Each Man’s Son: The Daemon of Hope and Imagination

Each Man's Son: The Daemon ofHope and Imagination DAVID J. DOOLEY Viewed from the perspective perhaps most frequently taken, Each Man's Son is a novel about a man who is a failure as a human being. The main reason for this is clearly apparent; it is the ancient curse of Calvinism, attacked so forcefully by MacLennan in his prefatory note, which blights the life of Daniel Ainslie as it blights the lives of all the descendants of the Highlanders who first came to Cape Breton. For Douglas Jones, the stern Presbyterian God whom MacLennan portrays is the embodiment of that European idealism which rejects the world as it is. The more men and women strive to live up to such ideals, the more they must reject their actual lives. But the Christianity of Ainslie's world is only one of the foundations of his faith; the other is science, whether pure or applied. Behind both of these stands a reliance on the law and not love, on reason and not intuition, on the will and not impulse. Ainslie can see no reason why he should not take Alan MacNeil from his mother, since he can offer him so much more in the way of education, money, and prestige. But in his callous disregard of the boy's feelings and the mother's feelings, he helps drive the girl into another man's arms and consequently to her death - when her broken-down prizefighter husband returns and kills both her and the other man. Given Ainslie's values, the tragedy was inevitable; moreover , it was symbolically prefigured and implicit in the lives of his parents - the father, who had no education besides what he learned from the Bible and Bacon's Essays (science and religion again), and the mother, sacrificed to the father's drive to get an education for his sons. I In much the same way, Margaret Atwood sees Ainslie's father as a perfect Grandfather 66 figure, rigid and domineering; she quotes a passage from the novel in evidence: The face of his father flashed before his eyes. How could he ever hope to win the kind of struggle such a father had bred into his son? The old Calvinist had preached that life was a constant struggle against evil, and his son had believed him. At the same time he had preached that failure was a sin. Now the man who had been the boy must ask, How could a successful man be sinless, or a sinless man successful? Ainslie's thoughts go round and round in such circles, even though he no longer believes in God. But in spite of his questioning, he chooses Alan as his surrogate son and tries to inflict his own values upon him, in a way which recalls his father's behaviour. He gets his son in the end, but it is a dubious victory, bought at the price of blood: it is clear that the child, having witnessed a double murder, will be warped in some essential way.2 For George Woodcock, it is not even a dubious victory; it is a tragedy, a tragedy almost grotesquely inevitable. As in his earlier works, MacLennan cannot avoid seeing life in terms of Greek tragedy; here the mechanics of a classical destiny grind too heavily on the human weaknesses of the characters. Yet this incorporation of destiny, even though it means a weakening of the sense of human freedom, is curiously appropriate in a novel permeated by Calvinist guilt. Fear always seems to overtop hope in the hearts of Cape Bretoners; this little society is bound together by faith in its own damnation.3 These readings appear to be so clearly in harmony with MacLennan's prologue that the only main point of discussion might be whether the thesis of the book is satisfactorily dramatised in characters and action. Edmund Wilson argues that it is not, in a discussion so wrongheaded that it takes on a classic quality: Another book by Hugh MacLennan that does not seem to me successful is Each Man's Son (1951). Here one guesses that it must have occurred to him that he ought to...