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Introduction
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction When The Group of Seven mounted their first public exhibit at the Toronto Art Gallery in May 1920, their forceful, vibrantly colourful paintings of Canadian wilderness shocked an art world accustomed to the European legacy of gentle refined landscapes. Although visitors called the works "disgraceful," fit only for "the ashcan,"1 and critics in 1932 termed them "a raw upheaval of nauseating colors with pointed rocks and dead trees stuck in at random,"2 the group slowly awoke part of the Canadian public, used to seeing nature through the lens of another culture, to the fact that an indigenous art and culture were vital to the building of a national identity.3 Similarly, albeit decades later, in a review of the novels reprinted in McClelland and Stewart's freshly created New Canadian Library series, Constance Beresford-Howe gave a somewhat unenthusiastic evaluation of Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley. She identified the routine of "heavy, ugly farm labour" as making up Notes for Introduction are on pp. 233-34. J_ the fabric of the novel, which unfolded "with a sense of raw power," but with a style that she qualified as "intolerably oppressive." She complained that so much "portentous imagery is as tiring as being trapped at close quarters with a piledriver." But she acknowledged the novel's distinctiveness and drew a parallel between Buckler's novelistic technique and the Canadian landscape painting that had so outraged critics and public alike: "this is the one Canadian novel Iknow to share the distinctive quality of some Canadian painting with its simplified, rugged forms, its bold colours and clear atmosphere"(Beresford-Howe40). In the catalogue that accompanied their first exhibition, the Group of Seven had declared that "art must grow and flower in the land before the country will become a real home for its people." They created a new space for the Canadian imagination. Similarly, many contemporary writers and critics have expressed the belief that Ernest Buckler was one of the pioneers in creating a distinctive Canadian literature . In a tribute to Buckler organized in 1982, Claude Bissell read out letters from admiring writers that emphasized Buckler's role as an innovator. Margaret Atwood called Buckler "one of the pathbreakers for the modern Canadian novel," adding that all novelists writing today in Canada "are very much in his debt."4 Margaret Laurence dubbed him "a genuine pioneer in Canadian writing." She argued that he was one of the first authors to write "out of his own perceptions of life and of his own land," one who, instead of taking British or American models, "helped forge a truly Canadian literature."5 An earlier review from western Canada of a work by Buckler anticipated this appraisal. Although Buckler celebrated the distinctive flavour of his region, the Maritimes, Tom Primrose of the Albertcm claimed that "Ernest Buckler may have broken ground in Canadian letters which can be cultivated further, even way out West," and insisted that the fictional memoir Ox Bells and Fireflies was "a breakthrough or breakaway in the world of Canadian letters" (Primrose8). If Buckler did indeed help "forge a truly Canadian literature," it was not by deliberately setting out to do so. He frankly disapproved of yoking art to nationalistic purposes. In a talk he gave on CBCRadio in 1953, he declared: it's...interesting to note that all this flapdoodle about the Canadian writer's first obligation being to write like a 2 Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment \ [54.157.61.194] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:06 GMT) Canadian (however that is), is dying down. If you're a Canadian, and write as honestly as you can about what you know—here or anywhere else—and the result doesn't sound Canadian—well, no conscious attitude you strike will ever make it sound so. If you're a Canadian and want to write a distinctively Canadian novel, I'd say: Just trust your natural processes, just trust your natural processes. Don't try to write like anything—except yourself.6 His insistence on artists being themselves, producing a distinctive culture by creating in their own manner, aligns itself with the groundbreaking manifesto that "art must grow and flower in the land before the country will become a real home for its people." The statement actually echoes the words of one of the United States' foremost thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an influence on Canadian painters and writers from Lauren Harris and Frank Varley to Bliss Carman...