At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  The people of Vancouver are expansive. They take to the sea. It was not long before we were cruising in the sounds, the fjords and among the islands near the city, listening to the news of the weather fronts on the radio and running for quieter water. And there, as we penetrated these deep inlets, mile after mile, the wildness of the country, the sense of animal freedom, was brought home. Forest everywhere, forest at every turn, forest behind forest, mountain behind mountain; in some new stretch of water, sea and forest would seem to have been laughing together as we came in, and to have fallen into a watchful and not well-intentioned silence, as we dodged the floating timber and forest jetsam.

  Here and there, on some steep slope, the forest was gashed, and that was a symbol of Canada—the felled trees, the logs rolling into the water. One saw the man with the ax, one heard the scream of the power saw and the weird sound of a tree falling. Here the logs were just waste matter, but on other rivers we would see those orderly rafts, floating silently, like fast geometrical propositions, from the forest to the mills or to the harbors. The log rafts, the log piles of Canada give to the inexhaustible savage landscape the first heartening signs of craftsmanship and the skills of civilization.

  This coast begins to have that sunny sophistication which is typical of the Pacific from Valparaíso and Lima to Monterey and San Francisco. The new villas have the California originality, and one can see, in the luxuriance of Victoria and Vancouver, why the people exuberantly dream that this is the site of a new Mediterranean civilization. So it may become—though I would have thought that the Scandinavian is the more likely prospect in this latitude. But for the present there remains the fact that eighty miles up the Fraser River, and once one is out of the rich farmlands, Nature begins to flower. Through the terrible gulches of this savage river, in 1857, the disheartened miners came down to found Vancouver; the old military trail is now a fantastic motorway, yet one still feels the warning in rock and tree that one feels all over Canada when one turns north: do not go too far. In a step you will be in total solitude, where leaves turn into eyes. And as you sit comfortably among the businessmen in a Vancouver club, watching ships load wheat for China and Europe and the timber that supplies half the pulp of the Free World, your mind wanders off northward and you ask what people are doing a hundred, two hundred miles away.

  The answer is peculiar. To begin with there are very few people. But there is an odd official statistic claiming that Canadians make more telephone calls than any other people on earth. Up there, then, they are talking. Stay for a few days in a forest cabin and you will remember only two sounds: the scampering of chipmunks on the roof and the daylong shrilling of the party line that links the solitaries of the wilderness or a forest. The Canadian is not a talkative man: the shrilling bell asserts that, among the billions of trees, a human being exists. Possibly alone.

  All this is far less true of the cheerful, gregarious, outward-looking life of cities like Vancouver. At one time British Columbia might have drifted into the American Union; this is now impossible, and no one in British Columbia would want it. But there is a close affinity of temperament with the people of the American Pacific. They share what South Americans call “the Pacific sadness,” which is not sadness at all but a sense of having got to the limit you dreamed of. You are in heaven at last. Now what do you do? You dream no longer, which is a loss; so you enact dreams. Hence the exuberance, the fantasy. (It is not surprising that Vancouver, its dreams lost, should have taken over the illicit drug trade from Montreal, though perhaps that is the old tradition of the China trade.)

  Steady-minded people from Toronto and Ottawa enjoy this breath of heaven for a while; then suddenly they get worried about education and their children. A solemn Nova Scotian in Winnipeg said to me, “In Calgary it’s all hoopla; in British Columbia they’re mad.” They pack up and return East, for education does better in purgatory than in heaven. Something like this occurs in California too. But if British Columbia has its taste for gorgeous boosters, for lotus-eating and pleasure, it takes pleasure more strenuously. The escape is to the sea, to the camp and to those overwhelming Canadian passions—skiing and fishing. Canadians are men of the open air. When Nature relents in the struggle she soothes them with sports. The Canadians use their dry, sunny winters as skillfully as the Swiss use theirs.

