The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  Robert D. Chambers, in the same issue of Canadian Literature as MacLulich's article, gets closer to the novel's core. He sees MacLennan as delving into his vague and wavering religious belief. If “the A-bomb drop on Hiroshima…confirmed the appalling possibility of a scientific daemon dethroning the traditional God of compassion and love,” all that might be left was “[g]reed, sex and violence…and…a kind of horrified vision of a world without any redeeming impulse.”35 Chambers points to the notion of the buried self found in the novel, mainly in Bruce, whose near-death experience in the war brings his “buried self” to the surface and in Marcia Stapleton who moves from three divorces, through psychoanalysis36 to become a Roman Catholic nurse. Chambers seems convinced by Marcia's conversion, but not entirely with Lucy's forgiveness of Stephen.

  Barbara Pell's analysis of religion in The Precipice37 makes reference to the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich's theories in The Courage to Be (1952).38 He argues that “autonomy left to its own devices leads to increasing emptiness and – since there cannot be a vacuum even in the spiritual realm – it finally becomes imbued with demonically destructive forces.”39 To counter this, Tillich suggests not an escape from the vacuum,40 but a deepening of autonomy (aloneness) until a new spiritual transcendence breaks through. Pell uses this idea to understand MacLennan's “transitional” novel. She sees Lucy at the end of the novel as representing “what the church means when it talks of Grace.”41 (It is as if MacLennan has transmuted Nora Kaye's physical grace as a ballerina into Lucy's spiritual grace.) Pell acknowledges that MacLennan neither defines this religious dilemma, nor its solution, clearly. She finds the novel and its central theme “too obviously structured and schematic,”42 and, like most critics, she finds The Precipice a failure.43

  Yet Pell draws our attention to the way MacLennan awkwardly fumbles his way into existential meaninglessness and his even more awkward struggle to save himself from it and to locate meaning somewhere, somehow. It is the “superfluous”44 character Bruce Fraser, MacLennan's writer-intellectual-teacher alter ego, who best exemplifies this fumbling and struggling. Bruce knowingly “makes himself bare, bleak, and self-reliant again” when he reasons his way out of declaring his love for Lucy in a cold cerebral philosophical syllogism: “Lucy was married. Therefore it was impossible to fall in love with her. Therefore he did not love her. Therefore he must think of something else” (196). After Bruce's late sexual initiation – a one-night stand initiated by Marcia in New York – he voices MacLennan's deepest conflict: “he was not sure whether he had crossed the frontier of a deeper mystery or merely entered the first of a long series of empty rooms” (206). Similarly, Stephen says, “The loneliness is all there is,” and listening to a jazz trio in a bar at three in the morning, senses “the vastness of the continental loneliness” (298).

  This angst, this despair (realized in his next novel Each Man's Son45 and more clearly in the following novel The Watch that Ends the Night) has a great deal in common with the existential writers emerging in Europe. Ten years before The Precipice, Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nauseé46 dramatized what came to be loosely called existentialism. Man must bear the intolerable burden of the freedom to act without religious (or any other) certainty, which meant making choices in a vacuum. English translations of Albert Camus's The Stranger (1942) and Sartre's play No Exit (1944) soon followed. MacLennan did not know these works. Yet his depiction of the stripping away of all man's supports until he is alone with his terror and his anxiety, is very close indeed to the thinking of these existentialists. Hovering just offstage for MacLennan's characters in the depths of despair is the spectre of suicide.47

  In a Maclean's article written right after he finished The Precipice, MacLennan explored his (and Bruce's) spiritual dilemma. “Are We a Godless People?” revealed MacLennan's confusion about spiritual matters.48 He knew he wasn't Christian – especially Calvinist – in any conventional sense. What were his “beliefs?” Even his readers were confused. Although he had far more responses by mail and by telephone to this article than to anything else he had written to date, these responses consisted of “widely divergent views.”49 Each correspondent or caller believed MacLennan had reflected his or her view. In his article, he traces the decline of religion in western society, concluding that there is now a “fracture with two thousand years of religious tradition.”50 As in The Precipice, he fumbles awkwardly and inconsistently to make sense of the human condition. He wills what is not yet convincing to him. The resolution (or “salvation”) he will eventually find arises from the heart, from the irrational connection between human beings through intense feeling. It is, he will find, an inexplicable mystery.51 In The Precipice this message is veiled, obscure, unfathomable, though the note is sounded.

  The Precipice won the Governor General's Award for fiction. Yet that was little cause for celebration as there was no financial reward to accompany it. Sales of the novel were not nearly what those of Two Solitudes had been and MacLennan believed that the three-month lapse between the novel's release by his Canadian publisher Collins and its American publication by Duell, Sloan, and Pearce was to blame for decreased sales. The earlier Canadian reviews were not as fulsome as the later American ones, partly because MacLennan seemed to have betrayed his role as nationalist chronicler by extending his setting and characters into the United States.52 There was no interest in the movie he hoped might follow.53 Two years after publication he wrote, “The Precipice was a gamble on which I lost.”54 Thirteen years later, after publishing another two novels, both more successful than The Precipice, he admitted, “I think I would have done better to have waited…longer than I did [to submit my manuscript], but at that time I couldn't write non-fiction and thought fiction was all I could do.”55 There is also the possibility that the extraordinary effort he put into Two Solitudes left him too drained of creative energy to undertake another novel so soon. The same pattern would occur when, depleted from writing The Watch that Ends the Night, he tackled Return of the Sphinx, a shorter novel that also lacked forcefulness and did not do well.

  Three years after The Precipice was published, MacLennan could no longer support himself and Dorothy on writing alone. He approached McGill University, and was offered two courses at a surprisingly small salary, which would begin in the fall.56 Meanwhile he earned money as a consultant to the National Film Board, spending the summer in Ottawa, while Dorothy's mother tended to her at Stone Hedge in North Hatley.

  On New Year's Eve, he wrote a sad and angry letter to Charles Duell telling him that he intended to leave Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, partly because they had not promoted or sold his book effectively or given him the emotional support he needed. Two American firms immediately tried to acquire him, and he chose Little, Brown and Company, with their Canadian affiliate Macmillan's in Toronto, in order to have what he needed to continue writing. This choice was excellent, for it put him into the hands of the best editor he was to have: John Gray.57

  Though MacLennan is known, admired, and sometimes disliked for his chronicling of sweeping social and political forces, this aspect of his fiction too often resulted in didactic passages and one-dimensional characters that represent these forces. Yet he was much more. His temperament and style marked him as a writer unlike either the American or the British writers of his time. He eschewed the liberated bohemianism of the Beats, and his Red Toryism made him more sympathetic than the Angry Young Men in Britain to all classes in society. Instead, he was tolerant, thoughtful, and moral. His writing carried forward some of the aspects of Victorian fiction: the positioning of man at the mercy of larger forces, the provision of back-stories for his characters that rooted them in history, and his reliance on traditional linear plot structures. Though he would come to sense that fiction required new bottles for new wine,58 he was reticent to experiment.

  Yet his work is much more than this conservatism. He was uncannily prescient in The Precipice as elsewhere. Carl Bratian,59 the Romanian immigrant entrepreneur is a case
in point. His soulless life and ruthless behaviour as head of his advertising agency draws attention to a major phenomenon just emerging in the United States and Canada. It is a phenomenon that still engages us, for example, in the TV series Mad Men, a scathing critique of the lifestyle and business dealings of Madison Avenue advertising agencies in the 1960s.

  MacLennan had read and deplored The Hucksters (1946),60 a popular novel that exposed the amoral way in which ad agencies manipulated the public to want things they did not need. The book was made into a highly successful film the following year. The year The Precipice was published, the American Advertising Theory and Practice by C.H. Sandage went into its third edition. This handbook touted the creation of “wants” through the use of “desires” (unrelated to the “wants,” using visuals – especially sexual ones – and radio commercials). In Canada, Ontario painter Bertram Booker had published three advertising manuals under the pseudonym, Richard W. Surrey: Subconscious Selling (1923), Layout Technique in Advertising (1929), and Copy Technique in Advertising (1930).61 Only three years after MacLennan's novel appeared, Canadian communications guru Marshall McLuhan's iconic The Mechanical Bride also took an anti-advertising position, establishing a significant difference between the way Canadians and Americans viewed advertising for the future.62

  The novel's title was also prescient. MacLennan treats the culmination of destructive mechanization in the American bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima as the final events to push the United States over the symbolic precipice. Yet even today, the desperate culmination of American self-destruction known as the “fiscal cliff” reveals a country brought to the brink of catastrophe because of consumerism, financial recklessness, and mechanization.

  With his next novel, MacLennan would abandon any attempt to join the “American branch cycle.” He would set it in a place he knew far more deeply than the settings in The Precipice. Most important, he would forego the explanations of Canadian places and social customs that he believed had been obstacles to writing the kind of “heroic” and “universal” novel he had always aspired to.63 Ironically, the novel would be regional. With Each Man's Son, set in the Cape Breton mining community of Glace Bay where he had lived as a child, he deepened the quest for the meaning of life begun by Bruce Fraser in The Precipice. Finally, in The Watch that Ends the Night, after narrowly surviving his despair at Dorothy's death, he articulated it.

  NOTES

  1 The novel sold approximately 50,000 copies in North America.

  2 Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Czech, Estonian, Japanese, Korean, German, and Norwegian. For bureaucratic reasons, the French translation did not appear until 1963, which meant that some French-Canadians could not read about this iconic version of their relation to English Canada for almost twenty years.

  3 Elspeth Cameron, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).

  4 Ibid., 202.

  5 HM to Bill Deacon 18 May, 7 March 1946; and “Canada Between Covers,” Saturday Review of Literature 29 (7 September 1946), 5–6, 28–30.

  6 Ibid., 212.

  7 Ibid., 201.

  8 “Canada Between Covers,” Saturday Review of Literature 29 (7 September 1946), 5–6, 28–30.

  9 See Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 170. A similar image of incomprehensible shouting occurs in an important passage in The Precipice, 336.

  10 “So All Their Praises” and “A Man Should Rejoice.” The love triangle in the former is set in Germany, New York, and Nova Scotia between 1929 and 1933. The latter follows a young American artist to Austria and Princeton, NJ. See Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 82–8 and 95–7 for more details.

  11 New York, Princeton, and three small southern Ontario towns.

  12 Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 199–200.

  13 In 1947, as MacLennan was writing The Precipice, Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas brought in the first provincial hospital insurance program. Not until 1966 would all Canadians have comprehensive health care, regardless of ability to pay.

  14 HM to author, 7 January 1976.

  15 Nova Scotia was marked by Calvinism, too, and MacLennan's doctor father was a case in point. MacLennan, however, creates minor characters (“splinter” characters) outside the community (such as Matt McCunn in The Precipice and Captain Yardley in The Watch that Ends the Night) that represent this earthiness. It was also an aspect of MacLennan himself.

  16 “On Discovering Who We Are,” Maclean's, 15 December 1946. This article was re-titled “How We Differ from Americans,” in Cross-Country (Toronto: Collins 1949), 35–56.

  17 See Cameron, “Ordeal by Fire: The Genesis of MacLennan's The Precipice,” Canadian Literature 82 (1979): 35–46. This article contains a more detailed account of the influence of Pillar of Fire on The Precipice.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Anthony Tudor chose the name Hagar to suggest the biblical Hagar, Abraham's Egyptian bondswoman, sent by his barren wife, Sarah, to conceive a child for her. Consequently, the outcast Hagar wanders in the desert until God gives her direction. See Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 205. Anthony Tudor, interview with the author, New York City, 7 September 1976.

