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These talks—adventures in the method of the spoken essay—are an expression of one kind of thinking about Canadian writing. Though they pretend neither to an adequate representation of the Canadian literary scene nor to a criticism with any savour of finality, they do proclaim a faith and they carry a good deal of implicit dogmatism.

Too often the comment on our literature has been sharp and right only with a negative emphasis; not sufficiently often has comment been discriminating and firm in a positive direction. Cleverly expressed fastidiousness has paraded as superior discernment, and exhibited, not sound criticism, but the mark of the colonial mind. It is time we searched for a better way.

These pieces try to be friendly and positive without denial of literary standards. They are pieces to be picked up casually and laid down perhaps not too unthinkingly. They may suggest a middle way between academic disdain and patriotic over-enthusiasm. Simplicity in approach and treatment does not necessarily mean superficiality.

Such pieces—spoken essays I have called them for they were written first for the ear—are successful only if they do not attempt too much. That consideration has been sufficiently safeguarded. Such pieces, further, should maintain, in diction and range of reference, a reasonable measure of ease and grace without sacrifice of a vitality of material appropriate to the need. Comment on that consideration is left to the reader.

Two students in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at McGill, Miss Ann Taylor and Mr. Robert Currie, as they came freshly to Service and Grove, delighted me with suggestions as to hospitality of interest and emphasis.

A. L. P.

The Old Mill

Chaffey’s Locks, Ontario

July 1951

Two years ago I stood in a bookshop in Belfast and pulled from the shelves a volume in a blue cover—Collected Poems by E. J. Pratt. “This is interesting,” I said, “Some of our people in Canada think Pratt is our most important poet.” “That’s what Mr. Hewitt, himself a poet, and in charge of our Museum, thinks,” was the answer, “Mr. Hewitt thinks there are two important poets in America, Robert Frost in the United States and E. J. Pratt in Canada. That’s why we keep Pratt on our shelves.”

Well, that for what it may be worth—from Belfast.

Edwin John Pratt was born in Newfoundland in 1883. Until Newfoundland joined Canada, though Pratt received his education beyond matriculation in Canada, and has ever since committed himself wholly to Canadian life, we always felt, when we accepted praise of him, that it should be said somewhere “Of course he’s really not a Canadian.” Now we call Pratt a Canadian. He came in with Newfoundland.

And of course Newfoundland came in with Pratt. His father was a Methodist minister on that sea-bitten grim island. As a boy, Ned knew the sea, and seafolk and sea ways. Teaching school at Moreton’s Harbour at nineteen, he would see, as he says, “The whaling steamers tow the whales into the harbour and moor them belly up until they were taken to the factories.” When Ned came west to the mainland, to Toronto to attend University, he was lean, gangling and different. His speech had what seemed an Irish lilt in it. He was both more innocent and far shrewder than the typical undergraduate of those days; he was another of “those queer Newfoundlanders.” The sea, and a very old tradition of the sea, was in Ned Pratt.

Pratt graduated with honours and remained in the University of Toronto for six years as a lecturer in the Department of Psychology. He had been ordained, and his Ph.D. thesis was Studies in Pauline Eschatology. A Toronto firm, more devout than businesslike, published the thesis. Pratt says he has started many a good study fire with remainder copies. They seem to anticipate, he says, the ultimate flame.

In 1919 Pratt joined the Department of English in Victoria University, Toronto, progressed to a full professorship, and is now doing part time lecturing in his post-retirement period. Throughout his career he has been teacher and poet. Within the University, he has always stood against inert ideas posing as scholarship. As a poet, he has exemplified the disciplines which accumulate exact knowledge and perfect a severe technique in the service of the creative imagination.

The Pratt home, graced by wife and daughter, has been the setting for the man. Ned’s stag parties, gatherings of writers, artists and kindred creative spirits, are known and loved by men in every province of Canada. There’s always a bit of the brogue when Ned is bidding a guest to one of his parties—“Can ye come now? On a week from Saturday. We’ll make a night of it. There’ll be good talk.” On “the night of it,” the women, invisible yet presiding spirits, will be out of bounds and Ned will pause over the roast or turkey with hovering blade. And eventually the dawn will come . . . .

All this is background for some comment on that part of our Canadian life which expresses itself through our poetry. Before Pratt, poetry in English in Canada had tended to be gracefully descriptive and pleasantly innocuous. Conscious as we were of the rich variety in our inheritance through English literature in our own tongue, it had seemed unnecessary or inappropriately immodest to attempt to add experimentally to that inheritance. Further, we were apt to say, if anything fresh and vital should come from this continent, the Americans could provide it. Anyway, they were Americans, and apt to be a bit brash. We Canadians nourished our tradition, our modesty and our incapacity. We produced pretty little poems about the bees and the birds and about bits of Canadian landscape. These, we felt, were but footnotes to the great tradition and of a sort we could make without undue pretension. What the Americans did was really rather vulgar. We Canadians hugged our respectful colonialism.

Pratt was derivative and imitative too in his early work. But the sea was in Pratt and an inheritance from preaching Methodists, both independent and explosive things. Pratt struck out new ways for Canadian versemaking. He loaded his lines with the integrity and authority of personal experience. He came finally to a style which is only his own. He revelled in his subject matter and out of his subject matter evoked thematic direction and drive. I remember when he was making an irresponsible piece about a saturnalia on the sea floor serviced from the stores of a sunken ship, to add to the hilarity of a wedding anniversary, he needed a rich list of all the good liquors of the world. He gathered wine lists and catalogues from all quarters, studied them, savoured them in their names and sometimes in their essences, brooded over them, and finally worked them magnificently and hilariously into the flow of his verse. It’s called The Witches’ Brew:

That was something a bit new in Canadian versifying. It was a fresh start in a new direction. Pratt could play with the stuff he handled. He could make come to that spree:

And Calvin, called, along with Blake and Owen Glendower and Carlyle and dozens of others, from the realm of Shades to watch the revel, he could make say:

But I suppose I should be speaking of the less marginal achievements of Pratt as a poet. An early volume, The Titans, published in 1926, and dedicated to “the boys of the stag parties,” showed to a lot of us that the man who stimulated and delighted his students from a University lectern and who, divested of academic gown, could be one of the boys, was also a true poet.

That slim little volume The Titans contained two poems. The second and longer one, called The Great Feud, is vigorous narrative filled with ingenious capricious and exciting versemaker’s self-indulgence. But there is more than that. The story is the story of a prehistoric battle between land animals and the great half-amphibious sea beasts—a battle without reason and without reward:

In the end, the battle is mutual destruction and stalemate. Concerning the ape:

One can make of it a parable or take it as a tale.

The other poem in The Titans volume is called The Cachelot. It is a tabloid sea epic, tight, controlled, vivid and powerful. Again, both pursued whale and pursuing ship are lost in mutual self-destruction. There is always a hint of the ironic in Pratt’s delight in the heroic. This ironic note came out in his long poem The Titanic, where the philosopher is behind the poet in the re-telling of that sea disaster. As he ends the poem, Pratt manages also to bring the action within the framework of an old idea associated with the tragic, the idea of Katharsis:

Pratt has also handled Canadian material with unabashed vigour and enthusiasm, not because it is Canadian, but because it comes as appropriately as anything else within a poet’s compass. In a long narrative poem Brébeuf and his Brethren, celebrating, (and I think celebrating is the word), the heroisms of the French Jesuits among the Indians, the essential right elements of the Canadian scene are gathered, shaped, and built together until they carry the accent and authority of art’s universality. Let me quote one passage. It will serve as conclusion and suggest the quality of E. J. Pratt as poet. The Indians are torturing Brébeuf:

One further thing in conclusion. Pratt has given us a small handful of lyrics as hard and as tooled and as colourful as something shaped by the sea. Here is one:

In Lantern Light

E. J. Pratt’s published work includes:

Sound working novelists are usually interesting fellows, be they male or female. If they are any good at all, they have a knack for observation and they can tell a story. If they are good, they understand the inside parts of people and they give us people alive and fascinating. If they are great or on the edge of greatness they manage somehow to get their scene, their story and their people all mixed in with something we call theme or vision and then they compel us to see what they see. Then they hurt us and challenge us and sometimes exalt us and make us sit, when we have finished their book, just looking out of a window or gazing at the coals in the grate, the victims and the beneficiaries in worlds we had not dreamed of.

We have had so few novels written in Canada that have reached even towards the edge of the full achievement of the novelist’s art that I am wondering whether my interest in Mr. Morley Callaghan’s latest novel isn’t born to some extent of wishful thinking. But, for what it may be worth, I am going to pass some of that interest on to you. Callaghan’s latest novel is called The Loved and the Lost. I recommend it to any reasonably serious reader of novels at least as an exercise ground for critical discrimination; to me it is an exasperating and baffling book. As I read, I am always wondering how much is really in it. There is at least that sort of challenge.

Reading it, I suppose you may call it a book about Montreal, our most interesting Canadian city. The book is full of Montreal. It has caught the hue, texture and essence of much that is Montreal: climate, weather, street scenes, amusement places, eating places, the sense of the mountain, of the river, of the city’s economic and social and racial stratifications. All these are interwoven with the stuff of the book, though never paraded in the book. The Montreal material is both incidental and inevitable. Callaghan’s people happen to five in Montreal, that’s all; it is inevitable that Montreal be part of them. For the first time, it seems to me, we have a Canadian city alive in a piece of creative fiction. If you wish, you may look for and find Montreal in Callaghan’s book.

But if you are a good reader, you will not stop there. You will find and delight in some of the people Callaghan found in Montreal. And—here I hesitate a little—I think you will still go on and find Callaghan’s theme; the thing Callaghan grapples with, by which he, as artist, is hurt, and through which he hurts us.

To put it briefly and far too simply, the theme of The Loved and the Lost involves racial differences and prejudices and barriers and the attempt through Peggy, the book’s heroine, to go below and beyond all such to something deeper, to a common human solvent in human innocence and sympathy.

That the attempt fails and that the attempt and the failure are alike handled with insight puts Callaghan’s novel among those books which, in spite of shortcomings that may be easily ticketed, satisfy their readers because they disturb and stretch the human spirit.

But, before more about the book, something concerning Callaghan as man and writer. Morley Callaghan was born in Toronto in 1903. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto. University life in the twenties in Canada was not so intellectually excited or so emotionally self-conscious as it was in Europe and in parts of the United States. That experimental wildness so often a phase of university life was not predominant in Toronto. But the kind of life which in the United States produced a Scott Fitzgerald and later an Ernest Hemingway did touch Toronto. It touched Callaghan. As a protest against security and smugness he explored life beyond its conventional boundaries. His findings were recorded in two volumes of short stories and in six novels published in the late twenties and throughout the thirties.

The stories and novels of those days had a kind of harsh coldness about them. They were “objective” and “realistic”—those words in quotation marks. They dealt with rum-runners and whores and down-and-outs. The stories were not tidied up. They were left at loose ends and with unhappy endings. In a sense that was their merit. Callaghan was exploring for other than the conventional values. He was of course, labeled at once by some critics as a man with a knack for being a secondhand Hemingway. When, about twelve years ago, he stopped writing, many shook their heads and said they could explain Callaghan: a man who had mastered a few literary tricks, but capable nevertheless of discovering in the end that he had nothing to say. That explains his silence, it was said.

But those who knew Callaghan were not satisfied with such easy dismissal. They said “wait awhile.” In the meantime, Callaghan seemed to be drifting. He did a good deal of hack writing. He became a successful chairman on many sorts of radio programmes. His short stories which had once excited American readers and won for him a reputation beyond Canada, and therefore, by reflection, in Canada, no longer appeared. His novels were forgotten. Callaghan, as a promising Canadian writer, was forgotten, though his book on the University of Toronto was a hint that perhaps he might be remembered.

Now, in 1951, he brings us this novel, The Loved and the Lost. The twelve years may have been merely lost time in the life of an artist. If they represent a period of self-scrutiny and self-schooling I think that in this book they justify themselves. I think Callaghan has never written with such reach and occasional grasp and delicate control.

The story in this latest book is quite simple. A successful teacher, a professor of history, comes to Montreal on the invitation of an important newspaper proprietor to do a column of general comment which is to be a feature in a morning paper. The great and dominant magnate is delighted with McAlpine, the professor; the daughter, a fine product of the upper social strata of Montreal, falls in love with him. McAlpine is on the way to the sort of advancement and achievement of which he had dreamed. Then he meets Peggy, a girl who possessed “a strange kind of stillness,” and an innocence which was rebuke or challenge or temptation to the wolfishness in man. For McAlpine, the history professor turned newspaper columnist, Peggy becomes an obsession. He falls in love with her. But he cannot believe in her. She is completely unconventional, the friend and confidante of every sort of human in the flotsam and jetsam of the shadow world of the great city where races and types intermingle, hating, lusting, loving, fearing one another. Peggy, a white girl, herself a university graduate, moves about beyond the fringe of the established and safe and conventional life she might so easily make her own. Particularly, she is the friend of the Negroes in the Negro section of the city. The gossip of the whites—newspaper men, artists, men about town—alleges that she likes “dark meat.” Jealous that she will not give herself to them, they assume she is the possession of any Negro. The Negroes, who find her so frank and friendly and free and yet unassailable, assume she really reserves herself for her own kind. In the end even McAlpine, the man who loves her, cannot quite believe in her and his lack of faith is the cause of her death. Peggy becomes the symbol of an innocence the world must destroy because it cannot live up to it.

