Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  Then he stormed out of the office, leaving Legate agape.

  Later, when it became clear that nothing further was to be said or done about the incident, Legate absorbed a valuable life lesson, that attack is often the best form of defence.

  Not that Legate really needed instruction in this matter. The last lines of his preface to the 1970 book, Stephen Leacock: A Biography, catch the man’s combative side. “A final note. This book was written without any assistance from the Canada Council, which refused my application for a grant-in-aid.”

  Earlier, the preface speaks of his youthful fascination with Leacock, thanks to his father, a Presbyterian minister in New Brunswick. Since his old man was so clearly delighted by Leacock’s work, Legate

  quickly developed the habit of visiting the local public library every Saturday morning to borrow a Leacock volume. My judgment of my father’s judgment was soon confirmed. Here was sparkling fun. But along came a black Saturday. As usual, I had blindly pulled off the shelf a Leacock title and taken it home. What I read dismayed me. It was deadly dull. Leacock had lost his touch. I informed my father, who hastened to point to the title, Elements of Political Science.

  It was Stephen Leacock who brought him to McGill University (and who later enjoyed hearing the story of young Legate’s textbook case of reader’s disappointment). Fair Dinkum records that making an application to this university in distant Montreal, “where the teaching staff included a person I devoutly wanted to meet in person, Stephen Leacock,” was not easy. “Since I had not sat for my matriculation (Principal Miles of the Saint John High School dismissed the idea, noting that he didn’t want the name of the school ‘dragged in the mud’) some sort of ingenuity was required in filing the application.” So with what he described as “untamed superciliousness,” he wrote to McGill’s registrar stating that he had looked over the 1923 freshman year curriculum and decided that he really deserved to be admitted to the sophomore year in Arts.

  Incredibly, acceptance followed. Only later did he learn that the letter so outraged the McGill authorities that they decided to make an example of him, with the principal himself, Sir Arthur Currie, roaring, in his best military style, “Admit him and pluck him.”

  Somehow, David Legate survived, going on to become the editor of The McGill Daily, and a Big Man on Campus. Even better, he met an interesting classmate named Marjorie, and their marriage lasted all their lives. And he did spend a great deal of time studying under — and studying — Stephen Leacock, who revelled in the academic life, tattered gown and all. The long vacations were especially appealing to Leacock: “I thus have what a businessman can never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stop thinking altogether for months at a time.”

  Young Legate revealed his uncanny ability to be part of the most interesting action when he was present at the Punch Felt Around the World. The famous magician Harry Houdini was in Montreal, and was boasting to Legate and a group of student friends that his stomach muscles were so strong that they could take any punch. They were invited to try (we can imagine the assurances, “Go on, as hard as you like!”). A McGill pal of Legate’s, a heavyweight boxer, stepped forward and obediently threw a punch. It ultimately killed Houdini, who died in the U.S. a few days later. For a brief period of fame newsmen researching the incident reported that Legate was the man with the deadly punch.

  Fisticuffs were involved in ending his academic career. Graduate students, past and present, right across the land will be impressed to hear that Legate’s time as a grad student at McGill’s English department ended when he got into a physical fight, in the corridor, with the dean of arts, Cyrus MacMillan. Having struck out, in every sense, he marched down to St. James Street to join the Montreal Star as a journalist, as nature surely intended.

  His career was interrupted by the Second World War, where he served with the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps in London during the Blitz, then switched to become assistant overseas commissioner of the Canadian Red Cross. And from these days one literary story did slip through his self-imposed barriers. On an introductory tour to meet the Red Cross staff in the London office, he came across four mature lady volunteers sitting at a table armed with scissors, glue, and strips of linoleum. They were gallantly pasting the linoleum on to paperback book covers, to provide sturdy reading for patients in Canadian hospitals. Fair Dinkum records what happened next:

  “Trying to think of something to say, I patted one lady on the back and allowed as how, who knows, she might be an author herself one day.”