  There is a brotherly bickering between Vancouver and San Francisco, farther south: a shopkeeper said, “My American brother-in-law is killing himself. He has a hardware business and he’s always there from early morning to late at night, every weekday. ‘Why do you do it?’ I ask him. ‘I have to do it because my competitors do it. I would soon be out of business if I didn’t.’ You see, he can’t stop chasing the dollar. It isn’t that he needs it; it isn’t that he is greedy either. The fact is, he enjoys making money; it excites him to make it and spend it. It doesn’t excite us quite so much. We don’t live to work. We want to get some fishing in.”

  Here we were on the fringe of the perpetual Canadian question, which gets more and more complicated the more one looks at it. Personal relationships across the border are excellent. They are made so by Nature itself; life in each province runs on a natural north-south axis, within Canada and outside. That is the way trade goes. But historically and politically Canada is a confederation of regions running from east to west; on the face of it, Canada is a nation living against its own current. When he looks across the boundary, the Canadian sees the prodigiously wealthy American nation of 180 million people prospering under the simplicity of the American Idea, while he himself, one of a population roughly one-tenth as large, is struggling with the knottiness of the Canadian Conundrum. There is a smile of success on the American face; on the Canadian brow there is a notch of admiration, envy and puzzlement. Looking up from his struggle he feels a mixture of attraction and repulsion about everything in the United States.

  In the euphoria of the postwar boom that ended in 1959, the Canadian felt he was standing up fairly well to the cultural and economic and political alternative that America offers to his life. Since the slump, he has realized how much of his industry and the new mining wealth is in American hands.

  It is often said that he prefers to invest his own wealth abroad rather than in Canada itself; this is a habit of old-style mercantile finance. In the nineteenth century he held out successfully against the doctrine of Manifest Destiny; how is he to hold out now against a peaceful penetration by American business and American ideas that often differ profoundly from his own? He is not American. He is not British (and in Quebec he is not French), for the attachment to Britain is no more than a respectful emotion; nowadays the United States puts in far more capital and takes out more goods than Britain does or ever did. Yet he is enough British, American and French to be lost when he asks himself what a Canadian is.

  In consequence, between the time you board the train at Vancouver and get out of it three or four thousand miles away in Quebec, you will have crossed a continent of doubt. “We are a negative country,” or “We do not know who we are,” such remarks are made right across the continent until one gets to Montreal. There the French Canadian—the Canadien—does know, but chiefly in a rhetorical way, who he is. The doubt sounds bad. But Canadians are proud of their doubt. It is the expression of that deep Scottish caution that is a marked strain in so many of them. In their dilemma they find a certain vanity and, it seemed to me, a strength of the kind that sends down roots slowly.

  Canada (it has been said) is a country held together by two railway termini and four thousand miles of telegraph wire. You get into the train at Vancouver and soon learn what distance means in a country with a small population. On the opening journey to Banff, for miles up the broad yellow Fraser, we were in the comfortable farmland. Hours go by. In the melancholy twilight across the river one sees not the lights of a city but those of an occasional few houses; or a boat tied up by the river at sunset, the loneliest sight in the world. There were few tourists on the train so early in the season; the
passengers were a working crowd. At night, as the climb begins into the Rockies, one is among the trees; in the morning, on the mountains, there are more trees. The names of stations raise hopes. But Rogers is a ruined lumber mill and two or three boarded-up shacks; Beavermouth is a woman’s face looking out of the window of the frame house as she washes clothes; Golden looks like a camp—it’s a scattered township with a frame hotel, a timberyard, hundreds of pale-blue cars. They must have come in from hidden settlements. The trees flicker by; the armies of firs relieved by the stippled poplars, burned by frost, hour after hour. The flickering hurts the eyes. Occasionally one sees two or three elk standing under the firs, senatorial and stupid.

  The train is running beside the coppery, foaming, rocky water of the Kicking Horse River up to the pass that takes the mind back to the Gold Rush tales, and by now the mountain walls are standing out, greenish-gray and naked, snow-slabbed, with their terraces arranged by Nature in dreadful precipices.

