Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  Present-day photograph of 1575 Summerhill Avenue, a 1950s-vintage apartment building where MacLennan lived for most of his life. He also lived at 1178 Mountain Street, a street named after Bishop Mountain but today incorrectly called rue de la Montagne. That building has been demolished.

  The next academic year I signed up for MacLennan’s course in great English prose writings, which took us from Francis Bacon to Boswell’s Life of Johnson to the middle of the twentieth century. Conrad, Joyce, and Hemingway were on our reading list and MacLennan, ever aware of important contemporaries, took us on byways into Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (he admired Waugh’s writing greatly and thought that the invention of evocative names like Basil Seal, Guy Crouchback, “Boy” Mulcaster, and Anthony Blanche was the work of genius), and Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope. But, at the same time, MacLennan was curiously neutral about the great issues of modernism in twentieth-century writing. Although he had lived in Oxford in the crucial (for literature) late 1920s and early 1930s and had travelled on the Continent, he seems to have skirted Paris, that great seat of all things modernist. In that he was not unlike Frank Scott, who had also spent time in Oxord at a slightly earlier period and appears to have been insulated from the modernist “contagion.” Was it something about Oxford, one wonders, so steeped in its classicism that it was immune to the raucous free-for-all of modernism?

  After I graduated from McGill, I kept in touch with MacLennan, dropping in on his classes from time to time, which seemed to please him. He remained helpful and encouraging in every way, writing letters of support whenever I needed them. When I dropped in on him in his office, – strangely located on a half landing in the Arts Building, to let him know that I was leaving Montreal for Ottawa, he reached to his book shelf and brought down a Polish translation of Return of the Sphinx and the measure of his friendship is caught in the inscription he wrote in it. Now it is my turn, in this small way, to record my own admiration for an extraordinary man and his work.

  MacLennan’s inscription in the Polish translation of Return of the Sphinx, a copy of which he gave to this editor in 1972, with my name misspelled!

  INTRODUCTION

  When Hugh MacLennan finally began to come to grips with the idea that was to become the novel Voices in Time, he had been nursing various ideas for several years, giving them a semblance of real existence by sketching tentative outlines. When he got down to the task of giving it shape and substance, MacLennan, then in his middle sixties, was at the peak of his maturity. He was also at that critical stage in an individual’s life when what was to be accomplished already lay behind; what would be an elderly novelist’s envoi became a prolonged labour of love that would take almost a decade to make its way into print and carried MacLennan through the Biblical allotment of three score and ten into retirement and the disappointments of the final stage of his life. But I do not wish to put too grim a construct on those troubling and telltale years. MacLennan, although wounded and not fully recovered from the poor critical reception of his previous novel, The Return of the Sphinx, could look back at a remarkable literary life marked by distinction and generous public admiration and recognition. Honours and awards had flowed generously in his direction. From early election to the Royal Society, to an unprecedented five Governor General’s Awards for his writing – three for his fiction and two for his essays – to a baker’s dozen of honorary degrees from some of the most prestigious universities, to an appointment to the Order of Canada, MacLennan could bask in the warm glow that must come with the knowledge that one has attained great distinction in one’s endeavours. (Elspeth Cameron, in her accomplished biography of MacLennan,1 gives us a much more detailed and panoramic sweep through this crucial, unquiet, and closing period of MacLennan’s life.)

  MacLennan, like so many older colleagues and contemporaries, had been buffeted, bedeviled, and bewildered by the virulent antics of student discontent, possibly fueled by the outbreak of student violence in Europe (France in 1968 in particular). Its expression in Montreal was often if not led then prompted by radicalized younger faculty and resulted in banner waving, chanting “McGill français”2 at the university’s Roddick Gates, and the sacking and burning of the computer facilities at neighbouring Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University. MacLennan found himself profoundly disturbed by what must have seemed to be an assault by ignorant armies against which the centre could not hold. Like so many of his fellow Montreal residents – the extremist nationalism and violence of terrorist groups3 and their cells was almost exclusively confined to Montreal – MacLennan had to contend with a sense of ongoing crisis brought about by the escalating terrorism of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) which, from the middle 1960s had engaged in a campaign of random violence.4 For MacLennan and many others these outbursts of political extremism were an aberration in a democratic society such as Canada, evidence of a serious malaise in the body politic that heralded the disintegration of traditional societal order and the eventual collapse of history. The times brought back recollections5 of Europe in the grip of Nazi thuggery, with torch-lit marches, burning of synagogues, and orchestrated chaos leading to the Second World War. History then and in the 1970s was sketching the future that would become Voices in Time.

