Letters to Leon

Louise H. Girard was Head of Book Selection, University of St. Michael's College Library, Toronto.

Hélène de la Hitte MacPherson comes to this, her first work of this kind, with a great deal of life experience. Born in 1934, the daughter of French nobility, Hélène de la Hitte spent the war years in Southern France, emigrating to Canada in 1945 at the age of eleven. Her working life has included acting in Hollywood films, obtaining a law degree, directing plays, being in the Army Militia, and writing poetry. She is the mother of three, separated and, unfortunately, the victim of multiple sclerosis, a disease that has left her handicapped.

This work is presented as a series of letters written to a friend of long standing, Leon Lossos, between June and October 1982. The purpose of the letters is to provide her friend with details of hen childhood which, in this case, was spent in France and covered all of World War II. The particular perspective of World War II that this work offers is not only unique but also extremely valuable, especially for those of us who did not really experience the war. Hélène de la Hitte’s parents were members of the underground, as a result of which she experienced the war as something very real and dangerous. Moreover, she experienced it as a child, and this combination gives the incidents she describes an intensity that it would be impossible for anyone else to communicate. There are real horrors here — the mass execution of the youth of the village, a child escaping from the Gestapo after a hair-raising ride up a mountain, days and nights of fear. Intermingled with the horrors of the war, and actually intensifying them, are the more usual and ordinary experiences of a little girl growing up — the first kiss, the first best friend, a summer holiday in the country.

The details of Hélène de la Hitte MacPherson’s daily life in 1982 which find their way into the letters provide a certain relief from the war and are interesting in themselves. In fact, they compete with the rest of the book. Many readers will be as interested in the author’s present life as in her past.

The work does suffer, however, from its structure in that it will probably seem quite improbable to some that these letters would need to be written. Granted that childhood memories are not necessarily the first that one shares with a friend, yet it seems strange that a friend of so many years would still be unaware of what could only have been very intense memories. Perhaps, however, it is because the memories were so horrible that Hélène de la Hitte waited so long.