  His tour guide reacted strangely, and back in his office was clearly in the grip of some deep emotion as he asked, “Do you know who you were speaking to?”

  “‘No. Who?’

  ‘Agatha Christie.’”

  As we worked together on his Leacock biography, this was the man who kindly made it his business to show me Montreal. Later, when I published William Weintraub’s marvellous look at Montreal in the forties and fifties, City Unique, with its accounts (second-hand, of course) of brothels and gambling dens and cops looking away, I realized that Legate had given me, a beardless boy, a censored version of his city.

  He was a founding member and a regular attendee — even after his pancreas took him off the booze — at the Montreal Men’s Press Club. The name is significant, and reminds us that Mavis Gallant had left her successful Montreal newspaper column in 1950 to move to Paris at least partly because she realized that in Montreal she could never be “one of the boys.” David Legate kindly took me there, and the bar area was full of amiable legends with names like Dink and Red (and indeed I later published Red Fisher’s hockey-beat memoirs). Great journalism war stories were paraded, not always for the first time, including the tale of How Legate Scooped the World.

  The Westminster Abbey coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 included several hundred reporters from across the world, and they were kept on the premises, in a metaphorical lock up, until the ceremony had ended. David Legate, however, “fainted” and was carried out, ignoring offers of brandy and gasping for “fresh air.” Once free of the Abbey, he scampered off through the fine fresh air and filed his “I was there” story first in all the world. I politely pretended to be more impressed than I was, since watching it at home on black-and-white TV, I had been “there,” too, but in the scoop-crazy Press Club that was clearly a minority opinion.

  Like the legendary Normandy Room, ideal for special dates and fine dining, the Press Club was then located in the Mount Royal Hotel (now deceased, transformed into a shopping mall). I stayed at this fine central hostelry for every Montreal visit. So did another Doubleday Canada employee, a salesman named Bruce. Now Bruce, I must insist, was a man of great probity and a controlled imagination, and yet he had almost incredible adventures at this hotel unique. Once, retiring to bed in his sober Toronto pajamas, he happened to pause at the window looking out across the hotel’s interior well. A woman at a window opposite noticed him and proceeded to stage a striptease that may have been impromptu, but was impassioned, and slow, and very impressively complete. On another occasion Bruce was wakened by a midnight thud at his hotel room door. Opening it, he found a man and a woman wrestling, naked, on the corridor carpet outside. Since they seemed evenly matched (although one must have had a sore heel from banging it against his door, in mid-tumble), he thought it best to leave them to it.

  Ah, Montreal.

  It was then, of course, indisputably Canada’s greatest city, and St. James Street, where David Legate’s office lay, still represented Canada’s financial centre, and had not yet become Rue St. Jacques. Those immediate post-Expo years were exciting ones, with an unconventional Montreal intellectual in Ottawa as prime minister, and a future one working his way up from Baie Comeau through a downtown Montreal law firm in Place Ville Marie itself, the skyscraper at the heart of the smart new city. The October Revolution and the murder of Pierre Laporte were still to come.


  Montreal was Leacock’s home for forty years, and among his sixty or so books was one about the city. Legate directed me to areas that Leacock would have recognized easily, despite the twenty-five years that had passed since his death. The McGill campus would have been especially interesting to him, now that the main building at the top of the avenue off Sherbrooke was named after him. And west and north of McGill, despite the invasion of new apartment buildings, he would have recognized the surviving grand old mansions of the former “Square Mile,” many of them family homes of the “idle rich” that he had enjoyed mixing with, and drinking with, because, as he said . . . “I like the drinks they mix.”

  As we put the book together, I was pleased to be escorted into Leacock’s old haunt, the University Club (not an exact copy of his Mausoleum Club), where he was a founding member, and his portrait by Richard Jack could be seen hanging in a place of honour above the fireplace. Club fireplaces, I learned, are especially important in Montreal. Apparently another club saw the dictatorial Premier Maurice Duplessis stride in (uninvited), unzip his pants (also uninvited), and urinate into the fireplace to demonstrate his contempt for the institution and its members. Some might dismiss it as just letting off steam, but others understood the serious message. And they also understood how essential Jean Lesage’s Quiet Revolution was if Quebec was to catch up to the modern world.

