiphany came as a Mcgill undergraduate with the reading of Benjamin Constant's 1816 novel Adolphe. The model for one of Constant's characters was Madame de Staël, whose standing as a writer and public intellectual is equalled, if not surpassed, by her reputation as a consummate salonnière whose gatherings had an indelible impact on the spread of Romanticism. Her story, for Leith, planted the notion of a holistic approach to the literary life: writing, yes, but also collaborating and nurturing.
Flash forward several decades from that Mcgill awakening and the realization strikes you that that's exactly what she ended up doing: as writer, translator, editor, publisher and, most crucially, on a grand scale, as the driving force of a groundbreaking multilingual literary festival. (Leith's time at the helm of Blue Metropolis spanned 1999 to 2010.)
“It really is true,” she said. “I loved that idea from the beginning, of a room full of writers and intellectuals and artists. I wanted a world like that, but how was I supposed to get it? But eventually, lo and behold, it's what happened.”
While The Girl From Dream City takes the Leith story up to her present running of an eponymous literary publishing house that will celebrate its 10th anniversary next year, it is the testament of how she got here that forms the heart of the book. It feels fair to ask how much all that old secrecy had to do with her having become a writer and all of what followed.
“It has to have had an impact,” she said. “I think that when things are unspoken, when they're shrouded in silence, your imagination starts filling in the gaps. Besides, to have been told anything at all — about my father's illness, about my parents' politics — would have required some discussion, and there wasn't any. So I became very alert, let's put it that way. I was always looking for clues and signals to account for what was going on.”
As for her father, Leith's hardearned account of his flaws, and her gratitude at having got past them, is tempered with admiration.
“He did a 180-degree turn, from being a doctor and editor of a magazine run by a collective of Communist doctors in London to being a corporate executive. And he pulled it off. He made a success of his different lives. He must have felt he'd earned those marble busts.”