With Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, the bombing of London ceased and George felt renewed pressure to enlist, now that his work as an ARP warden had come to an end. The pressure seems mostly to have come from inside himself. His cousin Lionel Massey had been captured in Greece and was now a prisoner of war in Germany. Hitler was marching toward Moscow. Though George continued to refer to the war as a “cauldron of folly and stupidity, pride and selfishness”—from which fastidious free thinkers should stand apart—it must have begun to seem self-deluding to think so.
At the end of August 1941, he wrote his mother that he had decided to enlist in the merchant marine, calling it “one of the stupidest, most useless, basest actions of his life,” but one forced upon him by the sheer pressure of family expectation. By enlisting, he had in effect repudiated his pacifism. He added bitterly that he was a slave of his baptism.
In reality, he was the slave of no one. His family had been more than understanding of the position he had taken. It was his own demons that were propelling him now. He moved out of Bermondsey and into the Dorchester Hotel with the Masseys. In October 1941, he set off for Middlesbrough in the north of England to join a merchant ship. Before boarding he learned, in a routine medical exam, that he had a tubercular lesion on his lung and was unfit for service. In a panic, he vanished from sight, headed for Liverpool, tried to sign on to another ship, was rebuffed and instead worked in demolition on the docks. In late November he returned to the Oxford area and found a job working as a farm labourer near Aylesbury. All this time, his family went without news of him. On December 7, 1941, he woke to the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. For most people, especially his family, the fact that America would enter the war meant that victory was assured, however long it might take. For a pacifist like George, the news that the war he had opposed would now become a global struggle came as a disorienting blow. For four days, he later remembered, he felt close to suicide. Then, on December 11 or 12, riding his bicycle along the narrow country roads outside of Aylesbury as the dawn rose, he stopped to unlock one of the gates placed across the road to stop cattle, and as he walked his bicycle through and closed the gate behind him, he knew, at once and for a certainty, that God existed and that all was well. This private epiphany—lasting an instant—proved to be the decisive event of his life.
The family had not heard from him for almost four months when he suddenly turned up one night in January 1942 at 54A Walton Street in Knightsbridge, the flat above a dairy where his sister Alison was living with another Canadian, Kay Moore. He was gaunt, dirty, badly dressed and both volatile and depressed. For the next month, he exhausted Kay’s and Alison’s patience with his lack of cleanliness, his overwhelming neediness and his aggressive bouts of self-justification. It was obvious he had to go home. In February he returned by Atlantic convoy to Canada. His mother took him in at the house she had inherited from Lady Parkin, at 7 Prince Arthur Avenue in Toronto. For the rest of 1942 and the first months of 1943, he remained at home with his mother, reading, grieving for the people he had lost in the raids on Bermondsey and trying to get his life back in order.
In 1943, he got a job with the Canadian Association of Adult Education and began a lifelong association with the CBC, preparing the Citizens’ Forum broadcasts hosted by Morley Callaghan. By early 1945 he was writing “Have We a Canadian Nation?” which outlined, for the first time, the theory that Canada was a conservative nation, based on adherence to “sane and orthodox religions rooted in the past” together with British institutions. He saw Canada as a middle way between the liberal acquisitive individualism of the United States and the collective tyranny of the Soviet experiment. In early 1945, he published a pamphlet, The Empire, Yes or No, in which he maintained that Canada could survive as an independent state only within the British Commonwealth. Otherwise Canada could not maintain its identity beside the United States.
The Empire, Yes or No also recanted his pacifism:
In 1940 we saw that it was not the pious talk of idealists that stopped fascism and the forces of evil, it was the practical co-operation of free nations of the British Commonwealth. Some always knew this lesson; some learned it very late (like this writer). But let us all remember it after the war, and never forget it.
While he recanted his stance on the war, pacifism continued to shape his attitude toward nuclear weapons. He was just returning to England in 1945 when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It remained for him the purest example of technological evil in the service of American imperialism. His opposition to American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil—which inspired Lament for a Nation—can be traced back to his pacifism and to his encounter with the destructive power of high explosives in Bermondsey.
