PSYCHE
A novel
PSYCHE
by Phyllis Brett Young
Introduction by Nathalie Cooke and Suzanne Morton
Foreword by Valerie Young Argue
McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008
ISBN 978-0-7735-3490-2
Legal deposit fourth quarter 2,008
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free
(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada
Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the
financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Young, Phyllis Brett
Psyche: a novel/by Phyllis Brett Young; introduction by Nathalie
Cooke and Suzanne Morton; foreword by Valerie Young Argue.
Originally Published: Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1959.
ISBN 978-0-7735-3490-2
I. Title.
PS8547.O58P7 2008 C813’.54 C2008-903929-7
CONTENTS
Foreword by Valerie Argue
Introduction by Nathalie Cooke and Suzanne Morton
1 Prologue
2 The Kidnapper
3 The Hoboes,
4 The Miner and His Wife
5 The Artist
6 The Social Worker
7 The Prostitute
8 The Doctor and His Wife
9 The Truck Driver
10 The Newspaperman
11 Epilogue
Studio portrait of Phyllis Brett Young, circa 1959, used for publicity and book jackets. Courtesy Valerie Argue
FOREWORD
PHYLLIS BRETT YOUNG
Phyllis Brett Young was born in Toronto in 1914 to English immigrant parents. Her father, George Sidney Brett, was head of the Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto; her mother, Marion Brett, was an avid reader and a talented woodcarver. Educated in both public and private schools, Phyllis attended the Ontario College of Art before marrying her long-time sweetheart, Douglas Young. The early, depressionera years of their marriage were difficult financially, but after World War II Douglas began a successful career in personnel that led to a five-year stint with a branch of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Their only child, Valerie, attended the International School there, while Phyllis had the freedom and perspective to write her first novel, Psyche, and plan her second, The Torontonians.
By the fall of 1960, when, after a two-year relocation in Ottawa, the Youngs returned to Toronto, Phyllis Brett Young’s writing career had taken flight. Between 1959 and 1969 she published four novels (Psyche, The Torontonians, Undine, and A Question of Judgment), a fictionalized childhood memoir (Anything Could Happen!), and a thriller (The Ravine, published under the pseudonym Kendal Young). Her novels, positively received by readers and reviewers alike, appeared in numerous editions and languages in Canada, the United States, and England and other European countries. The Ravine was made into a movie under the title Assault.
Over the years, the Youngs lived in variety of apartments and houses (both urban and suburban), eventually retiring to their dream home in the country near the town of Orillia, Ontario. Phyllis Brett Young died in 1996, Douglas Young just eighteen months later.
PSYCHE: SOME REFLECTIONS FROM
THE AUTHOR’S DAUGHTER
An emotionally gripping story, an intellectually challenging idea, and a contemporary Canadian setting are the three basic elements of my mother’s novels. In Psyche, her first novel, each plays an essential role. The book was greeted with huge critical acclaim and quickly became a national and international bestseller, published in more than a dozen hardcover, paperback, bookclub, and magazine editions, in many different languages. People seemed to fall in love with Psyche and her compelling story. As the following sample demonstrates, reviewers repeatedly commented on how absorbing and affecting they found the novel: “a powerful, exciting, and thoroughly moving book” (Globe and Mail, 31 Oct. 1959), “completely absorbing” (Ottawa Journal, 28 Nov. 1959), “a fast-moving intriguing story” (Penticton Herald, 5 Dec. 1959), “irresistible” (Halifax Herald, 13 May 1960), “read on without interruption until it was finished long after midnight” (Toronto Daily Star, 13 Feb.1960), “a book that ruthlessly holds the attention of the reader from first to last” (Mazo de la Roche, on the jacket flap of the 1959 Longmans Canadian, 1960 Putnam American, and 1961 White Lion British hardcover editions), and “Start to read Psyche only if you have the time to lose yourself completely!” (Chicago Tribune, on the back cover of the 1964 Lancer American paperback).
