The Boy I Left Behind Me
$2.00
BY
DOUBLEDAY
THIS intimate and attractive little book of 184 pages is, unfortunately, all that we shall have from the late Stephen Leacock in the way of memoirs. At the time of his death two years ago, he had completed the first four chapters of the autobiography which he planned to call “My Memories and What I Think” — a characteristic title. The four chapters cover his youth, from England, where he was born, to the farm, schooling, and schoolteaching in Upper Canada.
Mr. Leacock was born in 1869; his autobiographical fragment closes in 1899 with his escape from the schoolteacher’s desk. It is all pure Leacock — funny and serious, gentle and stern, discursive and highly focused.
Education is an old theme with him. In the last years he wrote a great deal about it: and if his publishers are smart, they will put together a collection of his critical and corrective essays on secondary school and college teaching. Leacock knew how to teach, and he knew that the fail ure of elementary teaching in Canada and America spring straight from the tragic fact that we have never made the profession attractive — financially or otherwise as a lifetime job. “You can never have a proper system of national education without teachers who make teaching their lifework, take a pride in it as a chosen profession, and are so circumstanced as to lie as good as anybody — I mean as anything around.”His advice on discipline to beginning teachers (pages 169-170) ought to be pasted on the shaving mirror (or in the compact) to be learned by heart.
This book is a fragment of Old-World charm — of gentility in England and in (for these people) the hopelessly antipathetic Canadian bush. The best portrait is unconsciously of the author himself — but the inferential portrait most endearing is of Mr. Leacock’s mother. Readers of the old master will flock to these pages of themselves. What the world needs now is more Leacock sanity and selfanalysis. The present generation needs him more than his own or the one in between. You can shout that from the housetops.
DAVID McCORD