By way of contrast, the other Canadians in London drew a very different lesson from their experiences. In the autumn of 1940, Mike Pearson and George Ignatieff were fire-watching on the roof of Canada House as incendiaries landed on the roofs all around Trafalgar Square. As they stared out at London on fire, Ignatieff remembered Mike Pearson saying that this could not go on and that the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations would mean the end of civilization itself. There had to be a better way. After the war, he and Ignatieff threw themselves into the creation of the United Nations, and then, as the Cold War developed, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 1956, they worked together for the deployment of the first UN peacekeepers in Sinai, for which Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In contrast to the Christian conservative pacifism of George Grant, they embraced a liberal anti-communist internationalism. In contrast to George, they believed in an essential difference, at once political and moral, between Stalinist tyranny and American imperial hegemony, while George continued to argue, right into the 1960s, that there was no real difference between Canadian subservience to the United States and the position of Soviet satellites such as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
George’s sister Alison spent the entire war in London, moving from the War Office into MI5, British Military Intelligence. In late 1942 and early 1943, she came to know a young Canadian, Frank Pickersgill, who had been studying at the Sorbonne in Paris when war was declared. Like George, Frank had stood aside from the war and he had remained in France until the German invasion of 1940. He escaped occupied France in 1942, made his way to London and, after what he had seen of the Gestapo during internment, enrolled immediately in the Special Operations Executive for clandestine operations. While training as a saboteur, parachutist and signals operator, he and his fellow trainee, John Macalister, spent the weekends at 54A Walton Street with Kay Moore and Alison Grant. Alison fell in love with Frank. In June 1943, Frank and John were dropped by night into occupied France. They were captured within a week and imprisoned in France. Alison spent 1943 and 1944 hoping against hope that Pickersgill and Macalister would survive, only to learn in the summer of 1945 that they had been tortured and executed in the concentration camp at Buchenwald in late 1944. It was a shattering blow, but she never doubted that Frank had done the right thing or thought that she or anyone else could have stopped him from doing what he had to do. She taught her children to revere Frank’s example. George once wrote of Frank that courage such as Pickersgill’s was a virtue before which one can only bow.
In August 1945, George Grant returned to Oxford to resume his Rhodes Scholarship. He met up with Alison, then preparing to return home to Canada. He noticed that she seemed depressed and withdrawn, even angry with him for having left England three years earlier. He wrote his mother, urging her to treat her gently upon her return. He had no idea that she had just learned of Frank’s death.
The relationship between brother and sister never recovered from the war. George had made his choices. Alison had made hers, and in Frank’s example, she found the polar star of her ultimate allegiances.
When George told his mother that he was returning to Oxford not to study law or politics but to study theology, he remembered her exploding w
ith all the pent-up frustration of a mother who had seen the son in whom she had placed all her hopes crack under the strain of war. “George, you have always been the poseur of the family, but this is the worst pose of all,” she raged.
It was not a pose but the beginning of a decisive change in his life. He explained to her that he had to study theology because “my need for God is … overwhelming.”
This need for God had changed him. And England had changed, too. He renewed his friendship with Mrs. Lovett and welcomed the Labour victory of July 1945 as a victory for Bermondsey. But he did not share the enthusiasm of his socialist friends for the new government. His ever-deepening religious faith was convincing him of the futility of salvation through politics. This lofty fatalism about the relevance of political action was already deeply embedded in his intellectual makeup by 1945.
He continued to think of England as the civilized, ancient alternative to the brutal new empires of America and Russia, but as 1945 turned into 1946 and 1947 and he ploughed along with his doctoral dissertation, Canada began to pull him home. He told his mother, “I love England—and think it is the greatest country on earth—[but] Canada is in one’s heart in a way that this country can never be.” Yet finding work at home for a young man with an unfinished doctorate proved difficult. Burgon Bickersteth and the Masseys proposed him for the position of warden of Hart House, the campus student centre at the University of Toronto, then filled with returning veterans. The committee considering the appointment decided they couldn’t select someone who had not served. George was philosophical. “You cannot have the plums after being a pacifist.” Nicholas Ignatieff, then returning from Britain after service in military intelligence, was chosen instead. George accepted a job teaching philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax and, after marrying Sheila Allen, who was to deepen his faith and to strengthen his convictions, he began his career as a Christian conservative philosopher in Canada.
Despite having broken with the family on the issue of service to king and country, he remained faithful to the Parkin and Grant heritage in other respects. He continued to subscribe to his father’s and grandfather’s essential belief that Canadian identity could not survive without a British core. But already in his twenties, he was giving the family credo a new inflection: conservative, religious, hostile to progress, modernity and liberalism. This was a substantial act of revision, even falsification, of his own heritage. His grandfather Grant, together with Sandford Fleming, had welcomed the leading technologies of the age—the railway and the undersea cable—as tools for nation building. George himself had been left Sandford Fleming’s watch, the first watch, he liked to tell interviewers, that Fleming installed with twenty-four-hour time. George valued the watch but not what it signified. Technology of this transformative sort was no longer progressive. He had seen what high explosives could do to an air raid shelter, and he never again associated technology with progress.
He revised his own pacificism, but he did not revisit his view that the war had laid bare the essentially inhuman dynamic of industrial capitalism. The war experience left him convinced that technology had become the master, not the servant, of the human soul.
He also came to believe, through the spiritual crisis he experienced during the war, that Christian faith was the core of his being and that Western civilization could not be redeemed without a return to faith. This view of modernity was deepened by his reading of the French philosopher and thinker Simone Weil. Though they never met, she too had been in wartime London and, like him, had been tormented by the conflict between a pure Christian pacifism and her awareness, as a Jew fleeing occupied Europe, that she must do something to confront evil. Her war work, her attempt to provide de Gaulle’s free French with a blueprint for postwar reconstruction in France, was a book called The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. It was first published at the end of the war, after her death in 1943 in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Ashford, Kent. The book’s message paralleled George’s conviction that a war-wounded world could be healed only by returning both to community—local, particular, rooted—and to faith—Christian, transcendent and purifying.
