Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Paul–why doesn’t Marius like you?”

  He laughed again. “Because I’m half-English. Because I’m not the pure thing. He knows I feel both races stirring inside me all the time. The pure race is everything to him. I suppose that’s why he refuses to speak English. If you’re completely at home in both languages you can’t help thinking differently.”

  “Does it feel funny belonging to both races?”

  “Well, it makes it impossible to be enthusiastic about the prejudices of either of them, and that can be uncomfortable sometimes.”

  “Does it still bother you–the way it used to?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve been away too long.” He stared into the fire. “I suppose patriotism was originally nothing but the remembrance of childhood. Childhood is always magical. No wonder the politicians got hold of it and organized it.”

  He was thoughtful for nearly a minute; the burning wood cracked loudly and a violent gust of wind made the windows rattle. He got up and looked out. Cap Chat was buried in darkness under the rushing wind and there was nothing to see. Coming back to the fire, he crouched again. “Well, one thing is certain. The same brand of patriotism is never likely to exist all over Canada. Each race so violently disapproves of the tribal gods of the other I can’t see how any single Canadian politician can ever imitate Hitler–at least, not over the whole country. But when the war comes…” He stopped and shrugged his shoulders.

  Keeping her eyes on the fire and her voice quiet, she said, “I suppose you meant what you said about the Navy?”

  “I suppose so. Why not be frank? I’ve made up my mind.”

  “My father was killed in 1918. I can’t even remember him.” She turned. “Oh Paul–do we really have to get into it again?”

  “We’ll be in it, all right.” He got up. “Let’s not talk about it. It just pulls the guts out of me. If you’ve grown up in a minority you can never feel simply about war. Quebec will enter it trying to save her legend. Many will go to it. Some like Marius will begin remembering each separate insult the English threw in their faces the last time. Some like me will have to feel for Quebec and feel for the whole country at the same time. No–let’s not talk about it.”

  “Paul?”

  He looked down at her. She was curled on the edge of the hearth, staring into the fire. When he answered the changed inflection in her voice she still looked away from him.

  “I’ve finished your manuscript,” she said.

  He waited, but for a time she said no more. All day Heather had been brooding over what she would say to him about his book. Each knew how tightly their future was bound up with the quality of this manuscript. “Well,” he said finally, “do you think it can be published?”

  “I don’t see why not.” She was still watching the fire. “Parts of it are wonderful. Your style is simply marvellous. I forget it’s you when I’m reading.”

  “But something is the matter with it. Something fundamental. You’ve spotted it. I can tell from your voice.”

  His calm, factual tones made Heather’s hopes sink. This book of his had completely baffled her. She was no professional critic, but her work with the museum in New York had involved a good deal of editing and she had helped write a small text book for art classes in schools. She had something of a professional approach to any form of written words. His theme was ambitious. Many sections had extraordinary power and descriptions were new and vivid. But the balance was not right and the whole was curiously unsatisfying.

  They discussed the book for nearly half an hour, and he took the manuscript and went over specific sections with her. At the end of that time she knew what had puzzled her.

  The book was too ambitious for him. She herself had been dazzled by the scope of the design. The young man of 1933, intended to type a world in disintegration, had seemed so important that she had not questioned the validity of his plan. Now she saw that the trouble lay in the fact that Paul’s emotions and mental analysis had not coalesced.

  “Look,” she said suddenly, “I read somewhere that the novelist’s principal aim is to celebrate life.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “That’s what you do best of all. Every time. Your characters are all naturally vital people. But your main theme never gives them a chance. It keeps asserting that they’re doomed.”

  He frowned thoughtfully. Then he remembered a discussion he had had with his tutor in Oxford. “Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen a European scene. Of course, Europe is the focus…” He jumped up and began walking back and forth. “My God!” he shouted. “I’ve been a fool! A year’s work! Heather–I’ve wasted a year’s work!”

  She looked at him in excitement. Her thoughts were on the same tack as his own. “Paul, why didn’t you set the scene in Canada?”

  He stopped in the middle of the room. “Because no world trends begin here. I thought of it, but–everything that makes the world what it is–fascism, communism, big business and depressions–they’re all products of other people’s philosophies and ways of doing things. A book about Canada–it would be like writing of the past century!” Having said this he wondered if it were really true. He sat down before the fire again, staring into it. Must he write out of his own background, even if that background were Canada? Canada was imitative in everything. Yes, but perhaps only on the surface. What about underneath? No one had dug underneath so far, that was the trouble. Proust wrote only of France, Dickens laid nearly all his scenes in London, Tolstoi was pure Russian. Hemingway let his heroes roam the world, but everything he wrote smelled of the United States. Hemingway could put an American into the Italian Army and get away with it because by now everyone in the English-speaking world knew what an American was. But Canada was a country that no one knew. It was a large red splash on the map. It produced Mounted Policemen, Quintuplets and raw materials. But because it used the English and French languages, a Canadian book would have to take its place in the English and French traditions. Both traditions were so mature they had become almost decadent, while Canada herself was still raw. Besides, there was the question of background. As Paul considered the matter, he realized that his readers’ ignorance of the essential Canadian clashes and values presented him with a unique problem. The background would have to be created from scratch if his story was to become intelligible. He could afford to take nothing for granted. He would have to build the stage and props for his play, and then write the play itself.

