The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (666 page)

Delight is tested in love, and she proves to be true. Jimmy Sykes, who wins Delight, is likewise true in love. He is also a good student of nature – hence his knowledge of crows and his fondness for the wild lagoon. As well, Jimmy is the fastest runner among the men who race to rescue Delight.

Jimmy and Delight are naive and powerless. Yet they triumph over adversity. Although
Delight
contains realistic details from lives of ordinary working-class people, it also contains romantic elements from fairy tales and myths.

When the distinguished Toronto literary critic, William Arthur Deacon, began to read
Delight
in 1926, he was both excited and shocked by a detail in the following passage: “The men passed into the bar. The noise increased, rising to a hubbub, then suddenly falling to a murmur accented by low laughs, the clink of glasses, the drawing of corks. The smell of dyes, the smell of the tannery, mingled with the smell of the bar. A blue cloud of tobacco smoke formed before Kirke’s eyes. It floated in long level shreds that moved quiveringly together till they formed one mass that hung like a magic carpet in the hall.”

The detail that stood out for Deacon was, as he put it, “the blueish tobacco smoke that drifted into the hall over the swing-doors of the bar.” As Deacon explained, “This phenomenon had to be seen to be believed; and it was a thing almost extinct in Canada.”

Deacon rushed to Jean Graham, an acquaintance of Mazo and the editor of the
Canadian Home Journal
.

“Where did Mazo see that?” Deacon asked Graham.

“Her uncle kept a hotel in Newmarket,” Graham replied. No doubt Graham’s incorrect answer was based on vague information supplied by Mazo.

Such a specific detail as the floating blue tobacco smoke was and is a mark of excellent writing, as Deacon well knew. Yet frequenting bars was not a socially acceptable activity for a well-brought-up woman, as Deacon also knew. Mazo never told anyone in literary circles about her close association years before with the Acton House, even though the experience had provided her with so much valuable raw material.

Her hotel experiences would remain a secret for many decades, until long after her death.

When
Delight
was published in 1926, the Canadian reviews were cool. Yet the novel’s reception in other countries was uniformly favourable.

Mazo complained in a letter to a British critic who had reviewed
Delight
enthusiastically: “Your attitude towards it was so sympathetic and unusual, that I cannot resist letting you know of the pleasure it gave me. The book has not been well received in Canada.”

Mazo went on to explain that Canadian reviewers had said that
Delight
was tedious, dull, and hedonistic. They also said that the characters were uninspiring.

Luckily Mazo was a strong person now. A weaker person might have given up. Luckily too, the previous year, 1925, Mazo’s play,
Low Life
, had won several competitions: one sponsored by the Toronto-based Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, and one sponsored by the Montreal branch of the Canadian Authors Association. These wins helped remind Mazo that all Canadians did not dislike all her work all the time.

Ironically, many decades after the hostility of Canadian reviewers wounded Mazo in 1926, Canadian academics would single out
Delight
for special praise. In fact, many professors would regard
Delight
as Mazo’s best book ever – a Canadian classic!

Mazo was dead by then.

The Winner

From the very first the characters created themselves. They leaped from my imagination and from memories of my own family
.

“What advice would you give to girls who wish to obtain success as a writer?” asked the reporter. “Seek solitude, read wisely but not too avidly, and concentrate your mental and physical powers on your work,” replied Mazo.

Mazo was talking to Norma Philips Muir, a reporter for the Toronto
Star Weekly
who visited her at Trail Cottage in July 1926. The resulting article was titled, “SHE HAS NEVER SEEN A MOVIE.”

Mazo de la Roche at Trail Cottage in the 1920s walking Bunty.

Mazo herself was concentrating her powers on her work. She was seeking solitude at Trail Cottage and writing a novel that she had been thinking about for several years. Two characters had come into her mind: a middle-aged man and his older sister. These characters became Renny and Meg Whiteoak. A house had come into her mind. Actually she had been dreaming about a house over and over again.

