Children's Literature Association Quarterly

Why does a novelist who has spent his entire career writing for the adult market pause in the midst of intense activity to create a book for children? Why, for example, while hard at work on The Fire-Dwellers did the Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence write her first children's book, Jason's Quest? And what is the relation of that work, and of her three more recent children's books, to the main body of her writing? Such are the questions raised in my mind by Frederick Philip Grove's The Adventures of Leonard Broadus, a children's book published serially in The Canadian Boy, a United Church of Canada publication, in 1940 and recently reprinted with commentary and notes by Mary Rubio, both in a special double issue of Canadian Children's Literature and in book form by Canadian Children's Press.

The creation of The Adventures of Leonard Broadus seems not unlike that of Jason's Quest. In the midst of rewriting his adult novel, The Master of the Mill, Grove was, he tells his publisher, "struck with the blues about it all" and to distract himself began the juvenile. Unlike Margaret Laurence, however, Grove did not [End Page 149] create another world. This book, like a number of Grove's adult novels, is set in the countryside outside the fictional town of Rivers during the thirties; and we meet here characters who inhabit the world of the adult fiction. We see that world, however, not from the adults' point of view, but through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Leonard Broadus. The story opens on a Saturday afternoon in May. While the parents are in town shopping, a gang of thieves responsible for numerous break-ins in the area enters the Broadus farmhouse, terrifies Leonard and his younger sister, and steals the family's valuables. Leonard, who can identify one of the thieves, becomes a witness for the police and a target of the gang. We follow him through numerous adventures: a high-speed car chase on the highway outside Toronto; a perilous journey by raft down a flood-swollen river and out onto a storm-tossed Lake Erie; a hair-raising experience in a hobo camp; an airplane ride; and a boat chase that ends in the apprehension of the thieves. Leonard, of course, is instrumental in the capture of the gang, and receives his reward from the King and Queen of England (who toured Canada in the year Grove wrote and published the story).

As this brief summary suggests, The Adventures of Leonard Broadus has many of the ingredients of an adventure story for boys. Grove, who apparently wrote the book for his son, Leonard, states that he "set out to write what would have delighted [his] own heart at the age of twelve." The story is entertaining and, to the allure of the chase, time has added the charm of an age now largely past, one to which cars, motorboats and airplanes were a novelty and camps of hobos a fascinating and sometimes frightening reality. Unfortunately, the narrative itself is not well crafted. Grove, who devoted countless hours to writing and rewriting his adult fiction, wrote this story in haste and immediately offered it for publication. Whatever his initial reason for writing The Adventure of Leonard Broadus, he quickly seized the opportunity to make some money and thereby relieve, however briefly, the poverty that characterized life for the Groves' in the late thirties. ("If you are as much taken with the yarn as others," he remarks to his publisher in a moment of black humour, "I'll murder a local druggist to get the necessary paper, and the principal of the business college to get the carbon and ribbons needed. You should countenance that in order to save me from the gallows thereafter; though even the gallows don't matter if the darn thing secures bread for my wife and my kid.") For Grove, The Adventures of Leonard Broadus was a welcome distraction and a potential source of income, little more. He...