Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  He was a courteous host — although one not totally at ease with infants and small children, who were the realm of his wife, Tota — and adult encounters worked better at his cottage than those where crayons were involved. But at that first honeymoon dinner party chez MacLennan and over the years, at lunches or dinners or other events in North Hatley, Montreal, or Toronto, I always found him to be very good company and enjoyed his Halifax-Oxford drawl, his mischievous smiles, and his emphatic bursts of laughter.

  He was regarded with affection and pride in North Hatley, which was a place of more than average literary accomplishment. People like Frank Scott, Blair Fraser — and now Graham Fraser and the elegant columnist Norman Webster — were to be found there in the summer. (Four-year-old Graham Fraser was so impressed by the tall legal scholar/poet Frank Scott falling splashingly out of a canoe at the dock that he clamoured admiringly, “Do it again, Mr. Scott, do it again!”) Ralph Gustafson, Ronald Sutherland, Douglas Jones, Alison Pick, and other literati have also graced the little town.

  Local legend has it that Hugh was a highly competitive tennis player (he won the Nova Scotia doubles title in his youth) but one constantly afflicted — sometimes to a slightly amusing extent — by aches and pains that prevented his game from ever quite reaching its zenith. And certainly in his later years, friends found that enquiries about the state of his health were not to be casually made.

  He was a kind and caring man, of course. I once saw him break into a run — in his late sixties — as he rushed off to give assistance on hearing that an elderly friend had just suffered a heart attack at the tennis court. I have mentioned, too, the incident from his days as a teacher at Lower Canada College when his instinctive kindness helped a boy in trouble. The reader will not be surprised to learn that that particular boy grew up to keep a watchful and helpful eye on Hugh and his wife in their last difficult days.

  They were difficult days, too, since our society is not good at looking after an old, very proud couple like the MacLennans. In the last few years of his life, Hugh’s activities were severely circumscribed by the fact that his beloved wife was almost bedridden. Hugh faithfully — though somewhat inexpertly, since he was a man of his generation — looked after her and ran the household, doing the shopping and the cooking, which took up most of his day and caused friends to be concerned about their diet.

  In the summer of 1990, just before what proved to be my last visit to their apartment on Summerhill Avenue, a pleasant walk from the McGill campus, I stressed on the phone from Toronto that I wanted to take them out for a really fine dinner. Yet when I reached the apartment and indicated that all of Montreal was our oyster — the Ritz, perhaps, or somewhere in Old Montreal? — discussion revealed that the place they really preferred for dinner, the culinary pinnacle, as it were, was Ben’s Delicatessen, “Home of the Best Montreal Smoked Meats.” Yes, Ben’s brightly lit café on De Maisonneuve, which famously had fed lines of hungry men each day during the ten lost years of the Depression. So to Ben’s we went. But not before I had been forced to stop Hugh, who was then very frail, from courteously hastening off to hail us a cab on Côte-des-Neiges. I finally managed to persuade him that I needed the walk — and at that point honour was satisfied, and I was permitted to go out and get the cab.

  He was a great gentleman, a dignified man for whom the word “courtly” might have been invented, yet he was far from stuffy. His conversation was frequently uproariously funny, sometimes bawdily so. That earthy humour rarely finds its way into his writing, although I proudly included in the anthology Hugh MacLennan’s Best the story of the buxom Cape Breton lady teacher unwise enough to ask a small boy trying to define “quadruped,” “What have I got two of that a cow has four of?” The plainspoken boy obviously came from a dairy farming background. We can imagine the nickname young Neilly bore to the end of his Cape Breton days.

  But MacLennan’s gift in conversation was genuine wit — pointed, clever, perfect. Three examples. In the sixties his student, then friend, young Leonard Cohen explained to Hugh the importance that he and his generation ascribed to enjoying every possible sexual opportunity that offered itself. “Leonard,” said Hugh, “you’re no different from a girl back home in Nova Scotia. She was called ‘Anytime Annie.’” Leonard, of course, did not take Hugh’s abstemious advice, to the relief of many ladies, going down though the years.

