THEMES IN CANADIAN LITERATURE General Editor David Arnason The Search for Identity Edited by James Foley ie Macmillan of Canada“LU Cp eto th etm om om om oo| | } | i | | | INTRODUCTION | | | Whoever searches for a Canadian identity cannot avoid an en- counter with a multitude of duplicities and contradictions. Does Canada actually have an identity of its own or does it mirror some | foreign identity — or is Canada still in the process of personality development? Is literature dealing with the Canadian identity optimistic or pessimistic? Is identity rooted in the past or in the future, in the mental or in the physical landscape? Canadian history and literacure might lead one to the conclusion that Canada has no real identity of its own. As a British colony, Canada had its umbilical cord attached to Mother England. When | this was severed, it was immediately grafted to the United States. | John Conway, writing in the Atlantic Ménthly (What Is Canada?”, 1964), likens Canada to a youth who has been sup- pressed by parental domination to the point where he has been unable to develop a personality of his own, Earle Birney further explores this relationship in “Canada: Case History: 1945” and demonstrates its effects in "Canada: Case History: 1973”. Bruce Hutchison, in “The Canadian Personality”, characterizes Cana- dians as a people who for long have failed co create a mythology | from their past, are inarticulate about their direction for the | future, suffer from a profound inferiority complex, and whose | identity may be defined in terms of “nothingness” | On the other hand, the complexity of che Canadian identity has | made it an elusive concept, shifting from one characteristic ¢© another depending upon che special concern of the time, the region, and the people. The same Bruce Hutchison, for example, inan open letter to Pierre Trudeau calling for a definition of policy (Maclean's, 1971), holds that the “common” Canadian "has a decency, courage and homely wisdom chat made the nation” and | that “Whatever else it may lack, the nation is rich in sanity.” On the surface, writers in search of a Canadian identity have always been rampantly pessimistic, spreading doom and gloom They tend co emphasize Canadians’ slowness to exert their nation- ality, their puritanical approach to life, their adolescent outlook, their apparent ultraconservatism and inferiority complex. Fromthis perspective Canada seems dull and introverted, But Canadian literature, like other literature, has another task, that of anckan ing the reader to a realization of his potential, Writers in every Country, using the past and in the present, have brought shox, change by exposing existing conditions _ lf we depend on Canadian literature for an insight into che Canadian identity, we must assume that Canadians have not yet discovered their ‘identity or that Canada ‘has not yet reached the full flowering of ts personality. Our problem may simply he, 2s wets Robert Krocrsch has stated, that we have aot yet developed a vocabulary aclequate to express ourselves in terms of identity. And ics quite evident chat Canadian writers, while denionstating pessimism, hold oue hope The piefall chat many searchers for an identity fall inco is the failure to realize that Canada, like each individual, is complex, ‘multisaceted personality. These searchers attempt to defite ng identity on the basis of one facet and without regard forthe others according i their own concerns . Some of the facets of identity are to be found in the attitudes Canadians toward Canada’s otigin, its People, its religions, s regions, its diversity, ies fears, its conflicts, its politics, and even its anxiety for an identity. That identicy is to be discovered through a wide range of writers and not just one who may be Preoccupied with a single facet. It is to be found not only in the apparene pessimism of our literature, but also in the lh licerature reveals, Shopestac our James Foley THE CANADIAN PERSONALITY Bruce Hutchison | Somewhere across this broad land of Canada tonight there is a) lost and desperate man trying to find the smallest needle in the largest haystack in che world. He is one of the best American journalists in the business, he has covered important stories in countless countries, but his assignment in Canada has stumped him. His assignment is to discover, analyse, and | spread on paper for the American public, the inner meaning of Canadian life. Well, I did the best I could for the poor fellow. I talked to him all last night but when I had finished he was still pacing) my room, aflame with the mystery of his mission and certain other stimulating refreshments I had provided — he was pacing the room at dawn and complaining that I had really told him nothing of Canada, "What I have ¢o find,” he cried | out in his agony, “is the Canadian character, the Canadian | personality, the Canadian dream.” | When I last saw him, staggering into the sunrise, he