The Foreigner: A Tale of Saskatchewan

Afterword

275 Afterword Y ou could say that Ralph Connor attended the birth of Canadian literature as a field of serious study, and that he was almost immediately dismissed from it. When The Foreigner was first published in 1909, Reverend Charles William Gordon’s nom de plume of “Ralph Connor” was a household name throughout the English-speaking world. He was the first Canadian to become an international literary star, selling millions of books in Canada, the USA, Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. Despite his enormous success and his serving as one of the early presidents of the Canadian Authors Association, however, Connor never found favour with the literary establishment. In 1922, J.D. Logan, the Acadia University professor who is credited with giving the first course of lectures in Canadian Literature at any university, wrote to Lorne Pierce, the editor at the Ryerson Press in Toronto who was compiling the field-defining Makers of Canadian Literature Series, that Connor’s “work, both in substance and in artistry, is a concoction so vile that it ranks with literature in the same way that bootlegger booze ranks with real Scotch whiskey” (qtd. in Karr 191). Gordon himself admitted that he “had not the slightest ambition to be a writer [and] made little effort after polished literary style” (150–51). Scholars have largely agreed with these views. George Woodcock’s 276 1988 assessment is representative: “Gordon’s novels should be required reading for Canadian social historians, but his place in a serious critical work . . . is at best marginal, and justifiable only because he was present so long and so copiously in Canadian bookstores and on Canadian bookshelves” (17). Even his relevance for social history gets questioned when John Lennox concludes that Connor’s books describe a “Canadian identity that had begun to pass away as he began to write about it” and that therefore “his books exist, with all their faults, as signposts of a Canada that no longer exists” (149). According to this line of thought, we acknowledge these signposts of a faded past but quickly insist that we moderns have moved beyond them. Connor is a sign of a past we would rather not connect in any direct way to the present. With the recent turn to a cultural-studies-influenced approach to Canadian literature, in which the primary aim has not been so much to sort out “high” art from “low” but instead to study how literary works circulate in, articulate, and shape cultural formations, some critics have shown renewed interest in releasing Ralph Connor from historical quarantine and reconnecting him to the present. In Authors and Audiences : Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century (2000), for example, Clarence Karr analyzes Connor’s career in some detail to understand the rise in early-twentieth-century Canada of popular fiction, a form of writing and a book economy that has continued to increase in social influence. In Dominion and Agency: Copyright and the Structuring of the Canadian Book Trade, 1867–1918 (2011), Eli MacLaren devotes a chapter to the publishing history of Connor’s first novel, Black Rock, as a case study of how early Canadian authors negotiated conflicting and uneven copyright regulations between the United States, Britain, and Canada, once again an ongoing topic of concern. And in White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (2006), I discuss a range of Connor’s novels in a study that traces the formulation of a specific form of whiteness based on a British model 277 of civility that was naturalized between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a definitive norm for English Canadian cultural identity that remains entrenched to this day. Connor’s works are getting renewed attention, not so much as markers of a society that either never existed or has faded away, but as ways we can track aesthetic tastes, literary forms, and social and economic conditions as well as cultural assumptions that remain influential today. This renewed interest may suggest why Connor might be reissued now, but, among his thirty-two published volumes, why republish The Foreigner? Others of his novels, such as The Man from Glengarry (1901) and Glengarry School Days (1902), have been repeatedly reissued in the New Canadian Library series by McClelland & Stewart, but aside from a failed effort to reissue The Foreigner in the University of Toronto Press’s Social History...