阅读斯蒂芬·里柯克 Stephen Leacock在散文天地的作品!!! | |||
尽管李科克的正式职业是大学的政治经济学教授，而且他也出版过好几本专业著作，但他在这方面的名声远不如他作为一位幽默作家的名声大。
李科克二十几岁就开始写作幽默小品，他的第一部幽默小品集子（其中收集了他于1891年至1899年期间所写的作品）出版于1910年（即马克·吐温和欧·亨利相继去世的那一年），其时作者已经40岁，此后他便笔耕不辍，在从这时到他1944年去世为止的三十几年期间他虽也写过一些其他形式的文学作品如诗歌、剧本、传记以及文学理论等，但他本人最喜爱的也是写得最多的则是幽默小品，共有将近30个集子。
李科克的幽默是一种淡淡的、含蓄的幽默，他不是靠奇特、滑稽的故事情节来把读者逗得哈哈大笑，而是善于从平淡无奇的日常生活中提炼出一些为大家司空见惯却又往往熟视无睹的可笑的和不合理的东西加以放大后呈现在读者面前，让他们产生共鸣而发出会心的微笑或无奈的苦笑；并且他的作品也不是让人看过笑过就完，而是十分耐咀嚼、有回味，发人深省。
李科克无论写景写事还是写人，笔法都十分细腻；尤其是在刻划人物方面他更具有独特的本领。他在《母亲节》和《五十六号》中分别塑造的一位一年到头终日为全家默默操劳而别无他求的母亲和一位善于观察想象、感情丰富、心地善良的中国洗衣店主人阿仁这两个成功的文学形象令人久久难忘。此外，在这12篇精选的幽默小品里你将要结识的人物还有：初次与银行打交道惊惶失措的小职员；自以为阅历丰富、能应付任何局面而终于上当受骗的“老于世故者”；给人照相一味追求“形象美”而全然不顾照片与真人是否相像的摄影师；为了推销存货而不惜蒙骗读者的书商；不管别人是否愿意、硬要给人“帮忙”甚至越俎代疱的“热心人”；不谙人情世故、不会说假话、终于导致悲惨下场的老实人；事事追本穷源、一辈子都在走回头路的倒退者；不懂装懂、做了冤大头还自鸣得意、津津乐道的暴发户；富极无聊、愚昧轻信的阔太太；以及观看演出时自作聪明、大煞风景、最后自食其果的“聪敏人”。这一个个在有限的篇幅里出现的身份不同、面目各异的栩栩如生，使人有似曾相识之感的可敬、可爱、可怜、可笑、可鄙、可悲的十分鲜明的人物形象，生动地展现了作者刻划人物的非凡才能，相信会给读者带来巨大的艺术享受和满足。
Early life
Leacock was born in Swanmore, near Bishop's Waltham, Hampshire, England, and at the age of six moved to Canada with his family, which settled on a farm in Egypt, Ontario, near the village of Sutton and the shores of Lake Simcoe. While the family had been well off in England (the Leacocks had made a fortune in Madeira and lived on an estate called Oak Hill on the Isle of Wight), Leacock's father, Peter, had been banished from the manor for marrying Agnes Butler without his parents' permission. The farm in the Georgina township of York County was not a success and the family (Leacock was the third of eleven children) was kept afloat by money sent by Leacock's grandfather. Peter Leacock became an alcoholic.
Stephen Leacock, always of obvious intelligence, was sent by his grandfather to the elite private school of Upper Canada College in Toronto, also attended by his older brothers, where he was top of the class and was chosen as head boy. In 1887, defending his mother and siblings against his father's alcoholic abuse, Leacock ordered him from the family home and he was never seen again. That same year, seventeen-year-old Leacock started at University College at the University of Toronto, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, but found he could not resume the following year because of financial difficulties.
He left university to go to work teaching — an occupation he disliked immensely — at Strathroy, Uxbridge and finally in Toronto. As a teacher at Upper Canada College, his alma mater, he was able simultaneously to attend classes at the University of Toronto and, in 1891, earn his degree through part-time studies. It was during this period that his first writing was published in The Varsity, a campus newspaper.
[edit]Academic and political life
Disillusioned with teaching, in 1899 he began graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received a doctorate in political science and political economy. He moved from Chicago, Illinois to Montreal, Quebec, where he became a lecturer and long-time acting head of the political economy department at McGill University.
He was closely associated with Sir Arthur Currie, former commander of the Canadian Corps in the Great War and principal of McGill from 1919 until his death in 1933. In fact, Currie had been a student observing Leacock's practice teaching in Strathroy in 1888. In 1936, Leacock was forcibly retired by the McGill Board of Governors—an unlikely prospect had Currie lived.
Leacock was both a social conservative and a partisan Conservative. He opposed women's rights (including the right to vote), and disliked non-Anglo-Saxon immigration and supported the introduction of social welfare legislation. He was a staunch champion of the British Empire and went on lecture tours to further the cause.
Although he was considered as a candidate for Dominion elections by his party, it declined to invite the author, lecturer, and maverick to stand for election. Nevertheless, he would stump for local candidates at his summer home.
[edit]Literary life
Stephen Leacock House in Orillia, Ontario
Early in his career, Leacock turned to fiction, humour, and short reports to supplement (and ultimately exceed) his regular income. His stories, first published in magazines in Canada and the United States and later in novel form, became extremely popular around the world. It was said in 1911 that more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than had heard of Canada. Also, between the years 1915 and 1925, Leacock was the most popular humorist in the English-speaking world.