  When, later on, one gets out and stands looking at these mountains, one has conflicting sensations. They are noble like massive cathedrals; they are brutal in their mass; they are silent and indifferent as if they were looking through one with empty eyes set in ice and granite above the tree line, and the sky looks clear and cold as the long evening goes on; yet to the imagination they crowd upon one with a sort of inner noise.

  They are less friendly than the Andes—they are grayer; they lack the urbanity and—I may as well say it—the intelligence of the Alps. This is absurd anthropomorphism, I know, but I am thinking of the poverty of human association in the scene and I realize that, in general, Europeans have to be trained to feel the emotion aroused in North Americans by the stupendous North American geography. We lack that feeling for plain scale. I thought of Mackenzie, Fraser and all the others who canoed across Canada and fought their way through these walls. Canada was out of luck again: the passes in the American Rockies were much easier. It was a feat getting the railway through here to Vancouver, and (with national pride driving them) it was as great a feat getting the transcontinental highway through in 1962. It is one of the spectacular rides of the western continent.

  Again and again, the talk on the train is all about settlers, the newness of everything. (It must have been like this in the U.S. West after the 1840s.) The Poles and Italians are admired for going out to the harsh places. The Germans and British are technicians, doctors, and so on. The Americans—who keep to themselves as they do all over the world—are in the oil fields of Alberta. The Dutch? Opinion is unanimous: they are by far the best settlers. I have found this opinion in South America too. The Dutch are patient and unromantic. In Banff I found a young Dutchman working in a bar, and his life story epitomizes everything the immigrant of these days thinks and feels. In Holland he had been a butcher. “I came here five years ago,” he said, “because I was fed up with army service in Indonesia. I chose Canada rather than the United States partly because of the fuss about entering the States—the forms, the questions and all that—but chiefly because there is more scope for the individual in Canada.”

  Canadians often stress this: sometimes they mean that the Canadian is more individual than the American, which is true; at any rate the feeling for uniformity is far less pronounced. At other times they mean that the individual is freer and has a better chance in a country that is still in the stage of being opened up.

  “Wages are not as high in Canada as they are in the States. Life is duller. But living is cheap,” the Dutchman went on. “Everything is very easy. Of course the food is poor, all this canned stuff and no fresh vegetables like you get in Holland, and my wife complains about that. And education is not really good—I mean compared with Holland. My eldest son, who is ten, already suffers from that—no foreign languages. In Europe he would be learning French and German and English as well as his Dutch, and speak them as I do. The youngest is far behind what he would be in our country, but it does not affect him because the Canadian school was his first. They speak English perfectly.”

  “But Canada is supposed to be bilingual,” I said.

  “In theory, yes. In fact, no. Only for the French,” he said, “in spite of all the bilingual notices. I’m sad when I see my children forgetting their Dutch; they speak it only at home and only when their friends are not about. They would be ashamed. You have to swallow things like that. They have a fine open life. They are skiing half the day; we don’t see them till they come home in the evening. Life is very free. In Holland if you are a butcher, as I was, you have to be apprenticed and certificated and it takes years; you are fixed in your trade. But here life is open. You can be anything. Of course there are losses. You wince at the vulgar advertisements on television. Life is perhaps a little dull. It is not gay. I used to go to the south of France every year, and for pleasure and civilization there is nothing to beat that. Still, you get wonderful sun in the winter in the Rockies—people forget the sun and clean dry air of the Canadian winter. It’s healthy. There is wonderful fishing; I have never had such fishing in my life. My family in Rotterdam keep telling me to go back to Holland, but I’ve made my decision, I don’t regret it and I shall stick to it.”

