XII

     IN TOWN, it was generally expected that my wife would ask to be relieved of her work. Had she done so, she would have gone insane. It was only the necessity of going on with her routine which enabled her to live.
     And now, as if we had at last paid our dues to the fates, break after break seemed to come for me. In the fall of the year, somewhat to my distress, A Search for America appeared, thirty-three years after I had written its first version. It was perhaps natural that I did not like the book any longer. It seemed very juvenile to me, full of garrulity and even presumption. During the last seven years I had read of the text only one brief chapter when Phelps had asked me to present something of my unpublished work to the English Club of Winnipeg. The book impressed me like the ghost of a man who had died three decades ago.
     But it made an immediate success with the book reviewers; which, of course, did not mean a sales success.
     Meanwhile my Winnipeg friends - friends of my work rather than of myself, for, being fifty-five years old, I had perhaps grown too set in my ways to make ready friendships - had made up their minds to place at my disposal the best that medical and surgical science had to offer.

     They asked me to go to the general hospital of that city and to have myself examined by the leading orthopedists of the West who had volunteered their services.
     I went about Christmas; and various specialists once more had their "go" at me. An operation was proposed; my shins were to be split in order for one half of each to be grafted on the corresponding side of my spine. This entirely confirmed my old diagnosis of the trouble; new X-rays, taken in the positions which I had always advised, proved conclusively that four vertebrae were displaced. I should perhaps add that, wise at last in the ways of hospitals, I had insisted on lying in the public wards where no charge is made for X-ray photographs.
     I conferred with my wife and one outside physician. The result was that we declined to have the operation performed; which left that matter where it had now been for exactly ten long years.
     On January 13 I was discharged from the hospital; and a friend took me to the station in his car. At Rapid City, my wife took me home.
     The following day I went, on crutches, to the post office to fetch our mail which arrived about three or four o clock. I remember the occasion with special vividness, for several reasons.
     At the corner of Main Street stood three men, leading merchants 'of the town. They were talking politics. I stopped for a moment; and their conversation reminded me of the fact that, sixteen months ago, to the day, my present attack had come on just after I had cast my vote in a general election!
     I had voted for a man who, regardless of party, I trusted would do under any circumstances what he considered best for the country. Not being a reader of,

much less a subscriber to, any daily paper, I had never heard how that election had come out.
     "By the way," I asked, "who got in, sixteen months ago?"
     All three of the men looked up, amazed at my question.
     "XY, of course," one of them grumbled.
     XY had not been my choice.
     Another of the three merchants, an extraordinarily atrabilious and skinny person - the other two were portly - was not without his share of caustic wit. He gave me a shrewd glance. "By the way," he said, "there was something strange about that. You may remember that AB was a candidate. At this polling station in town he polled one single vote. That must have been yours."
     "It was," I said. "I am glad to hear of his defeat."
     This caused a quick lifting of three heads. "Glad?" the atrabilious iron-monger repeated. "How do you make that out?"
     "Well," I replied, "if anybody else had voted for him, I should ever after have suspected that I had been wrong in my choice."
     Which was good repartee, but poor policy.
     I nodded and went on to fetch my mail.
     Among the letters I received was one from Graham Spry who at the time was general secretary of the Association of Canadian Clubs at Ottawa. He asked whether I would go on a six-weeks lecture tour among Canadian Clubs in Ontario. In the name of the association he offered me twenty-five dollars a lecture, with a minimum of four lectures a week, and expenses paid.
     This was news indeed. I promptly accepted, of course, and as promptly received an advance of six hundred

dollars on expenses; apparently Spry had been tipped off as to my financial position.
     But I was still walking on crutches. I could hardly lean on them while lecturing; I took myself in hand.
     The last advice my Winnipeg physicians had given me, with one of the leading orthopedists as spokesman, had been to sell my car; never again to try "to tie my own shoe-laces"; and, for the rest of my life to consider myself an invalid, doomed to the wheel-chair!
     Instead, I went to Winnipeg to have myself fitted with clothes. This was imperative if I wanted to address clubs of men and women embracing all classes of the population.
     At almost the same time, no doubt as a consequence of the, so far, only literary success of the Search of which up to that date, no more than a thousand copies had been sold, Our Daily Bread, recently rewritten and typed, was accepted by Macmillans, both in Toronto and New York, and by Jonathan Cape in England. As far as our financial circumstances went, it seemed as though the break had come at last.
     No doubt it was this fact which had its immediate results in a vastly improved physical condition; but I was far from being restored to any degree of agility when, six weeks later, I started out on my lecture tour, giving my first address at Portage La Prairie; but by sheer force of will I developed a definite technique in handling myself. For a good many months to come every movement I attempted had to be effected by a conscious effort; I could never abandon myself to instinct. Yet, I believe, few of the many hundred people who heard and saw me suspected a chronic invalidism. I was fifty-six years old but looked forty.