A humorist particularly admired by Leacock was Robert Benchley from New York. Leacock opened correspondence with Benchley, encouraging him in his work and importuning him to compile his work into a book. Benchley did so in 1922, and acknowledged the nagging from north of the border.
Near the end of his life, the American comedian Jack Benny recounted how he had been introduced to Leacock's writing by Groucho Marx when they were both young vaudeville comedians. Benny acknowledged Leacock's influence and, fifty years after first reading him, still considered Leacock one of his favorite comic writers. He was puzzled as to why Leacock's work was no longer well-known in the United States.
During the summer months, Leacock lived at Old Brewery Bay, his summer estate in Orillia, across Lake Simcoe from where he was raised and also bordering Lake Couchiching. A working farm, Old Brewery Bay is now a museum and National Historic Site of Canada. Gossip provided by the local barber, Jefferson Short, provided Leacock with the material which would become Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), set in the thinly-disguised Mariposa.
Although he wrote learned articles and books related to his field of study, his political theory is now all but forgotten. Leacock was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1937, nominally for his academic work.
[edit]Death and tributes
In 1900 Leacock married Beatrix ("Trix") Hamilton, niece of Sir Henry Pellatt (who had built Casa Loma, the largest castle in North America). In 1915 — after 15 years of marriage — the couple had their only child, Stephen Lushington Leacock. While Leacock doted on the boy, it became apparent early on that "Stevie" suffered from a lack of growth hormone. Growing to be only four feet tall, he had a love-hate relationship with Leacock, who tended to treat him like a child.
Predeceased by Trix (who had died of breast cancer in 1925), Leacock was survived by Stevie, who died in his fifties. In accordance with his wishes, after his death from throat cancer, Leacock was cremated and his ashes were buried at Sibbald Point in Georgina Township, near his boyhood home and across Lake Simcoe from his summer home.
Shortly after his death, Barbara Nimmo, his niece, literary executor and benefactor, published two major posthumous works: Last Leaves (1945) and The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946). His physical legacy was less treasured, and his abandoned summer cottage became derelict. It was rescued from oblivion when it was declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 1958 and ever since has operated as a museum called the Stephen Leacock Memorial Home.
In 1947, the Stephen Leacock Award was created to recognize the best in Canadian literary humour. In 1969, the centennial of his birth, Canada Post issued a six cent stamp with his image on it. The following year, the Stephen Leacock Centennial Committee had a plaque erected at his English birthplace and a mountain in the Yukon was named after him.
A number of buildings in Canada are named after Leacock, including the Stephen Leacock Building at McGill University, a theatre in Keswick, Ontario, and schools in Toronto and Ottawa.
[edit]Screen adaptations
Two Leacock short stories have been adapted as National Film Board of Canada animated shorts by Gerald Potterton: My Financial Career and The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones.
[edit]Bibliography
Elements of Political Science (1906)
Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government (1907)
Practical Political Economy (1910)
Literary Lapses (1910)
includes "The New Food"
Nonsense Novels (1911)
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
Behind the Beyond (1913)
Adventurers of the Far North (1914)
The Dawn of Canadian History (1914)
The Mariner of St. Malo (1914)
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914)
Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915)
Essays and Literary Studies (1916)
Further Foolishness (1916)
Frenzied Fiction (1918)
The Hohenzollerns in America (1919)
Winsome Winnie (1920)
The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice (1920)
My Discovery of England (1922)
College Days (1923)
Over the Footlights (1923)
The Garden of Folly (1924)
Mackenzie, Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks (1926)
Winnowed Wisdom (1926)
Short Circuits (1928)
The Iron Man and the Tin Woman (1929)
Economic Prosperity in the British Empire (1930)
The Economic Prosperity of the British Empire (1931)
The Dry Pickwick (1932)
Afternoons in Utopia (1932)
Mark Twain (1932)
Charles Dickens: His Life and Work (1933)
Humour: Its Theory and Technique, with Examples and Samples (1935)
Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs of Verse Done in Our Social Planning Mill (1936)
Funny Pieces (1936)
The Greatest Pages of American Humor (1936)
Here Are My Lectures (1937)
Humour and Humanity (1937)
My Discovery of the West (1937)
Model Memoirs (1938)
Too Much College (1939)
Our British Empire (1940)
Canada: The Foundations of Its Future (1941)
My Remarkable Uncle (1942)
Our Heritage of Liberty (1942)
Montreal: Seaport and City (1942)
Happy Stories (1943)
How to Write (1943)
Canada and the Sea (1944)
While There Is Time (1945)
Last Leaves (1945)
The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946)
Wet Wit and Dry Humor
Laugh with Leacock
Back to Prosperity
The Greatest Pages of Charles Dickens
Essays and Literary Studies
[edit]Quotes
"Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions." -- Nonsense Novels, "Gertrude the Governess", 1911
"Professor Leacock has made more people laugh with the written word than any other living author. One may say he is one of the greatest jesters, the greatest humorist of the age." – A. P. Herbert
"Mr Leacock is as 'bracing' as the seaside place of John Hassall's famous poster. His wisdom is always humorous, and his humour is always wise." – Sunday Times
"He is still inimitable. No one, anywhere in the world, can reduce a thing to ridicule with such few short strokes. He is the Grock of literature." – Evening Standard
"I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so."