Fiction

LETTERS IN CANADA: 1953 263 of her book indicate her mastery of the central technical device of nostalgic verse, a list of reminders or stimuli, vigorously checked off one after the other: The strong clean smell of yellow soap, A farmer plowing with a team, The taste of huckleberry pie, A pan of milk with wrinkled cream. Poem after poem exhibits a similar shopping-list sequence: "Mended Things," "Keepsakes," "Drug Store Smells," occasionally varied ,by a phrase that shows a sharp awareness of what she is doing: There is a sweet oostalgic chann, About an old Ontario farm, That pulls your heart strings all awry, A clean breath taking sweep of sky An old grey bam built on a knoll ... and so on through another inventory. The tone of her WrItmg is equally central to her approach. The psychologists have made us familiar with the disasters wrought by unpleasant and repressed memories; they have naturally said much less about the memories we seiect, the smoothly edited and censored transcript of wholesome food, happy children, simple virtues, and, of course, mother dear, which plays such a large part in keeping us adjusted. Miss Jaques' rule is never to stop flattering the selective memory: Beneath the fire's lovely light, Faces take on a softer look, And little children from our street, Look like gay pictures in a book. . . . To lift the dull and commonplace Into a realm of love and grace. No, if this kind of thing is worth writing, Miss Jaques is certainly the person who knows best how to write it, and all our poets who are ambitious of belonging to the "conservative" or "romantic" school should learn about nostalgia from her. II. FICTION CLAUDE T. BISSELL Since the year under review yields little that calls for detailed critical attention, this is an appropriate time to pause and to look back briefly on the way that Canadian fiction has come. 264 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY The nineteenth century left behind no tradition of excellence in fiction, but it told us emphatically about the types of fiction that came most easily to our writers and had the strongest appeal for our reading public. These types were the historical romance and the domestic romance. Modern novelists have diligently cultivated both types, usually with more enthusiasm than success. Only two have consistently achieved success : Thomas Raddall in the historical romance and Mazo de Ia Roche in the domestic romance. What we might call "the new Canadian novel" was shaped in the twenties and thirties of this century , principally by Grove and Callaghan, who, dissimilar in most respects, agreed in this: that the novel was a serious art form and that it should strive to present a tragic version of man in a realistic social environment. A little later, Grove and Callaghan were joined in the good work of establishing the Canadian novel as a serious work of art by Child and MacLennan. These six writers--Raddall, de la Roche, Grove, Callaghan, Child, and MacLennan-are the major figures in Canadian fiction. There is no reason why we should not expect from any of the five who are still living some lively and dramatic changes of direction. Indeed, Thomas Raddall made an abrupt change two years ago with The Nymph and the Lamp and this year persists in the same course in Tidefall. And even Miss de la Roche, the oldest and, presumably, the most solidly entrenched of the group, is not always predictable. But I have come to look for new- directions among writers not so well established, most of whom have written only one novel. The group would include: Ethel Wilson, now by far the senior with three novels to her credit, each one an advance on the other; Sinclair Ross, W. L. Mitchell, Henry Kreisel, Christine Van der Mark, Louella Creighton, and Ernest Buckler. These writers do not make up a school, nor have they influenced each other to any extent. None the less, they have in common two general characteristics that tell us something about the probable direction our better fiction will take. The first of these is an acceptance and reinterpretation of regionalism so as to make it...