Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  He began walking. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s find him.”

  The moment they entered the lounge they heard the radio. A commentator was talking about the evacuation of children from London. Heather still held Paul’s hand. “He’s that old man over there. I’ll get him.”

  Paul stood aloof by the door as she crossed the lounge to speak to the doctor. The gayness of her light gingham dress only heightened the grimness of the mood in the lounge. The men and women sat listening with church faces to the radio, and when they spoke they used whispers. The few Americans present seemed ill at ease. Perhaps they felt what was happening in London as sharply as the Canadians did, they certainly hated Hitler as much, but it was not their war yet. Heather returned with the doctor. He came slowly forward with head bowed, bobbing slightly as he walked. His left hand clasped the lapel of his jacket and Paul saw a brown age-stain behind the knuckles, a tiny tuft of hair protruding from it. Heather introduced them.

  “Would you mind if we talked on the veranda?” Paul said.

  The doctor looked at him suspiciously, dropped his eyes. “If you wish.”

  They walked to the far end of the veranda where they could not hear the radio. The salt air blew up to them with noise from the sea. Heather stood slightly apart and looked at the two men: Paul intense, his face pale and tired but his eyes very bright, balanced easily on the balls of his feet like an athlete on guard. In front of him the doctor stood with a grey face, clipped white moustache and silver hair; as neat as a bird. Yet his eyes looked somehow lost and baffled. Heather thought: how many wars has he seen begin? What was the colour of his hair when the first airplane flew?

  Paul was speaking. “I want you to tell me frankly just what is the matter with Mrs. Methuen.”

  The doctor’s Adam’s apple rose and fell. “She’s a pretty sick woman. She’s been in bed a fortnight now. I’ve been seeing her every day.” An attempt at a smile. “Miss Methuen’s been very good to her.”

  Paul kept his eyes on the old face. “I understand she wants to get up to listen to the radio. Are you permitting her to come downstairs?”

  It seemed to Heather that the doctor had become too old even to be tired. She sensed the suggestion of hostility; but vague, edgeless, like an object stirring behind fog. Old eyes on Paul’s strained face, old face vaguely on guard against it knew not what.

  “Miss Methuen–” The doctor cleared his throat. “I intended to tell your mother she could come down whenever she wished. I forgot. Will you go and tell her?”

  Heather looked from one to the other, then turned and disappeared.

  The doctor shifted away from Paul’s steady gaze and began walking slowly back along the veranda, his eyes apparently counting the cracks in the boards. “I’ll tell you how it is, Mr. Tallard. These women like Mrs. Methuen–they excite very easily. There’s nothing anyone can do about it when they start. Now take yesterday–when she heard the war’d started, she felt a lot better.”

  The doctor reached the door and stepped inside.

  “Are you telling me there’s nothing the matter with her?” Paul said behind him.

  The doctor turned slowly, his face weary and aloof, his remote eyes apparently looking over Paul’s shoulder to the glittering sea, a bird-like dignity enfolding him. “That’s right,” he said, “not a thing.” Without looking back he walked slowly into the lounge.

  The radio was still describing the evacuation of the children, already disinfecting the reality of the war by concentrating on ordinary action and human interest in trivial details. Paul walked across to the desk and asked the number of Mrs. Methuen’s room. Then he went upstairs to find it. When he knocked on her door it was Heather who opened it. He saw them there: mother and daughter. Janet’s eyes black in a pale face, fierce, restless, old.

  “You know Paul, Mummy?”

  Janet’s nod was barely perceptible. “I’m on my way downstairs,” she said.