     From the beginning my lectures were a success; but my culminating performance, on my way out, came at Ottawa where I carried off a minor triumph by merely telling the men something of my life, a very little, which gave them a glimpse of my struggles and the reasons why I had been willing to face them. After the lecture, when I was completely exhausted, I was kept on my feet bowing till, as one observer remarked to me afterwards, I "had taken three bows more than had been accorded to Stanley Baldwin" - a way of gauging success which amused me vastly.
     At night, when I was to address the Women's Canadian Club, I began speaking after nine instead of at eight o'clock; twice it had been found necessary to change into a larger hall in order to accommodate the crowd.
     Already, in the afternoon, the rush for A Search for America had begun at the local bookstores; a second large edition - large for Canada - had to be got under way at once.
     Incidentally, an American publisher enquired for the rights, but unfortunately I insisted on a large advance. The publishers who ultimately brought the book out in the United States were an unstable concern; and so was the English firm which offered to handle it. Of that I shall have to speak again; for, financially, this book which had the largest sales-success of anything I have published was to cost me good money instead of bringing me wealth.
     For the moment, however, I rode on the crest of the wave. As newspaper men expressed it, I was a "frontpage head-liner" whose views on God-knows-what were eagerly printed. After Ottawa, where I had perfected my speaking technique and where, incidentally, I had dis-

carded my canes, I went from triumph to triumph. Wherever I appeared, I was lionized; and I might have enhanced my success had I surrendered myself. But I had to husband my strength; and if I was able to go through with my tour, I owed it largely to the care with which I watched over symptoms.
     By the end of the six weeks allotted to this first lecture tour I had addressed twenty-five clubs and a good many other organizations, most of them educational institutions, for my contract forbade me to address associations which rivalled the Canadian Clubs in purpose or scope. At Ottawa I had been assured that, in the coming fall, there would be a second tour, this time through the west; and, early in 1929, another tour through the east, extending to the Atlantic seaboard. Two thousand copies of A Search for America had been sold. I bought a one-thousand-dollar government bond.
     When I returned to Rapid City, my wife and I made up our minds that this momentary success did not warrant the slightest change in the scale of our living. Whatever the lectures and my books netted us, directly or indirectly, must go into reserves. A reserve was needed worse than anything else.
     As far as our financial status went, the year remained prosperous enough. In the summer we motored east, visiting all the eastern provinces except Prince Edward Island. My lecture tour had won me many friends; and some of them had extended invitations to me and my wife. Distraction was an imperative need.
     In the interval between the lecture tour and the holiday trip I had prepared two books for publication: Adolescence, which, under the horrible and misleading publishers' title The Yoke of Life, was not to appear till 1930; and

It Needs to Be Said which consisted largely of undelivered addresses, though its pièce de résistance, the last essay, was to be delivered as a Canadian-Club address during the fall and the following winter.
     It was at this time, too, that I typed out a more or less final version of The Chronicles of Spalding District which again had to be ruined by a publishers' title when it finally appeared in 1933.
     Henceforth, beginning with the success of these three lecture tours and with the publication of the two books of mine which had a sales success, for Our Daily Bread appeared in the fall of 1928, just when I began the second tour, the development which had begun with the purchase of our first car, in 1922, began to be accelerated, the acceleration being, of course, causally connected with that success. There are many explanations; there are many excuses; and I have, since that time, often said that the catastrophic development was primarily due to the fact that the success was not large enough in a financial sense.
     For ten years to come I was to struggle incessantly and to the full extent of my powers to create for myself and my wife a material environment remotely in keeping with those expectations which had been mine when I had first been stranded on this continent; or at least such living conditions as would give us the indispensable fraction of what other people, those with whom we lived in daily contact, considered the minimum to be demanded of the gifts which this modem material civilization has to bestow - gifts which, in any rational world order, should constitute the common birthright of mankind.
      The Yoke of Life did not appear till we had moved to the east; and it remains to explain how and why we did so.

