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October 31, 2004
REVIEW: A secret she couldn’t keep
WHO doesn’t have a story to tell? But not everyone is a storyteller, especially if it’s a true story. Autobiographies and biographies have this difficult task of capturing the attention of their audience since fictional stories can be more far-fetched, adventurous and capturing. But if it’s the story of a celebrity, like Bill Clinton’s My Life, they can become instant bestsellers. Yet there is really nothing more such autobiographies reveal than they already have. They become just another book.
Reaching into the dark recesses of one’s life and attempting to make sense of it all is a monumental task on its own let alone doing it publicly. Canadian professor and writer, Anne Coleman’s autobiography, I’ll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers, is one such story, told with immense courage, that reaches into the past and explores the intricacies of the human condition which all relationships are imbued with.
It’s an autobiography told, as if intimately, to each one of its readers. And this quality is precisely what makes Coleman a great storyteller.
During the 1950’s, growing up in a small town called North Hatley in Quebec, Canada, an almost 14-year-old tomboyish girl started a secret friendship with a 43-year-old married man. He was Hugh McLennan, the celebrated Canadian novelist and the author of Two Solitudes, Barometer Rising and The Watch That Ends the Night. This friendship became one of the most defining relations of her life. A friendship based on trust and love of literature. Parallel to this apparently platonic friendship, she was in a more binding relationship with a European tennis instructor, Frank. These two relationships form the core of Anne Coleman’s autobiography.
Her friendship with “Mr McLennan”, as she called him, as a young strong-willed girl who was unlike any other 14-year-old, played a crucial role in her development during her formative years. At such a young age, she was rereading Tolstoy’s War and Peace and memorizing the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry V. She remarks at her love for books, “I have simply jumped into books and lived in them.”
So, it was not incidental, despite his charming looks, that she found herself intrigued by the literary figure who was to become her professor at McGill University. The “important conversations” they had which she had never had with any male members of her family and above all, the attention he gave her was perplexing as well as exciting to her young mind. Musing over her relationship with Mr McLennan, as she often does in the book, she says, “It’s quite different with Mr McLennan. He asks me questions: ‘Anne, what are you reading now?’ and, ‘What do you think about it?’” So, she fell in love with him, hoping that he would love her back. His answer to this riddle remained a mystery in itself unfolding word by word as she aged. This book, written in two short months, about those seven summers of her life a half-century ago concludes her search into her past. As Coleman writes, “My memories take on a life of their own and I let them. I want to discover what I unconsciously pushed aside as I moved along my path.”
As she explores the myths and secrets of her family, she finds out about her ancestral ties with the early British settlers in Canada and their participation in the First World War. She not only delves into family secrets but village secrets as well, uncovering a poverty stricken image of Northern Canada that is rarely shown to the world. Throughout her struggle to deal with her past demons and regrets the figure of Frank remains an elusive one. But in reality, it is her relationship with Frank that is the one thing she can’t and is struggling to justify.
With a flowing style of writing and words as light as air, she whisks us off our feet with her imagery and attention to detail. But this detail or imagery hardly compares to early examples of literature for instance in the works of Leo Tolstoy or Ayn Rand and has a distinctly Canadian flavour of its own. It’s the simplicity and clarity of thought conveyed to evoke our imagination through all senses that makes even the simplest of her stories powerful. She writes, “Memory opens to me through my body. I slip back because I catch a smell, hear a sound or hold an evocative flavour on my tongue. But these single-sense glimpses of or gusts from the past are often fleeting. More compelling for me, more total, is when my whole body, the entire surface of my skin, and my muscles’ movements connect me to my old self.”
Critics have pointed out that her portrayal of Hugh McLennan and his wife, writer Dorothy Duncan, is incomplete and that her attitude towards his wife was cruel especially when she refers to her as “ugly” and can’t understand his love for her even though Dorothy is sick. Those critics tend to forget that it’s Anne Coleman’s coming of age story and not of McLennan or Duncan. These characters serve the same purpose as they would in a fictional tale of merely providing the context for or enhancing the narrator’s own story. Above all, it’s her story and a one told with passion.
I’ll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers
By Anne Coleman
McClelland & Stewart
ISBN 0-7710-2278-6
248pp. Can $29.99
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