At the pivotal point in the novel McAlpine is offered a moment when he and he alone could be the one man with complete faith in Peggy. He has a chance, through his faith in her, to commit himself to what she really is. But, with a self-deceit which makes evasion seem moral, he fails her.

That, I think, is the core of the book. Peggy is too unstudied, too honest, too friendly for the world of jealousy, suspicion, evasion and duplicity she tries to live in. It isn’t that she is innocent of the ways of that world in a negative sense. She knows all about that world. She is innocent in the sense that, having accumulated knowledge of good and evil, she remains innocent of evil. Foley, the cynical newspaper man, who introduces Peggy to McAlpine, says “Don’t you like meeting someone fresh as a daisy? . . . . We may end up believing the dew is still on the grass.” Foley doesn’t give up his cynicism, but he makes his tribute. Wolgast, the Jewish proprietor of a popular bar and night club who had come up the hard way to what he considered a place in society, lined up ultimately with the forces that destroyed Peggy because one day she brought a friend, a young Negro, into his bar. “Why did she have to pick on me?” he asked. McAlpine answered him out of his faith in Peggy, this time that faith standing its test. “Because she knows you and likes you and thinks you have no prejudices . . . . it was her tribute to you as a human being.” Then he added: “Which the whole of history compels you to take as an insult.” But Wolgast knows where the issue lies for him. If he lets her in, “Soon I’m running a nigger joint,” he says, “and I’m through.”

In distress of mind over what he feels is maturing for Peggy, McAlpine goes to a hockey match. He watches the crowd and the game, but he thinks of her.

He describes the crowd.

But McAlpine knows they are not united as Peggy would have them united. The rink becomes for him in imagination Wolgast’s joint and his deeper mind hears Wolgast say as he grabbed Peggy to throw her out: “You goddamned amateur. Don’t give me that tenderness and goodness routine . . . .” Between playing periods McAlpine bumps into a little priest enthusiastic about the game, but he only sees again, imaginatively, with his deeper vision, Peggy in the priest’s confessional, Peggy saying “I confess to the Almighty God and to thee, Father. I confess to having no sense of discrimination—I confess to not keeping my love for the right ones . . . .” And with bitterness he hears again in his deeper mind the priest saying “My dear child, it’s complicated. You must not be a nuisance . . . .”

Without parading his intention, without moralizing or didacticism, just as something inwoven with his story, I think Callaghan has written a novel on what we call the racial problem that approaches greatness in its insight and inevitability. In this book I am inclined to think Callaghan, as preparation and schooling, has justified all he has done heretofore.

Admittedly, there is a kind of blur over the book. The reader wonders if he is finding what Callaghan himself intended or what he, as reader, to his half surprise chooses to discover. The betting might be even on The Loved and the Lost: a brittle technically smart writer’s stunt imitative of an American fashion, or a novel with the reach and insight, sometimes fumbling, of sad comprehension. My own betting would not be even. As I suggested in beginning, the book is worthy exercise ground for critical discrimination.

Morley Callaghan’s published work includes:

To talk about Thomas Chandler Haliburton as our first distinctively Canadian writer is to suggest paradox and fate’s whimsy. For Haliburton, who did so much in his writings and in the tradition he created, to discover and nourish an individualized Canadianism, was against that Confederation whose logic has led to the Statute of Westminster and the progressive withering of colonialism. Haliburton disliked and distrusted the Yankee theories of democracy and independence: he wanted the bond with Britain tight and obvious. It was an important symbol for him that his friend Samuel Cunard established the first regular independent mail service between England and Canada. Haliburton did not want the Canadas of the early nineteenth century to go the way of the thirteen Colonies. He wanted no absorption into the United States of America. It was natural that he should see in Canadian Confederation, among other things, a trend away from the motherland. Yet the very delight and pride he took in his native province, Nova Scotia, nourished by implication the large Canadianism whose road was to be the road towards independence. Today, however, in 1951, Haliburton’s spirit might be reassured after all. If ghosts can grin, he might grin at the sardonic whimsy by which the Canadianism which threw off British colonialism yesterday becomes nourishment for the protest against absorption by the United States today. Haliburton would surely have listened with delight when Mr. Pearson said that Canada was not content to be a mere echo of the United States.

But that is bringing Haliburton into contemporary politics and my job today is to set Haliburton the man and writer in his own day and place in Nova Scotia, over a hundred years ago.

Thomas Chandler Haliburton was born in 1796 in an unpretentious pioneer home near the present village of Avondale in Nova Scotia. He was the son of William Haliburton, a Loyalist who had moved north from the Thirteen Colonies into British territory to escape the terrors of democracy and the contagion of revolution. William Haliburton established himself in the Colony and became Chief Justice. In this position his son later succeeded him. Young Thomas took his university degree from King’s College, in Nova Scotia. After graduation he went to England, an adventure the equivalent of the Grand Tour for the young Canadian. He married at nineteen and began the practice of law in his native province. In 1829, at the age of thirty-three, he published his first book and the first history of Nova Scotia, An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia. On the title page of that book he set these words: “This is my own, my native land.” In 1829 a Canadian was in the making.

After practising law for five years, Haliburton was elected to the House of Assembly. He held his seat for three years and then resigned rather than apologize to the House after a vote of censure had been passed upon him. It is an interesting comment on Haliburton’s type of independent Toryism that the vote of censure came upon him because he had made a fiery and sharply sarcastic speech attacking the conservatism of his fellow members. The capacity for analytic observation, rendered telling by a keen wit, which later made his writings famous, was already in evidence. Even today, that analytic wit does not accommodate itself readily in some minds. A Canadian critic was recently solicitous for Haliburton’s reputation in these words: “Unfortunately he lapsed into coarse epigram and vulgar epithet.” How Thomas would have appreciated that comment.

In that young colony in the first half of the nineteenth century there was a good deal of conscious and unconscious kinship with the literary and social traditions of the eighteenth century. Joseph Howe, one of the great figures in the great debates that led to Confederation, gathered about himself a group of well-read, cultivated and sharpminded men who called themselves The Club. Haliburton was drawn into this group and helped to make it lively. Howe was the vigorous and independent editor of the Nova Scotian and he tempted out of Haliburton for serial publication his Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick. The sketches were an immediate success and they had their first book publication in 1836. In creating Sam Slick, the peripatetic Yankee clockmaker, with his droll talk in drawled dialect, full of homely wisdom and incisive comment, Haliburton had begun the making of Canadian literature. Somehow Haliburton was able to make his reports of the doings of Slick and the sayings of Slick combine two elements that give body and spirit to what we call good writing: local flavour and human verity. It is scarcely proper to say that Haliburton added to these two elements humour. Rather, he found and expressed the humour which is always, to the friendly and discerning eye, embedded alike in the local and the universal. And that humour of course included the wry, the ironic, the grotesque—all that makes the business of being alive on the earth fascinating and inexplicable, homely and miraculous.

I want to give you some examples of the Haliburton writing, but first I must complete the story of his life. To one sort of Canadian of today it is a little unsatisfactory that Haliburton, so much the Nova Scotian, so committed to this continent and to his own, his native land, should have ended his days in a pleasant manor house on the Thames. He spent the last nine years o£ his life in England. It is possible to feel a lack of symmetry and of consistent fulfillment in that. Yet to Haliburton, who died two years before the accomplishment of the Confederation he feared, there was really no sense of a break. To him the England of the Thames and the Colony across the Atlantic were one whole. It probably made him very happy in a deep and fundamental sense to sit, as he did, in London as a member of the House of Commons. In those days that was accomplishment for the Colonial who had feared the United States. There must have been gratification also in the Honorary Degree received from Oxford. Nevertheless the life of the man and the essence of the literary achievement is Canadian. Thomas Chandler Haliburton belongs on the West side of the Atlantic and north of the 49th parallel.

Now for some of the writing.

Haliburton’s output was voluminous. Today his writings, brought together in any library that cares to preserve them, fill a wide shelf. The range of his interests is suggested by such titles as: The Bubbles of Canada; The Attaché or Sam Slick in England; The Old Judge or Life in a Colony; Rule and Misrule of the English in America; The Americans At Home or, Byeways, Backwoods and Prairies; and Nature and Human Nature. But the fame of Haliburton the writer rests on the Sam Slick series, published again and again in successive editions in England, the United States, France and Germany. Sam Slick the clockmaker takes his place in literature alongside Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Dickens’ Sam Weller.

Of course the reader of today may find Haliburton old fashioned, lumbering, and, in the end, merely tedious. Selections from his writings, however, under astute editing, have persuaded many who might otherwise miss him that there are delights still to be found in the work of a man who touched the funny bones and sharpened the wits of his own generation. The fact is that Haliburton knew human nature and, without too much illusion or disillusion, loved it. Both the Yankee braggart and the shrewd observer of human nature are brought out when Sam Slick is made to say concerning the Highlands of Scotland:

There is a passage in which Sam, in England, is remembering his boyhood and youth at home. It is full of the detail of the things one loves and remembers and colours into beauty and warmth as the past recedes. And then this bit:

One day Sam is bragging about one of his many horse trading exploits. He reports the Doctor as interrupting him, with a gentleman’s teasing query as to his veracity.

Sam continues the story on himself:

It is Haliburton himself of course who is the droll boy as he goes on, page after page, revealing Sam, revealing his native Nova Scotia, revealing the new, raw, shrewd America as exemplified in Sam; revealing as well, when his story takes Sam as American attaché to the Court of St. James, the shams, mannerisms and hypocrisies of the older culture.

One more bit. Sam is reporting his father’s account of his courtship of his mother:

But Sam’s father was interrupted at that point by Polly herself, who, though pleased as Punch, said she didn’t thank her husband one bit for talking about her “as if I was a filly.”

I could be tempted to go on and on. Suffice to say this (I paraphrase an American critic): at a time when on this side of the Atlantic the writers of prose fiction whose work counted at all—Irving, Cooper, Richardson—wrote as Englishmen wrote, Thomas Chandler Haliburton wrote as an American—that is, as an American in the continental sense.

We Canadians say he wrote as a Canadian. Thomas Chandler Haliburton is part of our tradition.

Thomas Haliburton’s published work includes:

Sitting at a luncheon table I asked a professor of English literature, a sensitive and incisive critic, for a comment on Robert W. Service. I saw that my friend was taken by surprise. It was a little as if I had asked a connoisseur of rubies for a comment on a piece of field stone. But I did get a reply. My friend said “Well, I must confess I don’t read Service, but I know that he exists. And I know that some of his ballads of the Yukon have a certain vigour.” He brightened, “I really enjoyed The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

Service’s own comment on his work runs thus. In the first volume of his autobiography, The Ploughman of the Moon, he says,

In a little piece called A Verseman’s Apology he puts it this way:

Insofar as that is honest, it is disarming. Service rhymes readily. He has an ear for easy rhythms; an eye for shape and colour. Apart from that, in his own mind, he has licensed himself to be rough and careless. It isn’t that he deliberately set out to write down to a presumably vulgar and insensitive public. Rather, with some real talent for versifying, he never attempted to refine his expression. He made a virtue out of being himself. As a result, there is a sort of uninhibited crudity in his writing which now and then has the strength and even attraction of natural vigour. His comment on his first poem, written at the age of six as a grace for the family table, is an interesting bit of self revelation:

On that, this is the comment he makes in his autobiography:

That at least has the virtue of awareness of limitation and the virtue of proclamation. Our most popular Canadian poet says, “I have always distrusted the abstract.” One could make a homily on that.

Service was born in England in 1876. Most of his boyhood was spent in Scotland. Before he was sixteen, over a score of his pieces of verse achieved publication in fugitive places in non-literary journals. He had a spurt of academic ambition and a glancing contact with Glasgow University. After seven years as a bank clerk he left for Canada to become a cattle rancher. This romantic ambition was never achieved, but he did wander here and there over the United States, Mexico and Canada.

In Montreal, he became a bank clerk again and was transferred to White Horse in the Yukon Territory. At this point Service’s Canadian story begins. And his contribution to Canadian writing begins.

In the Yukon he continued his careless, easy-going habit of versemaking. The pieces he produced were read to cronies in drab rooms after bank hours. There was a local unpretentious delight in what he did. “The boys” gathered and guffawed and shouted whenever Bob had “done another one.” With an honest and excited glee Service entered into the vivid and intense frontier life of Canada’s North. Then someone suggested publication and Service saved his money until he had a spare hundred dollars. He sent the hundred dollars along with a sheaf of poems to a publisher in Toronto asking for a private printing of as many copies as a hundred dollars would purchase. That was in 1907. From that day to this, in 1951, Robert W. Service has been a universally known name in Canada. No anthology of Canadian verse dare leave him out. No academic critic knows quite what to do with him. He has become an event in the writing annals of Canada on his own terms. Incidentally, his verse has made him well-off—almost wealthy.

I suppose Service occurs in this series because he is that sort of phenomenon. He has gone on writing and he has always had his public. In nearly every book store in Canada two volumes of collected poetry can invariably be found: Kipling, of course, is the author of one; Robert W. Service is the author of the other.

Quite frankly, Service took Kipling as model. It is inevitable that he be called the Kipling of Canada. But the suggestion of subservience and pallid imitation can be misleading. Service found the Canadian Yukon. The Canadian Yukon found Service. And the colour and romance, the vigour and wildness of frontier days under the northern lights got some authentic essence of itself channelled into expression in a way that made Canadians cry out with delight. This is the story of that first printing in Toronto of the Service verse as told in a Canadian trans-Canada broadcast about ten years ago:

For some there may be a kind of literary pathos in the fact that Service never advanced beyond the first volume Songs of a Sourdough and the second Ballads of a Cheechako, of 1909. Readers who purchase the Complete Poems published in 1940, may read and enjoy much of the added material, but to find Service and the original justifying delight they search out the Sourdough and the Cheechako pieces.

I think the clue to the justifying core of the Service achievement may be in his own words concerning his best-known poem The Cremation of Sam McGee. That poem begins:

The story builds a grotesque gruesomeness into a folk tale of unquestioned natural vitality. The story is simple and there is imaginative gusto and comic relief as well as a fine touch of the ironic in it. Sam’s partner has promised to cremate him and when he dies the partner, who tells the tale, loads the corpse on the cariole behind the husky dogs and sets off under the northern lights:

The cremation takes place:

When the partner opens the door, Sam McGee is sitting inside on the coals amid the flames grinning and enjoying himself—warm for the first time there under the Aurora sky.

In this tale, by oblique inclusion, there is built up something of the mind, the imagination, the humour, the capacity for adjustment to any and all of life’s exigencies and incalculable surprises, of the men and times of our Canadian North. Every Canadian feels that the great white North, and those nights when the long quivering silver and saffron fingers of the northern lights blaze and flicker and palpitate as from the source of all mystery, are his peculiar possession. Through a knack for easy taletelling and implicit involvement, Service recorded something we recognize as our own.

This is what he tells us about the writing of The Cremation of Sam McGee.

There is passion amid the clichés. Also, there is a record, not negligible, of the processes of literary creation. A. E. Housman would understand what Service meant.

Canadians with some pretensions to literary taste are always half ashamed of Service; he is no artist, it is alleged. He lacks taste and range. He is sentimental. But to tens of thousands forty years ago he was the adequate expression of the excitement, colour and raw vigour of a romantic phase of Canada’s development. Even today, he is loved and recited; a ballad maker for the folk who will not let him die.

For those outside Canada, Robert W. Service is a mirror not only of a vivid part of the Canadian scene, but of an aspect of what, in a broad use of the word, can be called Canadian culture.

Robert W. Service’s published work includes:

A Canadian writer whom the few have acclaimed and the many ignored, Frederick Philip Grove was once described to me as the best unread author in Canada. I think Grove, who died in 1948, would have taken a wry satisfaction from both puttings of the case. In one of his bitter moments he said that perhaps he was writing for posterity; certainly he was not writing for his own time. He left behind him two volumes of descriptive essays, one volume of sharply reflective critical essays called, characteristically, It Needs To Be Said, two volumes of autobiography—one oblique under a fictional veil, one direct, personal and poignant—and nearly a dozen novels, in published form or in manuscript. Two books have been written on him. His work has been the subject of many critical essays. Most Canadians reasonably knowledgable about books, would say he is our most important literary figure. Yet, so saying, they might never have read him; and so Grove remains for most Canadians acknowledged, but unread—an author with a reputation and no public.

This is a rather strange situation in regard to a presumably competent author. I think if I open it out and discuss it a bit some interesting things about Canada and the literary conditions in Canada may be made plain.

I first met Philip Grove in the early twenties. That seems a long time ago. I met him because I sought him out—I sought him out because I had read his first book, a volume of essays called Over Prairie Trails. And I read that book because a learned old Scotsman, who had been a missionary among the Blackfoot Indians and had since retired to be a librarian in the college in Winnipeg where I was teaching, said to me one day “Here’s a book. Read it. It’s something unusual in Canada—a piece of writing with power and beauty in it.” Dr. MacLean—the grand old boy, camper by prairie trails, student of Indian philology, author—who, though tamed a bit as a college librarian, still chewed tobacco and spat the juice behind the denominational college radiators, was right. Grove’s work had quality.

That spring there was a Provincial Teachers’ Convention in Winnipeg. Grove, who was then a school teacher in one of the small prairie towns, attended. I saw him first across a room in the Convention Hotel. He was taller than those about him. He stooped a little as he listened to a conversation. He looked Scandinavian. His face was both rough-hewn and fine. I could see his gestures and catch the rise and fall of his resonant talk with a foreign accent. One felt that a man was standing there among the teachers.

First, then, something about the man; and then something about the writings and the people in them and the Canada in which Grove worked.

Frederick Philip Grove was born in Europe of a Scottish mother and a Swedish father. Apparently there was wealth in the family and as a boy and young man Grove seems to have moved from one European capital to another in the atmosphere of the cultural life of the times. At least he nourished the memory of such a life in his talk and writings. A collapse of the family fortune turned young Grove into an American adventurer. For almost twenty years he was a wanderer in the United States. He was a migratory farm labourer, a waiter in restaurants; a dozen and one occupations half supported, half exasperated him while he wrote interminably long novels in what he called his leisure time. From the American Middle West he drifted up into Canada, following the wheat harvests. One day he was sitting in a railway station waiting room reading a French classic. A Roman Catholic priest approached him because the sight of an apparent vagrant absorbed in such reading matter aroused curiosity. The result of the conversation was the priest’s advice to Grove to ask the Minister of Education in Manitoba for a job as a teacher.

So began the train of events that committed Grove to Canada. He taught in Manitoba, he took his B.A. degree extramurally from the University of Manitoba, and he began getting some of his manuscripts into print. But there was no popular supporting sale for any of his books. After the death of his daughter in tragic circumstances he left the West, and was drawn into a publishing venture in Ottawa which, before its collapse, made him a little money. With that money he bought a farm in Western Ontario, with dreams of being a gentleman farmer and literary man. The project was as pathetic as it was ambitious. Grove’s health failed, the farm yielded an insufficient income. His wife started a small private school in the farmhouse. Together they lived in a deprivation which was often extreme need until, after a long unhappy illness following paralysis, he died in 1948. Some recognition had come to him. The Canadian Club sent him on a speaking tour across Canada during which he consistently alienated his audiences by a combination of what seemed like egotistic self-revelation and bitter home truths about the materialistic preoccupation of Canadians. The Royal Society of Canada honoured him. University professors paid him the respectful tribute of serious critical scrutiny. Yet his books, published for the most part at his own expense, seemed scarcely to go beyond the presses. He died beaten and embittered, himself an example of what he felt was the capricious inconsequence of life. Speaking of art generally and of his own in particular, he says, in his autobiography In Search of Myself:

Of that work, now a word. I think much of Grove’s writing will have an eventual public. Grove himself, as writer, will stand inevitably in the Canadian literary tradition. No writer in Canada has worked so assiduously, so continuously, so passionately against such odds at the job of writing. True, he never broke beyond the limitations imposed by the fact that he was writing in English and not in his native tongue. He never got away from the tradition of the over-long nineteenth century novel. I have in my possession handwritten and typed manuscripts which run to hundreds of thousands of words. The fierce puritan in Grove seemed to drive him to write on and on and on in the attempt to fulfil in expression every possible expansion of his material. Publishers’ readers would say “He is good. There is grand stuff in him, but he is writing out of touch with the mode of his time.” All this is true, but, whether he is read just now or not, Grove’s passionate absorption in the craft of letters has enriched the tone of literary culture in Canada. And some day, perhaps some day soon, editorial insight will abstract from the mass of his work the selections which will present in agreeable compass that strength and beauty in his work which old Dr. MacLean, the Blackfoot missionary, was so sure about.

I am inclined to think that the failure of Grove to gain a public contemporary with himself was in part the failure of Canadian criticism. We are a dispersed population in Canada and we lack the kind of book reviewing in local journals here and there across the country which creates that climate of expectation and critical appraisal in which a somewhat difficult and unusual author lives. Furthermore, in Grove’s day we had not developed the techniques of publishers’ ballyhoo and aggressive salesmanship which might, irrespective of merit, have launched one or other of Grove’s books among the drawing room and cocktail coteries.

As a readable book, indeed as a fascinating story of hobo wanderings across the face of the United States, I can recommend A Search for America. It is full of incident, fabulous, fantastic and homely. And there is a man in that book. There is also an America in it.

Among the novels, I suggest Our Daily Bread. It is a slow-moving, rather heavily written book. But it has accumulation and power in it, and there are one or two pieces of descriptive and reflective writing that are events for the reader. It is a story of Saskatchewan and of the break-up of a farm family under the impact of urban influences. An agricultural tradition decays and, for Grove, there is an accompaniment of character disintegration. Much of the book is the record of what Grove saw taking place in the changing culture of the Canadian West.

One other novel I should like to mention. It is Grove’s first published novel, called Settlers of the Marsh. I mention this book because of what Grove himself says of it. The comment is a clue to much in Grove. He says:

I can also recommend Grove’s book of descriptive essays Over Prairie Trails. The book is mainly the detailed, meticulously observed record of winter drives, sometimes behind plunging teams in smothering blizzards and sometimes with ease and speed in moonlit crystal clear zero weather. I think Grove has, as we say, “done” snow in Over Prairie Trails as it has not been done before in literature.

One last word. If you want the moving, too self-preoccupied story of this partially self-thwarted artist read In Search of Myself by Frederick Philip Grove.

Frederick Philip Grove’s published work includes:

Frederick Philip Grove was born in Europe. He committed himself to Canada and contributed significantly to the making of literature in Canada. Here now is a writer whose beginnings were in Canada but whose mature life has been committed increasingly to the United States. Merrill Denison is an example of the professional writer who, as we say, makes his living by his pen. In order to do that he moved out of Canada to New York where, presumably, the aggressive publishers and the organized markets are. Denison has specialized in giving narrative and interpretative treatment to undertakings and personalities in American life which seem to him romantic and rich in human vitality. His Klondike Mike, for instance, is a colourful, vivid reconstruction of the gold rush and fortune building days of last century centred about the life story of a well-known Ottawa personality who died but a little while ago. Denison felt that in capturing for the record Klondike Mike and all he symbolized he was salvaging something half fabulous, half splendid out of the early days of this continent’s development, something that might otherwise be lost.

At the present moment Denison has at least three undertakings in hand: he is doing the script for a film which will tell the story of the expansion of the tobacco industry in Canada; he is preparing the volume on the American automobile industry, in the series of American industrial histories; and, for the Ontario Government, he has taken on the job of digging out and setting up, in informative story form, everything that the forests have meant in their millennial origins and in relation to Ontario life, social, political and economic. Denison delights in this sort of thing. In one sense of course it is a kind of literary hack work. He will be the first to say so. But it is respectable and sometimes exciting work and sometimes it results in one sort of literature. It involves long processes of exasperating sleuth work in research—the location and interpretation of documents; the imaginative reconstruction, based on factual findings, of dynamic personalities; the tracking down of all sorts of intrigue and romantic adventurings connected with the industrial and commercial expansion of a continent’s resources. But of course it is not called creative literature.

When Denison gave me to read in manuscript the first draft of his story of the great Massey Harris Company I said “Why, this is really a sort of footnote to American and Canadian history.” His eyes twinkled. “That’s what I meant it to be,” he said. And it is true that, into that story of the beginnings, struggles and growth of an agricultural implement firm on this continent, Denison, with his sense for the drama of human relationships and his knack for connecting incidents with processes, has interwoven material that is not so much merely the history of an agricultural firm as it is the history of agriculture itself.

There are of course those who say that Denison, in turning from his earlier work as a creative writer to this sort of commissioned writing, has sold out to the dollar. Certainly he has made a great deal of money which would never have come his way had he remained in Canada and stuck to his playwriting and humourous sketches. But in doing this sort of writing Denison makes no bid for credentials as historian or maker of literature. He is doing a good and serviceable job for good pay; that is all that need be said.

I have dwelt on this aspect of Denison’s work because what has happened to Merrill Denison has happened to a good many Canadian writers. Young men and women with writing talent, with insufficient outlet and challenge in Canada, get writing jobs of one sort or another in the States. If they remain at home, working as teachers, clerks, bond salesmen or civil servants, they continue their writing merely as a sort of left-handed hobby or they drop it altogether. This state of affairs is inevitable in a small country lying adjacent to another whose language is the same. The demanding effective market for professional writing is in the big country. I think one result is that there are a lot of thwarted would-be or might-have-been writers in Canada. Sometimes I think this makes the literary atmosphere in Canada a little sour. There is a feeling that those who left the country left for the money and that those who remained at home are not appreciated. Merrill Denison has been called a lost Canadian and there is sometimes a touch of envy not untinged with jealousy in the statement.

Yet Denison has by no means given up Canada. The telling of the story of the Ontario forests is a labour of love for him. He delighted in Klondike Mike, and in resurrecting the history of the Massey Harris Company. And he maintains in Canada, visiting it every summer, a vast estate, ten square miles in area, along the shores of a magnificent lake south of the Algonquin Park country. Merrill Denison likes to think of himself as American with Canadian roots and United States (or Usonian—I use that word for the U.S. when I need an adjective for the nation, not the continent) connections. Across the lake, opposite his summer home, towers a magnificent rock face about whose spruce-serrated top edge, high against the sky, the eagles swoop. Near the base of that rock, just above the water, Merrill has had carved the words from Whitman:

The rock is called “Old Walt.” Sitting opposite it with Denison of an evening, with the sunset colours splashing its face and the eagles hovering, one can feel the Canadian and the American traditions combine. Merrill Denison is a writer who represents that intermingling.

But true as all this is and interesting as it may be, it is of Denison’s earlier work done in Canada that I wish to speak now. That work done in Canada is not extensive. It consists of two small volumes, both out of print. The Unheroic North is a volume containing four plays, three of them short one-acters. Boobs in the Woods is a collection of humourous slightly astringent pieces based on Denison’s attempt to be the presiding genius of a summer resort business adventure. The thing that makes these two little books valuable is what tempts some people to call Denison a lost Canadian when they do it with regret and only as a tribute. If Denison could have remained committed to Canada, they say, he might have given us more of this sort of thing and matured as an artist in doing it. The plays are full both of accomplishment and promise and the humourous pieces tantalize because they suggest what riches we might have had if Denison had only gone on to give us more. But Denison went to the United States to write for a market which demanded of him different things and so became our lost Canadian.

So the argument runs. It is of course an unsatisfactory argument because it is based on conjecture. Even Denison himself cannot contribute to it with any certainty. We don’t know what would have happened had he remained at home.

But we do have those plays and those humourous sketches. In having them, our deposit of literary material bred out of ourselves is richer and more sprightly than it would have been had Denison not begun his literary career in Canada. For Denison saw, heard, felt, and loved his Canada. The people he puts in his plays and sketches are Canadians. They have a mark on them. They could occur nowhere else. They help, by imaginative insight, to reveal and differentiate something that does exist—a Canadian local type. In those early writings Denison is not dealing with large abstractions like the growth of the forests and their industrial and social significance in the Ontario economy. He is not dealing with large projects like the building of the Massey Harris commercial kingdom based on wheat growing. In those early works he is preoccupied with a rural pioneer area and with the particular kind of life that develops on the stony farms about the lakes which make the summer resort centres of Ontario. Denison knew these people. He lived among them. He loved their ignorance, their intelligence, their wit, their shrewd common sense and their own particular sorts of immoralities. His ear caught their turns of speech and their intonation, and his eye delighted in their walk and their gesture.

No one has caught more effectively than Denison, in any form of literature, something that is the essence of a way of life in a Canadian region. And no one has turned the trick with less pretension and less self-conscious literary ambition. Denison delighted in his people, loved to write about them, and caught them in his words; or rather in their words, cunningly chosen. Once in connection with his summer resort management adventure Denison decided to have his carpenters make bedsteads from unpeeled birch cut from the woods. In an offhand manner he suggested 6’ 6” by 6’ 6” as the size. Trouble developed because Sam the carpenter couldn’t decide where the head of the bed should be. The two carpenters are lying on the floor within a 6’ 6” by 6’ 6” chalked-off square trying to discover the bed’s head; Merrill reports the scene:

Denison can do that again and again until it builds up into the flesh-and-blood reality of a society and its characters. He can make his people vital and vocal in their own terms. In the play Brothers In Arms, for instance, he lifts as it were two Canadian farmer-woodsmen by the scruff of their necks and the seat of their pants and puts them behind footlights. On the stage they are as alive as in their own hunting shack. It was Synge who said that in a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple. Denison gave us the nut-and-apple flavour of our own Canadian stuff. We wish he had given us more. Giving us what he did, he left a mark for others to shoot at. Denison’s early work challenges the Canadian to find his own. It may be said that the later type of work challenges also but not with the same imaginative vitality.

Merrill Denison’s published work includes:

Archibald Lampman was a Canadian minor poet. He did not leave behind him a body of work of any importance in relation to the main movement of the poetic art in his own or a subsequent time. He did not even leave behind him a single poem or group of poems whose vitality of spirit or unflawed craftsmanship might guarantee an incidental immortality. Neither in the mass of his work, by virtue of its general trend and significance, nor in any isolated piece of inescapable quality is Lampman really important.

Yet Archibald Lampman has a place in the story of the development of Canadian literary culture. No Canadian literary historian can ignore him, and what might be called the general climate of opinion in regard to poetry in Canada would be less fine and sympathetic without him. Lampman, in Canada, has performed the services of the minor poet; he has done something to keep open the ways of communication between a people and the environment it inherits and must call its own. To some extent it is because the late Professor E. K. Brown could say of Lampman quite correctly “Abroad, he is today quite unknown” that I bring his work to your attention now. Dying from the progressive onset of a heart ailment and knowing the end might come at any moment, after one of his walks, he wrote his last poem, Winter Uplands:

Not a great, not even a really good poem in any sense. There are manifest shortcomings and subtle lapses from that absolute decision and control which keep poetry inevitably right. But there is feeling in the piece. There are pictorial values. There is observation and communication. There is delicacy of sensibility and a quiet unpretentious privacy of spirit sufficient to suggest that even the minor poet may lead us some steps away from our habitual insensitive selves.

Lampman was born at Morpeth, Ontario, in 1861, the son of an Anglican clergyman, with an ancestry of Dutch and Celtic stock going back through United Empire Loyalist refugees from the American revolution. He had good schooling. First from his father, who put Pope first of all poets, and then from a Mr. Barron, a Cambridge M.A., who used to march into the classroom with a cushion upon his outstretched hands, on the cushion a Bible, and on the Bible a rod. From Barron, despite or because of the Bible and the rod, Lampman received a grounding in Latin and Greek. He graduated in Arts from Trinity College, Toronto, in 1882. He tried school teaching, failed at it, and through a friend received a Civil Service appointment in Ottawa in the Post Office Department. He was government clerk and poet until his death. The departmental routine of the Civil Service created the amount of exasperation and the sense of frustration normal in an imaginative and cultured man. But Lampman was a gentle philosopher. His responsibilities to the government were defined by the clock and therefore limited. Beyond the limits he found his freedom. It was the freedom to make poetry.

It is Lampman the Canadian poet I am going to bring to you now. This will not mean, through a poet’s writing, an introduction to specific social or political matters filtered in a Canadian way through a Canadian mind. Lampman did not work with that material. Nor will it mean a gift of persons in terms of their variety and colour. Lampman did not possess the knack for seeing and communicating people. It will mean landscape and, in an exact and sensitive way, a particular part of our Canadian landscape.

I know that in the critical mood of today it is dispraise to call a poet a landscape poet. To apply the limiting adjective to a minor poet can be deadly. It depends of course to a considerable extent upon the sense in which we use the word landscape. For Lampman, landscape was not something merely to be photographed non-selectively and with a poor lens. Lampman had a way of taking his emotional departures, as it were, from the sharply observed significant detail of landscape. He loved the Ottawa valley—the blue Laurentian hills, the moving river, the farmlands sloping to the water, the roads, the clumps of woods, the by-paths and ponds. He loved to see, from some hill slope beyond its confines, his own city of Ottawa, the young city, “the bell-tongued city with its glorious towers.”

In seeing all this, he tried to capture the moods that went with the seeing. Sometimes that made him mawkishly sentimental, sometimes philosophically trite. But sometimes he caught and held, in phrases beginning with exact description and ending in incantation, the very essence he was after. I wonder if you can catch a kind of plus of evocation beyond the mere description, in this piece, called simply A January Morning:

The Canada of the eighties of last century was a sparsely populated area. Even Eastern Canada, the centre of the young nation’s vigorous beginnings, the Canada of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence river valleys, was a land of widely separated villages and tiny crossroads hamlets. True, Montreal and Toronto were dreaming of great cityhood, but Ottawa was little more than a sprawling town of uncertain promise. Lampman was never really a city man. Indeed, he lacked in Ottawa the stimulus which the richer and more varied intellectual and artistic companionships of a matured city might have given him. So he spent his poetic sensitivity in the main on the nature round about him. He walked, he explored, he sat in quiet places, “content” as he says, “to watch and dream.” The result, in the record, is a body of verse in a low key which often gives surprisingly more than it promises. It is as if Lampman was always hesitant to touch anything but a muted string. He says:

Yet this does not argue a lack of vitality in Lampman. Within his own limits the vitality is there. It lies in a power of rightly selected observation and in a choice of word and phrase whose austere economy suggests awareness and control. To match that Canadian winter picture given earlier, here is a Canadian summer piece. It is called Heat.

The comment of the pert young modern on that is apt to be vigorously disparaging. The implication is that, poetically speaking, there is nothing “significant”; and Lampman is effectively damned. As a test, one more stanza (there are six in all):

Lines like the last four are poetic salvage for many readers of Lampman. Such readers are ready to admit that appreciation of this sort of writing is thwarted for those who lack intimate knowledge of country things and in whom an aroused if not diseased imagination creates specialized expectations. Lampman’s loves are simple loves. For Lampman a church spire is not necessarily a phallic symbol. It may be something far more simple and profound.

I have one more piece to mention. I don’t wish the choice to suggest that Lampman wrote only what may be called landscape verse. He did venture timidly now and then into the verse of political and social observation. He wrote some love poetry and sometimes he could be personally poignant. He could speak of that place

But as interpreter of the landscape he knew, and of its moods, he found his most authoritative mode. Here is what he gives us when he sees, not the Ottawa valley, but this time an aspect of the valley of the St. Lawrence where the tide comes:

A Sunset at Les Eboulements

That is Lampman.

Archibald Lampman’s published work includes:

Thomas Raddall is an example of the Canadian writer about whom readers outside Canada are enthusiastic but concerning whom Canadians have tended to be ignorant, grudging or apathetic. I think it is the nemesis of our colonialism at work once again. Canadians should not have had to wait for Blackwood’s Magazine in England to appreciate Thomas Raddall’s stories. It is a comment on Canadian reader interest that when Raddall’s Canadian publishers brought out The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek, a collection of his short stories, they deemed it expedient to launch the volume with the credentials of a foreword by Lord Tweedsmuir. The favour of an Englishman (though he happened to be a Scot!) and a Lord would presumably set the office-boy newspaper reviewers on the right track.

The publishers were not entirely to blame. Few in Canada had discovered Raddall or said the appropriate directive critical things about him. There is the further fact that no Canadian literary personage or critic, had there been one to speak out, would have carried outstanding authority and respect. In literary matters Canadians still tend to wait upon the King’s nod. This might be put down to humility and modesty were it not for the suspicion that it is mere ignorance. The fact seems to be that few if any Canadians knew or cared about Thomas Raddall until he presented his credentials from abroad. It is to be remembered that the prose tales of Charles G. D. Roberts were known and enjoyed in Britain and elsewhere nearly fifty years before Roberts became a Knight and was acclaimed in Canada. The pleasant tales for children and those who delight in children by L. M. Montgomery had publication in England nearly forty years before she obtained the first imprint of a Canadian publishing house. At least it may be said that Canadians have been reticent about their own writers.

That brings me back to Thomas Raddall. The other day I was talking to a Canadian nurse, a woman long resident in the United States and the victim of successive yearly subscriptions to book clubs, to whom I had loaned an armful of Raddall. She was exasperated and enthusiastic. “But why didn’t I learn of this man before?” she said. “He’s delightful. He’s alive and colourful and he makes me love my own country.” I told her that the Literary Guild had made Pride’s Fancy one of its monthly selections. “I must have missed it,” she said, “But anyway, I keep Canadian connections; I subscribe to Maclean’s and Saturday Night and I see the University Quarterlies. Why didn’t they shout to me about these books?”