     In the spring of 1929, when I was on my third lecture tour, again in the east, a new prospect opened before me. The president of the Macmillan Company of Canada made me an offer whereby I was to join the firm as one of its readers or editors. Since there were to be no strictly-defined office hours, for the reading could be done at home, such work would leave me freer than I had ever been in the past while making my living as a farm-hand or as a teacher. For that reason the proposal strongly appealed to me. Besides, as Mr. Eayrs, the president, expressed it, the work would pay for my bread and butter; and other earnings, royalties and lecture fees would be "velvet". We owned four thousand dollars in government bonds and had an additional thousand in the bank; not a bad showing for that brief burst of glory. I authorized Mr. Eayrs, at his request, to assemble all my books so far published under his single imprint.
     During the spring and summer of 1929 we therefore made all preparations to move to Ontario. The long, severe winters of Manitoba were beginning to tell on me; and the east seemed to hold out certain prospects; two-thirds of my lecture fees had been earned there; Toronto was the centre of the publishing business; and most of such new friends as I had made lived in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes.
     But even before we pulled up our stakes in the west, clouds had begun to gather on our horizon. It Needs to Be Said had fallen flat; the only echo I received from its publication had come from Europe; the lecture field seemed to be exhausted in Canada; and, worst of all, world conditions had begun to crystallize into the Great Depression. The first fruit of the latter circumstance was the withdrawal of the Macmillan offer.

     But I had one personal reason for the removal to the east which overshadowed all others and which remained unaffected by our economic situation. I had to do something to distract my wife. At Rapid City, every street and every corner was a reminder of May. If I suffered from tragic memories, my wife suffered from a mortal wound.
     It was at this time that, as an alternative to our going east, my wife proposed to go north, into the wilderness surrounding the foot of Lake Winnipeg where it empties itself into the Nelson River, there to live an entirely primitive life, in just such a shack as I had dreamt of in 1912 before I had allowed myself to be side-tracked by the interlude of my teaching career. I would gladly have done so had it not been for one single thing, namely, the appalling void which May's death had left in our lives. Already there was, in the background of our minds, the dim purpose of starting our married life over again by having a second child.
     In the early fall, then, disregarding what was happening all over the world, we made the move, storing our few sticks of furniture for the time being, and using the car for the trip. Since Mr. Eayrs had offered us his summer cottage, we made our first stop at Bobcaygeon where Phelps too had a place next door which he said we might use. Between the two cottages, we spent a halcyon month full of a strange, tragic beauty. Once more we planned, determined not to consider our lives as lived.
     I had two books ready for publication; and there were a score of manuscripts awaiting a last overhauling. A year or two of leisure and freedom from worry would have brought others to the fore again, the Ant Book, for instance. In addition, there were scores of plans. For

many years, so I felt, I could keep up publication at the rate of a volume a year. It never occurred to me that, with such successes as I had had, there might ever again be the slightest difficulty in finding a publisher; I had not yet fully grasped the peculiar condition of the publishing trade in Canada which demands that a book, especially a novel, must first appear abroad where, naturally, there was no particular enthusiasm for novels with a purely Canadian intention and setting.
     Thus we had a belated holiday that year, tasting to the full the vast, sad beauty of the fall; not a worry, not a care cast a shadow on our contentment; for we carefully avoided speaking or even thinking of May.
     Shortly we received a second invitation. Dr. Currelly, curator of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archeology, owned a magnificent place at Canton, near Port Hope. He had just built a small but charming cottage for Susanne, his daughter; and to this she invited us for the month of October. We accepted; and we had the most delightful change imaginable; instead of the lake, there was the farm, with marvellous elms in front of our door. The weather remained golden; and when we stepped out of our cottage, the falling leaves rustled about our feet.
     It was during our stay at Canton that I heard from Graphic Publishers again; they hoped to have another book of mine. But in many ways their handling of A Search for America had been unsatisfactory; what sale there had been had been due to my lecture tours.
     However, I was told that the company was undergoing a radical reorganization and that great things were expected from it. Since we were only two hundred miles from Ottawa, I made up my mind to see for myself.
     When I arrived in the capital, I found an amazing state

