Stephen Leacock

[carfilhiot]

Stephen Leacock, Canadian satirical writer, was born in England, but was taken to Canada at an early age and is rightly regarded, even honoured, as a Canadian icon. There is a prize for humorous literature in his name. He died in 1944, but much of his most famous work was written in the early years of the century. He was a professor of Politics and Economics, and much is made of the fact that his satires were interleaved with serious works. Serious study of his comic output has taken place, based on the premise that they are a reflection of Politico-Economic doctrine. I thought that this analogy was stretched rather far, until I discovered that Soviet Russia regarded the book I am about to review as a serious text on the Evils of Capitalism in the West. That fact in itself is worth a healthy laugh.

Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich is probably my favourite Leacock, and was written in about 1914. It consists of a dozen or so stories about members of the Mausoleum Club in Plutoria. They are written in such a style that, as you start to read, a grin comes over your face that remains there until the story in over. They are tales of social success and failure, financial success and failure and the progress of fads. An occasional guffaw might escape your lips but mostly you feel a quiet delight at the archaic language and the clever comedy.



Stephen Leacock's tone appears in work by S J Perelman, who undoubtedly was influenced by Leacock. His innocently sardonic timbre also appears in Thurber and in Garrison Keillor. If Leacock himself has an influence, it may well be Ambrose Bierce. There is a tradition of dry North American humour that I find very compelling, my most recent discovery being P J O'Rourke, who, as well as advertising airlines, writes a very biting line.

These snippets from Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich should give you some flavour of the richness of Leacock's comic prose:

In Europe, no doubt, you may see in the Unter den Linden avenue or the Champs Elysees a little prince or princess go past with a clattering military guard of honour. But that is nothing. It is not half so impressive, in the real sense, as what you may observe every morning on Plutoria Avenue beside the Mausoleum Club in the quietest part of the city. Here you may see a little toddling princess in a rabbit suit who owns fifty distilleries in her own right. There, in a lacquered perambulator, sails past a little hooded head that controls from its cradle an entire New Jersey corporation. The United States attorney-general is suing her as she sits, in a vain attempt to make her dissolve herself into constituent companies. Near by is a child of four, in a khaki suit, who represents the merger of two trunk-line railways. You may meet in the flickered sunlight any number of little princes and princesses far more real than the poor survivals of Europe. Incalculable infants wave their fifty-dollar ivory rattles in an inarticulate greeting to one another. A million dollars of preferred stock laughs merrily in recognition of a majority control going past in a go-cart drawn by an imported nurse.

and

Dr. Boomer was eating his oysters as a Nigerian hippo might eat up the crew of a doolie, in great mouthfuls, and commenting as he did so upon the luxuriousness of modern life. And in the pause that followed the oysters he illustrated for the Duke with two pieces of bread the essential difference in structure between the Mexican pueblo and the tribal house of the Navajos, and lest the Duke should confound either or both of them with the adobe hut of the Bimbaweh tribes he showed the difference at once with a couple of olives.

Arcadian Adventures ends with an account of how Clean Government was introduced to Plutoria, an account which rings true to this very day. Apparently, the sun rises on nothing new a century later.

Although most of Leacock's books are still in print, The Gutenberg Project features many of them for download, so they are easily accessible. Try one.