Now of course that is not quite fair to the Canadian attitude towards the work of Canadian writers. The comment is the comment of an ordinary reader familiar with the mine-run of currently publicized material. That volume of short stories by Raddall, The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek, received the Governor-General’s Award for distinguished Canadian literature in 1943, and again, in 1949, his book on the city of Halifax, called Halifax, Warden of the North received the same honour. Raddall has not been without recognition in his own country. Indeed, such recognition as he has received is sign of the changing literary times in Canada. The Canadian reader is now beginning to discover and appreciate for himself the merits that may lie in the work of his own writers. The combination of exasperation and enthusiasm in my nurse friend is a part of the awakening process.

Now who is this Thomas Raddall and what has he done?

Thomas Raddall, now in his late forties, son of the late Colonel T. H. Raddall, was born in England, came to Canada as a boy, and for over thirty years has been, not a lost incomer, but a committed Canadian—committed particularly in relation to his adopted province, Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia’s history, Nova Scotia’s ships, Nova Scotia’s men and women, and the sea, which is so much the life of that province, have been, in Raddall, the urgency and even passion which have turned him from sea-rover, radio operator, bookkeeper into a writer, with burnt bridges behind him, depending for his living on his pen. The fact that more than 170,000 copies of his books have been sold in all parts of the world, that there have been English and foreign language editions, that selections from his work have appeared in Braille in Britain and the United States, may suggest that Raddall justifies his commitment to the writer’s labour.

From the first, Thomas Raddall has accepted and worked within a Canadian tradition. He says: “It was from Haliburton that I learned a most important fact—that stories could be written about the country I knew best, and about the people in it and the incidents of their daily life; and that if the stories were good enough, and the workmanship were good enough, the world would read them.”

There are two prides in that: pride in one’s own material and pride in craftsmanship. Raddall has both. It is what makes him solid and respectable as a writer. When John Buchan wrote the foreword to the Pied Piper stories it was the tribute of one workman to another. With calculating kindliness Buchan put his finger on the achievement of Raddall which may at the same time suggest his limitations. Buchan says: “I confess to a special liking for a story which has something of a plot and which issues in a dramatic climax . . . . To this school Mr. Raddall belongs, and he is worthy of a great succession. He has the rare gift of swift, spare, clean-limbed narrative. And he has great stories to tell.” That last sentence, I take it, has not only the flavour of the phrase “great yarns”; it means also that Buchan was aware that Raddall recognized the greatness in his own native material. There is a clue to Raddall’s attitude to this material in his comment on Halifax, Warden of the North while it was still in contemplation. He said: “I have in mind a book on Halifax; not a novel, but the story of the city, from its foundation to the present time. The true story of Halifax is a romance in itself, and one I should like to put on paper.” The Halifax story is a first-rate achievement. Equipped with an acute historical sixth sense and the capacity for assiduous apprenticeship to archives, equipped also with a gleeful impishness and a sharp eye for human nature, (he didn’t sit at the feet of Haliburton for nothing) Raddall brought the tradition and present day verities of Halifax alive. He both delighted and scandalized his readers. He made Canadian doings, Canadian personalities, Canadian scenes as vital and worthy a part of the fabric of the human story as any such material gathered by any writer anywhere. If you want some fascinating hours of winter reading I recommend Thomas Raddall’s Halifax, Warden of the North.

But it is of the short stories I wish chiefly to speak; and of one of those in particular: Before Snow Flies. Raddall began his literary career with sketches and short stories, widened his range to the type called the historical romance, tightened his grip in the firm workmanship of the Halifax book, and, most recently, in The Nymph and the Lamp, has essayed what, for lack of a better phrase, may be called the novel proper: that is, the story, which as organism and as art, presumes to dimensions beyond mere tale telling. For me, the short stories still seem to contain the essential best of Raddall. When His Majesty’s Yankees was published in 1942 in London, New York and Toronto, someone proclaimed it “the historical fiction discovery of the year.” Be that as it may, His Majesty’s Yankees, a grand vivid three-dimensional tale, is of a type matched by many others. The same may be said of Roger Sudden, which the Latin Americans seem to want translated for them into Spanish. Raddall knows the recipe for colourful women and ardent men but it tends nevertheless to be a type recipe. It is in the short stories that the knack of the writer for close description and human verity is disciplined to exactitude and fineness by the indigenous material. The texture is hard-woven and the pattern often exquisite. The short stories seem to me the artistic core of Raddall’s work.

On the surface, the short story of which I wish to speak is simple to the point of being ordinary. But if I turned the statement about and said that Before Snow Flies is ordinary to the point of being simple, one might glimpse a special tribute. There is a simplicity which is ultimate and satisfying, like the gable end of a Canadian nineteenth century stone grist mill here in my own countryside around Kingston, Ontario.

Before Snow Flies, a story in the Pied Piper collection, begins thus:

They sail together, the boy and the old man, out of the little port of Kezzigoosa bound for the Spanish Main; the old man, after a lifetime of stay-at-home boat building for others, full of dreams of warm seas and far places, and the boy sea-enamoured and adventurous. “Why, I know all them places like the palm o’ me hand,” says old Ham. “Havana-de-Cuba an’ Port-a-Prance an’ Trinidad, an’ Demerara where the rum comes from. Sunshine, Dougie, all day an’ every day an’ you takin’ it easy in a cotton shirt an’ a pair canvas trousers same as a lord. Warm nights, boy, an’ stars hangin’ low an’ hot enough to singe your hair, an’ gittars twangin’ an’ creole gals dancin’ . . . .”

But they never reach the Spanish Main. They sail across bays and past headlands and lighthouses and wooded shores to Halifax and ultimately to Yarmouth. They put in at Nova Scotia ports, the old man finding sea-cronies and the talk of ships. They stop in a little bay to get an illicit catch of lobsters. They feel the chill of the autumn mornings and see the glory of the frost-painted woods. Sailors have warned them, indulging the old man’s fancy for the Spanish Main, that they must be south before the snow flies and the boy is anxious and weather-wary but the old man dawdles from port to port along the Nova Scotia shores. He cannot hurry away from what he loves. At the critical point when they should veer south if they are really going south, Dougie shouts: “You’re holdin’ her too much to the no’thard. You got to give her more westin’ to clear Cape Fourchu.” “Fact is, Dougie Boy,” says old Ham, “I got an errand in Yarmouth.”

And just as the first snow flies they put up the ship for the winter in Yarmouth. Old Ham never gets farther than the discovery of his own Nova Scotia. In the end, he is content with his own autumn.

I suppose the story is a sort of parable. Raddall has loaded it with his love of his own material and old Ham becomes local and universal humanity. In many of his stories Raddall achieves this result. He knows the secret of economy and exactitude in observed detail. He makes that detail belong where he finds it, with all its right flavour and colour, and belong also, as symbol and picture, to the warm life of human universality. Old Ham is Everyman.

In Raddall’s latest book and most serious venture in the novel form, The Nymph and the Lamp, there is much of this descriptive sharp exactitude. Sable Island, the scene of the book’s central action, is a splendid achievement in creative evocation. But the book’s people seem to fail us. The novelists’ nimbus of plus dimensional suggestion seems lacking. There is not enough human vista in the book. There is even the suggestion of that sorriest of all makeshifts, built-in sex appeal. There is not enough to frighten and dismay and exalt the reader. Yet the suggestion of power is present. The reach is there if not the grasp. And Thomas Raddall, studious craftsman and alert observer, is not yet fifty.

Thomas H. Raddall’s published work includes:

I suppose that even today it is still true—though his peak of general popularity was twenty years ago—that Stephen Leacock is the most widely and favourably known of all Canadian writers. I don’t think it is a sufficient explanation to say simply that Leacock was a humourist, meaning merely that he was a funny man. As a funny man, creator of a dozen and one deft, gay, absurd, sometimes uproarious, pieces of bright foolery, he had his inevitable public. He worked in the tradition of Thomas Haliburton and Mark Twain and Artemus Ward and there were readers (and, when he lectured, listeners) ready for him. But Leacock always had rather more than the funny man’s public. There were always the readers who felt they got their laughter plus. In other words, there is a lot of seriousness in Leacock for the serious. The piece called Oxford As I See It in the volume My Discovery of England, along with its fun, is a trenchant criticism of American education. And take this bit, when, dead in earnest, Leacock is discussing the place of the classics in education: it may sound indeed like something bred on the American continent; a debatable heresy offered with careless hilarity, but a heresy to be considered seriously:

Leacock’s observation and analysis, embedded with the humour, is often as didactic and tendentious as a Puritan sermon. He was a moralist in the sense that he delighted in the whole of life and had values for the whole. That is being moralist in the high inclusive sense. When he did an introduction to the study of humour to become one of the volumes in The Home University Library, he called his little book, not simply, Humour, but Humour and Humanity. In his preface he says:

The man who writes that way suggests two possibilities: that he will not be funny at all, or that, being funny, he will be something else as well. Leacock in most of his work is in the second category, and gives us the plus.

Some of you will remember that in the early thirties the nations of the world were talking a lot about international agreements for naval disarmament. The general public, that composite decent patient deluded credulous thing, took the talk seriously, but Leacock didn’t. He laughed at it. He wrote a piece called Ratification of the New Naval Disagreement which is a series of sharp little explosions in derisive mockery of all the pompous hypocrisy and dishonesty of the contracting nations. The piece ends: “At the close of the year all the delegates left for home in order to get their naval budgets in good shape for Christmas.”

Leacock didn’t like dishonesty and cant. One feels he would appreciate the tribute J. M. Keynes paid to a friend: “He was a sceptic in everything—but affection and reason.” Leacock’s humour was on behalf of affection and reason. That’s why he called his little attempt at a treatise on humour, Humour and Humanity.

Now in talking this way I don’t want to deflect interest from the Leacock who seems so often merely the completely irresponsible fun maker. That Leacock is available to every reader. I only want to suggest that there was keel weight under Leacock. Apparently the sport of every silly breeze, he knew what he was doing and where he was going. He was so responsible he could seem irresponsible. Leacock is one of our more serious Canadian authors.

Stephen Leacock was born in England, in Hampshire, in 1869. When he was seven his parents moved to Canada. In his unfinished autobiography there is a picture of the farmhouse and the conditions to which the English immigrants had to adjust themselves. Leacock says, looking back:

Conditions were hard. The father was an incompetent farmer. But the mother held the family together, and successive contributions from England solved the successive financial crises. Young Stephen was able to go to Upper Canada College in Toronto and make the beginnings in the educational training which took him finally, via the Universities of Toronto and Chicago, to the professorship in economics and political science at McGill.

As a professor he belonged to McGill. But as a writer he belonged increasingly to the whole English-speaking world. He wrote for his readers as they increased and he sensed, with a kind of grand carelessness, that they were waiting for him. With easy camaraderie he shared with them both his foolishness and his wisdom. The nature of the salvage from the total output will vary with individual taste and temperament. I think most of us who have been his readers through the years will make our own little collection of pieces we feel we can always chuckle over alone or with others. But one volume I think we can all agree on: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town has delights for every normally alert reader. The book is really no more than a collection of sketches. But the sketches fit in, one beside another, so happily that the little town comes to life with all its people in it. Leacock says of this book: “If it fails in its portrayal of the scenes and the country that it depicts the fault lies rather with an art that is deficient than in an affection that is wanting.”

That is not the Leacock of the sharper edges, the Leacock who, in his discussion of humour, comes out with: “There is good ground for saying that the primates all laugh—the word here being used to include not only archbishops and bishops, but orang-outangs, gorillas and chimpanzees.” The Leacock of the Sunshine Sketches book is having fun, but it is fun with something he loves—the life, in all its patterned variety, of a little Ontario town he knows with easy and perfect intimacy. Here is a paragraph from the first chapter:

And the book is off. The sketches accumulate. The magic works. And the little town is alive in the sunshine for all who choose to visit it.

There is, as you know, lots of Leacock. Every library carries some of his books. Often they bubble and sparkle with an irresponsible energy which is a pure delight. Often they add to laughter thought. They remind us that Leacock had a high function for humour; and that he said it should be kind—that is, kind in intention, which can involve, let us remember, analysis, and sharpness, and new truth seen clearly.

When you go to pick out one of Leacock’s books, try first Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. After that, you may build your own Leacock anthology.

Stephen Leacock’s published work includes:

At the moment I suppose Hugh MacLennan is our best-known Canadian novelist. His latest book Each Man’s Son makes people recall his other novels, Barometer Rising, Two Solitudes and The Precipice.