of affairs; but, so it seemed to me, not a hopeless one. I had by this time acquired a certain amount of insight into the workings of the publishing business; and I had ideas. These I freely discussed with such members of the directorate as I met.
     When I returned to Canton, I found, awaiting me, an invitation to address certain organizations at Hamilton.
     It was time for us to leave Canton; and there were friends at Simcoe who had been inviting us. Since Simcoe is only forty miles from Hamilton, we accepted both invitations.
     By this time we had begun to feel at loose ends. So far, we had intentionally banished all thought for the future; we wanted to live in the present, if only for a few weeks. But at last we were faced with the question of how and where to spend the winter. I had always, perforce, been a fatalist. I often express my attitude by saying, metaphorically, "The Lord will provide"; by which I mean that it does not pay to worry unnecessarily. Had there been any immediate danger of our having to break into our invested holdings, it would have worried me very much indeed; the bonds must remain inviolate. But we still had close to a thousand dollars in the Winnipeg bank.
     At Hamilton, where, as planned, we went from Simcoe, we received a new invitation, namely, as we understood it, to spend a week or two with friends there, beginning with Armistice Day.
     Meanwhile what? We could not indefinitely remain at Simcoe.
     The year before, during my lecture tours, I had made at least one lasting friendship at London, with R. E. Crouch, the librarian of the city. Boldly, for I was anxious

to see him again, we invited ourselves to his house for the latter part of the first full week of November.
     But even at London we could not outstay our welcome. By this time we felt like castaways on an uncharted sea. On November 10, my wife, who, on account of my deafness, did all telephoning for me, spoke to our Hamilton friends over the wire. The invitation was repeated most cordially - for the Thanksgiving dinner next day.
     Since we had understood the previous invitation to be for a week or two, we were disturbed by the wording of the new one. We had counted on that respite to make up our minds. Besides, all this travelling was costing us money; and we saw the moment coming when our cash-in-hand would be exhausted. Since leaving Canton we had not remained in any one place long enough to secure a remittance from Winnipeg.
     On the way to Hamilton we talked matters over; but we could arrive at no decision. We were not on sufficiently intimate terms with our friends in that city to lay the situation frankly before them and to ask them to back a cheque of mine; besides, the 11th of November was a holiday; even a wire to Winnipeg would lie over till Tuesday.
     We found there had, indeed, been a misunderstanding; we were not even invited to take our baggage out of our car. We never betrayed, of course, that we had expected to remain for any length of time.
     Just before dark, having shared a fine turkey, we took our leave, running out of the city by the first road to which we came; it happened to be the highway to Toronto. We had about five dollars left.
     We spent the night at a "tourist home" by the roadside; and next morning, our funds reduced to the price of one

more filling of our gasoline tank, we set out again, still taking, by a sort of inertia, the direction of Toronto.
     We had friends there; but both Eayrs and Currelly had already been our hosts that fall; and we felt it would have been an imposition to inflict ourselves on others: W. L. Grant, of Upper Canada College; the poet, E. J. Pratt; W. J. Alexander, professor emeritus of English Literature at University College; and so forth.
     Again I remember the occasion with vivid accuracy; perhaps because what happened seemed to symbolize my whole life on this continent.
     I had entered the city via Queen Street; and when we came to the Yonge Street crossing, espying a vacant space by the curb, I ran the car out of the line of traffic, stopped, turned to my wife, and asked, laughing, "What next?"
     "Cross Yonge," she replied laconically.
     I did so, driving very slowly, to give her a chance to change her mind. But she let me proceed, at a snail's pace, till we had left the city behind. Then we had a frugal lunch; and with the very last of my money I bought three gallons of gasoline. That left me with five cents in my pocket.
     In order to get the most out of my available fuel, I speeded up now till we were approaching Port Hope. I had been anxiously watching the gasoline gauge on my instrument panel, doubtful whether we could make the town. If not, I should have to telephone to garage or service station.
     Now the approach to Port Hope, along Highway Number Two, consists of a steep descent; and we had just made the first downward dip when the engine went dead with a "Ph!" We proceeded by gravity till we

reached the foot of the hill, with Main Street stretching level before us. At random, as the momentum of the car exhausted itself, I turned to the curb.
     Having attended to gears and brake, I looked up, feeling somewhat uncertain what to say or to do. And there, beyond the sidewalk, stood the Port Hope branch of the Royal Bank. I took that as a sign from Heaven. "The Lord will provide."
     Reaching into the back seat for our club-bag, I extracted a number of papers: my driver's licence, an expired identification card, some letters, my Winnipeg bank book; and then I alighted and entered the bank.
     I spread my papers on the accountant's desk. I told him I was stranded, showed him my bank book, adding that no withdrawal had been made since the last entry, and asked him whether he considered my papers sufficient warrant to cash a cheque for a hundred dollars.
     He wavered.
     At that precise moment a door opened from the left; and out stepped the manager. Seeing me, and taking the situation in at a glance, he held out his hand. "You need no identification here, Mr. Grove," he said. "I heard you speak in this town a year ago. What can we do for you?"
     Two days later I heard that this manager had suddenly died, from causes unknown.
     I reboarded the car with a hundred dollars in my pocket, filled my gas-tank, and asked once more, "What next?"
     "Turn towards Bobcaygeon," said my wife.
     It was a glorious, frosty, late fall day. So far, there was no snow.