More than just a good read, Psyche revolves around a thought-provoking and still topical question: which factor has the greatest influence on character development, heredity or environment? In the early 50s, when it was still the norm for families to dine together and in my home it was felt that conversation should focus on topics of “general interest,” the nature/nurture debate came up frequently. No doubt my mother had already followed such dinner-table discussions when she was young. Clearly my grandfather, who as head of the Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, introduced a new course in 1931-32 that included in its description “the influence of heredity and environment,” had given the matter a great deal of thought. A firm believer in science as philosophy’s companion in the quest for knowledge and author of the three-volume History of Psychology, George Sidney Brett would have kept abreast of every new finding and point of view.
For Phyllis Brett Young, the subject ultimately led to a novelist’s “What if ...?” What if a young child - perhaps two or three years old - was stolen from her parents and grew up not knowing anything about her roots? Would her genes or the events of her childhood and adolescence shape her character and her future? The major clue to the answer lies in Young’s choice of title. Like her beautiful namesake from Greek mythology, who wandered the world looking for her lost love, the novel’s heroine, Psyche, whose name has come to personify the soul, journeys in search of her physical and psychological identity. Assisting her in this search is the genetic legacy she carries. “In modern parlance,” the author tells us (p. 8), “the ‘psyche’ is the most complex and most important component of any given human being. It is the sum of the infinitely varied intangibles which make every living man and woman unique in his or her own right.”
Most readers have seen heredity as the hands-down favourite in the novel. My mother, intelligent and strong-willed, would certainly have found it difficult to imagine herself (or her daughter) as anything but a survivor. Nonetheless, having read and considered everything she could find about the subject, like Psyche’s mother she does not discount environment as at least a partial determinant. “I can know - perhaps,” Sharon says of her daughter, “that her chances are better than even. No more than that” (p. 99). Psyche finds kindness and help along the way: from her unofficial foster-parents, Mag and Butch, from the young school inspector with his precious gift, from Bel, the madam with the heart of gold, and last but not least, from the newspaperman, Steve Ryerson; even the egotistical artist, Nick, plays a positive role, opening a door to the outside world and her long-lost beginnings. She also has the early-childhood influence of her biological parents, with “chords of memory, touched from time to time by vaguely familiar harmonies of sound and colour”(p. 43).
Psyche’s odyssey is played out against a contemporary Canadian setting, deliberately chosen by the author because of two strongly held beliefs: one, that the development of a distinctly Canadi
an literature was necessary for Canada to become known in other countries, and two, that the novel was paramount to the preservation of our social history. As she says in two of numerous interviews, “We must become interested in ourselves and then we’ll interest other people” (Montreal Gazette, 13 Jan. 1960) and “What our writers should be doing is reflecting ourselves as we are now” (Star Weekly Magazine, 24 Feb. 1962).
Unlike my mother’s second novel, The Torontonians, first published in 1960 by Longmans Green and reissued in 2007 by McGill-Queen’s University Press, Psyche contains no dates or place names. Although the central themes in The Torontonians (the perils and pitfalls of a materialistic, suburban life, especially for middle-class women in the pre-Betty Friedan 1950s) were, and still are, relevant to any large North American city, the novel is firmly grounded in time and place, with real names used for every location except one neighbourhood and a couple of streets. In Psyche, not specifically identifying any of the locations allows the author to take creative liberties with her closely described settings - though readers from outside the country will at the very least recognize them as being in Canada, while most Canadians will recognize Toronto as the inspiration for the noisy, never-sleeping metropolis and Sudbury for the northern mining town. Some may also be able to identify such areas as Muskoka (site of the kidnapper’s rented cottage) and Caledon (the artist’s studio). Having lived most of her life in Toronto and vacationed either at her family’s cottage on Lake Muskoka or, with her husband and daughter, in Algonquin Park, all of these locations were well known to my mother.
