Hugh MacLennan's Canadian novel about novels - She knew she was supposed to admire these writers for their realism, but actually she loved them for their style

The last third of Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes jumps from World War I to the 1930s, ending in 1939 with the start of World War II, and the main characters switch to Paul, the son of the aristocratic, enlightened Athanase and Heather, the daughter of the war widow from the chapter I praised yesterday.  Young people problems come to the front, like romance (the French/English division will be reconciled by love and patriotism) and jobs and writing the Great Canadian Novel.  A surprising amount of the novel is about novels.

Hemingway, for example, inescapable in 1947:

He [Paul] went into the kitchen and opened a can of beans, spilled the beans out into a saucepan and heated it on the stove.  Then he cut a slice of bread and buttered it, and poured himself a glass of milk.  The beans and milk tasted good.  (225)

That last sentence especially, even if the whole thing is stolen from “The Big Two-Fisted River” (1925).

If that seems thin – although it is directly stolen – let’s look at Heather selecting a book from “her collection of post-war writers”:

All of D. H. Lawrence was there, all of Aldous Huxley and Dos Passos, some Hemingway and the social works of Bertrand Russell.  She knew she was supposed to admire these writers for their realism, but actually she loved them for their style.  She could not bear a book that lacked style.

  (258)

On the next page, MacLennan spends a paragraph watching Heather read the first ten pages of A Farewell to Arms.  “It was vibrant, it was beautiful, it was life!”  MacLennan is listing his own influences here, all easily detectable long before this page, however paler they become in his own style.  Well, I have never read Russell.

Paul and Heather begin a love affair that moves the novel firmly into Lawrence territory, although my notes tell me that I lost the most relevant page numbers (what a useful note, thanks, past me).  Not that Lawrence was not visible early on (this is Paul’s older brother, an interesting character in his own right):

His hatred of his father collapsed in a longing for his father’s approval, never attained because stubbornness of pride made him refuse consistently to do a single thing his father wished. (38)

Admittedly, that’s a heck of a lot balder than Lawrence would ever write.  How about what may be my favorite single line in Two Solitudes:

Twice last autumn, on silent nights with a full moon, he had heard miles away the cough of a rutting moose.

  (51)

A moony, moosey echo of a favorite bit of Women in Love (1920):

The moon was transcendent over the bare, open space, she suffered from being exposed to it.  There was a glimmer of nightly rabbits across the ground.  The night was as clear as crystal, and very still. She could hear a distant coughing of a sheep. (Ch. 19, “Moony”)

Paul is also the name of the hero of Sons and Lovers (1913).  That made me laugh when I remembered it, although the characters are more like Rupert and Ursula in Women in Love, with their honeymoon trip along the Gulf of St. Lawrence full of resonances.

Paul has been writing a novel about the masses – “Could any man write a novel about masses?” (307) – but it is not going well.  “A novel should concern people, not ideas, and yet people had become trivial” (same page).  His great breakthrough, with Heather’s help, is to turn to a novel about Canada.  This is what happened to MacLennan, too.  This is, of course, a terrible idea, leading to the kind of kitsch I find on the very last page, where MacLennan feels it necessary to summarize the meaning of Canada.  Inevitably, the moony moose returns: “the moose came out of the forests on October nights and stood in silhouette against the moonpaths that crossed solitary lakes” (369).  It worked out all right for MacLennan, overall.  We do not see how it works for Paul.

A highly instructive novel. Thanks again, Dorian, for the recommendation.

She was each of the characters in turn - Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes

Dorian Stuber asked people to let him recommend a book; I asked; he pointed me to Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes (1945), a novel that became a reference point – the title especially – for the differences between English and French Canada.  So poetic!  It’s from Rilke!  I assume that all such references are now to Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006).

The first two-thirds of the novel are set during or just after World War I, when the English Canadians are gung ho to help their British countrymen fight the Huns, and the French Canadians are not.  You would think they would want to help the French, but no, the French have become godless lunatics who deserve their suffering.  The portrait of the Quebecois village in 1917 is like a trip back in time to the French 18th century, with a tyrannical village priest and characters named Polycarpe and Athanase.

Athanase is the central character of the first section.  He is a man of the Enlightenment, believing in knowledge and progress and probably not so much in God:

He looked at the print of Rousseau hanging beside Voltaire.  Rousseau was wearing a fur cap, and it made him look like an early French-Canadian colonist, almost a coureur de bois.  (75, 1945 edition)

Poor Athanase is ground to a powder, between his intolerant, backwards neighbors (prints of Rousseau and Voltaire cannot compete with that priest), and the greedy momentum of the English bankers who want to turn his Quebecois idyll into a factory town.

Two Solitudes is a family saga, with the son of Athanase and the daughter of another character using the last third of the novel to reconcile the two sides of Canadian culture.  I will leave that for tomorrow.  It turns out to involve the writing of the Great Canadian Novel.  Most of my notes are from the last third.

MacLennan’s novel is good with the culture clash, and good with Montreal – anyone interested in Montreal should read it, no question – but also quite good with death.  The death of the defeated Athanase, torn between three faiths, Catholic, Protestant, and atheism, is excellent, and anticipated by the best chapter in the first part of the book, when the focus shifts for just one chapter to a minor character, a woman whose husband is a soldier.  The post office has received an official letter, “from His Majesty the King, via the Canadian Ministry of Defense,” and everyone in town can see it.  Everyone knows what it means.

Then she began to walk very fast down the road to her father’s house.  All the stories she had ever read in which one of the characters received bad news of a bereavement began to chase each other through her mind.  Idiotically, they got out of control, they became herself.  She was each of the characters in turn, bravely keeping her personal grief from intruding on others, she was nothing but memories and the things which had made her what she was.  (129-30)

But at home, no one has seen the letter, and life is just flowing onward.  Only the widow knows what has happened.

The advantage of including it in a novel is that in the later part of the book, MacLennan can show how her husband’s death in combat poison her life, or perhaps how she chooses to let it poison her life, and tries to use it against her daughter.  But this ironic chapter could stand on its own as a terrific short story.

Tomorrow, D. H. Lawrence and the Great Canadian Novel.  Thanks for the recommendation, Dorian!

I borrowed the book cover from the irritatingly sparse Wikipedia entry.  That’s the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City on the cover.  The characters in Two Solitudes never go to Quebec City.  It’s a Montreal novel.  Don’t ask me.