     By the time we got to Peterborough, my wife had made up her mind. "You will have to settle down to writing," she said. "We like the Bobcaygeon landscape; perhaps we can have one of the summer cottages fixed up for the winter."
     That was what we did.
     We had set out without the slightest idea of where we were going; unable to form a plan, we had left things to chance; indeed, apart from my wife's idea that I must write, there was nothing that called for any plan. One place was as good as another. Yet, what we did was to prove decisive in precipitating us into another phase.

***

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     I had never written a line for money, not even when I wrote for the magazine section of the Winnipeg Tribune, though, in that case, I had connived at two or three changes the editors had made in my texts. The demands of the reading public had never entered into my considerations.
     In spite of that I had at last had a certain measure of success. During the previous year my royalties had run to sixteen hundred dollars. Surely, I said to myself, they are never again going to fall below that sum; if they didn't, we should have all we needed from that source alone. Happily, I did not yet know that within a year that royalty income was going to fall to $32.88; and, for the next year, to precisely ten cents. But the immediate income, of course, did not constitute the whole of our problem; we had to provide for our old age as well.
     I did some serious thinking. I understood at last that my whole attitude to the public and to my environment implied that I had refused to fit myself into life as it is lived in America; I had refused to conform. It is true, in one sense I had become American; I still saw America as a democratic country, and all my instincts were democratic, if not anarchic; in the sense that, in all authority imposed from without, I saw at best a necessary evil which must be reduced to a minimum. But I also had, by this time, come to the conclusion that there is no worse, no more objectionable tyranny than that of the "solid majority" as Ibsen calls it. The solid majority worships the eternal average, the colourless mediocrity which I despised. My books exhibited numberless weaknesses, known to no one as well as to myself. At the same time I felt that slowly, slowly I was becoming a master of my craft; and, at any rate in Canada, I knew

that I was the first novelist to rely, for what is commonly called "the plot", that is, for the sustaining interest which compels the reader to read on, on a deepening of human sympathy for, on an understanding of, the chief characters rather than on a heightening of curiosity and excitement. I imagined that a small fraction of my potential public had come to acknowledge that fact. It will be seen that I had not yet gauged the capacious dearth of mature judgment and sure taste in Canadian readers. Nor had I as yet fully comprehended the utterly hopeless ineptitude prevailing in what is commonly called literary criticism in Canada; for that I had to study its attitudes to others than myself. Surely, in a population of nine millions there must be a handful of people capable of appreciating genuine effort; but I still failed to see how small that handful is.
     My wife, I knew, expected that, ultimately, my books would make money for me. It is true, she had once said to me, "I would rather be able, one day, to point to another book of yours on those shelves than that you should leave an estate of a hundred thousand dollars." In that she had been perfectly sincere. Yet she had also said that our only economic salvation lay in the ultimate success of my books; and I knew, of course, that often a single work gave all a writer's output, past and future, its final chance.
     It was during the brief Bobcaygeon interlude that I became conscious of the contradiction involved; and once more I said to myself that, if anyone, my wife was entitled to such security as such a success would afford her. For years it had been she who had made my literary work possible. But I should have preferred to give her that economic security by means other than literary.

     Our economic difficulties were not yet compelling enough to make me envisage a compromise with my literary integrity.
     I did not and do not worship poverty as such. While, theoretically, I agreed with Thoreau when he said that "None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage point of what we should call voluntary poverty," I fully realized that voluntary poverty in his sense meant abstinence from marriage as well as from commercial activities. Besides, Thoreau had never been really poor; no matter how low he had set his standards; no matter how frugal his life had been, he had always built his theories on the datum of a sufficiency of the material things. To us, poverty meant constant worry, because ultimately it was bound to mean destitution; it involved an unremitting slavery.
     Though I considered myself more lavishly endowed for spending than many of the millionaires I had come to know, I did not want luxury; what I wanted was leisure to do my work. If there had ever been the choice between a decent poverty, similar to Thoreau's, secure from the want of essentials, and such affluence as led, let me say, to the building of Palm Beach East, I should unhesitatingly have chosen the former.
     Such a poverty had been my dream in 1912 when I had exchanged manual labour for mental labour. For a brief spell that desire for a shack and utter freedom had been possible of fulfilment; when we had left the west, we had had a total of five thousand dollars, the interest on which would have given us twenty-five dollars a month. If, as my wife proposed, we had then gone to the northern foot of Lake Winnipeg, I should have been able to hammer out the ultimate implications of my thought.

