At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  The summer is hot. At Medicine Hat—“a wonderful clean town, just become a city,” said the Negro attendant on the train; by “clean” he meant no crime or misdemeanor—temperatures go up to 110°. In the winter, at 50°below, the prairie must be a nightmare, though all Canadians speak of the winter sun. Wallace Stegner, who was brought up in Montana and Saskatchewan (in this region Americans and Canadians are indifferent to the frontier) has written in Wolf Willow a fine, precise and dramatic account of the prairie winter and of the madness of the thaw. He is no friend to frontier life, having lived through it in childhood; his contemporaries are of the same mind. They are moving fast into the towns. But the land has formed them so that they will never be like the people of other provinces.

  The epic period of Canadian life is always near to one’s mind, even when it goes back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; perhaps because such a small population stands between oneself and the past. The Bow River flows into the Saskatchewan, and the waters of the Saskatchewan into Lake Winnipeg and Hudson Bay: it is extraordinary to think that the great river was discovered within a few years of La Salle’s journey to the mouth of the Mississippi. In 1690 the French voyageurs, the fur traders, were making their way across the continent. “A man in the Canadian service,” runs a Hudson’s Bay Company report in the eighteenth century, “who cannot carry two packs of 80 lbs. each, one and a half leagues loses his Trip, that is, his Wages.” I heard the same weight-carrying boast from a stumpy little métis, aged twenty-five, not so very long ago in Quebec. It is an irony of history that an American, the famous Peter Pond of Connecticut, was one of the first men to find an east-west route across the continent by way of the Saskatchewan. His discoveries were unknown to the treaty makers after the American Revolution, who were preoccupied with the eastern territories. So Canada, as we know it, got a chance to be viable and survive.

  At Winnipeg the flat country was still with us, but now there were sappy scrub and long coppices of aspen, poplar and cottonwood. This is traditional wheat country, a continuation of North Dakota and Minnesota. Winnipeg is still called “the gateway to the West.” I met a wiry, complaining old chap who had been thrown out of his job in Toronto and was working his way West “to get more scope for the individual.” He was cheerful and kindly, but I could not tell him that his “trade” in industry was done for owing to automation. He would become a cranky “little man”; he came straight out of the Cockney seam in Canadian life and Canada would preserve his wiry eccentricity. He was driving a taxi in fighting form, through the dust of one of the ugliest and historically most interesting cities of the country. It has the ugliness of the English industrial Midlands, relieved by fine trees and by some pretty streets in the suburbs. The days of the great wheat fortunes are gone, and Winnipeg complains that Americans “dump” their wheat in what were Canadian markets: it is an episode in Canada’s struggle with American overproduction. But since the Canadian sale of wheat to Russia last year, the position has improved. So Winnipeg still sells wheat but now has also turned to making clothes.

  In this hot, dusty growing city of half a million, one meets at last a real, well-rooted Canada. Winnipeg is not as polished as Toronto or anywhere near as sophisticated as Montreal, but it is as individual as all other Canadian cities and puts the fundamental Canadian case. The first things to catch the eyes are the onion domes of the Russian Orthodox churches of the Ukrainians. Here the non-British immigrant becomes important. The Ukrainians came here in 1900 from the richest wheat-bearing lands of Russia. The older men still wear the long beard and sheepskin coat; the older women are still weather-scarred like Russian peasants. Up at Selkirk, on Lake Winnipeg, are the Scandinavians and Icelanders: in the city itself is a new Jewish population, as well as the German and Italian settlers who arrived in the last few years. The original population includes a very strong outpost of French Canadians, the descendants of French marriages with Indians and of the men of the fur trade. Their churches across the river in Saint Boniface and their seminary are the best buildings in the city. Winnipeg’s money and power are in the hands of people of British stock, who are now less than half of the population. In other words, on the face of it, we have a melting pot.

  But no. Canada does not easily melt. Until now its pride has been in not melting its population, in letting the minorities go their separate ways, in leaving people alone. The tradition started by the British, after the fall of Quebec, the tradition of noninterference with French customs, religion and education, has lasted. Indoctrination, Canadianization does not exist as a principle or practice, as Americanization does in the United States. Once more, the Canadian is proud of his respect for individuality and of his theory of the bilingual confederation: once more he has chosen the difficult course. It has been easy up to now in this huge country to let people go their own way; but will it go on being easy? The children are now being taught French in the schools. Will they be taught Italian and German too?

  This delightful state of academic speculation has been brought up against some hard realities since the war. In the last ten years Canada has had an enormous increase in population—four million—chiefly Poles, Dutch, Germans and Italians. Immigration has dropped now because the boom is over, but when the Canadians cry out for people they really mean the northern Europeans. There is a waiting list for Italians: why, one cannot imagine. They are one of the cleverest breeds in Europe, and the tens of thousands of them who have come into Toronto since the war have had a lot to do with livening up that very staid city. One thing immigration has done for Winnipeg is to give it some excellent restaurants. Good food tends to civilize.

