Mazo De La Roche And Dorothy Livesay

Dorothy Livesay was known most of her poetic and literary life as a radical and often associated with various forms of socialism and communism. Her brief, vivid and incomplete autobiography, Journey with My Selves: A Memoir (1991) tells, in graphic and never to be forgotten detail, much about her personal literary and political journey. The autobiographical tale is a classic of Canadian literary and political life. What, we might ask, has Mazo de la Roche to do with Dorothy Livesay? What does de la Roche the Tory have in common with Livesay the radical? Is such a meeting common within the Canadian political experience? The answer to the latter question, of course, is yes, and Livesay went out of her way many times to defend de la Roche when all the liberal literary critics attempted to dismiss her.

When Mazo de la Roche lived in Trail Cottage in Clarkson, Ontario (between 1924-1928), the Livesays lived just across the road from Mazo and Caroline Clement. Dorothy Livesay was in her mid to late teens at the time, and Mazo de la Roche was often at the Livesay home. The Livesay home was a bustling place in which many of the up and coming Canadian literati in Canada tested their mettle and wares. Both of Dorothy?s parents were front and centre in the literary and media world of Canada, and the Livesay home was very much a literary salon of sorts. De la Roche was still very much an unknown Canadian author at the time, and she spent many an hour and day bent over paper with creative pen in hand. All this changed, though, with the Atlantic award in 1927. The Jalna tradition had been launched, Mazo de la Roche was catapulted to prominence and the final book in the Jalna series was not completed until 1960. The Jalna series is, probably, the finest and fullest epic tradition written in Canada, and it is rather sad that so few Canadians know Mazo de la Roche or have read the Jalna novels (about the grandeur and follies of the Whiteoaks family).

I mentioned above that it became rather trendy for many self styled intellectuals to mock or ignore Mazo de la Roche, but Dorothy Livesay was always there to come to De la Roche's defense. In the winter edition of Canadian Literature (1965), Dorothy Livesay wrote a rather lengthy article on Mazo de la Roche. De la Roche had been dead for four years, and the critics were making sport of her. Livesay's article, "The Making of Jalna: A Reminiscence" walks the reader into and through a much more positive view of both Mazo de la Roche and the inspiration and setting of the Jalna tradition. Many is the personal story and tale told by Livesay, and many is the warm and affectionate memory. There are no hard or mean spirited things said about de la Roche, and Livesay highlights the good in the vision that de la Roche was trying to portray in her many novels, plays and short stories. In the spring edition of Canadian Literature (1967), Livesay came to de la Roche's defence yet once again. The publication of a biography on Mazo de la Roche by Ronald Hambleton had been published, and Livesay's review, "Mazo Explored", both applauds the fact a biography is now in the hands of readers, but questions the depth of Hambleton's approach to such a fine and exquisite Canadian novelist.

The 20th century witnessed the rise of a form of literary criticism that was more concerned with the author than the creative work of the artist. Works of art were read and interpreted through the lens of the artist's life, dispositions and faults and failings of personality. A classic discussion of this highly charged debate is the missive by E.M. Tillyard and C.S.Lewis, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939). Mazo de la Roche suffered from this approach by some critics, and again it was Livesay who came to the aid and assistance of de la Roche. Livesay's article, in Impulse (1973), "Getting it Straight", goes after those who abuse and misread the Jalna tradition and Mazo de la Roche's other novels. Dorothy Livesay was defending the importance of female authors as much as defending good literature and the worldview and ethos that good literature evokes.

Livesay ended her article, "The Making of Jalna: A Reminiscence" with these telling reflections. "My last talk with Mazo de la Roche was a gentle one, on the personal family level of the early days. The war was over and I had a little girl of my own whom Mazo and her half sister wanted to see. Miss Clement, alas, was nearly blind by then, and Mazo was the one who must read to her. We were invited to tea in their charming Toronto house, glittering throughout with coloured glass. They spoke with particular affection of my father, the erratic 'Squire of Woodlot', and of the thousands of daddodils and narcissi he had planted under the white birches at Clarkson. But by now our beloved woodland had been cut up, paved, made into suburbia; and we lamented the old days in Ontario when people did live as English landed gentry".

It is rare these days to see a radical poet and political thinker come to the aid of a High Tory, but Dorothy Livesay did this for Mazo de la Roche. Canada has such a civic and civil tradition, and, in many ways, Livesay and de la Roche embody such an sane and civilized way in our era and ethos of political correctness and culture wars. May we learn something from such grace and graciousness.

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Ron Dart teaches in the department of political science/philosophy/religious studies at University College of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC