My role as editor and publisher in 1978 involved working with Elspeth Cameron on her excellent selection of essays The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan. In the creation of that book, Hugh was a model of co-operation, especially in the vital business of selection, where he gave Elspeth a free hand. And here a word of tribute to Elspeth is in order. In compiling the anthology I found her very professional biography, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life (1981) to be invaluable; all MacLennan admirers are in her debt. And I remember fondly the unprofessional tears she shed at Hugh’s funeral reception.
Hugh’s sense of democracy — of liking and respecting ordinary people — comes through to me most strongly in Each Man’s Son (which I found the most moving of his books, perhaps best read to the sound of distant bagpipes). There he writes with affection about the poor doomed men who will live confined, crippled lives underground in the mines until a lung disease or an accident at the coal face gets them. In the same book, you find Dr. Ainslie expressing that same sort of respect for unlettered Newfoundlanders who can somehow navigate their dories “like seals” through the fog. And of course you see it in the essay “A Disquisition on Elmer” — which takes us into sixteenth-century religious politics by way of Hugh’s real-life encounter with Mr. Elmer Z. Stebbins, the trigger-happy barfly in Arizona who once shot a man “through the ass — sideways” in a fashion that, as Mr. Stebbins put it, “kind of stung him up a bit.” It’s obvious that Hugh — the product of the most patrician of educations in those days of greater social stratification — cared about and enjoyed these people.
In planning the publication of The Other Side it became clear to us that we had to fight a general perception of Hugh MacLennan as a writer of what his Oriel College predecessor, Mathew Arnold, would have called “high seriousness,” and nothing but. His novels had suffered the fate of being taught in high schools and universities with the usual diligence, so it was a challenge to plant in the public’s mind the idea of reading this serious, sober, even sombre purveyor of important themes for fun and entertainment. We worked at it by creating a carefully different title — The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan — and by running an unexpectedly relaxed image on the cover. Hugh happily went along with this, dressing casually and perching somewhat uncomfortably on a stool in Peter Paterson’s photographic studio until I, crouching beneath the lights, coaxed a smile to his face by recounting, I believe, a string of true poaching stories from the Scottish Highlands, the setting of one of his finest essays, “Scotchman’s Return.” (That wonderful 1958 piece, by the way, ends with a real-life version of his imagined bird’s eye view of Canada coast to coast in Barometer Rising: as his trans-Atlantic plane descended through the clouds, “I saw beside the Bras d’Or lake the tiny speck which was the house where my mother and sister at that very moment lay asleep.”)
The 1978 selection of essays succeeded in restoring a balanced view of Hugh MacLennan as a writer, with William French in the Globe and Mail, for example, noting: “MacLennan’s work as an essayist has been overshadowed by his reputation as a novelist, but that’s an injustice that should be corrected by The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan.” The book met with general critical acclaim, not least from David Helwig who was moved to review it in the following terms: “MacLennan is one of those writers whose personal goodness and decency shine through all his works. His generosity of spirit is such that after a couple hours spent with one of his books, the world seems a better place.”
The reviewers’ response to Voices in Time, his last novel, was less unanimous. I edited the book, so am perhaps too close to it to be properly objective. But I remember being delighted when Elspeth Cameron, in a quote for the jacket, hailed it as “Hugh MacLennan’s greatest novel.” My own line on the jacket, that the book is, “in every sense, the work of a lifetime,” was undeniably true. Working on the anthology revealed to me how right from the start — from his Princeton Ph.D. thesis about the decline of the Roman Empire as seen in one small Egyptian outpost — Hugh was fascinated, perhaps obsessed, by what I call “the descent into barbarism.” He was keenly conscious at all times of the skull beneath the skin of civilization.
How could European civilization produce the Passchendaele of his impressionable boyhood? (Note the bitter line in Two Solitudes about the returning soldiers parading through Montreal: “Some had stood up to their necks in cold water stained with blood and human excrement while they waited for hours to crawl a few yards closer to Passchendaele.”) How could it produce the masses of aimless, shoeless, shuffling Kulaks he saw with his own eyes on a visit to Russia in the thirties, and described in The Watch That Ends the Night? How could it produce the total economic breakdown of the Depression that left his generation unwanted and mostly unemployable, lining up for handouts at Ben’s? And above all how could German civilization — the civilization of his beloved Haydn, and Beethoven, and Goethe, and so many others — produce Hitler and his gang? Clearly there lies the most striking example of the descent into barbarism of our time, and so it is natural that he chose to examine the issue from the point of view of the “good German,” Conrad Dehmel, while looking at our society’s descent into an Orwellian future as a parallel. Let us hope that he was wrong.
The creation of Voices in Time took thirteen long years. During the last part of that period my role was to encourage him and to assure him that there was still an eager audience out there for his work. Like all the first-class writers of my professional acquaintance he was unsure of the current book’s quality as he worked on it. He was also aware that in the Canadian literary firmament his star was waning as newer planets soared into view. There was even a technical problem, related in Harry Bruce’s Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers (2009):
When Hugh MacLennan was in his seventies and completing his last novel, Voices in Time, his elderly Underwood died of old age and overwork. With that black, noisy, anachronistic typewriting contraption — whose shape was as familiar to the elderly as Model T Fords had once been — MacLennan had earned his reputation as Canada’s first internationally acclaimed novelist and had written no fewer than five winners of Governor General’s Awards. Now, the machine was just a mess of keys, spools, wheels, and other useless parts. It was too old to repair or replace, and he was too old to switch to another brand. How could he possibly finish Voices in Time?
His alarmed publisher, Douglas Gibson, asked Peter Gzowski, the host of CBC Radio’s This Country in the Morning to appeal to his listeners for old Underwoods in working order. Gzowski was the most popular on-air personality in the country. He was “Mr. Canada,” and to enable a pioneer of modern Canadian literature to finish his last novel, dozens of Gzowski fans now rummaged through their attics for dusty Underwoods of a certain age. MacLennan accepted the machine that best suited him and, sure enough, Voices in Time reached bookstores in 1980. . . . Without Gibson, Gzowski, and the Canadians who answered their request, this story could never have had a satisfying ending. They recognized the breakdown of a certain old man’s certain old typewriter as a national emergency.
In the teeth of considerable domestic difficulties and health problems, Hugh worked away at the novel, until when he delivered it to me — complete — he said, “My brain is tired.”
That wintry Montreal day when he walked through the snow in his overcoat and beret, an old man delivering his last manuscript, I was at the Château Versailles. About a dozen prominent Canadian authors making up the executive committee of the Writers’ Union — people like June Callwood, Rudy Wiebe, and Jack Hodgins — were meeting there, and I was on hand to give a publisher’s advice. I persuaded Hugh that he should go in and say hello. Being Hugh, he was reluctant to intrude, but I insisted, and he went in with me, very shyly. And everyone in the room stood up and applauded. They knew what Hugh MacLennan the pioneer had done for Canadian writing, blazing the trail for the writers who followed.
On the train back from Montreal I read the novel, which, I must record, was
not especially well typed. But I read it with mounting excitement and called him right away to tell him how much I liked the work. My editorial role was minor, involving few major strategic shifts. My chief contribution, in fact, was to suggest that the line “voices in time” leapt out from page thirty-six as an ideal book title. On the tactical side, when I went through line by line suggesting, as editors do, that an extra adjective here would make this clearer, or perhaps the paragraph should be split there, he was the consummate professional. I should note that the rule is unvarying: the less experienced writers are the most defensive in the editorial process, insisting that not a hair of their baby’s head, not a comma, be touched.
With the editing process neatly accomplished, the book came out in the fall of 1980. The author’s promotional tour produced a chorus of delighted responses from all our sales and publicity people who had to look after him, in Ottawa or Winnipeg or wherever: “What a wonderful man.” The response is not always so enthusiastic when major figures have to be shepherded through a harrowing day of interviews, but Hugh was invariably pleasant and polite to those he encountered in the mad circus of a publicity tour.
When I left my role as Macmillan’s publisher at the beginning of 1986 to set up my own editorial imprint at McClelland & Stewart, Hugh was one of the first authors to volunteer to come with me. He had a highly developed sense of loyalty that was central to his character. To my deep gratitude he signed up with me on my new venture, undertaking to write his memoirs for me, continuing to introduce me to his friends as simply “my publisher,” and asking me to go to Vancouver in 1986 to accept his award from the Canadian Booksellers Association in recognition of his lifetime contribution to Canadian readers.
He never completed the memoirs. I’m certain that they would have been a marvellous piece of work if they had married his novelist’s skills with his touch as an essayist and brought his historian’s perspective (what I’ve called “the long view”) to a life that spanned every decade in the turbulent twentieth century.
And so — faute de mieux — by arrangement with Shirley Woods, his literary executor, I became his anthologist, putting together the book called Hugh MacLennan’s Best.
Here I put on the anthologist’s hat. They say that no man is a hero to his valet. The literary equivalent must surely be that no author is a hero to his anthologist. Perhaps a professor never feels quite the same about an admired author once he or she starts to teach that author’s work. But having read all of Hugh MacLennan’s work I found myself forced to select from an embarrassment of riches. In fact, I can reveal here that the original galley proof selection was a full one hundred pages longer than the final book, requiring further painful cutting. And at the end of the process I was an even greater admirer of his skills as a writer.
When I read his work start to finish, some themes emerged. The obsession with the descent into barbarism is one that I’ve discussed. His constant concern as a “writer engagé” with politics and the big issues, and his ability to take the long view of them, is another, as is his genuine interest in ordinary people.
Another theme worth investigating is how deeply war shaped MacLennan and how so much of his best writing deals with physical conflict. I’m speaking here of war scenes such as the Halifax explosion in Barometer Rising (in historical reality, the largest man-made explosion till Hiroshima, so massive that it not only shook young Hugh in Halifax, it broke windows in Truro almost one hundred kilometers away, and, as Alistair MacLeod reports, could be heard hundreds of miles away in Cape Breton). Then we have the naval engagements witnessed by Matt McCunn in The Precipice, Jerome Martell’s account of his horrible deeds with a bayonet and the high drama inside Alan Ainslie’s crippled bomber in The Return of the Sphinx, followed by the unforgettable screams on the ground below, “Neunzig Kinder hier getötet. Neunzig Kinder.” (“Ninety children killed here.”)
But there are other, more intimate scenes of combat outside war zones. Consider, for example, Young Tallard’s back-street scuffle with the soldier, or the famous essay about hockey, “Fury on Ice,” or, especially, in Each Man’s Son, the heroic Archie McNeil’s last fight in the sweltering New Jersey arena. All of them demonstrate what a fine, exciting writer MacLennan is when dealing with scenes of physical action, which he no doubt saw as Homeric combat. The critic Elizabeth Waterston, in Rapt in Plaid, has drawn interesting parallels between the outbreaks of fierce physical violence in Hugh’s novels and those of John Buchan. It’s conceivable that his old athletic skills are put to good use here, perhaps allowing him to write from what in kinetics they call “muscle memory.” Certainly he can write about boxing or tennis or wood chopping with an enviable physicality that is convincing and infectious — at least to an old boxer and tennis player and even wood-chopping man like me.
I was struck once again by what a good writer he is about place. An American reviewer of the anthology in the Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote that “his sense of place is so strong the reader is tempted to pull out an atlas and follow the character’s progress on a map.” And from that magical opening of Two Solitudes where you’ll recall he follows the St. Lawrence, the sword wrenched from the stone, down to the sea, his work impressed me again and again with his almost unmatched ability as an essayist to make, in John Oughton’s words, “history and geography come dramatically alive.” That is why so much of Rivers of Canada is to be found in the anthology, along with excerpts from his pen sketches in The Colour of Canada, because no one else, in my experience, can do it better. The voyageurs whose history puts grade five kids to sleep every year across the country are very different from the flesh and blood heroes that Hugh MacLennan creates with such impressive effect, as they bind the country together with birchbark, spruce gum, and sweat.
