The Captive Reader

I’ve been struggling for weeks now how to review Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock.  Like most of Leacock’s works, it is a collection of stories linked by a shared settting: in this case, Plutoria Avenue, a tony street in a wealthy North American metropolis.  And, like all Leacock works, it is funny.  The trials and tribulations of the outrageously wealthy provide no end of giggle-inducing commentary from Leacock – commentary that seems just as fresh and appropriate in 2014 as it did on publication in 1914.

But, again, where to start with a review?  Perhaps at the beginning, with the introduction of one of the Mausoleum Club’s august members taking his modest mid-day meal:

Mr. Fyshe was seated at lunch, consuming a cutlet and a pint of Moselle in the plain downright fashion of a man so democratic that he is practically a revolutionary socialist, and doesn’t mind saying so…

Mr. Fyshe and his fellow millionaires flit between their offices and the Mausoleum Club, congratulating themselves for their good luck at having become millionaires and, in turn, being vociferously congratulated by those who live in hope of charitable handouts – namely, clergymen and university administrators.

Leacock was a professor at McGill University, which is no doubt why the details of the university’s delicately subtle and wildly successful courtships for the rich ring so true.  And why the book is littered with instances of internal university politics devoted to matters of such insignificance that of course they have become matters of life and death to their supporters:

 The meeting of the faculty that day bid fair to lose all vestige of decorum in the excitement of the moment.  For, as Dead Elderberry Foible, the head of the faculty, said, the motion that they had before them amounted practically to a revolution.  The proposal was nothing less that the permission of the use of lead-pencils instead of pen and ink in the sessional examinations of the university.  Anyone conversant with the inner life of a college will realize that to many of the professoriate this was nothing less than a last wild onslaught of socialistic democracy against the solid bulwarks of society.  They must fight it back or die on the walls.  To others it was one more step in the splendid progress of democratic education, comparable only to such epoch-making things as the abandonment of the cap and gown, and the omission of the word “sir” in speaking to a professor.

But the millionaires of Plutoria Avenue are a practical bunch so while the academics quibble over minutiae, the millionaires set their sights on more important matters, like the corruption of the press:

“There is no doubt that the corruption of the press is one of the worst factors that we have to oppose.  But whether we can best fight it by buying the paper itself or buying the staff is hard to say.”

If you do not giggle over that, then I am afraid there is no hope for you.

While the men congregate at the Mausoleum Club, their wives roam about town in search of intrigue and excitement.  If they are in town, that is:

It was indeed a singularly trying time of the year.  It was too early to go to Europe and too late to go to Bermuda.  It was too warm to go south, and yet still too cold to go north.  In fact, one was almost compelled to stay at home – which was dreadful.

To detract from the dreadfulness of home, the ladies seek to educate themselves.  They host salons in their homes where ”people of education and taste are at liberty to talk about things they don’t know, and to utter freely ideas that they haven’t got.”   These salons are delightful, though occasionally a little awkward, as when an actual educated person from the university chooses to attend.  The women also content themselves by seeking spiritual enlightenment, flirting both with the church (though their allegiances are easily shifted, depending on the fashion) and the occult (though the mystic seer one hostess hires proves a bit more worldly – and sticky-fingered – than suspected).

Though this is only a small book with a handful of stories, it is great fun.  I still don’t know how to review it, but hopefully I’ve given you a little bit of an idea of why you should try it.