     But I had felt that neither she nor I could undertake to live out our lives under the shadow of May's death. That death still had to be integrated into our very beings; it had to be made part of the foundation on which any further life could be built.
     I want to make it clear, emphatically, and beyond the possibility of misunderstanding, that, what happened to us after the wilderness had been rejected, was done by the east which, in its worship of money and nothing but money, is an outpost of the United States; just as the United States has, economically and socially, become an outpost of a misunderstood Europe. No doubt, if we succumbed to the influence of this east, we were as much to blame as the east itself; my instinct had guided me right only when, in my early days, it had taken me among the pioneers of the west.
     At Bobcaygeon, then, I turned, during that brief interlude, and under the silent pressure of my wife, to the possibility of modifying, if temporarily, all my literary aims and of making concessions to the demands of the public. I tried; and I shall shortly discuss why I was bound to fail, as I had failed in everything that I had ever undertaken with an economic aim in view; this book is the record of a failure; and its explanation: a double failure, an economic and a spiritual one, for ultimately the one involved the other.
     For the moment, then, although we had gone to Bobcaygeon in order that I might write books in which the miracle should happen again, as it had happened in certain brief passages of Settlers of the Marsh, the economic problem overshadowed all others.
     Such was the state of affairs when a letter reached me from Ottawa, written by that lady who, at the moment,

was controlling the destinies of Graphic Publishers. She begged me to come and to stand by her in her difficulties; to be, as she expressed it, "a tower of strength to her".
     We spent an agitated afternoon before I replied. Snow had fallen; it was the end of November; and it was bitterly cold. Yet we walked and walked, talking and talking, discussing every angle of the situation as it presented itself.
     My wife was in favour of my going - for a brief stay. She was not in favour of our sacrificing all the expense we had gone to in order to instal [sic] ourselves at Bobcaygeon for the winter. Against that I argued that we could not afford to spend money to help others. I did not tell her how utterly impossible I had already found it to work under economic pressure; nor that, once more, in my fatalism, I saw in this call a hint how to solve our problem in a new way. I did say that, if I went, she would have to come along; and it would be for good or at least for a considerable length of time.
     In that I was actuated by two considerations extraneous to our personal problems.
     I knew, I had seen on that visit to Ottawa made from Canton, that the firm was embarked on a course which I could not but consider as disastrous; it planned to erect, in connection with a small publishing business, a huge printing plant; and that at Ottawa, whereas Toronto was the established centre of the book trade in Canada, and in the face of the fact that no great publishing firm, not to say anything of a small one, had ever found it quite expedient to do its own printing. Why I considered this quixotic, I need not explain; but my very good reasons were later to be proved correct. For personal as well as national reasons I wished to see Graphic pros-

per; I could hope to dissuade the firm from its erroneous purpose only if I was on the spot and took a more or less permanent position with the company. Graphic Publishers had, so far, produced only ugly books; and it had pursued a vulgar policy of advertising - two defects which I imagined I could remedy.
     Secondly, I felt convinced that the lack of success with which the firm had so far met was largely the consequence of their injudicious selection of books to print; they had been trying to meet a popular demand which could be met far better and far more cheaply by established firms in England and the United States. If, in one capacity or another, I joined the firm, I should insist on having the sole decision with regard to acceptance or rejection of manuscripts. I knew by this time that the writing of books was one of the major if least profitable industries of Canada where a higher percentage of the population than anywhere else aspires to literary fame and with less justification. By using what judgment I flattered myself to possess, I thought I could do a useful piece of work.
     Incidentally, I saw in a flash that here was an opportunity to make a certain amount of money by means other than writing. It would enable me to preserve my uncompromising attitude as a man of letters.
     It might also mean, at least for the time being, a cessation of all literary work. What did it matter? My health was improved; I was only fifty-seven; I felt as young as ever. Even today I am a young man.
     By evening we had decided to go.
     It took us a day to get ready; and during that day there was an abundant snow-fall. By next morning, the snowstorm was over; but the temperature had dropped to

twenty-eight below zero. The roads being icy, it took us two days to reach Ottawa, where we arrived on December 2.

