“A Late Germination in a Cold Climate”: The Growth of MacLennan Criticism

"A Late Germination in a Cold Climate": the Growth ofMacLennan Criticism ELSPETH CAMERON Survey the critical material1 surrounding Hugh MacLennan and scratch your head. How can so much praise walk hand-in-hand with such condescension? Any passable lawyer could make a fine case on either side: a genuinely creative personality fights overwhelming cultural odds to produce a substantial and internationally known body of work, or, conversely, an opportunist of unusual persistence debases fiction by using it as a vehicle for relatively commonplace social observations . Is it only the man who is important? Or the work? Both? Neither? Something of this enigma informs a recent article by Roger Leslie Hyman2 called "Hugh MacLennan: His Art, His Society and His Critics." Hyman lodges there a complaint which is well worth our consideration: MacLennan's critics may have rendered him a greater disservice than they did his readers by not pointing out the weaknesses of the novels more forcefully. For a first novel, and in its time and place, Barometer Rising was a remarkable achievement, but its promise was never entirely fulfilled. The blame for that failure must rest at least partly on a critical establishment which either never properly learned, or largely abandoned, its critical responsibilities. "It is certainly time now," Hyman exhorts us, ''to give his novels a more honest critical reading than they have yet been accorded, and to remove MacLennan from the pantheon of literary untouchables to which he was unjustly elevated. Only then will his contribution to Canadian letters be seen more clearly, and (perhaps) less fondly ." By "critical establishment," Hyman means Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 14, No. 4 (Hiver 1979-80 Winter) especially Edmund Wilson, Northrop Frye (and by implication, Hugo McPherson), George Woodcock , Peter Buitenhuis, Alec Lucas and Robert Cockburn. This critical establishment, Hyman maintains, has shifted from one foot to the other when dealing with MacLennan. While generally respecting him as "a Canadian institution" (a respect, Hyman speculates, frequently generated by personal friendship or the desire to give a native son his due), MacLennan's novels, or sections of them, have come in for some strong criticism . The man, it would seem, is noble and praiseworthy ; his writing something less. And yet, since it is only through his writing~ that we know the man, this conclusion is illogical. One outgrowth of this non sequitur of criticism has been the widely held critical view that MacLennan's essays are "better" than his novels. That is to say, MacLennan as an individual commenting directly on Canada or whatever, is more at ease artistically than MacLennan as a writer of fiction. Yet here, too, are anomalies. Critics, despite this claim, do not anywhere demonstrate a particularly firm grasp of MacLennan's essays, certainly not of the four-hundred-odd he has written to date, nor even of the hundred or so readily available in collections. None of MacLennan's essays has passed into our general literary inheritance with anything like the certain status of C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures," for example. Furthermore, the vast majority of critical comments on MacLennan concern not the essays, but the novels. The prime example, in my view, of the critical foot-shifting to which Hyman refers can be found in the two separate sections, one dealing with MacLennan's novels, the other with his essays in the Literary History of Canada. Hugo McPherson concludes, after surveying the novels and duly pointing out their strengths and weaknesses, that it is the essays which remain "perhaps the truest image of Hugh MacLennan's gifts."3 On the other hand, Brandon Conron claims after treating the essays that ''they will probably always take second place to his fiction'' (italics mine).4 These two views, expressed in 1965, follow hard on the heels of Edmund Wilson's well-known praise of MacLennan in 0 Canada5 - a fact which may in part at least account for 3 some critical wavering. Quite inexplicable, however , is the fact that while MacLennan's views have been frequently solicited on national and international political and social events, they have rarely been invited on his views of art and theories of literature. While it is an overstatement to conclude...