Valerie Argue (Phyllis Brett Young’s daughter), early 1960s. Courtesy Valerie Argue
By not providing explicit dates, the author is free to play with the timeframe of the novel. A few clues - in particular, the fact that as a World War II veteran the kidnapper would have been eligible for generous government grants (page 12) that were not available after World War I - suggest that Psyche is probably stolen around 1945 and that her story moves forward, through a compression of time, into the 1950s, with her flight from the city at age nineteen occurring sometime before March 1954, when Toronto’s streetcar service to its northern limits (p. 281) was shut down in favour of the new subway. Along the way there are flashbacks to 1930s Depression-era phenomena, such as hoboes riding the rods (chapter 3), and premonitions of dramatic changes in a city whose population has already exceeded one million (p. 133). By not providing dates and not giving the places in her novel any names, even fictitious ones, the author contrives to draw the reader in and to create a more enclosed fictional world for Psyche’s timeless story. That the technique is deliberate can be seen in the novel’s opening description where, in the front hall of Sharon and Dwight’s home, a shaft of sunlight hitting the chandelier scatters a shower of prismatic colours over a maid’s black-and-white uniform, “transforming it momentarily into motley out of place in time and locale.”
If Psyche captured the hearts of millions of readers, it was probably in no small part due to the fact that she also captured the heart of the author. Before starting to write a novel, my mother would live with her characters for up to a year, until they took on a life of their own - propelling the plot. In the case of Psyche, I think she must have fallen in love with the beautiful child she created and rejoiced in her remarkable courage and resiliency.
Valerie (Brett Young) Argue
March 2008
INTRODUCTION
PSYCHE is a terrific read. A captivating view of popular psychology in the 1950s, it sweeps readers into a fictional world of crime, suspense, and romance. But the novel is more than a popular romance or mystery since it both uses and queries the conventions of those popular forms, just as it scrutinizes some of the most hotly debated topics of twentieth-century psychology. Psyche is a thoroughly modern novel, with a fiercely proud and independent heroine who experiences life on her own terms. Published in 1959, the same year as Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch that Ends the Night and Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Phyllis Brett Young’s Psyche has largely disappeared from public consciousness. This new edition of the novel allows us to reintroduce a work set in mid-century Canada and to suggest ways in which it sheds light on its place and time. Psyche speaks to the age-old tension between nature/nurture and to questions about the influence of heredity and environment. It also challenges generalizations about postwar democratic and egalitarian values as well as those surrounding Canadian literature and popular genre literature at the end of the 1950s.
Psyche is out of step with the stereotypes of democratization and egalitarianism associated with postwar Canada. The post World War Two years are generally characterized as a time of rapid social change in which social attitudes about class, ethnicity, and gender were transformed, with Canadians beginning to internalize the ideals of international human rights protocols that led in the 1960s to the end of previous restrictions on immigration and elitist educational and legislative impediments to equality of opportunity. Psyche, however, speaks to the tenacity of older values surrounding class, elitism, and heredity.