  Why the preoccupation with history? MacLennan had been schooled in history from his days as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford’s Oriel College, where he immersed himself in the great classical texts of pre-Christian Greek and Roman civilization. His copies of Tacitus, Demosthenes, Aristotle, and Thucydides, in the venerable Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis editions, survive and show MacLennan’s annotations in a tiny hand in the margins. His doctoral dissertation at Princeton took as its subject the study of Oxyrhynchus, a Roman colony in Egypt that suffered collapse and utter decline, whose societal difficulties MacLennan had studied for the lessons they had for the present. It was no accident that from his first published novel, Barometer Rising (1941) – admittedly after having been prompted by his wife to explore Canadian themes – through Two Solitudes (1945) and The Watch that Ends the Night (1959), MacLennan had played his characters against the tapestried background of historical event. It was natural, therefore, that his valedictory work, Voices in Time (1980), would be about the angst of history lost.

  The cover of the first issue of Parti Pris, a radical little magazine which began to appear in 1963 and served as a vehicle for much of the nationalist discourse that animated separatist sentiment. It featured some of the most prominent writers and intellectuals in separatist circles in Québec.

  “From Revolt to Revolution,” the lead article in the first issue of October 1963 of Parti Pris, launches a lament about Québec’s church-driven and priest-run history. Not surprisingly it holds up the revolutionary spirit of the FLQ as the alternative to what it describes as the emmerdement of Québec society.

  Page I 113 from MacLennan’s copy of Thucydidis [:] Historiae, volume I, showing the careful marginal notations that characterize all his classical texts.

  An example, on Oriel College writing paper, of MacLennan’s meticulous working notes. Found among other papers in his copy of Thucydides. MacLennan’s notes refer to Thucydides’ account of the invasion of Attica and the attempt by Lesbos to leave the Athenian alliance and join Sparta.

  During the period when Voices in Time was gestating, MacLennan’s situation was changing. When he embarked upon writing Voices, MacLennan enjoyed great standing in the world of Canadian letters and was seen as a wise and uncannily prescient observer of Canadian life, on one occasion outguessing all the political commentators and media pundits on the outcome of an election. But the literary stage in Canada had welcomed new players on the scene and MacLennan’s vision of fiction as a repository of cultural history was being displaced by the work of a new cohort of writers with a different set of fictional interests and a very different perspective on life. A generation of extremely accomplished women writers had arisen in Canada and MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Mordecai
Richler, and others of the male tribe were having to make way for the Margaret Atwoods, the Margaret Laurences, the Alice Munros, and the Marian Engels of this new wave. A major shift was taking place in Canadian writing and Voices in Time would be its victim in public and critical perception. No longer were conflicts of ideology, the growing pains of nationhood, or the tensions between founding races and founding cultures of prime importance or concern. The new vogue had to do with relations between individuals rather than between societies – the empowerment of the person in full cry.

  It is no accident that Voices in Time opens on a picture of defeat – history itself has been defeated as a result of a cataclysmic event that has all but obliterated the tangible evidence of past civilized life, leaving only shards of memory lodged in the minds of aging human relics who are reluctant and apprehensive keepers of humanity’s record.

  Enter John Wellfleet, who is both voice and memory in the novel and, as some reviewers have suggested (perhaps unkindly), is also MacLennan himself, caught up in nostalgia and what is visible in the rear-view mirror. (MacLennan was at this time in his early seventies and John Wellfleet is seventy-five.) The opening scenes reveal a novel of considerable complexity, which advances by a kind of stutter step: its time frames belong to different individuals and the architect – MacLennan – has built many rooms whose narratives are so interwoven as to make one house. The owner of this house of memory is John Wellfleet, who ushers us into an other-worldly setting where he is living out his days, on sufferance from the governing Bureaucracy, in a retirement refuge on the periphery of a ruined city that has been all but obliterated by the “Destructions” visited upon it by some kind of anarchist/terrorist act intent on expunging not only a great city and its cultural institutions but civilization itself. Wellfleet is approached via telephone (called an “instrument”) by Andre Gervais, who has discovered a box of archival material he has connected with Wellfleet’s family and whose contents he seeks help in “deciphering.” Gervais, as part of a new generation – Gervais and Wellfleet are fifty years apart in age – is essentially ignorant, or perhaps innocent, of the past but is intrigued by what that lost civilization might have been. He approaches an initially reluctant Wellfleet for help in understanding the past, something that is frowned upon by the authorities.

