Despite scholarly studies, a comprehensive bibliography, new anthologies, and critical editions of his two most well-known books, Stephen Leacock remains only vaguely understood behind the ubiquitous smiling eyes to which we collectively reduce him. Critical assessment of Leacock’s career has often pigeonholed him as a sentimental and/or commercial humorist, an outmoded imperialist, a failed novelist, and so on. In the same vein, biographies still recycle tall-tale anecdotes without verification and fail to contextualize Leacock’s driving motivations. What makes The Letters of Stephen Leacock particularly significant is not the sudden exposure of Leacock’s private life, but rather the insight they provide to Leacock’s career and work. These letters document Leacock’s circles of influence, his professionalism as a popular literary figure and public intellectual, and his awareness of his market, his craft, and his public persona. Arranged chronologically, the letters also chart the trajectory of Leacock’s career from an ambitious international figure to a surprisingly frail and uncertain individual. In the context of enduring critical and biographical questions, the first comprehensive and formally published selection of Leacock’s letters is nothing short of a revelation, whereas Margaret MacMillan’s new biography is little more than a missed opportunity.

Commentators have often dismissed Leacock’s correspondence as being more concerned with the business of publishing than with art. Leacock never professed to be a commercially disinterested artist, nor did he ever market himself as a timeless and charming funny man, for that matter. “I admit that I am very commercial and like money,” Leacock stated, “but at the same time I have enough of the petty vanity of a writer not to care to see things too much altered.” This statement encapsulates the cultural polarities Leacock navigated throughout his career:  a wish to produce work that sells and a concomitant conviction in his authority as a public intellectual. Leacock’s first book, Elements of Political Science, was published in 1906 by Houghton, Mifflin, a conservative and scholarly publisher, and launched Leacock’s academic career as professor in political economy. In submitting his next book, Literary Lapses, to the same publisher, Leacock was less astute and the manuscript was summarily rejected, humour deemed as being “too uncertain.” Undaunted, Leacock produced a self-published edition of Literary Lapses, aggressively marketed it through promotional placards and flyers, and sold-out the entire print-run of 3,000 copies in two months. John Lane of the Bodley Head (at that time, a mainstream British publisher that also cultivated an artistic reputation) picked up a copy of that first edition of Literary Lapses in Montreal, a chance acquisition thanks to Leacock’s marketing efforts that led to a long and lucrative publishing relationship between the two men and the launch of Leacock’s complex cultural signature.

Early in his career, Leacock was aware of the shifting values accorded to popular art and the public intellectual. When Leacock states that he can make Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town “Canadian enough (to English readers) by inserting a sentence or two here and there” and “put in plenty of comparative stuff to make [My Discovery of England] sell in America” he does so clearly with the intent to ensure good sales. And yet he also wanted to ensure his books were read: “I am glad the price [of Sunshine Sketches] is to be fairly low as I think that humorous stuff ought to be cheap: those who are most willing to buy it are young people with lots of life and fun in then and, as rule, not too much money. Rich people buy stuff with a gorgeous cover & fine paper, but never read it.” For Leacock, humour was never simply escapism. In his 1937 study Humour and Humanity, he noted that when Nathaniel Hawthorne was concerned “mechanical civilization was threatening to undermine the moral worth of humanity . . . [he] could have written all this out as an essay, and conveyed it to a few hundred readers.” Instead, he “wrote it as a humorous ‘parody’ and reached thousands.” Leacock not only packaged serious messages in humorous sketches, he also capitalized on his celebrity status for the benefit of a wide range of causes and issues, such as a fundraising and advocacy campaign for cancer research, a proposal to develop “an advanced national school of Canadian economics” at McGill University, and a lecture tour promoting political and economic integration of Canada.  Leacock’s motivation for such serious work was not the opportunity to make money (in fact, he often donated his time and resources to such causes), but rather to engage and promote a distinct social vision through writing “for the public, not for the professoriate … [since] … the professors read one another’s books and the public pays no attention.”

