Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The Maclennan-Engel Correspondence

Introduction

Introduction "Dear Miss Passmore," Hugh MacLennan addressed a young student one Thursday toward the end of term at McGill in 1956, "Re your writing: I mentioned that the day before I went over your piece with you I myself had written an essay which the next morning had seemed flat and confused. I also mentioned that I had re-written it and made it good. But when I got home that night and re-read it, I found out that not only was it not good, it was considerably worse than it had been before. Now I'm doing it all over again. And that, Miss Passmore, is what a writer's life is like."2 Thus began a long-term correspondence between Hugh MacLennan and the future writer Marian Engel.3 The young Engel had come to McGill in the fall of 1955, following the completion of her undergraduate degree at McMaster. She enrolled in MacLennan's graduate courses and in time she worked up the courage to ask him to direct her M.A. thesis. She wanted to investigate the novel in Canada. MacLennan agreed to be her director, just as later he agreed to read some of Engel's early fiction pieces. This work together became the basis of a correspondence, the MacLennan half of which is the subject of this book. MacLennan's letters to Engel are located in the Marian Engel Archive at McMaster University. Catalogued in 1984,4 the Archive assembles thirtynine letters that MacLennan wrote to his former student. Papers acquired inJuly 1992 belonging to Marian Engel, who died in 1985, include three letters MacLennan wrote in later years (May 16, 1981; January 9, 1983; November 30, 1984).5 With a few later-life exceptions, Engel's letters to MacLennan have not turned up. A note of condolence she sent MacLennan after his wife Dorothy Duncan died April 22, 1957, is among MacLennan's papers in McGill University's Rare Book Department, along with a few letters she wrote to him a quarter-century later.6 These letters form part of the presentation of this book, but its principal focus is MacLennan's missives, particularly those dating from the ten year stretch 1956 to 1966. Within this decade, the most intense epistolary period spanned the 1956-57 academic year through to the end of 1958. This was when Engel worked on and completed her M.A. thesis under MacLennan. It was also the period of Dorothy Duncan's final illness and death. Finally, these were the years when MacLennan was writing The Watch That Ends the Night, 2 Dear Marian, DearHugh believed by many to be the author's most important achievement. Throughout this period, MacLennan wrote to Engel frequently, even weekly. Fortunately for readers today, his correspondent carefully kept the letters. Marian Engel was aware of the value of Hugh MacLennan's letters to her. In correspondence about the sale of her papers, she observed that MacLennan's letters were "of extreme value."7 Even earlier, writing MacLennan from Cape Traverse, P.E.I., in July 1976, she remarked: I'm pleased with your attitude towards the letters. I had a bibliographer tenant one year and was annoyed by his attitude towards my wastebasket; on the other hand if these birds are going to go around writing biographies they had better have real information. I've been so involved in the Can. Lit. campaigns lately and feel that if we want to make our literature count we had better cease modestly hiding. Those are good letters and I'll make sure she gets any of them that will help.8 MacLennan's letters had inestimable personal value for Engel. They were a source of inspiration in her strugglesto become a writer.She carried them with her, rereading them periodically, in particular when she was experiencing difficulties or doubts about writing. In a notebook dating from her sojourn in Cyprus in the early 1960s, Engel wrote: "I could see my own story in those pages, but nicely put and feel an enormous effort on his part to tame my hysteria and lack of direction. Men will give me hell, he said, because I have talent. They will want mothering I can't give—and I will want fathering they can't give. I am to suffer & struggle & win."9 MacLennan and Engel were both epistolary virtuosos in their own way. They wrote great numbers of letters to a wide variety of individuals and organizations...