  20 See Cameron, “Ordeal by Fire,” and Hugh MacLennan for a more detailed account of these source materials.

  21 “On Discovering,” in Cross-Country, 51–2.

  22 Ibid., 55–6.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Lassiter is partly inspired by MacLennan's North Hatley rival in tennis, John Bassett. The blond, handsome, wealthy Toronto businessman inherited the Toronto Telegram. Their tennis matches were legendary.

  25 MacLennan to Charles Duell, 5 March 1947, MacLennan Papers, McGill University Library.

  26 MacLennan, “Changing Values in Fiction,” Canadian Author and Bookman 25, 3 (Autumn 1949), 15.

  27 The Montrealer (28 September 1954), 23, 25, 27, 29. Reprinted in Scotchman's Return and Other Essays (Toronto: The Macmillan Company Limited, 1960), 159–67.

  28 MacLennan mentions marihuana (sic) in The Precipice, but only in the context of a jazz nightclub. He was unaware of any drug culture beyond marijuana usage.

  29 Surprisingly, MacLennan observed a similar phenomenon in The Precipice. Lucy, describing her vision of the headlong rush of Americans towards a precipice, says to Bruce: “they were all shouting at each other so loudly nobody could hear anything” (336).

  30 Many details in The Precipice – the Lassiter's maid in their New York apartment, details of clothing, and Jane's sophisticated knowledge of classical music – show that MacLennan (whose family always had a maid) was far from harbouring working-class resentments.

  31 This novel had won the Governor General's Award in 1947, the year before The Precipice.

  32 Davies's Salterton trilogy was about to appear in 1951, 1954, and 1957.

  33 Malcolm Lowry published Under the Volcano in 1947, but he was considered a British writer because he was born and raised in England and his publisher, Jonathan Cape Ltd., was British. His novel would not be fully appreciated in Canada for many years.

  34 T.D. MacLulich, “MacLennan's Anatomy of Failure,” Journal of Canadian Studies 14, 4 (Winter 1979–80): 54–65.

  35 Robert D. Chambers, “Hugh MacLennan and Religion: The Precipice Revisited,” Journal of Canadian Studies 14, 4, (Winter 1979–80): 46–53.

  36 MacLulich rightly shows MacLennan's ambivalence about psychology and psychoanalysis in this novel. See The Precipice, 75 and 329

  37 Barbara Pell, Faith and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan (Waterloo: Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion/Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998), 31–43.

  38 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (London: Fontana-Collins, 1962).

  39 Ibid., as cited by Pell, 35.

  40 In The Precipice such escapes include alcohol (Stephen), marijuana (the jazz trio), psychoanalysis (Marcia), the intellect (Bruce), institutionalized religion (Catholicism), work, the arts (humanism), exile (Matt McCunn), and fantasy.

>   41 Pell, Faith and Fiction.

  42 Ibid., 36.

  43 See MacLulich, “MacLennan's Anatomy of Failure,” 65n1, for references to the eight critics who thought the novel failed.

  44 Ibid., 61.

  45 Where Daniel Ainslie repeats to himself, “God is dead.” Hugh MacLennan, Each Man's Son (Toronto: Macmillan, 1951), 219.

  46 La Nausée was published in 1938; Nausea, the English translation by Lloyd Alexander, was published by New Directions, New Classics Library (New York, 1949).

  47 This is most clearly seen in The Watch. Drawing on his own extreme desolation and despair after Dorothy's death, MacLennan has his alter ego George Stewart reflect:

  Then a man discovers in dismay that what he believed to be his identity is no more than a tiny canoe at the mercy of an ocean. Shark-filled, plankton-filled, refractor of light, terrible and mysterious, for years this ocean has seemed to slumber beneath the tiny identity it received from the dark river.

  Now the ocean rises and the things within it become visible. Little man, what now? The ocean rises, all frames disappear from around the pictures, there is no form, no sense, nothing but chaos in the darkness of the ocean storm. Little man, what now? (343)