Here in Canada one can assume for such books a common background of knowledge and even sometimes of interest. If a novelist is writing about our places and people, we have a useful, practical check on at least one sort of thing he does. We can say he didn’t see this or he distorted that; that he doesn’t understand our character or our temperament—or even, being more specific, our politics or our religion—or, in an enthusiastic approach, we can say, reading a novel or play or essay, “That’s us. There’s a writer who knows his own stuff.”

This is local criticism; perhaps one might say parochial comment. Within its limits, it can be quite serviceable. There is a sense in which intelligent rural South of England folk, for instance, have a specialist’s eye for some things in Thomas Hardy; just as North of England folk have a special measuring rod for some things in Emily Brontë.

As far as it goes, that is all right. As criticism—which should mean appreciative understanding—within its limits, it can be illuminating. It can teach us a good deal about what the art of the novelist should accomplish. At one level, it can help us to discover, as the conventional phrase goes, how close an author is to his material.

This means that if I were talking about Hugh MacLennan to Canadians a number of things would come into the conversation almost inevitably. We should ask, for instance, how well MacLennan in Barometer Rising described and recreated the Halifax explosion disaster on which that book is based. We Canadians think we know about that explosion. It was our explosion. The sense of it billowed out into our national consciousness through a thousand and one personal contacts. We are apt to say to the outsider: “You know, of course, about the terrible explosion of that munitions ship in Halifax Harbour in the first world war—well, here’s a book about it. Hugh MacLennan is a Nova Scotian, and he wrote a novel about it.” Perhaps we wouldn’t say so, but we would imply that we thought MacLennan did a pretty good job in handling something of ours. That’s one sort of criticism. And we could go on in that way. Take Two Solitudes, MacLennan’s second book.

Two Solitudes is really about us. It’s about the French and the English in Canada, particularly in Quebec, where the two races, languages, temperaments intermingle with mutual jealousy, suspicion, confusion; also sometimes with mutual delight and occasional mutual understanding. In Two Solitudes, the novelist explores the validity of a thesis; namely, that the two peoples, the French and the English here in Canada, are two peoples living each in its own solitude, shut off from the other. As a novelist writing in Canada for Canadians, MacLennan had a sort of head start with such a thesis. He had, as you might say, a good pitch. This French Canadian business is a Canadian problem. It got frighteningly sharpened in the last war over the conscription issue, for instance. Quebec was aloof and unhappy and smouldering with voiced and unvoiced resentments. Ontario, the neighbouring great English-speaking Province on Quebec’s western boundary, was vociferously loyal, fiercely demanding and insistent. Some think that only the uncanny knack of the late Mackenzie King, then Prime Minister, the knack for postponement or evasion or compromise (different critics chose different words) saved the country from bloodshed.

Further, between the French and the English there is not only the matter of a differing approach to Canada’s responsibility in what the French often speak of as foreign wars. There is always the latent passion connected with religious differences, operating at the ecclesiastical and institutional level and always, wherever people fall in love across the barrier, creating a special set of worries over mixed marriages. Further, there is the matter of education. Quebec preserves her autonomy in that field granted to her by the B.N.A. Act, and any federal attempts at schemes of universal application are eyed with suspicion in Quebec. As lately as last spring, the Hope Report on Education in the Province of Ontario fanned the educational issue to a sturdy little blaze because Quebec’s Roman Catholicism has overflowed substantially into Ontario and asks for special consideration in a predominantly Protestant Province. The whole question of federal controls and reserved provincial rights is many-faceted and constantly challenging or irritating or both. Some would say that Pitt in the early days, fearful of a repetition of the trouble caused by the unity of the American colonies, and setting up two entities instead of one in Canada under the name of a liberal policy, was the evil architect of Canadian disunity.

Well, MacLennan had all that waiting for him in the Canadian consciousness when he wrote Two Solitudes. For Canadians themselves the novel is provocative and illuminating. There is a parish priest in the book, a figure interesting in himself but also a symbol. There is the French Canadian businessman who in habit of thought and in the practice of his life breaks, at least seemingly, with the Church and aligns himself with the new industrial and commercial energies of an active progressive society. There are young people caught in the meshes of inherited traditions and contemporary compulsions.

All this is our world, we Canadians say; we thanked MacLennan for at least attempting to give expression to it in a piece of creative wilting.

With The Precipice, his next novel, published in 1948, MacLennan was again the Canadian writer using materials round about him as his subject matter. This time he broadened his range. He brought together in marriage an American, a New York advertising specialist, “a man in the advertising game,” as we should say, and a Canadian, a girl brought up in the supposedly stuffy and Victorian and limited atmosphere of one of the old Ontario small towns along the St. Lawrence between Montreal and Toronto.

Tensions develop. Two ways of life, an American way and a Canadian way, become symbolized in the two people whose marriage breaks almost to finality. An old underlying Puritanism maintained by habit and custom in the relatively backward little Canadian community challenges the American business executive, enamoured of the gadgets and glitter and short cuts of materialistic aggressiveness, challenges him to reveal, as the crisis in human relationships develops, an embedded Puritanism in the American tradition. The treatment is interesting and at times subtle. Once again, MacLennan wrote a book which is a sort of current documentation in novel form of many problems and tensions in the Canadian consciousness.

Now I come to MacLennan’s latest book—Each Man’s Son. The reviewers have said that, in this book, MacLennan comes to stature as a novelist. For the moment, I leave that question aside. It raises critical issues concerning MacLennan which I have, intentionally, not yet faced. All I have said thus far, is that MacLennan, working at one level, has handled indigenous local matter in a reasonably satisfying fashion for the people concerned. He has met some of the tests for what a novelist is supposed to do.

For the moment, I wish to keep this last book, Each Man’s Son, still in the category of locally revealing local material. There is a sense, however, in which MacLennan has let himself go in this latest book. The story is set in Cape Breton, that island off Nova Scotia settled by Highlanders. MacLennan himself is of Highland stock. His father was a Scottish doctor in Nova Scotia. A doctor is the central figure in the book. MacLennan has seen and heard and smelled and felt the stuff of life in Nova Scotia, both in outward expressions of that life and in terms of the dark subtleties and rich confusions of the Highland transplanted tradition. It is obvious that MacLennan delights in the speech, temperament and character of that isolated world where Gaelic is still spoken and the life is today still, some would say, more Highland than the Hebrides. It is obvious also that MacLennan is frightened by the preserved inner core of that Scottish Calvinistic tradition. He talks of the Celtic imagination of the North exacerbated and complicated by the theology of the Lowlander. One feels as one reads that in himself and in the people of his novel, MacLennan is exploring the nature of the disasters and the splendours that a darkly nourished sense of original sin and a doctrine of election can breed in the human mind and spirit.

In his prologue, (for many readers the best handful of pages in the book,) speaking of those Highlanders, MacLennan says this:

It is against that sort of awareness and insight that MacLennan writes this latest book of his, a book full of solicitous delight in a people he knows well, full of a fine sensitiveness to a land and a seascape he loves. There is humour of sorts in this latest MacLennan book. There are people in it. Anyone who knows Cape Breton can say “These are our people, our ways.”

But there is also in this latest book an underlying concern for values which are, or are not, Everyman’s, no matter who he is or where he may be. That is MacLennan’s new achievement in this book. That is his point of arrival as a novelist.

I think the book’s handling of its material sacrifices something to a presumed need for a maintained story interest. Perhaps, after all, that is no great fault in a novelist if the story be sound.

A reading of Each Man’s Son might send you back to the other books. And if you read MacLennan, you will discover, inevitably, something concerning Canada. But you will discover, I think, something else—something as well about what we call, for lack of a better phrase, life itself. That’s the composite achievement in every true novel. In his latest work MacLennan is reaching for this composite achievement. He may indeed be coming to stature as a novelist.

Hugh MacLennan’s published work includes:

An interesting Canadian literary fact admits of varying interpretations. The fact is: romantic and sentimental writers, handling Canadian material, have a pretty wide circulation outside of Canada. Apart from library circulation, for instance, sales of Robert W. Service’s verse dealing with the Yukon and the North have run to hundreds of thousands of copies. Mazo de la Roche, with her Jalna series of novels, has had a circulation of millions. Ralph Connor forty years ago and L. M. Montgomery more recently have had a huge and widespread popularity. By the standards of discriminating literary criticism none of these writers is important. No critic would think of any one of them as having made a serious contribution to literature. Yet these writers have carried the name of Canada here and there throughout the English-speaking world, and, in some cases, through translation, much beyond the English-speaking world.

Now how shall one interpret this phenomenon? Some Canadians hang their heads in shame. They say we export only sentimentality and mediocrity. Some go further and say we are not an artistic people, we Canadians; popular mediocrity is our natural product, but it is too bad that we should be publicized by it. There is another view. There are those who say that there is always a public hungry for readable romantic and sentimental material honestly presented, and isn’t there therefore a basis for some gratification in the fact that Canada can produce so much of that sort of thing so well?

Let me suggest briefly what a little five-foot shelf of this popular Canadian writing would hold.

There would be Ralph Connor with his Glengarry School Days, The Sky Pilot, Black Rock and The Prospector. Each book tells a good story. There are fights and loves and people in each book. Glengarry School Days is set in a Scottish settlement in Ontario. It has a lot of the decent everyday often colourful ways of the early Canadian farm life in it. Black Rock is a story of the Selkirks. The Sky Pilot and The Prospector incorporate much of the ordinary vivid romantic actuality of missionary and mining energy in a young country on the frontiers of its future. Within his limits—he was no literary artist in the critics’ sense—Ralph Connor was honest, enthusiastic and colourful. He was readable for the ordinary straightforward somewhat simple-minded reader. Robert W. Service’s volume of collected verse would be on that little five-foot shelf. At least half a dozen pieces in that volume are not beneath the notice of any reader. Scores of the pieces will give delight to scores of thousands. Service got into a swinging easy-going expression something that belongs to the essence of the Canadian crystalline nights under the Aurora Borealis. He got hold also of something of the essence which is in the kind of men those nights make. Mazo de la Roche will be on the shelf represented by her Jalna series of novels—readable, full of close human observation, a merry whimsicality and a sharp wit. Two or three of her characters have become living contemporaries for millions of readers. And L. M. Montgomery’s books will be on that shelf. In the main, L. M. Montgomery’s public is in England but in every library across Canada her books, Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Chronicles of Avonlea, have the worn corners and thumbed pages that proclaim the delight of constant readers.

Now I come to a confession which is partly a proclamation. I have been going through a lot of this popular Canadian writing. It is rapid and easy reading for the accustomed reader. By contemporary standards it lacks realism and penetration. It makes no parade of being philosophic. There are few rich passages of really good writing. It raises no great issues and seems unaware of problems that habitually vex the contemporary mind. It is soft reading. It is simple, ordinary and straightforward and makes no pretensions whatever to being “literary” in quotation marks. Yet it has its public and it performs a function for that public. My confession is that, coming at it freshly and with an attempt at open mindedness, to my surprise, I enjoyed some of it as a relief from the tension and self-conscious craftsmanship and experimental techniques of many contemporary works presumably much more important and widely publicized. The proclamation is, I suppose, that one need not be ashamed of this sort of writing. If to say it has its place seems like condescension and dismissal, there still remain for the critic the questions: what is that place, and how important in relation to literature is that place?

Such questions can bring us at once to L. M. Montgomery. L. M. Montgomery’s work stands as representative of the kind of writing I have been discussing. It is unpretentious to the point of being naive. Its innocence seems always on the edge of suggesting close cousinship with ignorance—ignorance of life. Yet, as one reads, the sophisticated reader is uneasily aware that the argument might turn and go in another direction. The unpretentiousness and innocence may be the kind of honest simplicity that does have life and even art in it. One critic at least has been able to say of Anne of Green Gables that it is “deservedly a classic of its kind not because of its excellence of style or plot, but because of the altogether charming character of Anne.” To that one is tempted to add that if a novel can create a character with capacity to enter alive into the imaginations of hundreds of thousands of readers, may one not say also of that novel that it must possess some of the vital qualities of style and plot that suggest a respectable artistic achievement? It may be that L. M. Montgomery, one of our popular so-called mediocre story tellers, should not be dismissed too casually just because she has been popular. Widespread popularity in any form of expression usually suggests the presence of positive and fundamental qualities. Discerning criticism will find in the Buck Rogers and Superman phenomena something of what it finds in Hamlet and Homer.

Of course the Montgomery popularity has been, in the main, popularity with young girls and their amiable ordinary parents. L. M. Montgomery is a category story teller. She writes girls’ stories. Anne of Green Gables is a girl in whom every girl can see a good deal of herself. But what if as well, those of us, male and female, who are not girls, can see in Anne something of that precious commodity, universal girlhood, made into such engaging flesh-and-blood reality that we laugh or weep and are tender with solicitude over the bright vulnerability of happy youth? What if L. M. Montgomery has given to all of us an enduring symbol in Anne? That might put L. M. Montgomery at least among the respectable story tellers.

