The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  The Channel Shore

  Charles Bruce

  Formac Publishing Company Limited

  Halifax

  The Channel Shore Introduction By Andy Wainwright

  In August 1946, having written either a short story or a group of stories he titled “On the North Shore,” which was about characters called Anna, Grant, Hazel, and Chance, Charles Bruce sent this work off to the fiction editor at The Atlantic Monthly Press. This short fiction was not accepted for publication, but the fiction editor, impresed by his creation of setting and character, asked Bruce if he had ever considered writing a novel. In fact, between early 1941 and early 1944 Bruce had produced the 355-page, typed manuscript of a novel entitled Currie Head. He now wrote to The Atlantic editor that this material was not “essentially autobiographical,” but was about “the cumulative influence of the place and the people on one person [Stan Currie] ...” There is no record of response to Bruce’s letter, but despite some additional correspondence with Harper’s magazine in the spring of 1947 about Currie Head, Bruce does not seem to have decided that the story of Stan Currie was too closely modelled upon his own life and, in particular, upon his close relationship with his father, Will Bruce.

  In January 1949, a New York literary agent received from Bruce the manuscript of a novel called The Channel Shore, once more about the Chedabucto Bay region of Guysborough County in eastern Nova Scotia. Two things are evident, however: this manuscript does not in any way seem to have been a rewrite of Currie Head, but neither does it appear to have much connection to the edition of The Channel Shore that was eventually published by Macmillan of Canada in 1954.

  Bruce indicated to the American literary agent that he wanted to do some rewriting of his novel, but in the next eighteen months he decided on Canadian publication, as in late 1950 he sent the revised manuscript to Lorne Pierce at Ryerson Press. Pierce’s response, while friendly, suggested to Bruce that “virtually a complete rewrite job” was necessary. His duties as General Superintendent of the Canadian Press (which he had become in 1946) were very demanding, but over the next four years he wrote an entirely new version of The Channel Shore: The Channel Shore was written in two- and three- and four- hour spurts. Any evening when I thought, around eight o’clock, that I could see three or four reasonably uninterrupted hours ahead of me, I would get to work on it. Nothing was ever done before eight because a good deal of TCS coincided with the growth of a small boy [his youngest son, Harvey] ... I would assemble the tools and stretch out on the chesterfield. None [of the novel] was written in any position except the horizontal.

  This time Bruce was right when he asserted that “The story is not autobiographical, nor are the people in it intended to represent actual individuals.” He had instead expanded on the characters of Anna, Grant, Hazel, and Chance (who became Anse) and moved away from the growth of one individual to focus on the influence of place on its inhabitants and the relationship of place and people through time, the extraordinary connections between past and present in human lives. Some important parts of Currie Head had been set away from the sea and landscape of eastern Nova Scotia, but Bruce’s vision in the new novel centered almost entirely upon what he called the Channel Shore and the people who lived there. In his epigraph to the novel, Bruce wrote:

  You will not find the Channel Shore, so named or in exact geogra - phy, on any map or chart. But there is a province of Nova Scotia. Two provinces perhaps. A land of hills and fields and woods and running water. And the image of that land, sensuous with the sound of seas and voices, in those who live or have lived here: a country of the mind, the remembering blood. If it is necessary to locate the shore, consider these twin lands: and take the edge of any country, or the coast of either one.

  The critical and reader response to The Channel Shore in 1954 was very positive indeed. Bruce received letters from all over Canada that praised his depiction of rural life. The novel was on the short list for the Governor-General’s Award, along with Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel, but lost out to Igor Gouzenko’s spy revelations in The Fall of a Titan. Poet and critic Fred Cogswell wrote, “The Channel Shore is one of the finest interpretations of Canadian life to be produced in this country ... Charles Bruce sees, in acts of sympathy and understanding, roots that creep through community life ... If the roots are not sufficiently strong to justify optimism, they are at least enough to justify faith.” There seemed to be some disagreement among reviewers as to the contribution of the poetic quality of Bruce’s prose to the action of the novel; it is interesting, though, that there seems to have been no comparison made between The Channel Shore and that other remarkable and poetic novel about rural life in Nova Scotia — Ernest Buckler’s highly-praised The Mountain and the Valley, with its emphasis on generations, place and time.

  Unlike Butler, Bruce does not focus on a single personality, nor does he isolate his various families from the community in the way that Buckler has the Canaan family live in the valley. Nor, for Bruce, is the individual ever alone in time, as past, present, and future, with their common communal experience, contribute to one another in beneficial ways. How does Bruce, in his novel, portray the interrelationship of these seemingly separate territories of time? How, for instance, is the future anything but what merely follows from the present? The answers lie in the short divisions of time within the fiction.

  The short, opening section of the novel is set in 1945 when a character named Bill Graham, through a chance meeting with a man from the shore, Anse Gordon, has “the sensation of moving at the same moment in separate areas of space and time.” Graham recalls the summer of 1919 when he was a boy on holiday on the Shore and the “shape of the land, the color of the moving water. The words, gestures and the feel of people.” Bruce then relates the story of Anse Gordon; his sister, Anna; Hazel McKee; and Grant Marshall in the summer and fall of 1919. Because of their own personalities and the vagaries of fate, Anse, Anna, Hazel, and Grant are bound together forever, though the two women are dead by 1921 and Anse leaves the Shore for twenty-seven years. Their connection rests essentially on two aspects of the plot: the birth of a son to Hazel and the by-then-absent Anse, and the subsequent, brief marriage of Hazel to Grant so that the boy, Alan is raised by Grant Marshall. But Bruce’s central theme of the individual thread as part of the “skein of time” reveals that Anse can never leave the Shore for good, nor can Grant and Alan forge their relationship without the influence of those who have gone before them and those others who are around them still.

  As for the future, Bruce re-introduces Bill Graham and Anse in 1945 before moving ahead in Shore time from 1919 to the winter of 1933-34. Here, Grant has been married to Renie Fraser for a number of years, and they have a daughter, Margaret. On the surface, there seems to be only harmony in the Marshall household, but Grant’s inability to deal openly with the past, and so provide for an honestly- lived present and future, disturbs his relationship with his son. However, what prevails is the wisdom — both innate and acquired — of Anse’s mother, Josie, and Hazel’s father, Richard, and their shared recognition that” yesterday, today and tomorrow [are] part of a continuing whole [that] put things in balance.” Grant and Alan do not have to work out their lives alone.

  In 1946, Bill Graham decides to return to the Shore, and so his memories merge with the present life of Alan, Margaret, Grant, and Anse. The latter, too, returns, revelling in the apparent power he still has to disturb the everyday rhythms of local existence. But, in attempting to claim Alan, to insist that a man alone can control a community woven together by place and time, Anse fails to see the strength of Shore life, the love among people that is the result of event and circumstance through the generations, “a thing deeper and more telling than
the accident of blood.”

  In a talk he gave the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire in 1955, Charles Bruce emphasized the nature of his artistic connection to his Guysborough heritage:

  Through a sense of relationship to past generations [there is] a feeling of kinship to generations yet to come ... Is it not where kinship has failed, or has never been, that all hostilities come to monstrous flower? ... Surely [creative writing] can hope to stir to life that kinship ... only if it carries in it the gleam of truth glimsed through lived experience.

  Today, Bruce’s vision of the Channel Shore remains as fresh and vivid as it was thirty years ago because despite changes in the world, “the only real history of any country ... cross-roads history” has not been eradicated. Indeed, Bruce would insist that it is the essence of humanity that can be found at such cross-roads, and the larger world would do well to remember this.

  Charles Bruce died in 1971. His fiction is not mentioned in the definitive Literary History of Canada, and his poetry, for which he won the Governor-General’s Award in 1951, no longer appears in anthologies of Canadian poets. However, this reprinting of The Channel Shore, the appearance elsewhere of his book of linked short stories, The Township of Time, and the publication of his selected poems in 1984, should help readers and critics to become aware of his proper and deserved status in Canadian literature.