     Again our stay at Ottawa was a mere interlude. It is true, it filled nearly two years and it comprised another illness of mine as well as the birth of our son. But spiritually it resembled the Empty Quarter in Southern Arabia. For the moment, my salary was fixed at three thousand six hundred dollars, to be shortly raised to six thousand. Successively we moved, first into a boardinghouse, then a suite, and finally, and perhaps a little prematurely, into a summer cottage on the Ottawa River.
     I remained in the employ of the firm for only a little over a year; and that year was a nightmare. Not only was there, within the firm, incessant wrangling; there was also incessant worry; for, after all, I had come too late to do any good. As for my salary, it was always difficult and sometimes impossible to collect it. Once I met the pay-roll out of private savings, taking, as a security for the one-thousand-dollar advance, a mortgage on some property connected with the plant.
     The point was that, apart from myself, there was not a person on the staff who knew anything whatever about books; not one of them was even a reader. Manuscripts had been accepted for publication on the say-so of a bookkeeper, an estimable young lady, but devoid of even a trace of literary judgment. Even in a purely business sense, nearly all who had a decisive voice were rank amateurs who believed that dividends could legitimately be paid out of capital. I was expected to move books

which had been dead from before their birth, at full prices and without advertising. Since A Search for America had had a spectacular success, it was taken for granted that, having become a member of the firm, I was under a moral obligation to feed book after book of mine into what I considered a suicidal enterprise. Instead, I insisted on buying my own rights in that book back from the firm.
     Not infrequently, during that year, I felt as if, for the sake of this moribund firm, I were ruining my health, my reputation, and my sanity. It goes without saying that the hopelessness of the situation did not appear at once; there were many things which were kept hidden from me and my fellow-victim, the president of the company. It was only by slow degrees that the secret history of the enterprise unfolded itself. For current funds, for instance, it depended entirely on the sale of shares.
     I must say a word about the now notorious novel contest staged by the firm. From the beginning I had been opposed to it; but in this matter, too, I came too late to veto the plan. I did the best I could under the circumstances; I cut the sums that were contemplated as prizes down to one quarter: $2,500, $1,500, and $1,000 respectively. I was aware, of course, that these sums, judiciously awarded, might do considerable good to those who received them; but I felt also convinced that, in Canada, there were no three writers who would ever justify the expense in a commercial sense. To avoid an utter waste in any other sense, I agreed to act as chairman and convener of the judges' committee, insisting on a free hand in making the awards exclusively on the basis of literary merit. I also reserved for myself the right of naming at least one of the other two judges. This, I

considered, would give me a practically decisive voice; for I felt certain that Barker Fairley, whom I chose, would agree with me because I trusted him to recognize merit where I found it myself. The third judge, nominated by the firm, was W. T. Allison of Winnipeg.
     Since the contest could not possibly bring a commercial success to the firm, no matter how the prizes were awarded - for there was no body of work from which a deserving choice could be made; and since, in any case, such a contest is more or less of a hoax - for how can anyone, out of hundreds of manuscripts, pick the most promising? -I made up my mind that at least those who received the money, if they received it, which, by that time was doubtful to me, should be those who needed it most. As I had anticipated, no unanimity was achieved; W. T. Allison dissented from the choice made by Barker Fairley and myself. Unfortunately, at least one of the winners, Raymond Knister, was never able to collect the whole of the prize money before he died, shortly after Graphic itself had expired.
     For months I ploughed through masses of utter piffle, reading evening, morning, noon, and night. The manuscripts were, of course, submitted anonymously, but in a very short time I attached, in my mind, the authors' names to a dozen of them. I knew my "Canadian Literature". Among the rest, there was nothing to choose.
     I made up a parcel of twenty-five manuscripts and sent it to Barker Fairley who, in turn, forwarded it to W. T. Allison. Fairley and I picked the identical three; but not one of them figured in Allison's list. Fairley and I laughed over it. But even among the three we had picked there was not one which could justify the expendi-