The innate intelligence of the novel’s heroine, Psyche, is a central theme throughout the novel. While postwar psychology was preoccupied with personality development or the effect of obsessive mothering, Psyche is remarkable for how little she changes - she was confident and self-assured as a little girl and is just the same as a young woman. Rather than being over-mothered, her surrogate mother, Mag, although kind, leaves her pretty much alone. Mag teaches by lived example and “perfect” Psyche provides few instances for reprimand, so explicit moral training on fundamental matters such as honesty and feminine virtue amount to a brief warning about how theft would lead to a “stomache-ache [sic] created expressly by the Lord” or vague admonishments “to be a good girl.”2
Young’s decision to go against the tenets of the time in creating her heroine reminds us that there was less consensus of opinion in the 1950s than we often think and suggests that she was well aware of the various aspects of complex questions about psychological development and values. Although it would be inappropriate to focus exclusively on her father in thinking about why she structured the novel as she did, given his role as a prominent public intellectual, he cannot be ignored. George Sidney Brett was one of the most influential English-language philosophers in Canada during the first half of the twentieth century. A 1902 Oxford graduate in Classics and Humanities, he arrived in Canada after four years teaching philosophy in Lahore, India (now Pakistan).3 While in India, Brett learned to speak Hindustani and read Sanskrit and Arabic and, according to historian Michael Gauvreau, continued to write about India in the 1920s and 1930s, disagreed vehemently with Gandhi and the Congress nationalists, and “was an advocate of the princely states.”4 While this may have been the result of his Britishness and allegiance to the Empire, this elitism was out of step with his liberal contemporaries. Brett came to Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1908, first as librarian and lecturer in Classics. Almost immediately, he was promoted to professor of ethics and ancient philosophy and soon moved “temporarily” to the university Philosophy Department to “shore up its psychology subfield.”5 At the time, psychology was a branch within philosophy and in 1912 Brett had published the first volume of his most important scholarly work, The History of Psychology. The appointment in philosophy and psychology became permanent and full-time in 1921 with the publication of the second and third volumes of The History of Psychology. At the same time, Brett was named the university’s director of psychology. Brett understood psychology as the “science of the soul.” He believed the discipline required a humanist tradition as “History alone, can adequately unfold the content of the idea denoted by the word ‘Psyche’ or explain the various meanings that have from age to age been assigned to the phrase ‘science of the soul.’”6 This was not the direction the discipline was taking, however, and from the time of his appointment he advocated that psychology be made a separate department, a step the universi
ty took in 1927.7 Brett’s support of the partition of psychology from philosophy reflected his opposition to the evolution of the discipline. He was opposed to all forms of behaviourism in psychology, an approach that was becoming dominant in the United States in the 1920s. Behavioural psychologists rejected the study of consciousness, focusing instead on what could be observed, predicted, and controlled.8 In Canada, behaviourial psychology was dominated by the mental hygiene movement, which emphasized heredity and adopted a eugenicist framework toward both “bettering the race” and preventing its degeneration. One of the tenets of this set of beliefs, which came to dominate English Canadian social reform in the 1910s and 1920s, was a belief in innate intelligence and the “overriding influence of heredity upon capacity.”9 Through the Canadian National Council for Mental Health (1918) and later the Toronto-based Eugenics Society of Canada (1930), prominent citizens, academics, and social reformers influenced immigration policy and public understanding of the issue.10 Mass intelligence testing and the educational experiment surrounding the Dionne quintuplets captured the public’s imagination. The Dionnes, born in 1934 and legally stolen from their parents when they were made wards of the Province of Ontario, became part of the twenty-four hour a day psychological developmental program of Dr William Blatz of the St George’s School for Child Study and the expanding Psychology Department, University of Toronto. The young girls were not only Ontario’s most important tourist attraction but were also seen as an extraordinary research opportunity for exploring the impact of nature/nurture: as the girls were believed to be genetically identical, differences between them had to be explained by environment.11
Even after Brett moved away from psychology, he maintained links with the discipline. In 1926 he was appointed to the Board of Directors of the St George’s School for Child Study, operated by Dr William Blatz and funded by the Canadian National Committee for Mental Health.12 In 1927 he was one of the founders, with Carl Murchison and Edward Titchener, of The Journal of General Psychology. Brett also maintained an interest in nature/nurture debates. Philosophy 1A, his course on “Introduction to Ethics” instituted in 1931-32., was described as a study of “The basis of morals in human nature; the influence of heredity and environment; standards, motives, and sanctions of conduct; application to the problems of personal conduct and social relations.”13 Ultimately, however, Brett believed in education and culture. Michael Gauvreau has described him as concerned that “modern civilization was the fruit of a fine balance of humanistic and scientific knowledge; here was the high road between freedom and determinism. At stake was the question of how to preserve that freedom in the face of the knowledge that much of human behaviour was determined by biological and environmental forces.” For Brett, who rejected psychological behaviourism, “philosophy and history assured the possibility of rational action.”14
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