In the dream, Mazo was walking alone across a wide stretch of sandy beach by the sea. Beyond the beach stretched a sunny moorland and, at its edge, facing the sea, stood a house, with all its doors and windows open. The house looked cheerful and welcoming, and Mazo could see that it was sparsely furnished. One room had nothing in it but a table and a chair or two. There were no curtains, no pictures, and no one was living in the house. Yet the house was not desolate. A most beautiful and comforting radiance emanated from the house – a luminosity. Yet there was nothing ethereal about the house. It was very real and Mazo was terribly eager to go into it – to live there. Yet always, as Mazo reached the doorsill, the house faded and was gone.

The disappointment of the dream became the satisfaction of the story as Mazo wrote more and more about a big, handsome, red-brick house located on an enormous rural property. In the 1850s, Mazo imagined, Captain Philip Whiteoak had bought four hundred hectares of “rich land.” This land was “traversed by a deep ravine through which ran a stream lively with speckled trout. Some of the land was cleared, but the greater part presented the virgin grandeur of the primeval forest.”

Captain Whiteoak had employed a “small army of men” to “make the semblance of an English park in the forest, and to build a house that should overshadow all others in the county. When completed, decorated, and furnished, it was the wonder of the countryside. It was a square house of dark red brick, and a wide stone porch, a deep basement where the kitchens and servants’ quarters were situated, an immense drawingroom, a library…”

Mazo’s new novel would be set in the 1920s. As the novel began, Captain Whiteoak would be long dead, but his widow and descendants would have lived in the house he had built for more than seventy years, or three generations. Similarly the Whiteoaks’ neighbours, the Vaughans, would have lived in their house on the other side of the ravine for three generations.

Caroline had taken the early morning train from Clarkson to her civil service job in Toronto. In Trail Cottage, Bunty was snoozing and Mazo was seated in the rocking chair in which her Grandmother Roche had soothed her baby sons: Danford, William, and Francis. Beside Mazo on the floor was her dictionary consisting of the two massive old leather-bound volumes compiled by the great Dr. Samuel Johnson several centuries earlier. These heavy, valuable books had belonged to Grandfather Roche.

With a drawing board on her knee, Mazo sat straight and wrote with a pencil. When she could not think of the right word, she rocked. When she did think of the right word, she stopped rocking and wrote it down. When she was not certain of the meaning of a word, she heaved up one of the volumes of the dictionary. Often she became so fascinated by other words that she forgot the one she was searching for.

Still, this fourth novel was going well. It opened with the youngest member of the Whiteoak clan, an eight-year-old rascal named Wakefield, running through a field on a beautiful spring day: “Wakefield Whiteoak ran on and on, faster and faster, till he could run no farther. He did not know why he had suddenly increased his speed. He did not even know why he ran.”

Mazo invented details and scenes and even people. She also added things from her immediate surroundings. But in large measure the fictional Whiteoak family was modelled on a combination of the families of Mazo and Caroline.

Grandfather Whiteoak built a handsome red-brick house on his land because Mazo’s Great-great-grandfather Lundy had built a handsome, red-brick house on his land. Great-grandfather Whiteoak was killed during the Battle of Waterloo because Carolines Great-grandfather Clement had been killed during the War of 1812. The grandparents of Renny and Meg Whiteoak pioneered in the wilderness of Canada because the grandparents of Caroline had pioneered in the wilderness of Canada, as had the great-great-grandparents of Mazo.

Many generations of Clements had been officers in the British army, so many generations of Whiteoaks would be officers too. Grandpa Lundy’s ancestors were of English origin before they were American, so Grandfather Whiteoak’s ancestors were English. Grandma Lundy had Irish connections, and Grandmother Roche had been born in Ireland, so Gran Whiteoak was Irish.

That summer at Trail Cottage, Mazo lived with the Whiteoaks, completely absorbed by them. To create the Whiteoaks, she wove together present and past, here and there, real and imagined.