  Heather faded back toward the window. She sat there frozen, her life in her eyes, watching her mother and Paul. She seemed to behold every action of their hands and flicker of their eye-lashes in slow motion. Janet was stiff and straight, her lips tightly pressed. She was wearing her black dress and stockings and her black beads. A wide-brimmed black hat was on her head. Her eyes were noting the details of Paul’s clothes as though she were pricing them. And Heather sat frozen on the window-ledge, bitterly ashamed not only for her mother but also for herself. At that instant she knew that nothing was the matter with her mother and that nothing ever had been. She knew intuitively that if there had not been a secret part of herself which had welcomed the force of her mother’s will she would have left her weeks ago, even when Janet was prone and apparently unconscious on her bed. She closed her eyes, remembered as if it were yesterday the touch of her mother’s hand on her forehead when she had been a child. In her flesh her mother held her. Flesh of her flesh.

  She felt ashamed of the unworthiness of this scene. The war had started, nations and perhaps civilizations had slid forward for suicide. She and Paul and her mother were part of it. Her mother’s voice said, “You’ll excuse me, I trust. I must hear what Mr. Chamberlain has to say to us.”

  Janet walked stiffly to the door, moving past Paul as if he were someone who had come to serve her. Heather opened her eyes, saw her mother’s straight back, looked away. Then she heard Paul’s voice. It was his usual voice, quiet the way it usually was. But because it was spoken in the presence of her mother it sounded different; shockingly unnatural, but wonderful. “I can tell you what Chamberlain will say, Mrs. Methuen. There’s no need to go downstairs to hear him. He’s going to say he’s sorry, and then he’s going to declare war.”

  Heather saw her mother’s wide hat nod and wheel as she stared at Paul, her fingers tight on her black purse. The old posture, the old expression. Who said that truth will prevail, that mind conquers all things? Force of the turtle, strength of the ostrich, sureness in the right!

  “If you’ll excuse me…” Janet’s voice crisp and British. “I wasn’t aware that my wishes were anyone’s business but my own.” She glanced around at Heather. “Come along. We’ve no time to waste.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “Heather will stay here for the moment.” A pause. “I think you will, too, Mrs. Methuen.”

  Janet lifted her hand to her cheek as if Paul had slapped it. Her mouth opened and closed, and Heather watched her in ashamed fascination. She had seen Yardley crumble before her mother’s nervousness, General Methuen break because of his pity for her, McQueen nod and smile at almost anything she said. Now she waited for her mother to strike, somehow out of her instinct to find where Paul was vulnerable.

  But it was Paul who spoke. “If you feel as you do because we were married without your knowledge, I understand.” He paused as he watched her. “But I don’t think that’s why you feel as you do.”

  Janet continued to stare at him, her fingers clasping and unclasping on her purse. Paul took a step backward, held out his hand to Heather and drew her beside him.

  “Heather and I have been waiting all our lives. Now there’s hardly any time left for us. Tomorrow I’m going to enlist.” Janet opened her mouth but his eyes held her silent. “I don’t want to do it. Everything that’s in me cries out against the waste of the only talent I’ve ever had. But I’ve got to go. And when I’m gone, I’d like to know that you and Heather are together.”

  Janet’s tongue moistened her lips and once again she opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. Paul and Heather moved past her to the door. “We’re going down to the lounge now,” Paul said. “Think over what I’ve said. Then I hope you’ll join us.”

  They went out the door, Heather not daring to look at her mother again. They reached the lounge and found empty chairs in a corner away from the radio. She felt Paul’s hand close over her own. The crowd at the radio was bending forward, listening intently. Instead of Chamberlain, the slow, hesitant, sad voice of the King began to speak.


  Before he had finished, Janet appeared and they saw her, coming carefully down to the foot of the stairs. She walked calmly toward their corner and joined them without a word. Paul rose and she took the place he had left. The King’s voice went on, they listened in silence, and after a while it ended. The lounge was so still they heard the laugh of a child a hundred yards away on the beach.