Now I know there is one further thing to say. For many it is the damning thing. Anne of Green Gables is old fashioned. L. M. Montgomery is old fashioned. She belongs indeed to the age of innocence. Modern young girls brought up on the funnies, the movies, the slick magazine stories, cannot tolerate the soft well-meaning goodness of Miss Montgomery’s portrayal. That portrayal belongs to an earlier time and is gone with the winds of change. Old fashioned stories are revived and enjoyed, it is said, only by the nostalgic and the sentimental or read today as current fare only by the uncultured and unsophisticated. For the modern there is stronger meat. Even for the modern little girl there is stronger meat. But the alternative reading is most often the current spate of wholly superficial magazine stories and the lurid empty sorts of pocket books. Contrasted with that type of writing, L. M. Montgomery’s stories have qualities of range and subtlety and fine comprehension which make them relatively worthy even today. That they are still popular can be a kind of reassurance. The local librarian from whom I got the four Anne volumes said to me, “Don’t keep them too long. They are out all the time.” There may still be a place for the stories of L. M. Montgomery.

Now, after all this, just a word about Miss Montgomery the author, and a little about her scenes and people.

L. M. Montgomery was born in Prince Edward Island, our smallest Canadian province there on our Atlantic seaboard. The scene of her novels is Prince Edward Island: the Avonlea of her stories is the seaside town of Cavendish on the north shore of the Island. Every summer, thousands of tourists search out the house called Green Gables, set in view of the shining inlets through which the sea fingers the land behind the sand dunes and the long miles of marvellous beaches bordering the warm sea water round about Cavendish. “The Green Gables Country” is a phrase that has got into the tourist guide books because L. M. Montgomery, through her stories about Anne of Avonlea, has made that part of Canada a centre for sentimental if not literary pilgrimage. It is lovely country. The Island, as we Canadians call it, is a magical place. With a total population of less than a hundred thousand, it has all the appurtenances, social and political, of a complete provincial autonomy within our federal system. The Fathers of Canadian Federation met in Charlottetown, its capital. The whole island is full of history and rich in natural beauty. There is independence and individuality in its people.

Miss Montgomery’s literary career is a product of the Island. Married to a clergyman and settled to an orderly existence with some leisure, she simply began the telling of the story of Anne, a red-haired freckled little orphan brought up in a kindly farm home on the Island, and, in successive books, because her readers demanded more and more about Anne, kept on telling that story. The Island, the sea, the people of the Island, come alive in the telling. All this came about because L. M. Montgomery knew her Island—its places, its people—and, with direct unpretentious simplicity, through her Anne, was able to communicate something of what she knew. I suppose that is the secret of a modest sort of regional literature.

Here is one bit of description, from Anne of Ingleside:

Elsewhere Anne says “This Island is the bloomiest place.”

I suppose that might be called the typical note of L. M. Montgomery’s writings. She makes her Island, and through her Island and her Anne, our world, for a little while, “the bloomiest place.”

In these days such a service may not be negligible. Just for fun, if you can, get a copy of Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery and read it.

L. M. Montgomery’s published work includes:

There are many kinds of delight to be had from the printed page. One kind comes to us when we pick up a book and can say, as we read, “I have seen that”; “that effect of light on landscape I know”; “I have heard men talk just that way.”

We have a young writer here in Canada who, within a limited compass, has something of this knack of the good writer to make us feel close to places and people. W. O. Mitchell was a high school teacher in our Canadian West. He studied for an extramural degree from the University of Alberta and spent one year in Edmonton in the University classrooms, making contacts with fellow students and professors. One professor, Dr. Salter, thought he saw a writer in Mitchell. He gave Mitchell the sort of advice Yeats gave to J. M. Synge. In effect he said “You know these people of the Canadian West. You know how they think, how they feel, how they talk. And you are fond of them; you delight in them; why not write about them?” Mitchell went back to his teaching in the Alberta town of High River with more than his degree. He went back with a quiet ambition to be a writer.

Almost before he knew it, his short stories and sketches, full of earthy vigour and humour and the kind of loving comprehension that is the mark of the writer of promise, made him known far beyond his High River classroom. Maclean’s Magazine, a national semi-monthly publication, asked him to come to Toronto to be its fiction editor. In that work Mitchell was reasonably successful, but in the spring of 1951 he left the Toronto job to go back to High River—not to teach this time, but to live once more in a house he loved under a sky he knew with the wind he loved and to commit himself to being a writer. While occupying his editor’s chair in Toronto he had had time to do a series of dramatic sketches for broadcasting over the CBC. He found out that the writing of those sketches and the planning of stories and novels was his life. He decided that the life of an editor was not for him. Those who have read his novel Who Has Seen the Wind and who have listened to his CBC dramatic sketches of Canadian prairie life feel that he is right. Mitchell is a writer.

I think there are some things to be said about that novel with its strange title, Who Has Seen the Wind. If the right things are hit upon we may get, through Mitchell, some sort of intimacy with our Canadian prairie West and with the people whose lives have gone into its making.

Of course there is a difficulty at once. Admittedly, this book of Mr. Mitchell’s is of little general intrinsic importance. It is a beginner’s first novel. Its main interest is for those who are curious about regional writing or the lively promise in an honest new writer. Then why bother with it?

I bother for this reason. Whether or not you read the book, I believe I can, by telling you about it, pass on to you an aspect of Canadian life which may be of some interest. I am sure I could do it if we were sitting at a table or by a fireside. I would turn the pages of the book and read bits here and there, and let the effects accumulate. That the effects would accumulate is in itself a comment on qualities that lie in the book.

First, there is this matter of the wind on the Canadian prairies. The wind is in the consciousness of our Canadian prairie people. It sweeps across the vast flat spaces in mighty undulations. It organizes its power in little spinning spirals, called dust-devils, that move along the roads or over the fields lifting dust and leaves and stray bits of paper up into the air in fantastic mad gyrations. In a dry season it incorporates the prairie topsoil with itself until the air seems almost solid and unbreathable. The soil becomes a finely winnowed dust that penetrates clothing, chokes the lungs, and drives inside the tightest house windows. The black prairie dust covers floors and bedspreads and makes the eating of food a gritty unpleasant business. The prairie wind can lift the topsoil from whole farms and blow them clean away. Even when the wind is not at its worst business in a dry time, it is always a mighty power: beautiful, as it makes of a vast wheat field a tossing golden sea; terrible, as it marshalls the black clouds carrying rain and hail. Anne Marriott, a Canadian poet, after a summer in the prairie West, wrote a poem called The Wind Our Enemy. It was an almost inevitable title for a Westerner. The prairie wind tans and toughens the faces of the men and women who live and work in it, puts crows-feet about their eyes. Anne Marriott begins her poem thus:

That’s pretty grim, and of course it is only part of the story of the prairie wind. Mitchell’s book is the story of a boy who grew up where that prairie wind blows. That boy saw the wind in its multiple aspects—saw it or felt it or sensed it, whatever verb one uses—as a moving force, sometimes gentle as it stirred the aspen leaves to multitudinous silver, strong and free as it billowed the long prairie grasses, sometimes whispering, rich-laden with the scent of wolf willow and prairie roses. For the boy, Brian, the wind was part of his heritage.

This is how Mitchell’s book begins:

The dying down of the wind at the end of a prairie day goes into the making of the boy Brian:

Amid scenes such as these the prairie boy grows up.

Mitchell surrounds the boy with parents, a vivid uncle, and the dozen and one strongly individualized types which a prairie community in the great wheat lands draws naturally to itself. There is humour in the book and a realism that communicates the shade and texture in speech and behaviour of men and women, alike the victims and the beneficiaries of their prairie and its prairie wind.

An old crazed man called Saint Sammy who lived in a piano box shored up against the wind on the open prairie and kept, as his only passion, eighteen fine Clydesdale horses, unbroken and useless, on eighty acres of pasture land, is one of the prairie victims.

“But what does he keep them for?” Brian’s father wondered. The uncle answers, calling the roll of the disasters that can beset the crops of the prairie farmer:

But Brian the boy is the prairie’s beneficiary. His father has died. The mother talks over his future with the wild uncle, Sean, who has fought the prairie, loved the prairie and believed in the prairie. She told him she hoped to send Brian to university:

That’s Mitchell the author talking too. W. O. Mitchell loves his prairie land and his prairie folk and believes in their grit and their imagination. Those are not beaten who have seen the wind.

W. O. Mitchell’s published work includes:

Canada is a bilingual country, a third of her population is French, with a major concentration in the Province of Quebec sufficient to sustain a self-contained almost isolated culture. It follows that the phrase “Canadian literature” must always mean a literature written in both English and French. To ignore the work done in either language is to ignore a significant part of Canadian literary expression. It is only for convenience in organization or as a natural adjustment to the audience addressed that one emphasizes one part or the other.

There is an English Canada and there is a French Canada. Each has its own cultural development and characteristics and its own literature. I am not going to talk in any detail or with any pretense to critical appraisal of French Canadian literature. Rather, I want to suggest something concerning the nature of the problems created by the existence of the two languages and cultures in Canada, and something of what is happening when literature begins to function as a bridge for inter-communication.

First, a word or two about the situation in general terms in this bilingual country of ours. The French, as you know, consider themselves the first and true Canadians. Though they are a conquered people and accept the fact of the English conquest, they tend to claim a basic cultural primacy. The British North America Act guaranteed to them special rights in language, education, religion and their system of law. The guarantee of those rights, when it was given, was not so much, as often interpreted, a liberal gesture towards a conquered group as it was a means of insuring the existence of two Canadas rather than one. British policy in the nineteenth century didn’t want a repetition of the Thirteen Colonies business. That policy didn’t want the colonies north of the United States to get together for another successful revolution in the Western world. British policy wanted two Canadas. As a result of that policy, in the situation in the Canada of today, there are elements of irony and tragedy. When the rest of Canada was moving towards a deliberately engineered increasing self-conscious independence of Great Britain, French Canada, despite her fear and hate of commitment to what she called British foreign wars, hung on tenaciously to the British connection because that connection guaranteed her autonomy. At the present moment, when, ironically, Canada’s search for independence through a loosening of British ties, has meant, seemingly, but a wholesale absorption into the United States, it is French Canada that fears the United States and proclaims the ideal of a true Canadian independence. Even in a world in which communism is called the enemy and the United States the organizer of a revived world fascism, French Canada, a solid Roman Catholic unit, still fears the United States. She fears that absorption into the United States would mean the loss of her ethnic and religious and language rights.

Now, as an English-speaking Canadian, I think it is true that English-speaking Canada doesn’t know enough about her French-speaking compatriots and fails often in understanding and sympathy. Canada is after all, only officially and theoretically bilingual and in many profound senses still two countries, not one.

Yet a great deal is taking place to break down the walls of division and to bring about some forms of unity. Literature is one of the agencies at work. To that I shall come presently.

In the meantime, a little more about the situation in some of its other aspects.

I said that a lot is happening to break down the walls of division between the two Canadas. Summer schools are being held in Quebec for English-speaking high school and university students where only French is spoken and in connection with which the students are billeted in French homes. The reverse of the process occurs in Ontario. Groups of French Canadian students and teachers come to Ontario for summer courses in English. This may seem a relatively minor operation but it nourishes individual and group centres of understanding. For one thing, the language barrier is removed.

For many years there have been held in Canada annual Dominion Drama Festivals open to plays in both French and English. Audiences have become accustomed to hearing plays in both languages and have learned to appreciate the subject matter, theme and techniques of dramatic art of both groups. The Festival Cup award for highest achievement has been held sometimes in Quebec, sometimes in English-speaking Canada. Conventions of mayors of municipalities, Chambers of Commerce groups, and discussion groups of many sorts increasingly bring the English and the French together. The French Radio network and the English Trans-Canada network, both under the CBC, are making tentative beginnings in the exchange of programmes. French is compulsory from Grade III on in the English-speaking schools of Montreal. Further, labour union organization operates, under the impulses of a common cause, to bring both groups together.

All this suggests that processes are at work that make for mutual knowledge and understanding. But much remains to be done, and the politicians know that there are prejudices, hates and fears which, at a moment’s notice, under stimulus, could be explosive and disruptive.

It is at this point that one can consider the nature and function of literature in a developing national society. Both imaginative literature and the literature of information and analysis have their part to play.