  The Italians, the Germans, and so on, give much the same report. It is always the scope for the individual they stress; though at the top of the tree, the Canadian executive in an American-controlled firm complains of the impersonal efficiency and of a boss whom he does not know and who gives him orders from outside Canada. The same complaint—the complaint of the distant, unknown boss—is heard in the United States, and I conclude that Canada still largely belongs to the opening-up period of development; the United States has passed out of that into the rule of the organization man. The Canadians for the most part live in a world where it is possible to be individual, and individuality is what one notices most about them. Their silences, hesitations, doubts, the strongly individual lines taken by various provinces emphasize this.

  You cross the continental divide. This country is all national park. The site of Banff, within the Banff National Park in the Rockies, is spectacular. The town looks very Scottish, clean, trim. The Bow River flows under its granite bridge as gravely as does the Tweed. The celebrated lakes add to the sense of the Scottish highlands magnified. The Fine Arts School in Banff—Canada’s painters are more notable than its writers—and the excellent Indian museum reflect a sort of Scottish seriousness. Basically Canada is Scottish and French—as one can see in the place names. And the Scottish traits come out in the careful, frugal attitude to money, the strictness of religion, the caution, the tenacity, the sentiment and even the superstitions. The dourness, a certain conceit in virtue, and the protective melancholy one often notices when a Canadian is doing well, are Scottish traits. It is said that Canadians are slow to quarrel, make friends slowly and are less highly strung than Americans. But if they do make friends it is for life—and if they do quarrel their passion is violent. I once asked a Canadian with a Scottish name if Canada might one day join the United States. He went white with rage, turned his back on me and sat muttering with anger. I feared he was going to call out the clans.

  Banff is a playground, unspoiled by commercial vulgarities. It is full of healthy, cheerful young people, and their faces have a northern openness and candor. Their minds are on the ski runs. But I am not a mountain man, and the Rockies impressed me most from a distance, as we got out of them into the prairie, where the country in June is kinder, where tall grass grows, the poplar replaces the firs, and cattle are grazing. One is still over three thousand feet up at Calgary, and the country rolls. The wheat was springing out of the black soil, and at this cheerful city one sees the first signs of great wealth—the wealth of the cattle and oil men. Alberta and part of Saskatchewan float on oil and natural gas. Many a British family who sent a remittance man to these provinces sixty years ago must have some rich relations there—if they could ever be found—though most of them must have finished among the wreckage of colonization. (It is odd that we
Englishmen go to the Americas to look for descendants, whereas Americans and Canadians come to us for ancestors.) Within living memory tens of thousands of settlers moved out of Manitoba, and from farther east, to these provinces, stuck out their early days in holes dug in the earth and covered with sods of turf, and struggled against drought, flood and blizzard. It broke thousands, but cities rose out of the struggle—Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon with its university. And now people no longer fling themselves against Nature with their naked hands.

  No, I have never been much of a mountain man—not, at any rate, since I escaped from Romantic literature. People forget how much the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century have inflated the reputation of the mountain scene and have declared that the plains are monotonous. For myself the Canadian prairie, considered as a sight to the eye and an emotional experience, shares the spell of the Polish and the Russian steppe and has probably already produced people who have much in common. Most of the Dukhobors live in British Columbia, but there are some on the plains. There are also Hutterites. In this landscape you are likely to develop a sensibility to the Unseen and an impenetrable inner life. It is a region made for such sectarians who see homespun visions and who combine the chaotic and primitive injunctions of the Old Testament with Utopian views of society. But what absorbs the eye of the passing traveler is the subtle coloring and texture of the prairie country—those greens turning to madder and yellow, to grays and blues of intricate delicacy—and the land mass itself flowing from fold to fold, from horizon to horizon as the light changes and the wind moves over it. The wild duck fly up from among the prairie flowers and the hidden rivers, for one does not see a great river like the Saskatchewan until one comes suddenly upon it in its wide gully; a human being is no more than a dot of a pencil, a house or an elevator can be seen for an hour as one travels toward it. Look back an hour later and there its shape still stands like a ship one has passed at sea. There is no mist. The only sound is the wind. And the simple meeting of empty sky and lonely earth on the horizon’s circle fills one with exaltation and fear.