Retirement Essays
Leacock was forcibly retired by McGill University in 1936 when he turned 66. He had been allowed an extra year of teaching.
That was a new policy at McGill. It was imposed on Leacock ex post facto. It became standard policy in Canada and the United States after World War II. It is illegal today in the United States: age discrimination. In Canada, the law is more loosely enforced. Prior to 2006, there was no legal protection at all.
This piece is the final one in Here Are My Lectures (1937). He finished the Preface on November 1, 1937. He mailed it to his editor in New York City. The book was published before the end of the year. That was remarkably fast. There was a strong market for his books in the United States.
I had made the decision never to retire before I read this. This piece confirmed my decision when I read it in 1970 or thereabouts. It has re-confirmed it this week.
He was a funny author. But he defined himself in terms of his teaching career, not his enormous popularity as a writer. The money was in writing. That did not change, not even during the depression. He would not lack income. This fact gave him little solace.
Read between the lines.
I was retired—or rather I was fired on the grounds of senility—last year from the college where I had been a professor for thirty-five years. Before that I had been a schoolmaster for ten years, making in all forty-five years of teaching. On this mere pretext, I was invited to go.
In other words I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, ‘out,’ and meritus, ‘so he ought to be.’ These old professors go drifting out of the colleges, so many every year, as when the harness is slipped off old horses, and they go wandering down into the pasture. The world is always very kindly about it. When they leave there is always a gentle pretence that now in retirement they will do greater things. ‘Professor Rameses, we understand, will now at last have time to complete his monumental work on the Assyrian epoch.’ Oh, no, he won’t; not all eternity would be enough for that. But he’ll sit there in front of a blotter in his study and his wife will put the inkpot beside him, and through the open door will come the scent of the laburnum, and the late summer flies will buzz around his head! No, no, he’ll never finish. Look, he’s asleep already!
Or of another professor, it is said, ‘We understand that Professor Dream intends, now that he is free, to devote himself to journalism!’ Will he? That only means that he’ll sit and read the newspaper all morning in a barber shop. But notice that kindly little touch ‘now that he is free!’ The idea is that the old fellow has been held back from all kinds of accomplishment, and, once set him loose, and he’s supposed to dash off at a tremendous pace! It reminds me of the old days when we used to hire a horse and buggy at a livery stable, and the livery man would drag the horse out, shouting, ‘Whoa! Whoa! there!’ and stand at his head while we got in, as if it were a close call for life to drive behind that horse. When he let go with the final ‘Whoa! Back! Get up there!’ the old horse hadn’t the strength to shake the fly-net. So with the professors. Complete their study of Horace! Bring their work on ichthyology up to date! Don’t believe it—autumn flowers and buzz flies for them—‘Whoa! Back! Get up!’
I recall long ago the resignation of one of my own old professors, and how we got up a dinner for him. I sat next to him and said, ‘I suppose now you’ll be able to complete your translation of Faust?’ and he said, ‘Eh?’ I said, ‘You’ll be able to complete your translation of Faust?’ ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘Faust!’ I yelled. ‘No, thank you,’ he called back. ‘I’ve had plenty.’ An idea struck me, and so I took the dinner card in front of me and wrote ‘Faust’ on it and put it in front of him. ‘I can’t read it,’ he shouted.
So in my own case I’ve taken warning. When people say to me, ‘You’ll be able now to finish your book on the History of Political Theory,’ I answer, ‘To hell with it.’
They’re a queer lot, the old professors. I suppose that forty or fifty years in the little empire of the classroom is bound to affect a man’s character and make-up. In business there are certain standards, certain normal ways of talking and dressing and acting that all men have to fall into as part of business life. Not so with the professors. Take their dress; they’ve never thought about it. As young men they had no money to dress, and by the time they had they’d lost any sustained interest in it, and so they buy their things spasmodically as the whim seizes them. I recall, from my days as a Chicago student forty years ago, the case, or rather the appearance, of a very distinguished old professor who came over from England to teach some kind of dead language. It was in the summer quarter. He wore a round straw hat—the kind that kids wear—a black morning coat with tails—that was a little bit of London—a pair of duck pants—that stood for the sea—and a pair of ox-blood tanned boots that were meant to represent the eager life of a newer continent. You see, if you analyse that costume, there is life in every bit of it. . . . The white pants were for the foam of the sea; he got them, no doubt, the day Sir Thomas Lipton invited him on his yacht. The London morning coat meant Piccadilly and the fashion of England; it was all there. Add to it, as the last touch, a string tie, to recall the Confederate campaign in Missouri, and there you have the man! I remember that he evidently looked on himself as pretty nattily dressed, quite an up-to-date piece of chocolate. The case is actual; anybody of the Chicago of the late nineties could give you the professor’s name—or, no, they couldn’t; they’d have forgotten it. The flies are buzzing round them too.
