Just north of Wiarton, Ontario, a county road splits off from Highway 6, runs east along Colpoy’s Bay, then swerves north toward Purple Valley, where my father owned a sawmill and where I spent long days of my youth piling lumber. Sometimes, if an employee did not show up for his shift, I was kept home from school to replace him. “You don’t work, you don’t eat,” my father growled. During lulls, I read whatever I could get my hands on. Circa 1976, when I was fifteen, I eased the boredom of manual labour with Chinaberry, a cheesy historical bestseller, and Jaws, because the movie had made it notorious. I memorized passages from The Merchant of Venice and declaimed them against the clatter of edgers and trimmers.
Stendhal’s The Red and the Black should have figured on my sawmill list. Had I read it as an adolescent, I might have better understood thwarted ambition, social mobility, and the value of hypocrisy. It wasn’t for lack of...
Allan Hepburn is the James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University.
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