  People of the Shore

  Stewart and Josie Gordon Anse, their son Anna, their daughter

  Richard and Eva McKee Hazel, their daughter Joe, their son

  James and Jane Marshall Grant, their nephew Fred and Will, their sons

  Renie (Fraser) Marshall Margaret, daughter of Renie and Grant Alan . ..

  Curries, Grahams, Neills, Freemans, Wilmots, Katens, Lairds, Kinsmans, Stileses, Clancys, Lisles ...

  1919 - 1945

  Bill Graham was standing on a garden chair, on the grass behind Buckingham Palace, when the Channel Shore came back to him.

  He had walked up the Mall from Canadian Military Head - quarters in Cockspur Street, presented his pass, and drifted through the building to join the sixteen hundred men of many nationalities who were gathered there on the palace lawn.

  For something to do, really.

  It was late May, nineteen hundred and forty-five. A bright day, soft with spring; and the war in Europe over. Across London, young men who were lucky enough to be in England talked at the bars of crowded clubs, sat in cinemas, walked with girls at Kew and Richmond, engaged themselves in the many amenities of friendship and entertainment and sexual pursuit which had made the city familiar, a second home to them, through the time of war.

  But Bill was thirty-nine years old, on the doorstep of middle age. He had spent the last four years as a conducting officer, in Public Relations. His work had not been without its excitements and dangers; it was, he supposed, about as good as anyone could expect who had come down to nineteen-forty with no military experience and until that time no interest in it. But it was not as good as having faced the sea-wall at Dieppe or crossed the Moro. It was not as good as having stood hip-deep in water among the polders of the Scheldt.

  Something of this, combined with a private apprehension that was not new to him, denied to Bill the relaxed sense of achievement he imagined others were feeling. It was not a sense of failure or inadequacy; more a feeling that adequacy was not enough, a lack of personal enthusiasm and the lift of youth.

  And so, out of a kind of impatient boredom, he had volunteered to write a colour piece, for a war correspondent with other things to do, on the royal garden party for Commonwealth prisoners of war. for anything but Anse Gordon, and today and the immediate tomorrow, had never come close.

  In the public bar of the Antelope he turned toward him.

  Anse said, “Beer’ll do,” and Bill remembered that drinking had not been one of the things they held against him. He ordered cider for himself and carried the glasses to a bench by the wall.

  He considered wryly that Anse had not lost his taciturnity. Neither of them had yet mentioned the Channel Shore. A question waited on his tongue. He left it there, looking forward to the answer with excitement, while his mind reached back for the start of the story: and found himself and Dan on the shore road, in the dark of a Saturday night.

  The night was soft, dark with cloud, and cooling off in the way it has even in the hot months along that northern coast. Himself and Dan, dropping back on the way home from Katen’s, falling back to see who walked behind them.

  Dan saying, low-toned: “Anse Gordon and Hazel McKee. Mrs. McKee won’t like that.”

  And, in answer to Bill’s question: “Oh, you know. Because. Anse is what they call wild ...” A touch of admiration in Dan’s voice. “And the Gordons are Catholics.”

  Another night, then, weeks later, when the story of Anse and Hazel was known and already fading, and the story of Grant Marshall and Anna Gordon just beginning, and before the tales were joined. Again himself and Dan. The long walk down the road ahead of the straggling crowd, homeward bound on a Sunday night from the Methodist church at Leeds. The sound of talk and laughter, and buggy-wheels away between the hills. Two boys, reluctant to leave the night and the road, walking on past the house, past Uncle Frank’s house toward the next small square of yellow lamplight.

  You picked it up again there, with darkness blurring the figures by Gordons’ gate. The sound of voices known and liked. Sensed movement. A girl speaking.