  Once, in a discussion about the latest tragic outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland, he said to me, “Of course you must understand, Douglas, that the trouble there is caused by the fact that the population of Ulster is split between two religions — [long pause] — anti-Protestantism and anti-Catholicism.”

  And let me quote another flash of wit, not his, but retold by him with what I might call adoptive delight. The not altogether popular principal of McGill, Cyril James, once happened upon a group of four deans lunching at the Faculty Club. “Aha,” he said, “the proper collective noun for such a group would perhaps be ‘a dread of deans.’”

  “And for you, I suppose,” shot back a dean, “it would be ‘a lack of principals.’”

  His stories — and he was full of stories — revolved around characters he had known. He loved unusual characters and enjoyed meeting and chatting with them. He made slow progress along the street at North Hatley towards the post office, or along Sherbrooke on his way to and from McGill, as he encountered acquaintances of all sorts, and of all collar colours, and stopped to chat with them.

  I never knew him as a teacher, but I know the type of teacher he must have been. The same well-stocked, allusive mind that saw connections everywhere and made him a great essayist — from Captain Bligh to Albert Schweitzer in two easy moves — must have made him a good, challenging, and thought-provoking teacher for bright kids. It must also have made him the despair of lesser lights, who expected the course to follow the outline, for God’s sake, and failed to see what on earth the Mafia in Montreal could possibly have to do with Robert Browning. And Leonard Cohen, a great admirer, once told me of Hugh becoming so moved as he tried to describe the depth of James Joyce’s loneliness in exile that he stood lost in tears, while the awestruck class filed silently out of the room.

  It is important to note the extent to which this kind, decent man was an inspiration to so many other writers, both directly (in his encouraging correspondence, and in person) and indirectly by way of example. He was a trailblazer. It was 1941 in October, in the darkest days of the Second World War, that Barometer Rising, his first book, came out. At the time it was regarded as almost foolhardy to set a novel in Canada, and the book’s opening words show what a mountain he had to climb: “It seems necessary to offer more than a conventional statement about the names of characters in this book, since it is one of the first ever written to use Halifax, Nova Scotia, for its sole background. Because there is as yet no tradition of Canadian literature, Canadians are apt to suspect that a novel referring to one of their cities must likewise refer to specific individuals among its characters.” He emphasizes that these are made-up characters, going on to regret that “there is no great variety in Scottish given names” and then, sure enough, we find ourselves pursuing Neil Macrae, in search of Big Alec MacKenzie, later aided by Angus Murray, going on a virtual street by street tour of the city.

  And then, something much more significant, perhaps one of the most important paragraphs in the history of Canadian writing:

  He stopped at a corner to wait for a tram, and his eyes reached above the roofs to the sky. Stars were visible, and a quarter moon. The sun had rolled on beyond Nova Scotia and into the west. Now it was setting over Montreal and sending the shadow of the mountain deep into the valleys of Sherbrooke Street and Peel; it was turning the frozen St. Lawrence crimson and lining it with the blue shadows of the trees and buildings along its banks, while all the time the deep water poured seaward under the ice, draining off the Great Lakes into the Atlantic. Now the Prairies were endless plains of
glittering, bluish snow over which the wind passed in a firm and continuous flux, packing the drifts down hard over the wheat seeds frozen into the alluvial earth. Now in the Rockies the peaks were gleaming obelisks in the mid-afternoon. The railway line, that tenuous thread which bound Canada to both the great oceans and made her a nation, lay with one end in the darkness of Nova Scotia and the other in the flush of a British Columbian noon.

  Think of that! A deliberately, even defiantly, pan-Canadian book — about Canada, coast to coast, and what it is to be Canadian. It seemed important to the thousands of Canadians who passed dog-eared copies of the book around barrack rooms in Britain or among the hammocks in corvettes bouncing in mid-Atlantic storms, or grabbed them from bookstore shelves . . . and it still seems damned important to the Canadian writers who follow in his footsteps seventy years on, and to their publishers — which brings me to my encounter with Hugh MacLennan as an editor and publisher.