Another constant that struck me is the effectiveness of his humour. We see it in his fiction, with Aunt Maria in Barometer Rising disapproving of Mrs. Taylor. (“She’s dreadful. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to take part in the war.”) Or in Jumping Rorie Macnair in Each Man’s Son being scared out of his wits by old Doctor Mackenzie threatening him with a roomful of poisons, or in George Stewart’s crossbow-inventing father in The Watch That Ends the Night. And we find it in his essays, where he takes pleasure in eccentric Oxford dons, like the one whose opening conversational gambit with strangers was “Whenever I see a naked woman I faint. Do you?”
Near the end of his life, speaking to the Writers’ Union of Canada in Kingston, giving the lecture named after his old friend Margaret Laurence, I recall he reported with delight a recent encounter with a boy who said, “You’re eighty years old and that’s an awful thing. What does it feel like to know that you’ll soon be dead?”
Finally, I was struck as an anthologist by the consistency of his tone. All of his books — fiction and non-fiction — are written by the same civilized, widely educated, informed, tolerant mind. I believe David Helwig was right when he noted that MacLennan’s personal goodness and decency shine though all his works.
I tried to make the anthology a tribute, because I believe that the selections demonstrate that Hugh MacLennan was an excellent writer with an astonishing range. I see him as a heavyweight novelist and an equally fine essayist who could write, apparently, with ease and grace about everything under the sun. He can take us to the torture chambers of the Gestapo, the sunny courts of Wimbledon, or to a New Brunswick lumber camp with a murderer on the loose in the dark. He can make us see the yellow foam above the Fraser in flood at Hell’s Gate, hear the wee pipers in Hudson’s Bay Governor Simpson’s canoe “blowing his ears off,” feel the impact of Jerome Martell’s bayonet in the German soldier’s throat, or smell the scent of new-mown hay in St. Marc in Two Solitudes.
The anthology is also intended to entice readers into Hugh MacLennan’s world, where I hope they will find they want to stay and roam. Because I believe the writing is strong, and will survive. In fact, I see Hugh MacLennan as a major writer in a long
and honourable tradition whose work has been underestimated in recent years for simple generational reasons. It was time, as the world works, for the old order to change, for the council of elders to be replaced. But “decency,” the consistent tone in his novels and his essays, “generosity of spirit,” and the ability to make the world seem a better place are qualities with lasting appeal. And there’s something more here. An artist. Not for nothing did Robert Kroetsch call Hugh MacLennan “the cartographer of our dreams.”
A final note. Hugh’s funeral was held at the McGill Chapel. I had the honour to be one of the four speakers who paid tribute to his life. One of the others, a nice but disorganized man, cast his voluminous notes aside, and spoke as the spirit moved him. He caught sight of Mordecai Richler, sitting quietly in the middle of the church, there to pay his respects to another senior writer. Mordecai, a shy man, found himself enthusiastically singled out for unwelcome attention, his moment in the spotlight ending with the words, “Keep up the good work, Mordecai!”
After we filed out of the chapel that day, I, as a non-Montrealer, found myself standing alone in the foyer, thinking sadly about Hugh. I was glad to be approached by a fine man who told me that he had come to the funeral in the hope of hearing a talk like mine, which had summarized Hugh’s career brilliantly and paid eloquent tribute to his special qualities. I was delighted to hear this objective assessment by a well spoken and clearly intelligent stranger, and I shuffled modestly and looked at my shoes, and said that Hugh had meant a lot to me.
There was a two-beat pause, then my new friend cleared his throat and said, “Ah, I’ve just completed a novel, and I wonder if I could send it along to you at McClelland & Stewart for your consideration.”
Stories About Storytellers Page 5