In other words, professors, if they go on long enough, turn into ‘characters.’
Much of what has been said about professors is naturally true not only of them but of all old men. More nonsense and guff has been talked about old age than of any time of life. Cicero, when his hair began to fall out, wrote a whole book On Old Age. Rabbi Ben Ezra—in Browning, isn’t it?—said, ‘Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be!’ and the same note has been struck a thousand times, but will never blend into a chord. Cicero and the rest talk of the ‘serenity’ of old age—in fact, a ‘serene’ old age has been a phrase in all languages! Serene old men! Have you ever seen one of them in a sudden temper, because he couldn’t find his fishing-line, or had lost his ever-sharp pencil? Old age is supposed to be quiet, restful, at peace with all the world. Don’t believe it! Old men live in a world of horrors. At a sniff, they are sure the kitchen stove has set fire to the house! The world is closing in on them. They feel that they are going to be overwhelmed at any minute by terrible changes—Bolsheviks, labour agitations, Mussolini—anything!
I remember a year or two ago, one such stopped me in the street, an old man, just old enough to be getting a nice shake on him even when he stood upright; in fact he had himself buttoned up pretty high in his collar and neckerchief. ‘These Bolsheviks!’ he said. ‘These Bolsheviks, they’ll overrun the whole world, mark my words: we’ll live to see it!’ Well, he didn’t, anyway; he blew up the next week.
And if it’s not public dangers it’s private ones—the dangers to themselves and to their poor old body that walks with a shadowed figure beside it. Do you realize, my dear young friends in the early twenties who read these lines, that for old people the world is full of death? Those notices that you hardly look at, those obituaries, of what seem to you old people dropping off—and why shouldn’t they?—that, to them, is their world going out one by one, people waiting to be called across a gangway, so many names called every day. Youth is careless of death. It is the price at which humanity lives. Wordsworth, you remember, said, ‘A simple child that lightly draws its breath and feels its life in every limb, what can it know of death?’
And Captain Harry Graham, the English humorist of yesterday (a tear to his memory), said it with even greater point in the little verse, ‘Grandpapa fell down the sewer; that’s one grandpapa the fewer!’ For people of insight and philosophy, Harry Graham’s stanza reaches further than Wordsworth’s sentimentality. Wordsworth is putting his own ideas into the child—you recall, no doubt, how the We-are-seven poem runs along in its cheerful discussion in a churchyard—‘and often after sunset when all is bright and fair, I take my little porringer and eat my supper there!’ Nonsense! Wordsworth as an old man might take a little porringer, provided he took it regularly and not too near bedtime, but the child wouldn’t.
A little porringer! That strikes again the note of the terrors of old men; they’re wearing out, they’re running down, and so they get the ‘death bug’ that ticks and ticks beside their consciousness, so that they feel the flight of time as it goes by, carry a scale of hours and days such as younger people can’t imagine. It is as if one looks down an avenue, all lined with evergreen trees—a little mist, indeed, at the end, but the end can’t be so far away after all.
So the old men are preoccupied. ‘Have you ever,’ they whisper, ‘had any trouble with your oesophagus?’ The answer to this is ‘Never!’ Don’t humour or encourage them. Let them take it on the oesophagus! They seem to know of parts of the body younger people have never heard of. ‘The membraneous coating of my diaphragm,’ bleats the old fellow, ‘is pretty well worn out. I’ve had to cut out all proteins altogether.’
Cutting them out! They start cutting things out like a captain lightening a ship. ‘I cut out whiskey,’ says the old fellow, ‘and I don’t feel any worse for it at all.’ No, certainly not; you couldn’t feel worse if you tried. ‘I’ve cut tobacco right out.’ Certainly, you haven’t got suction enough left in you to keep a cigar alight. Then they cut out meat, and cut out coffee, and cut out all the things they know of, and then begin to cut out things that are just names. Ask them; just let them start and they’ll tell you they cut out all nitrogen and glycerine, and gun-cotton, and tabloids—the things they cut out would supply a Spanish army.