  When I joined Macmillan of Canada as editorial director in 1974, I inherited a galaxy of major Canadian authors, my North Hatley friend Hugh among them. Like so many of these stars, he was there because of John Gray, the legendary publisher at Macmillan who was perhaps Hugh’s best friend. I was lucky enough to get to know John Gray fairly well, acting as editor for his memoirs, Fun Tomorrow, and I can see why the two men were close. Their relationship was a model for contacts between author and publisher — respectful, friendly, and encouraging, with tact and frankness blended to a nicety. It was John Gray who went out on a limb and printed ten times the usual print run for 1959’s The Watch That Ends the Night — ordering 25,000 copies for Canada — while all the publishing world wondered, and his colleagues thought him mad. Yet he was right. It proved to be Hugh’s best — and his most successful — book.

  This leads to a confession. When I read all of Hugh’s work to produce Hugh MacLennan’s Best, I suffered from the anthologist’s secret disease: I hoped to discover a hidden jewel, unjustly overlooked. I was disappointed to find that his most famous novel, published in 1959, is in fact his best. Hugh’s own years, from 1947 to 1957, spent watching over his sick wife “knowing,” in the words of the novel’s narrator, “that at any hour of any day she might die,” informs this novel, told by George Stewart, a man who teaches at McGill. There is one striking difference between Stewart and the author: after years of happy marriage to a widow named Katherine, at the end of the first chapter Stewart receives the most dramatic phone call in Canadian literature, from his wife’s long-dead first husband, who in fact has survived both Nazi and Soviet death camps.

  The Watch That Ends the Night sold like wildfire around the world, even, to the author’s shy amazement, dominating bookstore windows on Fifth Avenue in New York. It still provides fine reading.

  In 1974 Macmillan was about to publish Hugh MacLennan’s so-called coffee-table book Rivers of Canada. My role on that book was a minor one, restricted mainly to writing the flap copy summarizing the book. (Editors, you should know, tend to be unreasonably proud of their flap copy, the writing on the book’s cover: I note now that I described the book as “bringing a new standard of excellence to those rare and wonderful books that succeed in pleasing both the eye and the mind,” and I’ve happily used variants of that phrasing several times since.)

  But the process of publishing Rivers of Canada involved running excerpts in Maclean’s magazine, and I recall Hugh arriving from Montreal for a meeting in the Maclean’s boardroom at 481 University Avenue with Peter C. Newman (then the magazine’s editor) and some of his senior staff. In those days Peter Newman shrewdly used Hugh as an occasional columnist/essayist, producing pieces such as the extraordinary 1972 essay on Trudeau and Nixon, “Trudeau Unveiled: Facing Up to the Public.” And even though the occasion was to discuss excerpting Rivers of Canada, the Maclean’s meeting turned into a fascinating, wide-ranging seminar on politics, economics, history, and life, as Newman and his colleagues drew Hugh out, and either literally or metaphorically took notes as he talked.

  Hugh, always a “writer engagé,” contributing to public debate, had an extraordinary record in anticipating the political themes that were to convulse Canadian society. One of the themes of Barometer Rising is Canada’s switch from its position in what he called “the butler’s pantry of the British Empire.” By the time of The Precipice (1948) he was warning us about the dangers of becoming a branch plant of the United States — a theme he returned to again and again, most directly in 1960 in the essay “It’s the U.S. or Us.” That essay, some say, helped to create a groundswell of opinion that led to the creation of a Royal Commission to study the Americanization of our media, which, it can be argued, led in turn to the creation of the CRTC, and much else.

  Back in 1945, of course, in Two Solitudes he tackled the grand theme of friction between English- and French-speaking Canadians, and in doing so changed at the very least the language of political debate in this country. He returned to the theme in The Return of the Sphinx. That now-forgotten book was published in 1967, the glorious year of Canada’s Centennial, and the novel’s predictions of precisely the sort of revolutionary violence that the FLQ was to produce just three years later were not warmly received in the midst of all the celebrations.