  Suddenly he began to talk. He got up and paced back and forth across the floor. He lit cigarettes and threw them into the fire half-finished and lit some more. Heather had never heard such a deluge of words from him. As she listened she felt sick from apprehension. He was telling her that his present book was a total failure, that he could do nothing to save it.

  Then, as abruptly as he had begun to talk, he stopped and knelt beside the fire. It had burned down until the logs were glowing coals. After a time he took a deep breath and turned to her. His face seemed several years older than it had been an hour ago, but his eyes were bright. He laughed in sudden irony.

  “And what have I discovered tonight?” he said. “Something the whole world has known for centuries. An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it a form.” He laughed again. “So–after all these years–I learn tonight what my job is!”

  Then casually, so casually she did not realize what he was doing, he picked up the manuscript and dropped it into the fire. With a cry she reached forward to save it, but the flames shot up and covered the papers. He took her by the arms and drew her back. “No,” he said, “that’s finished. Burn the mistakes. Otherwise they’ll haunt you permanently.”

  She was frightened by the resignation in his voice, appalled by the fact that he was destroying what had taken him a year to create. She watched the mass of papers burning and her face became hot from the flames. Slowly they curled and shrivelled into quivering layers, blackening from the edges into the ce
ntre, and she knew she was watching more than an unfinished book going up in smoke. She felt she was watching the fire burn up the next two years of her own life.

  FORTY-FOUR

  It was early when they woke the next day and set out after a good breakfast. They drove fast along the river highway toward Quebec. At Rimouski they saw the wind sweeping up swathes of mist from the river like a broom brushing a floor. At Trois-Pistoles the sun was shining. When they stopped for lunch at Rivière-du-Loup the day was hot and the mountains on the far side of the river looked mauve against a brilliant sky. Steadily the Saint Lawrence narrowed as they drove inland, and by late afternoon the Île d’Orléans was on their right, its contours dark in the late afternoon sun. The land was richer here, the parishes older; they passed red-roofed barns and the lovely sloping roofs of old stone houses. In some fields farmers were already beginning to cut the hay; in others the smell of clover was as strong as an anaesthetic. Then, as they neared Lévis, they saw Quebec across the river with the sunset flaring behind it, the Château and Citadel stark against the light and a pool of purple shadow lying like oil on the river underneath Cape Diamond. It was cool crossing on the ferry, but in the steep streets of Quebec the heat had lingered even past sundown. They found in a side street a small hotel Heather knew, left their bags and went out for dinner. Afterwards they leaned on the railing on the edge of Dufferin Terrace for nearly an hour watching the lights on the river, and then went back to bed.

  At breakfast the next morning Paul saw the name Danzig on the front page of Le Devoir. After reading the headlines he threw the paper aside. War might be a certainty, but he was sure it would not begin before the harvest was in. Europeans always seemed predictable about things like that.

  After checking out of the hotel, Paul drove the car back to the ferry for Lévis. Heather made no comment. She remembered that on the usual highway to Montreal along the left bank of the river lay Saint-Marc, and wondered if he were deliberately avoiding it.

  He drove slowly all that morning and Heather sat quietly beside him. Only a few hours before them lay Montreal, holding the tangled roots and residues of their separate lives. The city waited for them ominously, something that had tried to dominate them as long as they were in it, something neither had really escaped even now. Occasionally Heather glanced at his profile, wondering if his thoughts were the same as her own. Her husband. No, that word made no sense. It was for other people, a fence put up to keep others out. Just Paul. Heather and Paul against the rest of them.

  She closed her eyes, clenching her hands in fury as she thought about the cage which had surrounded her all her life. They would humiliate him. Her mother and the rest would get at her through him. And inside her brain, behind her closed eyes, she saw what would happen if they knew she had married him. She saw how they would hurt him, slash at his pride as though they had whips in their hands. And now, just at the moment when she herself felt free of them, she knew they could hold her through what they could do to him.

  Opening her eyes she looked again at his profile. His jaw was tight and his hands grasping the wheel seemed nervous. Was he thinking the same things? It seemed amazing that he had married her in Halifax, for he was really a careful man, aware of the odds and calculating them. Had he calculated them all now? She looked away. If only it were not for Montreal! If they could go away some place where nobody knew them! But he would have to get a job to be able to do that. And through working at the job, what would happen to his writing? She looked back at him again, drew close, laid her hand on his knee.

  Shortly after lunch they saw the smoke of Montreal lying over the horizon, dulling the sunlight. The hot air held it like an umbrella. The river water began to look darker, they saw the giant cross on the top of Mount Royal, then the trestle-work of the Jacques Cartier Bridge. A few moments more and they had reached its southern foot. Paul paid the toll and they moved onto the incline in a long row of cars. Then, as the bridge climbed over Saint Helen’s Island which lay in mid stream separating the channel from the shallows, he turned the car to the left and descended the ramp. “Let’s not go into town yet,” he said quietly.

  They drove along the island and stopped on its farthest tip. There were few people about at this hour of the afternoon, so they sat on the grass side by side and looked across at the city. It sprawled there ponderously, miles of docks, warehouses, grain elevators, factories, slums, office buildings, homes; a huge encrustation of concrete, brick, mortar and asphalt spreading back over the flats to Mount Royal and beyond, an enormous property.

  He said quietly, “Heather, do you think things have changed much since I went away in 1934?”

  She forced herself to answer. “Not much. My own part certainly hasn’t. Huntly McQueen, Chislett, Rupert Irons–they’re the same as ever, and so is everything else.” She looked fixedly across the river at the docks. “I think I hate them.”

  There was a long silence between them. He broke it finally. “Have we both been thinking the same thing?”

  She smiled ruefully.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted property,” he said. “But I’ve never been able to get the old house in Saint-Marc out of my mind. I suppose land is in the blood of all French-Canadians.”

  She pulled a blade of grass apart as he went on.

  “I’d like to have a place of our own sometime. I’m quite commonplace and banal, really. I’d like to see you cutting roses in the garden.” She turned away, and his voice continued. “Somehow or other, we’ve got to get some graciousness back into human life. I seem to have seen so little of it. People may forget all about it, soon.”

  Her hand found his and pressed it. “We’ll have all that, Paul. We will!”

  “Not in a single room.”

  She continued to gaze across the river. In her mind she saw one thing clearly. Janet would try to help them with money. It would be constitutionally impossible for her to stand aside if she believed that her daughter was living in poverty. And with her money she would humiliate him even if she restrained herself from hurting him in other ways. She would never understand how to respect Paul’s way of doing things. She would never be able to leave him alone to arrange things his own way–slowly, tenaciously, by trial and error, as he seemed to do everything.

  As if reading her mind, he said, “Heather–when we were married, it was on our own terms.” He nodded across the river. “Not on theirs. They aren’t bad. It’s an odd thing about this country–it has few outright villains. It’s only their instincts that are wrong. People at the top now–their instincts betray them in everything they do. Look at Chamberlain.”

  Her eyes remained on his. Keeping her voice steady, she said, “Our own terms, Paul?”

  He got up to watch the slow process of a ten-thousand-ton freighter being warped out of her dock by a pair of tugs. The stern came far out and he read her name: Borkum, Hamburg. The swastika was flying from her mainmast.

  Still looking at the Borkum, he said, “War’s unavoidable now, you know. That’s why I asked you to marry me before I had a job. Without waiting.”

  She tried to hold his gaze, but she couldn’t manage it. Looking away, she wondered how many millions of others were like them, waiting for war, all over the world waiting with different thoughts for it to come to them personally: to destroy the burden of their own identities, to give them jobs, to cut the umbilical cords that bound them to the past.

  “All the way between Athens and Halifax,” he went on, “I kept telling myself that the world you lived in wasn’t my world, and that it was still in authority. I suppose its rules hold even now. No matter how you might feel about it–I told myself that it had no use for me and didn’t want me. And all that counted in me didn’t want it, either.”

  The Borkum was casting off her tugs and getting under way. A tiny ridge was pressed out from her cutwater, surface tension holding it from breaking.

  “The day after war begins,” he said, “you and I will be wanted.” With some bitternes
s, he added, “Then we’ll be respected.” His face suddenly broke into a smile and he bent down, helping her to her feet. “But meanwhile the old rules still hold. I’ve got to get some kind of a job.”

  A great wave of joy passed through her; joy at something which at first seemed quite vague, then almost tangible, then the most important thing in the world. Once more, each understood all that was in the other’s mind. She knew that he was guarding his pride. He knew that she recognized it.

  “If we weren’t married,” he said, “what would you do now?”

  “I’ve promised Mummy to spend a month with her in Maine.”

  He brushed a dried leaf from her dress. “Go with your mother, Heather. I’ll stay here and try to find a job. When I do…” The muscles of his face tightened. “When I do, it will be time to tell them we’re married. Do you mind?”

  Watching him, she knew this was the only way it could be. Earning a living in any other way but writing meant wasting his talent. She knew he would have to stand on his own feet as he had always done. No matter what happened, she would never ask him to do anything else.

  They walked back to the car, drove up the ramp to the bridge and on into Montreal. She left him with his suitcase in front of the old house where he had lived five years before. It still had the same sign by the door saying that it took roomers.

  FORTY-FIVE

  The day after they separated began one of the longest weeks Paul had ever spent. Heather’s absence was like a physical pain. It produced a kind of homesickness sharper than anything he had known in Europe; being in Montreal made it all the worse. The old sense of failure, of marking time against a brick wall, was heavy on him.

  At the beginning of the week he went to the office of the university to see if they had a list of jobs available to graduates. Nothing. Because he wanted only to write, he found it difficult to think of possible jobs, and still harder to knock on strange doors to ask for work. Judging by want-ads in the papers, unemployment was still bad. No one wanted help. As usual. Always as usual.