The Novels of Hugh MacLennan

The Novels of Hugh MacLennan ROBERT D. CHAMBERS In many ways I count myself lucky to have lived in Canada when I did. In the next generation it will become clear that the ground here was very good for a writer in the last eighteen years. Suddenly the thought occurs to me that the only countries where really major themes have been tackled during this time have been Canada and South Africa. Only the occasional Canadian book has received a large overseas public, but quite a few of them last. They seem to adhere. When Hugh MacLennan put these words into a letter in 1958, he had just finished writing The Watch That Ends The Night. He was looking back across twenty years of work, content that his time and his place had yielded rich and enduring materials for the Canadian writer. The sequence of his novels - Barometer Rising (1941), Two Solitudes (1945), The Precipice (1948), Each Man's Son (1951), and The Watch That Ends The Night (1959) - testifies to the fertile range of opportunities that a Canadian novelist could grasp in this century. I Opportunities accompanied, however, by difficulties . As MacLennan himself has pointed out, the Canada of literature has been a largely unmapped and uncharted land. Older place names - New York, London, Rome - provide writers with a set of useful literary ciphers; no such immediate connotations attach to Halifax, Montreal, or Toronto. Trafalgar Square, St. Peter's, and Fifth Avenue live in a thousand books, but what of Barrington Street, St. Joseph's, ]ournal of Canadian Studies and Bay? MacLennan's first hurdle was the problem of background: When I first thought of writing this novel [Barometer Rising] Canada was virtually an uncharacterized country. It seemed to me then that if our literature was to be anything but purely regional, it must be directed to at least two audiences . One was the Canadian public, which took the Canadian scene for granted but had never defined its particular essence. The other was the international public, which had never thought about Canada at all, and knew nothing whatever about us.1 The outsider must be told much that he did not know before; the insider reacquainted with what he has long known, but made to see it in a new way. When Paul Tallard, the young hero of Two Solitudes, contemplates his first book, the problems of language and background demand early solution: But because it used the English and French languages, a Canadian book would have to take its place in the English and French traditions. Both traditions were so mature they had become almost decadent, while Canada herself was still raw. Besides, there was the question of background. As Paul considered the matter, he realized that his readers' ignorance of the essential Canadian clashes and values presented him with a unique problem. The background would have to be created from scratch if his story was to become intelligible . He could afford to take nothing for granted. He would have to build the stage and props for his play, and then write the play itself.2 This willingness to start from scratch, to assume nothing and provide all, is the initial fact to grasp about MacLennan's fiction. It explains why students of Canadian history and society turn to his books for a "sense of period". The flexibility of the novel form provided MacLennan with the chance to be "something of a geographer , an historian and a sociologist'',3 and he 3 welcomed the opportunity. No other Canadian novels capture such a wealth of social documentation , with the result that they have been variously interpreted, as allegories of emergent Canadian nationality (George Woodcock), or Canadian variations on a basic theme of Puritan Calvinism (Roy Daniells), or successive stages in a revelation of Canadian consciousness (Hugo MoPherson) .4 MacLennan's novels thus look back to the more ample canvases of Thackeray and Tolstoy. In his books, character is shaped not primarily by inner-directed impulses, but by the play and interplay of those historic forces which sweep across Canadian life. If occasionally his people become puppet-like stereotypes, they are often memorable representatives of that elusive abstraction called "the...