  Let me add some further points about that 1972 Maclean’s piece on Trudeau. In that essay he actually called Trudeau “a genius,” going on to define the term: “My idea of a genius is a person who can reach a destination without having travelled there, which is pretty well what Trudeau did when he reached No. 24 Sussex Drive.” (Max and Monique Nemni’s recent research on Trudeau’s preparation for office, detailed in Young Trudeau, and in Trudeau Transformed, has now cast doubt on Hugh’s interpretation.) There is no doubt that Hugh sympathized with Trudeau’s dream — one that, sadly, is now seen as an impractical, hopelessly idealistic one — of a bilingual Canada where the two solitudes would indeed touch and greet and protect each other. In his last years Hugh was deeply saddened by the path we seemed to be taking, and he saved his most savage invective — much of it unprintable, especially when he phoned at night after a drink or two — for our then–prime minister, whom he insisted on calling Muldoon. It was not an affectionate nickname, and since I had not then worked with Mulroney, I had no defence to offer.

  The friendship with Trudeau was returned, and the admiration was mutual. The ex–prime minister joined us at the small celebratory reception in Montreal’s Racquet Club to mark Hugh’s eightieth birthday, slipping in quietly while the dinner was under way. Later, in correspondence with me following Hugh’s death, he said how sorry he was to be abroad and thus unable to attend the memorial service at McGill for “that great human being.”

  The Maclean’s essay is important, I believe, because it suggests an answer to why Hugh was such a shrewd predictor of future trends. Simply put, his education allowed him to take the long view. In fact, Hugh MacLennan was the sort of person who gives education a good name. In theory, if you give people the best education three countries can provide — Dalhousie, then Oxford, then Princeton — and after that expose them through wide travel to many different cultures and imbue them with a keen and continuing interest in people and human affairs in all their variety — then, the theory goes, you will produce wise men and women who will be able to fit current events into a wider pattern.

  Well, we all know how rarely this happens. But in Hugh MacLennan’s case, it seems to me, the system worked. At the time of the Vietnam War many commentators wrote comparing the American Empire to the Roman Empire. Yet how many were able to compare the Vietnam adventure to the expedition into Germany of Quintilius Varus? That sort of precise comparison speaks for itself about the range of his accumulated knowledge.

  With its links to events two thousand years ago, that essay displays, yet again, the same uncanny ability to predict the themes of the future debates. How many other 1972 essays on politics can we find that include the words “ecology” and “non-renewable resources”?
How many of us could even define the word “ecology” in 1972?

  Reviewing Hugh MacLennan’s Best, Robert Harlow, the West Coast novelist and teacher, said simply, “The man was prescient to the point of clairvoyance.” I’d like to give one example where the word clairvoyance is amazingly apt. In Two Solitudes, Huntly McQueen, the St. James Street tycoon, reminded many readers of Prime Minster Mackenzie King. This passage is about McQueen and the office where his mother’s portrait hangs: “Except when he was alone in the room McQueen never even glanced at the portrait, but whenever he had a decision to make he shut everyone out and communed with the picture, and after he had looked at it long enough he was usually able to feel that his mother was silently advising him what to do. It was the most closely guarded of all his secrets.”

  That was written in 1945. The full extent of Mackenzie King’s reliance on his dead mother for advice, and the role played by her portrait in his decisions, was one of the prime minister’s most closely guarded secrets. It only emerged thirty years later when his private diaries were released and were then used, not kindly, by C.P. Stacey in his book A Very Double Life (1976), published by Macmillan and launched by us, impudently, at the ancestral Mackenzie House in Toronto. So how do we explain MacLennan’s passage? Clairvoyance? Or the flash of insight that strikes an imaginative artist and qualifies as genius? I don’t know. But I do know that we must all desperately hope that his predictions in Voices in Time (1980) of “The Destruction” leading in time to “The Bureaucracy,” which enforces ever greater conformity on citizens, are less accurate than his earlier ones have proved to be.