Under the influence of Weil and his wife’s strong religious belief, George came to conclude that the family’s original faith—pious, earnest Presbyterianism—had been the spine that had sustained both its patriotic love of Canada and its insistence that Canada must resist the lure of American ideals and greed. Once this spine of faith had dissolved, the family tradition degenerated into an empty, secular liberalism that offered no resistance to American influences. Whether this was true or not did not matter. What mattered was that he believed it and drew the conclusion that it was up to him to salvage the family’s intellectual inheritance from the shallow liberal conformity into which it had subsided.
Another decisive factor that shaped the evolution of George’s thought after the war was the changing place of Canada in the world. The Canadians of his generation forged in the crucible of wartime London—Ritchie, Pearson, the Masseys, his sister, the Ignatieffs—returned to the peacetime world with a deep sense that Canada mattered. Anyone who had lived through wartime London and the Canadian part in victory—from Dieppe through Juno, through the liberation of Holland—knew that we were a serious country, with a serious part to play in the making of the postwar world.
Because George, like them, had lived in London at the height of Canada’s brief moment—after Dunkirk but before Pearl Harbor—it came as a shock that the United States had emerged the victor and that Britain was subsiding into war-ravaged decline. This changed everything the Grant family had assumed about the place of Canada in the world. Canada’s fate had been tied to the fortunes of the British Empire. What would it do now as the mother country found herself eclipsed by the American ascendancy? As George settled into the prosperous Canada of the 1950s, teaching at Dalhousie and then at McMaster University, he was appalled that the Canada he had grown up in—Protestant small town, British, virtuous—was being swept away by a surge of continental integration. To his dismay, much of central Canada began to look like anywhere in the United States, with the same highways, gas stations and supermarkets. Instead of questioning whether this tide of continental integration was a good thing, Canadians seemed to embrace it. And worst of all, the Liberal Party of Canada, led by C.D. Howe, Louis St. Laurent and Mike Pearson, appeared to welcome rather than resist the Americanizing tide. It was especially bitter to see old friends like Pearson appearing to abet the assimilationist drift.
In 1963, George’s mother, Maude Parkin Grant, died at eighty-two after five years lost in the white desert of Alzheimer’s disease. By the end, if she acknowledged him at all, she mistook her son for her father, George Parkin. The woman he had called his anchor, the last living connection with the Parkin and Grant tradition, was now gone.
Two days after her death, the Liberal Party, led by Mike Pearson, combined with the other opposition parties to bring down the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker. The issue on which Diefenbaker fell was his refusal to allow American nuclear weapons—the Bomarc missile—on Canadian soil.
In another single, defining moment—the death of his beloved mother, the severing of the last link with the ancestors, the perceived sellout of Canada by an old friend and the introduction of American weapons onto Canadian soil—Grant saw what he must do. Over the next year, he composed Lament for a Nation, a ninety-seven-page polemic that was, as he put it, “a celebration of … the memory of that tenuous hope that was the principle of my ancestors.” Diefenbaker’s fall was the pretext, but the deeper source of the essay’s extraordinary rhetorical power was his sense that a great tradition of patriotic identification with Canada, central to his being, had been betrayed by those, like Pearson, whom he had once considered friends.
The thesis of Lament for a Nation was simple and stark. Canada had gone from colony to nation to colony, from imperial subservience to Britain to imperial subservience to the United
States. In the process, it had lost its identity and its soul. Its disappearance was only a matter of time.
But this was not all. The new empire of capitalism and commerce subverted all the smaller, local and provincial attachments that once went by the name of love of country. In the era of technological modernity, love of country was a sentimental and retrograde illusion. A place like Canada could no longer serve as an object of love and longing.
Lament for a Nation appeared the year I began my undergraduate career at the University of Toronto. I rebelled against this pessimism then, as I do today. But George Grant’s pessimism lays down the gauntlet. There is no easy answer to the challenge he posed—for he asked, as no one had ever done before, Is Canada still possible?
He defended Diefenbaker and the Conservatives, he said, because, unlike the Liberals, “the character of Canada as British North America was in their flesh and bones.” He added that many men in the Conservative Cabinet had been men of the 1939 war, as if this was proof of their loyalty to Britain, conveniently forgetting that he had been the pacifist and that “the ambitious little bureaucrat”—his acidic description of Pearson—had been a man who had served in both the First and Second World Wars. George was equally scathing about Pearson’s men—who now included his brother-in-law, George Ignatieff, who had married Alison in 1945—calling them acquiescent servants of American imperialism. Ignatieff, who had preceded George Grant as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol and was now working in the Canadian foreign service in Ottawa, did not enjoy George’s remark that “the officials of External Affairs had mostly been educated in the twilight scepticism of Oxford liberalism.” In George’s hands, “liberalism” became a catch-all term of abuse, a synonym for value-free secularism and supine acquiescence to the American takeover.
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