The Ante-Room

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

This stunning biography is the account of Lovat Dickson’s early years in Australia, England, and Canada; the years of his infancy and boyhood, up to the time when he realizes that he has left the “ante-room” of the first twenty-five years of his life, in which for good or ill his character has been formed.

This was a difficult and, in many ways, lonely period. The early death of his mother meant the effective dissolution of family life, as his father busily pursued his own interests and his siblings drifted apart. The young Lovat struggled with several jobs beyond his strength, and then, greatly underage, enlisted in the ranks of World War I. Somehow nothing he undertook truly succeeded, and job after job proved a dead end. Eventually, and without any appreciable parental encouragement, he decided to complete his education, and after a rousing and hard-won academic success, attempted teaching in his turn. Again, the effort was doomed to failure. It was not his métier. Fate decided the issue when the young man chanced to meet Fred Hammond, owner of the English Review. His offer of a job altered the direction of Dickson’s life, and set him on the road to a distinguished career as a writer and publisher. This story of his formative years is a critically acclaimed biographical prize.