  Over the years in publishing, I learned that portraits, either by photographers or painters, are important, since they show the face the subject wishes to present to the world when they are allowed to pose — a significant word. That Leacock painting by Richard Jack was what we chose to put on the front cover. It was exactly right for the book, showing a tweedy, rumpled Leacock sitting there, his tie askew, fresh from marking student essays with the red pencil in his hand. And on his squarely handsome, grizzled face he has the “old-boyish” grin we all know, the one that perfectly represents the chuckling humorist every reader imagines him to be.

  And I fear that it was misleading.

  In my experience, every humorous writer finds that his or her public confidently expects them to be a happy person, facing life with a wry chuckle, and perhaps a slow, smiling shake of the head. To his great credit, Leacock tried to shoot down this view. He wrote: “If a man has a genuine sense of humour he is apt to take a somewhat melancholy, or at least a disillusioned view of life. Humour and disillusionment are twin sisters.”

  Robertson Davies (who knew more than most people about the expectations placed on successful authors in their private lives) wrote in his 1981 introduction to The Penguin Stephen Leacock, “I have written a good deal about Leacock, and I believe that I was the first to press the point that he was not necessarily a man of continuously sunny, carefree temperament. . . . He had, in fact, the temperament of a humorist, and they are by no means unfailingly sunny people.”

  Leacock’s life was not short of events that would have disillusioned anyone. His family (of, eventually, eleven children) came from England to rural Ontario and a life of genteel poverty (the boys were not allowed to go barefoot in the summer, like the other local kids; a matter, Leacock later said, “of caste and thistles”). The father, Peter, was a Catholic whose runaway marriage was never accepted by his wife’s Anglican family (and to make matters worse the bride was older, and may have been pregnant). Peter was excellent at provoking pregnancies, but less productive with his work on the farm near Sutton, just south of Lake Simcoe. He is politely described by the notable Leacock scholar David Staines as “a man of sluggish character.” In fact, he was so bad that Stephen and his brothers threw him out of the house (one version involves that Victorian staple, a horsewhip, and there were rumours of drunken violence in the marriage), telling him to stay away, which he did. Lack of money forced young Stephen to drop out of university for a year. For ten years he laboured as a schoolmaster, and, in the words of Robertson Davies “disliked the work heartily.”

  Although he went on to enjoy great professional success and prosperity, in his marriage he lost his wife to cancer when she was forty-five, and never remarried. His beloved only son, “Little Stevie,” remained miniature, so tiny that he barely attained a height of five feet, and became an embittered drunk, his escapades hushed up by the local community. Even the teaching life Leacock loved, where in his tattered gown he could put on an Eccentric Old Professor show for his students, was taken from him when McGill briskly removed him from the faculty when he reached sixty-five — a crushing blow: “I was then retired, much against my will, on grounds of senility, having passed the age of sixty-five.” It should not have been a surprise, of course, since he had voted, many years earlier, for precisely that retirement provision.

  And what a perfect Leacock funny story that would be: a middle-aged professor, certain that old age will never come to him, votes for compulsory retirement at sixty-five, then reacts with outrage when it is applied to him. Leacock’s coolly classical view of human nature, in which people routinely fall prey to false hopes and small hypocrisies, believing that they are exceptions to the follies of human nature, provided him with his profitable living as a humorist. But it did not protect him here, in his own life. He did not die a happy man.

  So what remains? In Montreal there is, of course, the Leacock Building at McGill, and the portrait in the University Club. Margaret MacMillan’s excellent 2009 short biography (Stephen Leacock, in Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series) notes that in Toronto there is a Scarborough high school named after him, which was attended by young people arrested as accused Islamic terrorists in 2006: a stranger-than-fiction example of how the old Victorian imperialist’s conservative Canada has changed.

