Autobiography

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 251, 14 April 1944, Page 7

Autobiography

Be Fares I was six, my parents emigrated from Hampshire to Canada, and I decided to go with them. After that we never saw a train again for three years. Three years after that, we went away to school and to the world. But the stamp I carry is that of the soil and _ the Canadian bush. I still rise like a farmhand. "My father went West from our Lake Simcoe farm to the first Manitoba boom over 50 years ago. He came back broke in six months. "Our farm was able by great diligence, to raise each year enough seed for the next. Thus my brothers and I were driven off the land, and forced to become professors, businessmen, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm labourers. "I went into teaching as the only trade that needed neither experience nor intellect. At university I spent all my time acquiring languages, living, dead and halfdead. Finally, I got Ph.D. "I taught three months, at 18, in Strathroy High School. Then a year at Uxbridge H.S. Then 10 years at Upper Canada lege. Then a good job at McGill University for 35 years. You will notice my jobs have grown longer. The next, I think, will be what you'd call permanent." EXHIBIT A_ (Fragment of a _ Police Court Form). Name?: Leacock, Stephen. Employed?: Except when resting. Read?: No-not without glasses. Write?: Yes-forty voiumes. EXHIBIT B: The Elements of Political Economy. The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice. Behind the Beyond and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge. Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy. Further Foolishness. Nonsense Novels. Frenzied Fiction. The Iron Man and the Tin Woman. Heilements of Hickronomics -and three dozen more.