When the idea was broached, now almost ten years ago, to gather Hugh MacLennan’s fiction under one roof, the proposal was readily taken up by Philip Cercone of McGill-Queen’s University Press. The plan was to re-issue MacLennan’s novels in a manner suited to the importance of these works, providing them with substantive introductions together with supporting materials intended to give the contemporary reader a ready and informed entry into the chosen novel.
The undertaking proved to be more difficult and involved than had been originally anticipated, so that the intention of launching what was to be called The MacLennan Centennial Series in 2007, the hundredth anniversary of the author’s birth, had to be amended. The main reason for the delay was the difficulty encountered in establishing indisputable ownership of rights to paperback publication. Various attempts were made to resolve this issue, and these proved, at least for the time being, unsuccessful. The plan to bring the entire works of MacLennan the novelist back under the umbrella of the university at which he had spent a great portion of his life has had to be temporarily set back.
For myself, the opportunity to work on this project is a truly privileged occasion. It is a small contribution to celebrate a longstanding and warm if somewhat distant friendship with a man who was an inspiring teacher and a quiet mentor. The path to this friendship came via English 100c, the composition class taught by the poet Louis Dudek, himself newly arrived in 1951 (as was MacLennan) in the English Department of McGill University. My good fortune was to be assigned by the dean’s office to his section of English 100c, where I was so taken with Dudek’s teaching – open minded, inviting of ideas, discursive – that the next year I sought out his course in Canadian Literature which, by fortunate happenstance, he was sharing with MacLennan. The latter proved equally inspiring, leading a class of not- particularly knowledgeable undergraduates into terrain that he had carefully sown with examples of Canadian prose writing. What strikes me now as I look at my old class notes is the eclecticism of his choices. From Joshua Slocum’s account of his sailing adventures (as a true “bluenose” he was justly proud of the sea faring skills of his fellow Nova Scotians) to Bruce Hutchison’s The Incredible Country, from Ringuet’s Trentes Arpents to Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (which MacLennan considered a milestone work in Canadian literature for addressing the problem of anti-Semitism in Canada), from Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Sam Slick to Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute. We (I) received a grounding in the makings of Canadian literature. Not only were we expected to read our assigned texts but we wrote essays on them and were expected to deliver them orally in class, stuttering and stumbling over our words while MacLennan, having retreated to the back of the room, listened with what I thought was an intimidating seriousness.
MacLennan’s class was scheduled in the late afternoon, and I noticed that after class he would walk westwards on the north side of Sherbrooke Street, headed in the same direction I usually took. One evening, I simply fell in step with him, and we began to walk together after class, a habit that would carry over into the next year. We walked as far as the corner of Sherbrooke and Guy Streets. MacLennan would turn north at Guy to walk a short distance to Summerhill Avenue, while I would catch the #65 street car to take me home up Côte des Neiges. We walked and we talked about all sorts of things, everything from the day’s events to what had been discussed in the classroom that afternoon. He was interested in my background and wanted to know how I had grown up and had been schooled, particularly what I had learned about literature in what had been a narrowly disciplined Catholic boarding school. He had been raised a Presbyterian and Calvinism as a grim conditioner of the human soul arose in casual conversation as it did in the classroom. He was caught, one suspects, between the determinism of his faith, on the one hand, and contemporary science, which fascinated him. I imagine that for him, having grown up in Halifax, Shanghai (where I hailed from) was really the far and fascinating East. From all the many talks, away from the quiet, still air of delightful studies and in the brisk air of winterly Sherbrooke Street, I recall his quiet humour. He was wryly amused that the first monument erected in the British Empire to honour Admiral Nelson and his victory over the French fleet at Trafalgar was la colonne Nelson raised in Montreal, a French city, and, he also wondered, was it true that there had been a statue to King George in Place d’Armes which the American Army of the Revolution had pulled down and decapitated, the head being found later in a well and, as rumour had it, hidden in a local museum? And when I, having quoted Cicero, complained to him, a classicist, about having to do mandatory Latin for one’s degree, he was quietly amused and noted “sed bene congravit.”
Present-day photograph of 1575 Summerhill Avenue, a 1950s-vintage apartment building where MacLennan lived for most of his life. He also lived at 1178 Mountain Street, a street named after Bishop Mountain but today incorrectly called rue de la Montagne. That building has been demolished.
The next academic year I signed up for MacLennan’s course in great English prose writings, which took us from Francis Bacon to Boswell’s Life of Johnson to the middle of the twentieth century. Conrad, Joyce, and Hemingway were on our reading list and MacLennan, ever aware of important contemporaries, took us on byways into Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (he admired Waugh’s writing greatly and thought that the invention of evocative names like Basil Seal, Guy Crouchback, “Boy” Mulcaster, and Anthony Blanche was the work of genius), and Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope. But, at the same time, MacLennan was curiously neutral about the great issues of modernism in twentieth-century writing. Although he had lived in Oxford in the crucial (for literature) late 1920s and early 1930s and had travelled on the Continent, he seems to have skirted Paris, that great seat of all things modernist. In that he was not unlike Frank Scott, who had also spent time in Oxord at a slightly earlier period and appears to have been insulated from the modernist “contagion.” Was it something about Oxford, one wonders, so steeped in its classicism that it was immune to the raucous free-for-all of modernism?
After I graduated from McGill, I kept in touch with MacLennan, dropping in on his classes from time to time, which seemed to please him. He remained helpful and encouraging in every way, writing letters of support whenever I needed them. When I dropped in on him in his office, – strangely located on a half landing in the Arts Building, to let him know that I was leaving Montreal for Ottawa, he reached to his book shelf and brought down a Polish translation of Return of the Sphinx and the measure of his friendship is caught in the inscription he wrote in it. Now it is my turn, in this small way, to record my own admiration for an extraordinary man and his work.
MacLennan’s inscription in the Polish translation of Return of the Sphinx, a copy of which he gave to this editor in 1972, with my name misspelled!