  A city like Winnipeg is really a workers’ society and almost classless. The granite houses of the wheat millionaires stand under the trees, but those days are done. Boss and worker belong to the same clubs, go fishing or spend weekends in the lakeside huts which—as the saying is—“everyone” has. They like the ballet, the theater and that very Canadian institution, the choral society. As for the race question: Winnipeg has a Ukrainian mayor.

  Flying out of Winnipeg you get one more shock to the eye. First of all, the city spreads for miles as if it were printed on the land. The print moves out to the scrub and forest of the Shield, the enormous slab of Precambrian rock that stretches to Hudson Bay. The north-south depth of forest across Canada ranges from 600 to 1500 miles—half the distance across the Atlantic. The second shock is the sight of thousands of lakes, gay eyelets of blue looking out of the face of vegetation, and you realize how much of Canada is wild water. It is forest and lake all the way to the Great Lakes, and hardly a road anywhere. There must be trails of some sort, for occasionally there is the white speck of a settlement. The Great Lakes themselves are forest bound. One understands why this country was crossed by water first, not by land: and that now it is the airplane that is opening up the northern and northwestern territories. How else could one get there? It is the plane that has made possible the exploitation of Canada’s mineral wealth—the greatest single factor in the country’s growth in the last few years. “You’ll never understand Canada,” a distinguished French-Canadian scientist said to me, “until you’ve seen the Arctic mining towns. They are fantastic examples of how modern technology has got its foot on the neck of the climate. I go up there once a year to meet intelligent people who prefer the life there to the boredom of city life.”

  The Rockies, the prairie and now the Great Lakes and the greatest of the Canadian rivers, the Saint Lawrence, the jugular artery of the country: the traveler’s capacity to react to geography has to be stretched once more to meet this astonishing scene. The blue inland seas, silvered by the wake of steamers, stare up like vast wind-smeared mirrors from the earth. The earliest dramas of the penetration of the continent strike up again in the mind. La Salle, Jolliet, the absurd Father Hennepin, the Indian wars come to life in one’s head; the character of those early North Americans was formed by something new to Europeans—endless forest, liberating rivers, inland o
ceans. The continental emotion moved in on these men and has remained ever since in the North American mind. It seizes every newcomer.

  Ontario was Canada’s stroke of luck; a northern but tolerable climate, good farmland, a countryside that would seem very English to the English and comfortable, at least to the Scots. Here in Toronto, and on up to Ottawa and Montreal, we are in the most densely populated, thriving and industrialized part of Canada, the richest market, where the British background is strongest. Conservative, solid, cautious, a region of long stockings, Ontario could be southern England except for one thing: a certain staidness. Toronto thinks Vancouver mad and dangerously nonconformist; Vancouver thinks Toronto conformist and dull. Until the immigration of the last twenty years, the shake-up of the boom and the last war, Toronto was in the grip of Presbyterian rectitude. Its Sabbatarianism and propriety were notorious all over the Commonwealth. Perhaps new countries require this rocklike self-righteousness; it makes people work and saves them from the moral collapse that afflicted large numbers of the earliest explorers and settlers.

  The first thing the Toronto man tells you today is that all this has changed. Even so, when I asked for a drink to be sent to my luxurious hotel room, I was told that this was illegal—but that I was now, under the new licensing laws, allowed to drink very expensively in the bar below. Canada has had great difficulty with its liquor laws. It has a higher percentage of alcoholics even than America and maybe even than Sweden. Boredom, loneliness, the worship of work—the Puritan illnesses—surely account for a lot of this, as well as the innate violence of the Anglo-Saxon. But—putting the special Canadian problem of alcohol aside—Toronto is obviously a happier and livelier city than it used to be. Intellectually it has awakened. It now produces poets and—above all—satirists. It has begun to laugh. It is the center of publishing and here, of course, the Canadians clash with American influences. Both the best and the worst of American periodical literature pour into Canada. And out of every ten books bought in Canada, seven come from the United States. Canadian writers cannot earn a living in their own country. A new novel by a Canadian sells only a thousand copies, and the writers are faced by the far more highly developed American culture, which long ago left the pioneer and the provincial stage behind.

  Although Toronto has been a very British city, it is becoming Americanized. Canadians are attracted, with a part of themselves, by this. But something in them also tenaciously resists. They are proud of their separate history; they have never disliked the long colonial period, indeed they have had many benefits from the gradualness of their evolution. It has suited them emotionally and morally. There is a basic difference between Canadians and Americans which goes back, of course, to the Revolution. The Americans made the first indispensable gesture of the creative mind at the time of the Revolution, when they rejected European authority. They did so under the tutelage of the Age of Reason—that is to say, in the name of an Idea. The rebellion was a mixture of the cynical and the lofty; it created an irreverent and confident spirit of “free-for-all” which at various times led to an inordinate amount of lawlessness and corruption, but it also gave opportunity to adventurous and finer minds. To the Canadians, on the contrary, the principle of authority was everything and still counts heavily. There was no desire to be “free.” There was no desire for a continental nationhood until about a century ago, and even then it took the panic at the sight of the American Civil War, and the American threats that lasted into the 1880s to give Canadians a rudimentary self-consciousness.