ture of the firm's money. Yet the names selected were those of Raymond Knister, Marcus Adeney, and Ella Wallis, all three potential writers of merit, but, in Canada, doomed to obscurity. Morley Callaghan, Mazo de la Roche, and myself had, of course, made no entry.
     I, as was to be expected, became at once the object of vicious attacks. I believe today that the choice made was the best that could be made. Raymond Knister has, of course, never appeared before the public with his best work. We lack, in Canada, a sufficiently large body of men and women interested in Canadian letters to insist on seeing experimental work by young writers encouraged not because it presents achievement but because it holds forth promise - such a body as exists in almost any older country where the national importance of letters is recognized.
     When, after a little over a year of work with Graphic Publishers, I resigned my position, I did so more or less under pressure. I refused to do the impossible, one might almost say the dishonest thing, namely, to promise the shareholders immediate dividends. It went without saying that no such dividends were in sight; and when I openly said so, I felt at once that I was no longer wanted. It was my considered opinion that, even if the company were once more reorganized on saner principles, no dividends could reasonably be expected within five or six years. The powers that be demanded them within a few months, even if they had to be paid out of capital not yet subscribed.
     Once more my wife and I were confronted with the question, "What next?"
     My own inclination would, at this stage, have taken us to England. I knew that, if ever I was to subsist on my

pen, it would have to be by what I called hack work. In Canada, we had only four periodicals - the University Quarterlies and the Canadian Forum - which would print the sort of thing I could write; in England, there were fifty of them. Writing for periodicals, on topics of the day, cannot be carried on from a distance.
     Meanwhile, our son Arthur Leonard had been born. In the spring of the same year, I had undergone an operation for appendicitis; my health was still delicate; my wife was averse to facing the task of fitting herself into an unknown environment.
     This time it was I who proposed to return to pioneer conditions. The interest on our investments was not enough to carry us; but I was quite willing to do the sort of teaching I had done at Ferguson, in the past, in a small rural school. I argued that, there, even my deafness was no absolute obstacle. My wife would not hear of it; and I gave in to her. She felt that the work of teaching would definitely have put an end to my literary prospects.
     One desire we shared: we wished to have a roof over our heads which we could call our own; but, as I said, if we bought any kind of property, it must be one which, in one way or other, would at least contribute to our support.
     During the summer of the following year, 1931, I made a number of scouting trips. We had six thousand dollars in apparently safe investments on which we expected to be able to realize whenever we wanted. Besides, we had a thousand dollars in the bank and held a mortgage of another thousand on property owned by the promoters of Graphic. I might add right here that the latter sum was ultimately recovered, under great difficulties and at considerable expense; the small payments that were made from time to time dribbled away as they came in.

     The outcome was that I bought a small farm north of the town of Simcoe in Norfolk County; there, I meant to breed Jersey cows for a living.
     What happened was again symbolic of my whole economic life on this continent. To make the purchase, I had to sell our investments. I saw a broker and was told that I could get around six thousand two hundred dollars for them. But, since the land deal had not yet been completed, I did not close the sale. When, two weeks later, I saw the same broker again, he exclaimed, "If only you had come a week ago; the market has gone to pieces, and you will get five hundred dollars less today." This was a blow; but meanwhile I had tied myself down. It could not be helped.
     Worse, when I bought the farm five per cent milk sold at four dollars a hundredweight; it was this price of milk which determined the price of the cattle which I bought as a foundation for my herd. By the time I was ready to start selling milk, a few months later, the price had broken and dropped to a dollar and eighty. In spite of the fact that I could not produce the milk at that price, I held on for seven years, always hoping that matters would right themselves. When I sold out, I had to write off a total loss of two thousand eight hundred dollars, or four hundred dollars per year.
     Meanwhile, to finish with this topic at once, I was, for half the year, doing manual work as hard as any I had done in the past. Often, when the morning's or the evening's work was done, I went home and lay down on the floor of my study, too tired to eat a meal or even to undress in order to go to bed. It must be remembered that, by the time we were installed on the farm, I was sixty years old.

     It was at that time, by the way, that the affairs of A Search for America had to be wound up. The book had appeared in Canada in 1927; in the United States, the following year; and shortly after in England. In the latter country it had never been sold, for the publishers promptly went into bankruptcy; the United States firm followed, after having done untold damage in the Canadian market by illegally exporting copies on which I never received a cent of royalties. Graphic Publishers were the last to bite the dust. In each and every case I had to buy out my rights and to acquire the remaining copies, with the result that in the end I was eighteen hundred dollars out of pocket. No matter what I touched, in the realm of material things, potential profit turned into actual loss.