  By way of contrast, there is the Stephen Leacock Museum at Old Brewery Bay in Orillia. Built in 1927 from his book royalties as the world’s most popular humorist, it is a fine example of a rich Canadian’s lakeside cottage. It was Leacock’s base for fishing and sailing and other summer pursuits, which included paying proper respect to the site’s convivial name. But it was also a research base, though his excursions into Orillia as a famous but unaffected local writer did not have the desired effect. The town barber once complained about the summer visitor’s shameless use of hot local gossip as material for his writing. The complaint predictably ran along the lines of “How the hell was I to know that he was going to take that stuff and . . .”

  Time has healed these wounds, and the Leacock Museum has become a tourist asset. Despite the spread of nearby houses (a scandal worth a Leacock story), the house itself is protected by its site on a point on Lake Couchiching, in tree-shaded grounds. The building is preserved as an old-fashioned cottage, with dark wood panelling throughout its interior, and comes complete with a library, straw hats on pegs, and ancient tennis racquets apparently ready for service. As you tiptoe through the two-storey house, upstairs and downstairs, peering at book titles, or at the papers on the desk in the study, or at the dishes in the kitchen, it’s hard to avoid the Goldilocks sense that the owners will return at any moment.

  One missing component is Leacock’s flourishing garden, which inspired the famous beaming-farmer-in-straw-hat Karsh photograph, still on display in the lobby of Ottawa’s Château Laurier hotel. It also produced the story, recounted by a niece, of the late-summer family dinner that was interrupted by the grumpy host’s complaints about the soup. The surprised guests were then hounded from the table to pick fresh tomatoes in the garden, which were to be delivered to the kitchen and turned into a (very) fresh batch of soup. It could be called the Hundred-Yard Diet.

  And the final biography? Legate’s book was well researched, inspired by direct knowledge of the subject, and well written, and it was respectably reviewed, but is now sadly out of print. Even Robertson Davies’ thoughtful selection, Feast of Stephen, is no longer available. (I should note that my wise old friend, who as the author of Fifth Business and much else, knew about writing novels, once told me in passing that Leacock could have been a f
ine serious novelist.) Sadly, too, David Legate is long gone. I heard of his death and asked for details at his old Press Club. The French-Canadian barman, who liked him, told me that “To the en’, he fought like a ti-gerr!” There are worse obituaries.

  To be selfish, Legate’s ambitious book taught me a lot, since I was working on a biography with all the trimmings — a photo section, captions, an index, and so on. In editorial terms, when David Legate and I disagreed he would refer the matter to a mysterious authority, another McGill grad who knew Leacock, he said. It took me a shamefully long time — perhaps after too many hours in the Montreal Men’s Press Club — to realize that this authority figure was his wife, Marjorie.

  I even learned a technical lesson about book making. The unvarnished truth, you might say. Soon after the books appeared in the shops, complaints flooded in that the attractive scarlet colour on the cover was rubbing off, to reveal the yellow below. This was serious, and evidence of a problem with the printer’s varnish. In his office my boss and I had a tense meeting with the printer and his salesman. The young salesman set out to prove that there was no problem. “See,” he began confidently, “when I take this pencil with the eraser at the end and start to rub at the red cover, there’s no . . .”

  He faltered, as streaks of yellow began to appear.

  “Bob, why don’t you go and wait in the car?” his boss said, not unkindly. We soon reached an agreement with him.

  And Leacock’s reputation? Leacock, born in 1869, was literally a nineteenth-century figure. As a young boy in England he knew an old sailor who spoke of his service in “The Great War” — the Napoleonic war. And Leacock was both Conservative and conservative. Much of what he wrote (and with sixty books he wrote too much, and much too fast) makes jarring reading today, especially when he deals with women and with people from other cultures. For instance, his innocent mention of “smiling negroes” glimpsed in a glamorous passing train produces unease, even if his point is just to establish that this train has a grand dining car, with waiters.