The most informal and readable history of Canada is by an English-speaking Canadian, Professor A. R. M. Lower of Queen’s University. His book, From Colony to Nation, will probably soon be translated into French. A History in French by a French Canadian, Jean Bruchesi, has already been translated into English for English-speaking readers. The literature of sociology, a growing body of documentation and analysis, by a kind of natural inevitability, is under compulsion to include studies of both parts of Canada in both languages. Professor Hughes of the University of Chicago wrote a book called French Canada in Transition. It has been published in both languages and has illuminated for the French their own scene while it has brought new and necessary knowledge to English-speaking Canadians.

In imaginative literature a most serviceable beginning in cultural inter-communication was made many years ago by a young Parisian Frenchman who dropped into Northern Quebec by accident, was fascinated by what he found, and wrote a novel Maria Chapdelaine. That book, a romantic idyllic interpretation of French Canadian religious devotion and pioneer life, came out almost immediately in two English translations. It has been used extensively as a school and university text for study in English schools. Trent Arpent or Thirty Acres in translation, a different study of Quebec, a novel dealing with the French Canadian exodus of workers to textile factories in the United States and the interplay of French Canadian and American relationships, is a much more realistic and less idyllic treatment of French Canadian life on its industrial side, which has also had a wide currency in English-speaking Canada.

I emphasize the translations from French to English because at the moment I am talking of Canadian literature in English and interested in the infusions from French Canada into that language area. There has been reciprocal activity from the French side, but that, just now, is another story. As a matter of fact, the need is not quite so great on that side because the educated French Canadian tends, out of necessity perhaps, being of the minor group, to be bilingual and to have accessible to him in English what he may wish to read. In illustration of this I remember once being in a group of French Canadians who, after tolerating for awhile my less than easy-going French, changed courteously to English. One of them said: “Haven’t you noticed that if there is a group made up of eleven French Canadians and one English Canadian, pretty soon everybody is talking English?” That was a gay rebuke to our lack of cooperation from the English side in a bilingual country. It was also, I suppose, acceptance of the fact that the minority group tends naturally to adjust itself to the larger group. English-speaking Canadians particularly can profit by the aid to understanding which translation provides.

There is a growing library of books in translation. Increasingly works of imaginative literature by French Canadians are having a present day currency and are illustrative of what I might almost call a new mood and movement in Canada.

Within the last five years the novels of three French Canadian writers have been translated for English readers and are enjoying a wide and favourable reception. Even in translation, with the inevitable loss of grace and nuance and organic quality which translation involves, they become, through translation, notable contributions to Canadian literature as a whole, taken in its broader and inclusive sense.

The Tin Flute, by Gabrielle Roy, is a story set in the industrial section of Montreal. It tells of the impact of industrial conditions on a humble family caught in the changing life of present day Quebec. The shadow of war and the conscription issue is over the family, and the people in their several relationships are brought into a sharp vitality. To put it bluntly, I know that the book for many English-speaking citizens of Montreal was a troubling revelation of ways of life and attitudes in their own city of which they had been completely unaware. Some French Canadians didn’t like the book. Its realism was petty and tendentious, they said; it wasn’t a true representation of French Canadian life. But the book, as imaginative literature, stirred up both French and English and, in that sense, served to bring them together. Miss Roy’s new novel, Where Nests the Water Hen, also tells of a French Canadian family; living, this time, in Northern Manitoba.

The Outlander, by Germaine Guèvremont, won the Governor-General’s Award this year for Canadian fiction. Containing tenderness and whimsy and a kind of warm vividness, again it is a book to bring French Canadian life alive for the reader.

The Plouffe Family, by Roger Lemelin, is set in Quebec City in the Lower Town. Physically, with all sorts of detailed domestic intimacy, and imaginatively, by sympathetic and understanding analysis, the book takes its readers to what one feels is the very inside of French Canadian family life at the lower middle class level, takes the reader inside until the English reader at least feels as if he were eavesdropping. That would seem to mark Lemelin as a good novelist.

This is what is happening then. Literature is performing the function of bringing the two parts of Canada to knowledge of one another; and perhaps to mutual understanding and appreciation. Canadian literature in English is being enriched, through translation, by contributions from Canadian literature in French.

Recent French Canadian writing published in translation includes:

As I bring two poets together for combined discussion, it is not on the principle that if you can’t get one good man, two half-men may suffice: A. M. Klein and Earle Birney are not fractional, either as men or as poets. But I am putting these two poets together because, taken together, they stand in their respective ways for the maturity and achievement to which Canadian poetry has come at the middle of the twentieth century. Both men are Canadian born; one in the old East, one in the new West. Both are products of Canadian universities. Both are broadly informed rather than narrowly educated; that is, they know the world of their time, its thought and art and politics; and they know the worlds of the past which today’s world denies or reaffirms. Both men are professionally engaged, Birney in teaching, in the University of British Columbia on our West Coast, Klein in the practice of law in his native city, Montreal. Both men are in their forties, with the possibility that their best work is yet to be done. No appraisal of the health and promise of the art of poetry in Canada could omit either man. They are the immediately contemporary important two.

Important, that is, if poetry be important.

I suppose that nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of every thousand, asked, Gallup Poll fashion, if they considered poetry important, would answer no. This overwhelming negative response would come conceivably from three groups: (a) those who think that poetry is sing-song rhyme, pleasant enough in crooners’ love lyrics or popular songs, indeed often rather nice, but never important, (that would be too immodest a word for something ordinary people like); (b) those who have a vague notion that poetry is highbrow stuff with credentials among the long-hairs; something remote and never practical and therefore not important; (c) those who are very sad because they think of poetry as something fine and precious for the sensitive few and therefore of course without importance in a nasty world incapable of giving an important place to anything good.

Diverse notions of the nature, function and place of poetry are embedded in these views. I wish criticism would do more than it does to clear the matter up for us. Mr. Herbert Read in a recent book, Phases of English Poetry, says “The poet makes his signals to a numb and indifferent body.” In other words, there is no audience for the modern poet. That doesn’t seem very helpful: who is the poet? we ask; what is he supposed to be doing? how is he supposed to be talking? But Mr. Read does go on to say: “How can the modern poet, in face of a hostile world . . . . find a means of reconciling his world and his art? How can he once more resume his function as the explorer and the educator of human sensibility?”

That helps a little. It suggests a precise definable function for the poet. It reminds us of Wordsworth’s talk of the poet as one with more of the spirit of life in him than ordinary men.

Such an approach, of course, makes poetry a very inclusive thing. It tempts one to say to the people who claim that poetry is not important—to all the different sorts of them—that they are talking nonsense. It was Keats who reminded us that the poetry of earth is never dead. Moonlight on landscape or on the sea, sunsets, and the colours of the earth are poetry. The appreciation of them is a poetic experience. A shadow crossing a lawn, a peacock strutting and calling before rain, the loon’s laughter on our Canadian lakes, a thousand, a million things, are poetry current and available. Gerard Manley Hopkins called it God’s Grandeur and made another sort of poetry, a poetry in words, as he talked. The conversational metaphor that occurs among ordinary people in ordinary speech is poetry. The great harmonies of feeling and expression in the liturgy and hymns of the church services, pageants, shows, even the mosaic of pastel colour and tableau and gesture in the patterns of an outdoor summer bingo game under floodlights, is poetry—a pervasive continuous almost inescapable kind of poetry. Why are young people so wild and irresponsibly passionate about cars with their sweep and speed, and about flight in the air beyond the wheels, if it be not that they are enamoured of a kind of release to imaginative freedom, which is the poetry of their day available under their hands? Even the crooners’ songs and those popular doggerels are a kind of distributed light voltage from the essential force. The poet as such, the poet when we think of him as master of the words that carry fire and fight, power and illumination, is but the master of the heavy voltage nearest to its source. As conveyer and interpreter he makes demonstrable poetry’s highest credentials.

Poetry at this latter level may be, relatively, poetry for the few. But it is poetry on behalf of the many. It is poetry studied and guarded at the centre of emanation.

This may have seemed an intolerable homily, but I hope it has made a point. It is not quite accident that this series on Canadian writers began with poetry as such and ends with poetry as such. Even today, I am tempted to believe that a report on the state of a people’s written poetry is crucially important in any appraisal, however tentative, of a people’s cultural achievement.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early years of this century it was generally assumed that Canada’s most reputable contribution to the arts was made through her poetry. That contribution, under the increasingly informed and increasingly sensitive critical analysis of the thirties and the forties, seemed more and more pallid and inadequate. It was well, we began to say, that painting and the novel began to be significant; our poetry seemed to have failed us. Consciously and unconsciously, this was a challenge to the workers in poetry in Canada. Little independent magazines other than the publication Canadian Poetry Magazine, sponsored by the Canadian Authors’ Association, came into being here and there. On the West Coast Mr. Alan Crawley, a lawyer forced from his profession by the onset of blindness, a man of fine and catholic taste, has kept going for years his Canadian quarterly, Contemporary Verse. He has cupped his solicitous editorial hands in a way that nourishes the essential fire. In the East, in Montreal, a group of young poets and critics, varying in temperament and conviction, with Mr. John Sutherland as a sort of persistent continuous storm centre, has sponsored a series of publications, the present survivor being called Northern Review. Criticism of poetry, in fugitive periodical and newspaper columns, and in club and drawing room groups, has tended increasingly to be informed, alert and discriminating. Our publishing firms have been both readier to take financial risk and loss in publishing poetry and readier to seek out only the best for publication. Back of all this is the fact that young Canadians, in the war years, have travelled more widely outside of Canada, and, back and fro and north and south, within the country itself. A kind of new intellectual and emotional excitement has been a result and with this, a sense of responsibility towards what the arts may mean and may be made to mean in a young country coming rapidly to political maturity and as yet largely unsung and uninterpreted. At one point in her development, Emerson said of his country “America is a poem in our eyes.” Canada is beginning to have her Emersons, as critics and as poets.

During the last quarter of a century, poetry, as a result of the joint labours of its makers and their critics, has taken a respectable place among the arts as practised in Canada. E. J. Pratt—now, by virtue of his seniority, a sort of dean among Canadian poets—began the shift towards the new vigour in idea and technique. Men like Klein and Birney consolidate the movement. Twenty-five years ago I was asked by a publisher to select twenty poems which without apology, because of unquestioned excellence, could represent favourably Canadian poetic achievement to the world. I couldn’t do it. Today, I am sure it could be done.

Men like Klein and Birney, I said.

Klein is a Jew; learned, cultivated, sensitive. He studied at one time for the rabbinate but writes, in The Cripples, a tribute to the cripples who climb the steps of a Roman Catholic shrine in his Roman Catholic city:

It is in that same poem that he opens wistfully the door towards another sort of belief with the phrase “Knowing the surgery’s in the heart.”

In Klein is the comprehensive catholicity of human understanding which gives its authority to noble verse. This does not mean softness and easy tolerance. Klein’s wit can be a rapier-thrust against pretension and cruelty and the intricate evil in man. It is part of his equipment as poet that he is one of the English-speaking world’s most studious and authoritative interpreters of James Joyce.

Klein has not been untouched, I think, by the less happy effects of the attempt in modern poetry to get away from easy sound patterns and flat diction. Only a completely matured independence escapes the ill effects of T. S. Eliotism. When in The Sugaring, Klein talks of the “ichor of dulcitude,” and, telling of the little golden brown cakes of sugar which the French Canadian farm women make in their kitchens in the spring sunlight, says—

—when Klein writes in that strain, challenging though the strain is, he seems at least one remove from the grace and ease of first-rate poetry. But Klein’s scope is broad and his insights sharpened again and again into arresting beauty. His work will stand anywhere. In a little piece called Dress Manufacturer: Fisherman he sees his man

That alone is enough to mark him poet.

Of Birney much could be said. Birney has made out of the experiences of these years of the world’s wars a poetry as clean and sharp and wise as the surgeon’s instrument. Marred a little here and there by the cerebral paper chase à la Eliot, it is nevertheless a poetry for the spirit which hurts and heals. In prose also, Birney has recorded his awareness of the ways of war. Turvey is gay, hilarious and astringent. I think I want to say but one thing about Birney as poet and it is surely enough. In his David he has written one of the few satisfying narrative poems of our generation. Two young men are mountain-climbing. One falls from the chimney to a perilous ledge above three hundred feet of space. The other, who tells the story, reaches the shattered man. The would-be rescuer says:

David, knowing himself at best maimed for life, David who had found a robin “gyrating in grass, wing-broken” and killed it saying “Could you teach it to fly?” pleads to be released over the precipice and is so released.

The poem ends:

In the poem as a whole there are the restraint, the vivid detail and the power which belong to poetry when it performs for us its full and proper office. Birney also is one of our poets.

Together, Klein and Birney prove that an art is healthy among us; that the voltage is kept powerful at its source. This should be reassurance for those who deplore with vague solicitude in drawing rooms and academies the lack of Canadian culture.

A. M. Klein’s published work includes:

Earle Birney’s published work includes:

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

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[End of Canadian Writers, by Arthur L. Phelps]