  FIFTY-THREE

  In that autumn of 1939 the countryside in Canada had never seemed more tranquil. There was golden weather. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick the moose came out of the forests on October nights and stood in silhouette against the moon-paths that crossed solitary lakes. In Ontario people looked across the water from their old river-towns, and seeing the lights of moving cars in the United States, remembered again that they lived on a frontier that was more a link than a division. On the prairies the combines rolled up the wheat, increasing the surplus in the granaries until it was hard to believe there were enough human mouths in the world to eat it all. In British Columbia the logs came down the rivers; people separated by mountains, plains and an ocean remembered English hamlets, pictured them under bombs, themselves islanded between snow-peaks and the Pacific. The Saint Lawrence, flowing past the old parishes, enfolding the Île d’Orléans and broadening out in the sweep to Tadoussac, passed in sight of forests that flamed with the autumn of 1939: scarlet of rock maples, gold of beeches, heavy green of spruce and fir. Only in the far north on the tundra was the usual process of life abruptly fractured. Prospectors hearing on their portable radios that the world they had left was at war could stand the solitude no longer; they broke camp, walked or paddled hundreds of miles southward, were flown out by bush-pilots, appeared before recruiting stations in Edmonton, Battleford, Brandon, in the nearest organized towns they could find, and faded into the army.

  But quietly, without bands or parades, while advertisers warmed up the slogans of 1914, the country moved into history as into matter-of-fact. Engineers went out along the rivers and railroad tracks: shipyards for the Maritimes, biggest aluminum plant in the world for the Saguenay, factories for all the power they could breed out of the rivers, from Ontario tanks, trucks, Bren guns, shells and bullets, from the West food for the Empire, from Edmonton aircraft flying surveyors to the Alaska boundary, on the coast naval bases and more factories, from all the provinces men and airfields for the United Nations.

  Then, even as the two race-legends woke again remembering ancient enmities, there woke with them also the felt knowledge that together they had fought and survived one great war they had never made and that now they had entered another; that for nearly a hundred years the nation had been spread out on the top half of the continent over the power-house of the United States and still was there; that even if the legends were like oil and alcohol in the same bottle, the bottle had not been broken yet. And almost grudgingly, out of the instinct to do what was necessary, the country took the first irrevocable steps toward becoming herself, knowing against her will that she was not unique but like all the others, alone with history, with science, with the future.

  AFTERWORD

  BY ROBERT KROETSCH

  Memory is important to the survival and health of a nation just as it is to the survival and health of an individual. Some novels are a version of memory. Two Solitudes is just such a novel, and in it a number of characters confront the idea of shared or cultural memory and the consequences of that sharing.

  The library is a major means of memory in our society. It is the French-Canadian, Athanase Tallard, who is most involved in the library and, consequently, in memory and the need to preserve or change memory. He is the first writer figure we encounter in the book; he wants to write about religion and its place in French-Canadian society. But he never gets the book written. Many years after his death it is his son, Paul, who becomes a novelist and a memory-shaper. At the end of the novel we realize that Paul, like Hugh MacLennan himself, will both learn from the library and contribute to its effect.

  Among the books behind the novel’s immediate story is Homer’s Odyssey. One of the characters most at ease in the novel is Captain John Yardley, the Nova Scotian sailor who has travelled the world. Like Odysseus, he seeks home and is much delayed. He has many adventures, but finally dies, amidst new ironies, at home in Halifax.

  Paul Tallard too has learned from Homer. “When I was a kid, in the old library in Saint-Marc, I used to read stories from the Odyssey in a book of my father’s.”

  Two Solitudes is in a way about the education of the artist. Paul, as part of his education, becomes a sailor. He even sails to Greece in his long journey. Like Homer’s Telemachus, he seeks his father. Like Odysseus, he journeys towards the Penelope figure, his future wife Heather Methuen.

  The theme of family is a shaping force in the novel. MacLennan anticipates the great shift in the shape of the Canadian family that was to take place in the latter half of the twentieth century. Athanase marries twice. His first wife is the saint-like Marie-Adèle, the mother of Marius. Marius is the purist son, the dreamer of an absolute. “He kept repeating the same things over and over…. A pure race, a pure language, larger families, no more connection with the English, no interference from foreigners, a greater clerical control over everything–with these conditions Quebec will reach the millennium.”