  The Canadians are moralists, but without the sense of guilt that harasses but also stimulates the American mind. And although Canadians frequently accuse themselves of having an inferiority complex in their masochistic way, they are relatively free of that desire to be loved which haunts Americans. They indeed ask often, “Do you like Canada?” with a wondering detachment. It is one of the rewards, perhaps, of sticking to authority. One effect of this attitude was that Canada became a parliamentary democracy on the British model and not in the Revolutionary sense. (America resembles Russia far more than Canada ever will.) Canadian politics, outside of Quebec, are clean; even rigorously so. The law is respected. When the United States West was a scene of crime, the figure of the lonely Mountie became a symbol of the sudden reign of order north of the purely mathematical frontier line. Authority has made the churches powerful in society: it has been said that almost every Canadian is a church member. Family life is dominated by the father, not by the mother as in the United States, and domesticity reigns. Not so long ago there were only sixty divorces a year in all of Canada; now there is one divorce for every twenty marriages; in the United States there is one divorce for every four.

  The soldier in Canada has a status he lacks in the States. He has never fought in a serious civil war. His wars have been foreign and in the Commonwealth interest; and although that might seem to mean a loss to a purely national consciousness—not to mention the terrible loss of manpower in the First World War—it has had exactly the opposite effect. Many Canadians from Vancouver to Ottawa have sat in their offices telling me this with a quiet conviction. One very frank political adviser in Ottawa, sitting in a Victorian room that might have been in the British Foreign Office, said, “Perhaps Canada was unlucky in not having gone through the crucible of civil war, or at any rate, of national violence. We have benefited from the British political skill and wisdom which steered us clear, without our having to earn our security ourselves, without having to forge ourselves into shape. Against this, it is certain that the men who came back from World War II discovered they were Canadians when they were out of Canada. Britain and America did not interest them anymore. They had found themselves. This we had never had before, and it has lasted.”

  Authority has its influence in education. A Canadian student of mine at an American university intended to become a schoolteacher. I asked if he would stay to teach in the States.

  “No,” he said with that shy, cautious purposefulness which I have often noticed among young Canadians. “Of course, life is more enjoyable here in the States and I would be far better paid. But in American schools, ideas are always changing, and the teacher is interfered with by parents’ associations. He has no authority.”

  Again, authority shows itself in the socialistic tendencies of Canadian life. Canada is not as progressive as the United States in its antitrust laws and gives far less support to agriculture. But there is a National Health Service in Saskatchewan; there are “family allowances”; the government operates the national broadcasting system—although there are also private broadcasting systems—an international airline, a national railroad. The provinces are taking over the ownership of hydroelectric power; the province of Alberta owns the telephone system, and the new and vastly important natural-gas industry is run by a public-utilities board. Socialism worries Canadians far less than it worries Americans.

  Authority—but this time it is perhaps reflected authority—is shown in the intense Canadian concern with foreign politics. Some sage heads wonder if here Canada does not overbid its hand, although this active concern does set Canada apparently apart from the United States. As a colony, a Dominion, and finally a member of the Commonwealth, Canada was always politically more conscious of the rest of the world than the United States was until 1914. Neglected or remote Canada may have been, but there was never anything comparable to American isolationism—a period in which the United States was concerned only with its own development and wealth. There is more foreign news, even today, in the Vancouver press than in the papers of San Francisco.

  This tradition of looking out on the world is a necessity so long as Canada is an exporting country; and it would outlast the influences of the Commonwealth if that were to break up. It has the side effect of encouraging Canadian nationalism, which, like all nationalisms, has its self-deluding aspects. Lying between Russia and the United States, Canada cannot help being in the American orbit in matters of foreign policy and defense; but Canada, li
ke every other nation in the Western alliance, is jealous of its independence, especially in its new self-conscious mood.

  Toronto has a substantial red-brick Victorian charm mixed in with its American innovations. Its villas with their sharply curved gables, always shaded by avenues of maples, are pretty. It is a well-painted place, and like all Canadian cities, very distinctive. This is very noticeable in Ontario—Windsor, Kingston, London are all different from one another. The journey along the long shore of Lake Ontario and up the Saint Lawrence at this time of the year is meadowy and charming. The farmhouses are substantial and the barns are impressive. Years ago a whole village would turn out for a barn-raising—that is, to lift the great beams of the structure in place. After the noble barns, the curious church spires catch the eye. They are commonly hexagonal and built of aluminum—for Canada has more of this metal than it knows what to do with. This unlikely material gives a blinding, piercing originality to the churches and they are one of the aesthetic sights of the province. The barns, the metal spires, the split-rail fences in the long fields that go down to the Saint Lawrence—this is the constructed Canada I shall remember.