Thomas Raddall Selected Correspondence: An Electronic Edition


About the electronic version

Copyright 2000. Dalhousie University.

PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Mrs. Barbara Grantmyre, 17 March 1961. MS-2-202 41.64.

Subject Headings

Summary

Having noticed a letter to the editor in the Chronicle Herald newspaper from Kenneth Leslie of Elmsdale, T. H. Raddall writes Elmsdale resident and fellow writer, Barbara Grantmyre, to see if she knows Leslie. Raddall describes a visit from Leslie in 1937 and the few details he had heard of the promising poet's subsequent writing and publishing career in New York before Leslie's socialist sympathies had forced him out of the United States in the 1950s.

March 17, 1961



Dear Mrs. Grantmyre,
     A week or so ago I noticed in the
Chronicle-Herald a letter from one Kenneth Leslie,1 headed
"Elmsdale, N.S." It urged the Cape Breton people to give
a hearing to Tim Buck,2 who was then trying to hire a hall
in those parts.

I didn't pay much attention at the time. Now it dawns on me
that the letter-writer must surely be Kenneth Leslie, the
erstwhile poet of Nova Scotia, who made quite a figure in
the late 1920's and early 1930's. He roved about Nova Scotia
and P.E.I. like a new-model Bliss Carman,3 and some of the
verse he wrote was good enough to appear in prominent news-
papers in Britain and the U.S.A.

He called on me here in 1937. He was then cruising about the
coast in a converted Tancook fishing-boat.4 His current bug
was the ancient wrongs perpetrated by the English upon the
Irish and Highland Scots; he talked a lot of Gaelic (or
what he thought was Gaelic) and described himself as "an
anti-Imperialist". He presented me with two or three
inscribed copies of his published poems, and wandered off
again. I never saw him again, and I never heard of him
until about 1950, when he was publishing in New York a
small periodical called "Protestant" but openly Communist,
and devoted to scurrilous attacks on the R.C.Church.5

When the anti-Communist fever spread over the U.S.A., Leslie
turned up in Kentville, living quietly with a lady said to
be his third wife. Now, it seems, he's living in your part
of the province. Do you know him? If you do, perhaps you
can tell me something of his present life. I remember him
as a charming fellow, lazy and easygoing, with some wool-
headed ideas about life and history, but the makings of a
good native poet.
With my regards,

Sincerely,











Annotations

1. Kenneth Leslie (1892-1974), poet and left-wing journalist, won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in 1938 for By Stubborn Stars and Other Poems. See entry in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997).

2. Tim Buck (1891-1973) was general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada from 1929 to 1962. See Tim Buck: a Conscience for Canada by Oscar Ryan (Toronto: Progress Books, 1975).

3. Bliss Carman (1861-1929), journalist, poet and essayist, was originally from Fredericton and later a member of the Song Fishermen group of poets in Halifax. See entry in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997).

4. THR may be referring to the small inshore fishing craft known as the Tancook whaler, a type of boat developed around Lunenburg about 1870 and subsequently built at Tancook Island in particular. See The Little Boats by Ray MacKean and Robert Percival (Fredericton: Brunswick Press, 1979).

5. The radical periodical Protestant, originally Protestant Digest and later New Christian, was edited by Kenneth Leslie from 1938 to 1953. He was considered a "fellow-traveller" and a Communist by Senator Joseph McCarthy and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and left New York in 1949 for Halifax.