This, I suppose, is a pessimistic discussion. I can’t help it. To my mind, the quotation given above, ‘that’s one grandpapa the fewer,’ goes to the root of the matter. In fact even this business of looking back on life and writing memoirs should be begun earlier, and by younger people. In fact I am glad to observe that it is. A generation ago people never wrote reminiscences till they could cover a long lapse of time. Reminiscences had some such title as: My Hundred Years in the U.S. Cavalry, or Pink and Punk: My Eighty Years of Fox Hunting. Then, thank goodness, someone began Looking Back from Forty! and then someone else realized that you could turn round quicker than that, and a crop of memoirs began to appear on Looking Back from Thirty; and then Looking Back on College, and Looking Back from High School, and finally Looking Back on Kindergarten, or Where Are Those Girls Now?
Youth will have its way; soon the old men won’t even write the old-age stuff.
This is a delightful essay -- light, friendly, and somewhat quaint.
It's all fake. It shows just how great a humorist he was.
He was livid. Two years later, he published his true opinions. He was still light, but he was neither friendly nor quaint. He was grim.
My old friend Mr. McPherson retired from the flour and feed business—oh, quite a few years ago. He said it was time to get out and give young Charlie a chance—even then "young Charlie" was getting near fifty. Anyway old Mr. McPherson said he wasn't going to keep his nose to the grindstone for ever.
I don't mean that he absolutely dropped out of the business; but, as he himself said, he took it easy. The McPhersons had a fine business, two or three big mills and a central office in our home town. Always, before he retired, Mr. McPherson would be down at the office sharp at eight—the flour and feed is an early business. When he retired he gave all that up. He'd loaf in anywhere round ten minutes past, or sometimes even twenty. It was the same way after lunch—or at least I mean after "dinner"; they don't have "lunch" in the flour and feed business; they have dinner at noon. After dinner if Mr. McPherson didn't feel like getting up and walking to the office at one o'clock, he'd drive down in a cab. And at five o'clock, when the office closed, if he didn't feel like going home right away, he'd stay for a while and run over some of the day's invoices. Or perhaps, if he felt like it, he'd go over to the mill, because the mill didn't close till six, and just fool around there a while helping the men bag up some of the farmers' orders.
One thing, though, that Mr. McPherson insists on, now that he's retired, is that, as he himself says, he never interferes. The business, as he explains, belongs now to the children. That means young Charlie and Lavinia—bless me! Lavinia must be not far from sixty; she keeps the house. To those two and a married daughter in Scotland. The old man has never transferred the business in any legal sense. He says it isn't necessary as long as he's alive. But it's theirs just the same, and he tells them so. And, as I say, he doesn't interfere; "young Charlie" is the general manager, and all his father does is just to look over the contracts to see what's doing, and keep an eye on the produce market to advise young Charlie when to buy—but only, mind you, to advise.
What's more, as Mr. McPherson himself loves to explain, he's not like a man who can't cut loose from business and enjoy himself. Oh, my no! Every year there's the St. Andrews dinner in the Odd Fellows' Hall, regular as clock-work, and every year Burns' birthday, when a few of them get together and have a big old time and read Burns out loud. And only four years ago Mr. McPherson took a trip to Scotland and saw his married daughter and Burns' grave and the big flour mills at Dumbarton, and paid for it all out of a commission on No. 1 wheat. Oh, no, Mr. McPherson says he never regrets his retirement: he can't think what it would be like to be back in harness.
My friend McAlpin was a banker—assistant general manager of a bank. He retired in the natural, normal course of things in accordance with the bank regulations. He made no plan or preparation for retirement. He said that it was enough for him to be rid of the strain of work. He'd have his mind free. So he would have had, if it hadn't happened that, on his first morning of retirement, as he walked down town, he felt a sort of wheeziness, a kind of, well, not exactly a pain, but a sort of compression. Anyway, a druggist gave him some bicarbonate of bismuth—he's told me about it himself ever so many times—or was it bisulphate of something? Anyway it fixed McAlpin up all right but it left him with a sort of feeling of flatulence, or flobbulence (he's explained it to me) that bothered him all morning till a friend told him to drink Vichy water, two or three quarts at a time. Now as a matter of fact you see, McAlpin had had that wheeziness every morning for years back when he went to the bank. But as soon as he opened the mail and began dictating, the wheeziness vanished, and the flobbulence never started. But the moment he retired, the wheeziness brought on the flobbulence; and Vichy water is all right, but there's so much chalk in it that if you take it you must follow it with an anticalcide of some sort. I don't know the names, but McAlpin has told me about them—bigusphate of carbon or any other antiscorbutic.
