Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Life by Elspeth Cameron (review)

452 LETTERS IN CANADA 1981 make them sound like 'rather wonderful devices,' turn out to be 'chairs that fall down when you sit on them.' (F.W. WAIT) Elspeth Cameron. Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Ufe University of Toronto Press. xv, 421, illus. $24.95 Hugh MacLennan's novels have been the object of much controversy in Canadian criticism. They have been praised as rigorous investigations into the national consciousness, as sober analyses of universal questions of individual and social morality, as probings of pressing religious and spiritual questions. At the same time they have been criticized as tedious, unimaginative, and clumsy, as having serious flaws in characterization, for being far too didactic and preachy, for weaknesses in the social and political views implicit within them. That MacLennan is an important novelist who deserves our close attention there is no doubt, not only because he has had significant national and international success and a large influence upon a generation of younger writers, but also because his art raises interesting questions about the function of the novel and the role of the artist. For those who believe that one cannot divorce the art from the artist, and that the essential value of art is its 'engagement' with society, MacLennan is either a model or a model gone wrong. For those who believe that art must be judged independently of its social context and that it should be technically experimental before it is socially useful, MacLennan went wrong right from the beginning of his career. The split is deep and will not be reconciled; it is a consequence of both a critical dispute about the nature of art and real doubts on the part of even MacLennan's supporters about the creative quality of much of his work. What is clear about MacLennan's fiction is that it is impOSSible to separate the novelist from the novels, that he, as much as his created characters, is an actor in them. His books, like those of E.M. Forster or Aldous Huxley, are best seen as novels ofideas. To know the novels fully, therefore, one must know the man and his context. This is, of course, a critical dictum which brings smoke from the ears of the new critics and their hermeneutical heirs, but it is one which Elspeth Cameron embraces in her marvellous critical biography of Hugh MacLennan. A Writer's Life is the very model of what such a biography should be but rarely is. It relates the intellectual and emotional history of the man to the content of the books themselves, and thus adds to them dimensions previously unknown or but poorly understood. It is clearly, and frequently compellingly, written, and it is based on an astonishingly complete job of research, the minutiae of which Cameron never allows to intrude on the main sweep of her story. And it is a story; the reader is caught up in the shape of structure of a remarkable life, of 'an extraordiriary mind ranging further and further afield, intensely engaged in a world of its own making.' And, as in a good story, there is a superbly subtle tension, in this case contained in the description of the final revisions and the public and critical reception of each novel. I found myself fascinated by the detailed analysis of the relationship between Maclennan and his various editors, by the way Maclennan and his first wife, Dorothy Duncan, acted as spiritual and actual co-editors, by the description of Maclennan's often tortuous creative process, by Maclennan 's successful battle to get better financial arrangements for Canadian authors. But most interesting is the picture we are given of a man for whom the times were almost always out of jOint, whose background and training left him at odds with the mainstream of twentieth-century culture. Deeply and pervasively affected by the Calvinist tradition of moral strenuousness , his values moulded in a Victorian colonial outpost which was essentially conservative and emotionally rigorous, he was suspicious at one and the same time of both social and literary innovation. From that upbringing, and from his intense training in the classics, derive his disdain for the twin gods of...