The push to market Leacock as a one dimensional figure has simplified the range and scope of his career and work, replaced Leacock’s complex personality and wide scope of interests with the larger-than-life fiction of his public persona. The letters counter that critical leveling by providing a provisional map for enriching our understanding. Leacock’s urgency to make money, for example, may be better understood in the context of his impoverished youth and his subsequent support for his immediate and extended family. Also, in a body of letters written late in his life to his niece Barbara Nimmo and to his long-time confidante and companion, Mrs. Herbert T. Shaw (“Fitz”), the Leacock personas appear to fail him: instead of the word play and wry wit of the famed humourist or the stridency or confidence of the public intellectual, we glimpse a frail and aging man, plagued by age and the illness of age: “I’ll be glad when you come, Fitz; I’m not ill but I seem to live in fear & each time I beat it down some little discomfort starts, a nothing in itself & it gets me down again.” Leacock describes his “bad time with neurasthenic depression” and the “fear that gives [him] a nerve collapse in the morning.” Such letters pull back the curtain that veiled the Wizard of Orillia, recover the man behind the wry self-effacement and earnest oratory that became his stock-in-trade in public discourse.

That being said, a selection of letters cannot do the work of a biography, although they do underscore the need for a biography that situates Leacock’s life, career, and body of work within a detailed cultural history framework. Unfortunately, Margaret MacMillan’s biography in the Extraordinary Canadians series falls short of meeting a clear need in Leacock biographical studies. Perhaps limited by the series format, MacMillan provides broad strokes and, in doing so, recycles well-worn anecdotes and the reductive overview of Leacock’s career. When MacMillan does push for insight, the results can be mixed. She raises the important point that Leacock’s extensive engagement with governance and society “were questions to which Leacock would return throughout his life but increasingly as a public intellectual rather than as an academic,” which is an important distinction to make. However, MacMillan also states that Leacock’s “more serious books … are badly dated and appear to have little to say to the world of today”, and yet only pages later insists Leacock “tackled the big questions (many of them still relevant today) of his own times.”

In some respects, the flaws and contradictions in MacMillan’s book are symptomatic of the current and enduring attitudes towards Leacock. And if that’s the case, if Leacock’s body of work is pigeonholed, denatured, ignored, fundamentally misunderstood, and reduced to a simplified cultural signature in the literary nationalist marketplace, then should it not be the role of a cultural historian writing a biography to probe and posit why such a large body of cultural work has been so ill-served?  Sadly, instead of critically engaging the complex motivations and influences that informed Leacock’s career and the persistent problems in critical and biographical Leacock studies, MacMillan’s dislike or, at best, boredom with her subject resorts to an at times immature stylistic tick of rhetorical questions, of dodging aporia with aporia – “is he joking?”; “is he protesting too much?”; “did she [Shaw] and Leacock sleep together?” Although this mode of questioning is more a matter of style than of substance (although that last example is a bit much), it is still the product of circumvention. Sadly, although a cultural historian of MacMillan’s stature is well positioned to contextualize a problematic biographical legacy and to explore why Leacock’s serious work is excised from the Leacock canon, this contribution to Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series is a superficial overview, which, coupled with inaccurate statements, clunky prose, glaring typographical errors, and a questionable use of paraphrasing, is a surprisingly dissatisfying and disappointing read.

It is The Letters of Stephen Leacock, then, that perhaps approaches a comprehensive Leacock biography, despite the gaps in chronology and details and the one-sided perspective that is the nature of letters. Although the editorial policy that governed the transcription of the letters is not clearly stated, Staines’ succinct annotation and useful chapter overviews (although the chapter titles are not helpful) enable Leacock’s complex personality to speak unimpeded. The result is an outline towards an as yet unwritten Leacock biography (and, perhaps, the problems of biography) as well as significant first-hand accounts of an important period of Canada’s cultural, social and political history.