In fact, as McAlpin tells me, he has come to realize that his diet while he was in the bank was all wrong. He used to take bacon and eggs for breakfast, whereas now that he has looked into things he finds that bacon has no food value at all—contains no postulates. Eggs would be all right if taken with a germicide, but they lack vitamins. So what McAlpin eats now—he tells me this himself—is a proper balance of protein and carbohydrates.
McAlpin spends a good deal of his time in the drug stores. He says those follows know a lot. Do you realize that if you take a drink of mineral water every half hour, with a touch of salt in it, it keeps your sebaceous glands open?
When McAlpin takes a holiday he goes down to Nugget Springs where the thermal baths are. It's a new place and he says that they say that the doctors say that the water has a lower alkali content than any other. That's why he goes there, for the low alkali content. You take a bath every hour and in between you drink the water and the rest of the time you sit in it. McAlpin says that when he comes back he feels a hundred per cent more crustaceous than he did before. He attributes this to phosphorus.
My friend Tharpe, who was in Iron and Steel, retired to Paris. He retired at fifty-eight. He said he wanted to retire while he was still fresh enough to enjoy life—feel those muscles. He wanted to have a little fun in life, before he sank into old age. So he went over to Paris to have, as he himself so fervently put it, "a whale of a time."
I saw him there six months later, in a night-supper restaurant. He had with him something that looked like an odelisk—isn't that the word?—anyway something Moorish with slanting eyes and a crescent diadem. Tharpe came over and spoke to me. He looked like a boiled lobster, all red and black. He said he felt fine. He said he was just starting out for the evening. He felt, he said, A.1.
I saw him in the hotel next morning. He was in the barber shop. The barber was fixing him up. He looked about four colors, mostly black and yellow. He said he felt great. The barber was steaming him, boiling him and squirting things over him. Then he went up to the drug store and the druggist "fixed him"—washed him right out—and then into the bar and the bartender "fixed him"—toned him right up with a couple of "eye-openers." Then he started off. He had on a pongee suit and a panama hat and a French silk tie, and he looked pretty slick, but battered. He said he felt fine. He said he was going out to play baccarat with two men he met the night before—Russians—he couldn't remember their names—Sonovitch or Dombroski or something. Anyway one of them was a cousin of the Czar. He said he felt elegant.
Tharpe is in a home just now, in England—a rest home. He's taking the rest cure, and then he is to take the gold cure and after that a brain cure. A big English doctor took out part of his skull. He says he feels A.1. He has lost most of his money and he's coming back to the Iron and Steel business. He says it beats Paris.
A peculiarly interesting case of retirement has been that of my long-time friend the Senior Professor of Greek at the college here. When he retired the Chancellor of the University said at the Convocation that our regret at Professor Dim's retirement was tempered by the fact that we realized that he would now be able to complete the studies on Homer's Odyssey which had occupied him for so many years. Notice, to complete. The general supposition was that in all these long years, in all the evenings of his spare time he'd been working on Homer's Odyssey, and that now all that he needed was a little time and breathing space and the brilliant studies would be consolidated into a book. To complete—and I was the only one who knew that he hadn't even started. He had begun, ever so many years ago, when we were fellow juniors, talking of Homer's Odyssey. There was something he wanted to do about it—I forget just what; either to prove that there was never any Homer or that there was never any Odyssey. At any rate it was one of those big academic problems that professors select as a life work. It began to be understood that he was "working on Homer's Odyssey"; then that he was doing a book on Homer's Odyssey, and then that he had nearly done it, and only needed time to complete it. And all the time he hadn't started. Professors are like that.
The years go by so easily—Commencement Day and a new session—you can't begin anything then—mid-session, impossible—final exams and the end of the session—out of the question to start anything then; a man must rest sometime. And you don't start Homer in the long vacation on the coast of Maine.
So when Professor Dim retired, people on the street would stop him and ask, "How's the book coming on?" And he could only turn pink and gurgle something. I'm the only one who knows that he hasn't started it. He's been getting pretty frail the last two winters; some of his old pupils sent him south last winter, so that he could finish his book. He didn't. They gave him a trip up north last summer—but not far enough. They talk now of sending him to Greece where the Odyssey began. They're afraid, some of them—this, of course, they say very gently and kindly—they're afraid that the old fellow may not live to finish the book. I know that he won't. He hasn't started.
But as to this retirement business, let me give a word of advice to all of you young fellows round fifty. Some of you have been talking of it and even looking forward to it. Have nothing to do with it. Listen; it's like this. Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? You hadn't realized it. And you notice that the sun has set already, the day gone before you knew—and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape. That's retirement.
From Too Much College, or, Education Eating Up Life (1939)
_______________________________________
For lots more Leacock, click here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department199.cfm