  Kathleen, Tallard’s second wife, is of Irish background and from a more fluid level of society. She is the mother of Tallard’s second son, Paul. Athanase Tallard, in his marriages, acts out the beginning of social change and the attendant narrative of memory.

  He also acts out the movement from the village life of Saint-Marc to the streets of Montreal. Canadian literature finds a primary model, a template, in the small town, a model that informs the fiction of writers as various as Stephen Leacock, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, and Sinclair Ross. That tradition gives us the characteristics that we find in MacLennan’s parish of Saint-Marc. In Saint-Marc we have the general store that is the place of gossip and control. There, familiarity is the rule; strangers are not to be trusted. The future itself is not to be trusted. Characters like Polycarpe Drouin embody traditional values and the longing to make memory static. We first see the blacksmith, Frenette, “shooting ducks from his blind in the marsh near the river.” Ironically, that river, ever present but also ever in motion, will lead to his being replaced by a dam and a factory.

  MacLennan was one of the first Canadian writers to portray the complexities of the Canadian city. His account of life in Montreal vividly announces the change from the village. He is also obsessed with Canadian geography and its transformations. The novel begins and ends with eloquent tributes to the geography that is, quite literally, the bedrock of Canada. But on that huge foundation, Canadians create an urban society.

  In the city, gossip gives way to transaction. Money becomes the medium. The simple hierarchy of the village is replaced by an elaborate world of contending patterns of acquisition and dominance. Sir Rupert Irons and Huntly McQueen express themselves in boardrooms and offices, not in village stores and fields. The river in Montreal is a far cry from the stream that shapes Tallard’s sense of place. Women in the city become ornaments, signs of success. Men conceal their pasts instead of living in them. Significantly, the powerful men in Montreal do not have libraries or read books. Memory for them is simply another commodity, to be adapted to the profit principle.

  The “two solitudes” of the novel are many. One of them is that between the French and the English of Canada. But another is the space between village and city. And another is the space between male and female.

  For a contemporary reader, the women in Two Solitudes in a number of ways steal the show. Kathleen Tallard, the young wife seeking a significance for her life, acts out the rebellion and secrecy and pain that are necessary to that accomplishment. Captain Yardley’s daughter Janet, a Nova Scotian married into a powerful Montreal clan, must strive against the insignificance that is ascribed to her by the powerful. Her two daughters, like the two sons
of Tallard, act out differing possibilities. Daphne, through willed complicity, marries the almost inhuman and frightening figure, the new man who emerges out of the First World War. Heather, by defiance, by fleeing family and going to New York on her own, by secretly marrying the outcast figure Paul, makes her way into the possibility of another version of the new.

  A major theme in the novel is that, hauntingly, of war and peace. MacLennan plays out his narrative on the immense world stage that exists between the last years of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War. The international echoes the contentions within the individual; the individual equally internalizes the long contention between peace and war.

  Another of the two solitudes in the novel is that between Canada and the United States. MacLennan remembers his fellow Nova Scotian, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who created the tricky and always attractive New Englander, the Yankee called Sam Slick. Heather, at the end of MacLennan’s novel, embraces her new life, her marriage, on a beach in New England. She and Paul and Heather’s mother, Janet, and the ghosts of Montreal’s Anglo elite meet and contend and find compromise in a fashionable American resort.

  But it is the act of writing itself that moves the novel towards its conclusion. Paul Tallard decides to become a novelist.

  He has studied in Europe. He tries to write about Europe. It is Heather who, after looking at a draft of the story, says to him, “Paul, why didn’t you set the scene in Canada?”

  At first he tries to defend his decision. “Because no world trends begin here…. A book about Canada–it would be like writing of the past century!”

  Then, as he wonders if that is really true, he debates with himself; at once fearful and excited, he makes a decision:

  But Canada was a country that no one knew…. The background would have to be created from scratch if his story was to become intelligible. He could afford to take nothing for granted. He would have to build the stage and props for his play, and then write the play itself.