  To reinforce the sense of a blank, abandoned setting, MacLennan creates a physical environment and intellectual context that are depressingly sterile. The effect is reminiscent of the totalitarian atmosphere that pervades Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and some of the samizdat writing that had begun to trickle out of the Soviet Union in the 1970s. The language, with its “destructions,” “Metros,” and “Third Bureaucracies,” brings to mind the euphemistic newspeak of sinister utopias. This deliberate emasculation of language and terminology is particularly chilling, and its lack of identifiable referents hints at a willed facelessness. The Third Bureaucracy, in effect the government, is invisible and identified with no party or ideology, and the impression one gets is that some kind of technocracy is running things. These anonymous and purposely ill-defined entities lurk in and around the ruins of equally unidentified conglomerates now called “Metros,” a name perhaps borrowed by MacLennan from the popular term for the subway system in Montreal. The deurbanization suggested in the novel echoes the extreme experiments in social transformation attempted by revolutionary regimes such as the Marxist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which exterminated the country’s elites and depopulated its cities in a grotesque experiment in authoritarian socio-political engineering. MacLennan knew the literature of failed utopias and was attuned to the vagaries of history – past and current. It is understandable that in reflecting upon the social turbulence and political troubles that had been plaguing Quebec, particularly Montreal, MacLennan would search his memory for plausible parallels in his own experience. For him that experience, as for so many of his generation, was the social unrest and collapse of values that befell Europe after the First World War and gave rise to the abusive and militaristic regimes of Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy and Spain. MacLennan had learned a good deal about political extremism and social dislocation during those years in the early 1930s when, as a vacationing student from Oxford University, he had toured Europe and roomed with a German family. Now, witnessing the terror of bombs in mail boxes, the chanting, sloganeering of agitated mobs, the clamorous invasion of classrooms by gangs of radical students, and the seeming powerlessness of the authorities, MacLennan must have felt that the future was in doubt. So, writing in the 1970s, he searches the 1930s for clues and projects a cautionary vision that reaches into the twenty-first century and, in crafting a commentary on what is, ostensibly, a Canadian situation, draws on sources from the period of Nazi Germany.

  For MacLennan, Germany is a tragic touchstone. He had come to admire the great accomplishments of German civilization, whose literature had entered his sensibility through Rainer Maria Rilke, whose poetry had given MacLennan the title for his key novel Two Solitudes, to Goethe, whose slightly mystical lines preface this novel, to Theodor Mommsen, the great scholar of Roman antiquities whose work was much lauded by classicists at Oxford. Germany, with its civilized, disciplined, and accomplished history, served MacLennan as a paradigm of a great society gone mightily wrong.

  Voices is a series of what MacLennan has chosen to call, charmingly, “stories,” each one a version of the past recalled by one of the main characters in the book, with Wellfleet acting as the uber-narrator. It is not clear what can or should be made of those elements in the novel that point at MacLennan’s own demons. What is one to make of the fact that Wellfleet is not given, properly speaking, a father and that his mother, Stephanie Wellfleet, has a pivotal role in uncovering the Wellfleet family’s history? MacLennan had a difficult relationship with his own father, who appears to have been distant and aloof,6 almost non-existent in positive emotional terms, while his mother was a key influence in his life, loving and supportive. Instead of a father figure or a grim authority figure, MacLennan gives Wellfleet a step-father, Conrad Dehmel, affectionately known as Uncle Conrad, whose tragic story becomes a hugely important feature of the novel.7 Uncle Conrad is an ex-Gestapo officer haunted by his betrayal (under torture) of his Jewish fiancée and her father. His “exposure” and assassination by a deluded holocaust survivor, brought about through the agency of Timothy Wellfleet, a media personality much given to sensational news-making and a cousin of John Wellfleet, forms the dramatic core of Voices in Time and provides the opportunity for the principal members of the novel’s cast of characters to tell their stories. What emerges is a complex and sophisticated novel, bravely touted as MacLennan’s “greatest novel” on its dust jacket but which received a strange mixture of praise and dismissal from reviewers.

  That there would be significant disagreement in the review press was to be expected – MacLennan had stepped outside the usual patterns of narrative practices in his fiction. The reviews that appeared in the two major Toronto dailies were particularly unfriendly. Unwilling to give MacLennan credit for an ambitious, complex, and thoughtful novel, they dismissed it as an old-fashioned exercise in nostalgia. Other critics, however, understood the profound intentions of MacLennan’s difficult, lonely message, and praised the work for its international outreach and its positive tone in spite of a subject matter laced with the sadness of lost worlds and past memories.

  For francophone critics, MacLennan’s work had always been a challenge, if only because of what they perceived to be an imperfect understanding of French Canada and the francophone society of Montreal. There was a tendency to see him, perhaps unfairly, as a kind of survenant anglais cocooned at a great anglophone university, resident on the western, therefore English, side of Montreal, and with only a smattering of French after many years residence in Quebec. There is, as a consequence, a certain nervousness about MacLennan’s understanding of French-Canadian nationalism. (Ironically it is the excesses of that nationalism that run
as a dark undercurrent in Voices in Time.) Consequently we have to expect that the reception of MacLennan’s novels by French-Canadian readers and critics would differ substantially from that of anglophone Canada. Jacques Brazeau, an academic critic who wrote an important essay on the perception of French Canada in the work of Hugh MacLennan, captures the feeling of many francophones that MacLennan may not have been sufficiently exposed to French-Canadian life to have been able to completely understand the aspirations of that society. Brazeau wrote: