The language of Leacock
On 100th anniversary of Sunshine Sketches, his humour still speaks to us
“Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.” STEPHEN LEACOCK
“The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough . . . But to write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.” — Author’s preface, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town ORILLIA— Stephen Leacock had, in the event, no shortage of “fortunate moments.” They especially came to prominence a century ago this month, with the first instalment of a series of humorous pieces commissioned by The Montreal Star. With amendments and some slight changes to (barely) mask the names of actual citizens of Orillia (under threat of legal action), they would soon be collected in book form as Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.
Such anniversaries are, of course, contrived reasons to reflect on a famous event or person whose memory we have hitherto mostly observed in the breach. But this has a brisk virtue to it, which Leacock would have recognized as natural and human, even as — perhaps especially as — he made fun of it.
Guilt (ours) is always offset by vindication (his), for who wouldn’t be abashed at not sufficiently celebrating someone who could pen this: “Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.”
Leacock may not be much part of the province’s school curriculum these days, but he speaks to us still. His tolerance is our tolerance. His self-deprecating humour, ours, even if Leacock liked to deny there was any essentially Canadian style of humour or approach to the world.
In a perfectly Leacockian way, he denied the existence of something he spent a lifetime demonstrating.
His comic works are all about “laughing at ourselves, not taking ourselves too seriously,” notes Fred Addis, curator at the Leacock Museum National Historic Site. “That’s what really defines Canadians. Much of that comes from Stephen Leacock holding up that mirror to ourselves.”
He could be enormously funny, in prose trembling with delight at the ironies and inconsistencies of human behaviour, especially when it begins with what appear to be the finest intentions.
In the best-known sketch, “The Maritime Excursions of the Knights of Pythias,” a lake cruise dedicated to temperance has only a winking relationship with the cause ostensibly at hand. As Leacock writes about those crowding the pier:
“You know, I think, the peculiar walk of a man with two bottles of whisky in the inside pockets of a linen coat.”
On board the Mariposa Belle, meanwhile, the band variously plays “The Maple Leaf Forever” and “O Canada” as the ship starts to sink. Everyone heads to the life boats — “‘Women and children first!’ For what was the sense, if it should turn out that the boat wouldn’t even hold women and children, of trying to jam a lot of heavy men into it?”
The reduced weight on board, coupled with heroic repairs by Josh Smith, the big tavern-owner in Mariposa, results in the ship being refloated just as a rescue party arrives in a boat with water sloshing over the thwarts. The would-be rescuers are rescued by coming aboard the Mariposa Belle. A CENTURY ON, it’s not hard to recognize this as quintessentially Canadian humour, delighting in the gaps between appearance and reality. We still don’t feel comfortable with showy displays, as if instinctively knowing that something made out to be grand invariably has a hollow core.
For the most part, we’re not meanspirited about any of this. We revel affectionately, as Leacock did, in the foibles of imperfect humanity.
Leacock was least funny when he tried to vent genuine anger through comedy, but it’s also true that, in his finest work, there is something sad and wistful lurking underneath.
The most successful comedians often wander through life with a painfully large kernel of personal sorrow, which they sometimes self-medicate with copious amounts of alcohol.
Leacock likely fell into this pattern, though more charitably he just kept up with the heavy-drinking ways of his time, thus upholding his own intellectual suspicions of the temperance movement.
How could you really trust someone who neither drank nor accepted money freely given?
If the best humour has this dark middle, Leacock, the man, certainly experienced his share of trying circumstances.
Born in Swanmore, England, in 1869, Leacock moved to Ontario with his family in 1876, but there was nothing auspicious about the change of locale. By then, his father had already failed as a farmer in South Africa and Kansas, and he’d fail in Canada, as well, en route to becoming overly familiar with the local taverns.
One family tale, not reliably corroborated, has Leacock physically packing off his father. What is known is that his father abandoned the family and a teenaged Leacock wound up assuming the mantle of leadership.
Undoubtedly in consequence, Leacock later became an extremely devoted dad, always worried about ensuring the future of son Stevie, a sickly child with thyroid difficulties.
Leacock’s father, meantime, emerged outside Halifax under a pretend name, “Captain James Lewis,” with a housekeeper/mistress in tow, and is remembered there as a respected citizen. No wonder his son had such a keen sense of the contradictions between public piety and private behaviour.
Tragedy would strike Leacock again with the loss of his beloved wife, Beatrix, to breast cancer in 1925. For the next two years, he stayed away from their summer house in Orillia, and never talked or wrote about his suffering.
But despite his trials, Leacock was determined not to dwell on sadness. As he writes in criticizing some of the more maudlin scenes in the work of his hero, Charles Dickens: “Sorrow as a deliberate luxury is a doubtful pursuit, a dubious form of art.”
Leacock would opt instead for humour, however melancholy.
So it’s not hard to imagine Leacock being delighted that, in a TV movie based on Sunshine Sketches and set to air Feb.12 on CBC, some of the country’s best-known comedians play the sternest, most dour characters — Ron James as Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker, Peter Keleghan as Rev. Drone, dean of the local Anglican church, and Colin Mochrie as Judge Pepperleigh.
THE MELANCHOLY in Leacock’s finest work may reflect the man, but it’s also the defining characteristic of the Ed- wardian sensibility.
This may explain why his writing still resonates with us now, why the Irish author Roddy Doyle, on a recent visit to Leacock’s summer home, all but emptied the bookshelves in the gift shop.
Edwardian worries echo our own as we, too, struggle into a new century.
With Queen Victoria’s long reign finally drawing to a close, the Western world — and most especially the British Empire — was rife with apprehension. A new epoch was clearly arriving, with all its uncertainties, prompting an acute wistfulness about a way of life that was about to vanish.
You hear it in the melodies of Sir Edward Elgar, and see it in the pages of a book like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind
in the Willows, wherein Rat tells Mole: “Believe me, my young friend, there is
nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
It’s a sentiment that would have gone to the core of Leacock. He straddled two worlds: the big city and modernity while teaching at Mcgill University; and the small-town life that still persisted in Leacock’s summer home in Orillia.
But as much as he might enjoy the finer things in life, there was little doubt that his heart was always tugging him back to life as a kind of gentleman farmer, boating and fishing on Lake Couchiching.
He certainly contrived to spend as much time as possible at the sprawling cottage he dubbed Old Brewery Bay, notes Addis. “He always left Montreal a little too early and went back a little too late.”
The most famous photographs of Leacock were taken at Old Brewery Bay, the great man playing country hayseed. Yousuf Karsh, expecting a half-day shoot, ended up staying three days.
It’s no coincidence that the rich worthies who populate the fictional Mausoleum Club in the big city originally hailed from their own Mariposas. As Leacock puts it: “. . . there isn’t one of them that doesn’t sometimes dream in the dull quiet of the long evening here in the club, that some day he will go back and see the place.”
But Leacock knows that, if they do finally return, and with enough money to build that dream house, they will do so as changed people, however much the town and lake remain unaltered. “No,” Leacock writes at the end of Sun
shine Sketches, “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. Perhaps if you had come back now and again, just at odd times, it wouldn’t have been so.”
“Sorrow as a deliberate luxury is a doubtful pursuit, a dubious form of art.” STEPHEN LEACOCK WRITING ABOUT CHARLES DICKENS