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Reviewed by:
  • Sir Andrew Macphail: The Life and Legacy of a Canadian Man of Letters
  • Edward MacDonald
Sir Andrew Macphail: The Life and Legacy of a Canadian Man of Letters. Ian Ross Robertson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. Pp. 448, $49.95

In a sense this meticulous and well-considered biography bookends Ian Ross Robertson’s academic career. Back in 1974, when Canadian intellectual history was waxing on the strength of Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), Robertson’s doctoral dissertation examined Sir Andrew Macphail as a social critic. Three decades later, Robertson has returned to this somewhat neglected figure, perhaps the best Canadian embodiment of that lost archetype, the man of letters. [End Page 576]

Born in 1860s rural Prince Edward Island, Macphail moved to Montreal, where he became a medical doctor and the first professor of the history of medicine at McGill University. Although he ‘tried his hand at almost every type of literary activity’ (231), Macphail made his reputation as an editor and essayist in the pre–Great War period. In the pages of the influential University Magazine, which he founded, edited, and helped fund, Macphail ‘articulated a philosophy of political and social conservatism whose pivotal components were imperialism and attachment to a traditional rural way of life’ (281). His imperialism, expressed in familial rather than economic terms, urged a greater role for Canada within the British Empire, and his rural vision of self-reliant, family-based farms reacted against the manifest evils of urban industrialism. His later years were dogged by ill health and disillusionment at current trends, yet produced two of his most enduring works: a controversial Official History of the Canadian medical services during the Great War and The Master’s Wife, his posthumously published memoir of life in the rural Island community of his youth. There is, in fact, a whole chapter on The Master’s Wife, examining its connection to Macphail’s social thought, its literary merit, and its continuing influence on Prince Edward Islanders’ sense of their own history and identity.

Although Robertson pointedly acknowledges the diversity of Macphail’s activities, there are two main strands to his biography: Macphail the turn-of-the-century man of letters, situated at Canada’s leading university in Canada’s leading city, and Macphail the chronicler, celebrator, and interpreter of Prince Edward Island’s traditional rural culture. In Robertson’s estimation, the latter is the key to the former: ‘On all matters, including his imperialism, he displayed an extraordinarily consistent conservatism that was firmly rooted in the soil of Prince Edward Island’ (281).

Robertson employs a formidable arsenal of sources, chief among them Macphail’s own papers and published writings, and Robertson’s own encyclopedic grasp of Prince Edward Island history. He writes in a lean and muscular prose that Macphail, the consummate stylist, would probably have endorsed. Macphail might also approve Robertson’s focus on his ideas rather than his persona. One comes away with little sense of Macphail’s interior life. Robertson is reluctant to speculate on the impact on Macphail of his beloved wife’s untimely death. An attempted assassination, which permanently damaged Macphail’s health, gets one paragraph. The paradox of a man who experimented with crops, but wrote, ‘Machinery is fatal to good farming’ (202) goes unexplored, while Macphail’s refusal to install telephone, radio, washer, [End Page 577] electricity, or even a pump (he used a bucket and well) at his home in Orwell is merely noted as evidence of his consistent anti-modernism.

Robertson clearly admires Macphail, though he never fawns on his subject. Nor is he an apologist for Macphail’s views, some of which – such as his trenchant, ‘separate spheres’ anti-feminism – have drawn the ire of modern commentators. Robertson does not judge; he explains. He takes a similar approach to Macphail’s lapses as a historian of Canada’s wartime medical service, carefully citing modern disclosures that Macphail routinely disguised his own opinions as unnamed sources.

As Robertson observes, it was not just Macphail’s ideas, but his artistry, the ‘vigour, wit, clarity, and topicality’ of...

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