  “All right; good night, Grant.” Laughter then, low and pleased. “Take care of yourself.”

  A man’s voice: “Good night . . . Good night, Anna.”

  That was the way it was. It was all like that, the parts of the story you could take in your hand and say, I saw this ... I heard this. Small words and private gestures, the look on a face, “Well, for God’s sake,” Anse said, casually. “A Graham. Dan, is it? No—it must be little Bill.”

  Afterward, as they walked together through the fringe of Belgravia toward a pub called the Antelope, Bill had the sensation of moving at the same moment in separate areas of space and time. He found almost unbelievable the clearness with which it was coming back to him. And equally incredible the fact that it was years since it had come to mind at all, except in wisps of memory vague and brief, seen dimly through the closer past and the present and disregarded.

  Across the years of study and work and love, of small successes and slow failures, of brief delights and long irritations, he saw the Shore again. Saw it as he had first seen it that summer of nineteen hundred and nineteen, when Andrew Graham had sent him there to stay with relatives. With Uncle Frank and Aunt Stell and Dan and Edith. To see the country he had sprung from.

  The railway station at the little port of Copeland, the county town. And then the drive west in the mail-team: Steep Brook, falling down its wooded hill, and the shoal water marching in, white on green and tan, under the bluffs at Millersville. The cavernous rock-sided gulch at Forester’s Pond. Blue-flags in the swamps by Mars Lake. Again the curling water, slow and dignified and deadly, on the reefs at Katen’s Rocks. The little cape, with the inlet tucked into its side, that gave a name to Currie Head.

  Currie Head. Home . . . But the road went on. A church on the hill at Leeds, where it turned inland for a little, and the branch road there, slanting off to Riverside. A blacksmith’s shop (now perhaps a garage) and two general stores at Findlay’s Bridge. And across the Channel from first to last the blue lift of the Islands, fencing the shore from the sea that runs east to France, south to the Caribbean and southeast to the hump of Brazil.

  That was the shape of it, the shape of road, fields, woods and water. But more than this, the Shore was people. It was flesh and blood in buggies on the road, swinging scythes in side-hill fields, tramping summer woods, braced to the jolt of oars on rolling water, that gave it colour . . . movement . . . life. It was flesh and blood, moved by its rooted hungers, b
y hate, fear, love and the branch and bloom of them—by caution, daring, malice, sacrifice, that formed the story with which Anse Gordon’s name was forever linked. Bill pulled himself back to the present, this present Anse Gordon. It startled him to think that Anse must be close to fifty now. Time had touched him with indifferent fingers. Worry, concern a voice saying, “I’m going away too, Bill. A voice saying, Well, she’s dead, that’s all. A voice saying, No, Uncle James, I’m staying here. A voice saying, finally, It’s like this, Bill—we’re going home tomorrow ...

  The shape of the land, the colour of moving water. The words, the gestures and the feel of people.

  Bill turned to Anse, indifferently tasting beer on the bench beside him. An almost childish excitement quickened his heart as he asked his question:

  “Well, Anse—and what’s going on at The Head?”

  PART ONE

  Summer - Fall 1919 HAZEL

  ANSE

  GRANT

  ANNA

  1

  Except in households headed by stern men like James Marshall, the women are usually the critics of family behaviour along the Channel Shore.

  Eva McKee sat by the north windows of her kitchen with hands folded in her lap. Her face was placid and her glance concerned, apparently, with nothing but the slope of the field, the flowers in her garden, a buggy passing on the road. But her thoughts were inward. Now and then she turned to watch her daughter, busy with the dishes left from Sunday dinner. She rose, finally, reached down an apron from the clothes-pole, tied it around the grey satin she had worn to Sunday School, and crossed the kitchen. In the downstairs bedroom Richard was lying down. His door was closed. There was a chance now to speak and she had made up her mind to doShe took a wet plate from her daughter’s hand and dried it with the dishcloth. She said casually, “Who was that outside the house last night, Hazel?”