Conscience and History: A Memoir by Kenneth McNaught (review)

506 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 rough notes, Salter coached him closely, urging him to emphasize the image of wind and the character of the Young Ben, and dismissing Mitchell's claim that Brian and the Young Ben were not likely associates. The descriptions of the editing and publication processes at Macmillan and at Little, Brown are valuable for anyone interested in the history of the book in Canada. rn this engaging story of W.O. Mitchell's formative years and development as a writer presented within a significant social, geographical, historical, and literary context, Orm and Barbara Mitchell have succeeded in producing an exemplary model of a biography which appeals to both the general reader and the literary scholar. (SHEILA LATHAM) Kenneth McNaught. Conscience and History: A Memoir University of Toronto Press. XI 202. $30.00 At the front of his memoir, there is a photograph of Ken McNaught sketching on his beloved Garden Island, near Kingston. There are clouds in the background, but the sun shines overhead. It says much about the author: the profound attachment to Canada and its land; the man of letters who also had a deep appreciation for art and nature; the sunlight flooding the scene with a hint of storms. Happy lives can be as dull to read about as the unrelentingly grim ones. This memoir, fortunately, is neither dull nor grim. McNaught, for many years a distinguished member of the University of Toronto's history department, was blessed with a quick intelligence and a sense of humour. A sceptic by nature, he never liked received wisdom or Simple-minded explanations, whether from the Left or the Right. He was kind, but with an acute eye for human foibles, including his own. (One of his few real hates is the department's new horne in the 1960s -Sidney Smith Hall, 'a building without soul and no hope of getting one.') He enjoyed the paradoxes of being the left-winger who was also a devout Anglican, the hard-working academic who enjoyed good living. c.P. Stacey, another historian with very different political views, once saw McNaught stepping out of his huge old Cadillac, a jaunty homburg on his head. 'Ah, Ken, my favourite socialist.' One of the many merits of a charming memoir is that it shows a different interwar Toronto from the usual dour Calvinist caricature. The city of McNaught's childhood has music, art, and good conversation. He sketches with Barker Fairley and listens to Frank Underhill talk about civil liberties. His parents, the father who rebelled against business to go into advertising, and his mother, one of Toronto's first female journalists, are cultivated and liberal. McNaught accepts that his upbringing was privileged. He recognizes the defects of Upper Canada College but also remembers with gratitude the strongly individual teachers who encouraged him to think. He HUMANITIES 507 knows that the family money eased his path and that his youth during the Depression was a sheltered one. But, as he reasonably points out, sometimes privilege can sharpen awareness of inequities. He jOined the League of Nations Society, ran for the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in school mock elections (he got 15 votes while the Tories got 267), and worked for the progressive League for Social Reconstruction. Typically he took his causes, but not himself, seriously. The moral he draws from the surprising disapproval of his black neighbours during a stay in Bermuda when he refuses to sit in the whites' only pews in church is 'Beware ostentatious liberalism!' He never lost his early enthusiasm for the Left, but he never became doctrinaire. In the late 1950S, he was involved in the landmark case of Canadian academic freedom, the Harry Crowe affair , when the contents of a private letter were used by United College in Winnipeg as an excuse to fire a radical teacher. McNaught's account is a model of clarity on what was a long-drawn-out and painful dispute. In the end Crowe's firing was upheld by the Board of Governors but the young Association of University Teachers and the cause of academic freedom in Canada had taken a giant step forward. McNaught, who fought passionately for Crowe, resigned...