hada’ found what he was looking for. And it suddenly occurred co | me that I hadn't found it either, after half a century, that I | probably wouldn't find it, that it may be forever | undiscoverable. I am not surprised, therefore, when my | American friend concludes that there accually is no Canadian | character, personality, or dream | Nevertheless, he was wrong. But he set me thinking. And the more I thought about this thing the more confused I became. Yet he was wrong. | Now, it’s true char you can't define the Canadian character, or at least I can't, nor can any of our statesmen, writers, or | artists, so far as I have seen. But nothing of importance in life is definable, Once anything yields to definition you can be sure it isn’t very important So we needn't go on making excuses, as we always do before serangers, because we cannot spell out the life of Canada like a chemical formula. And we shouldn't apologize either because ‘the character of Canada is so divided and complex, holdingWithin itself at lease six sub-characters — the proud, grim, and inflexible character of the Maritimes; the gay but hard and practical character of Quebec; che bustling, able, and rather Provincial character of Ontatio; the character of Toronto, a groweh so rare and baffling that I shall not venture, as an outsider, co give it even an adjective; the spacious, generous, and almost naive character of the praities; che boyish, ravenous, and self-centred character of British Columbia Our national personality is split many ways. So is the Personality of every great nation and every great man in history. Britain is commonly supposed to have the most settled and clear-cut character of any country, but set the Scotsman or the Welshman againse the Englishman, set the cockney against the north-countryman, and you will cbserve the startling diversity and contrast of British life We Canadians worry too much about our diversity. For it is an illusion, very common with us, to imagine that a nation grows strong by uniformity. Why, in the basic and most essential unit of mankind, in the family itself, diversity is the Surest sign of strength and talent, the best guarantee of unity No man in his senses would try to make his children all alike, and would mercifully extinguish them ae birch if he thought they would resemble him when they grew up. What folly it is, what a will-o'-the-wisp, whae a national obsession, to imagine chat we shall only achieve a true national character when we have at last curnéd out a generation as uniform as a package of chewing gum and about as durable Nevertheless, as my bewildered American friend told me, it won't do to say that Canadians have strong and varied local characteristics in different parts of che country. That won't Prove the existence of a national character. You must be able to prove that throughouc the country there are certain dominant, widely shared, and fally accepted characteristics, instinces, and deep feelings — certain common denominators by which the incangible thing as a whole can be measured. Thac is where the argument about our national character 4 always collapses, as I have seen it collapse, over and over savin, wal kee a igh amid eating dino ise from Victoria co Halifax. It's no wonder that it's a difficult thing co clutch in your hhand, the character of Canada; wonderful, rather, chat chere is anything to clutch. Wonderful for chis reason: Whereas other nations of the past grew up in a world of watertight compartments, and hardened into individual shape before other nations could touch and dilute them, we began to build a nation here only a few years ago, ina new world, in a violent world revolution, in an age where all nations were beingao aI FIO Oe ee eeedriven together, cheek by jowl, through the new means of transport, information, and propaganda. Our case was peculiarly difficult, much mote difficule, for example, than Australia’s because we lived beside a great established nation, the mose powerful magnet the world has ever known, and its ideas have washed in on us in a ceaseless tide. We were indeed, and are still today, like a youth starting out on his path, glancing over his shoulder at the ancient glories of his home in Britain or France and, when he looks ahead, dazzled by che glitter of the Uniced Scares. Despite everything, however, I think we can begin now to detect some of the special characteristics common ¢o all Canadians, and add them up co something, First, and most obvious, is our national humiliy. We are a People bounded on one side by the northern lights and on the other by an inferiority complex just as vivid, a pecple distracted by the mossy grandeur of the old world from which we came and by the power, wealth, and fury of our American neighbours. We are the last people to realize, and the first to deny, the material achievements of the Canadian nation, which all the rest of the world has already grasped and envied Self-depreciation is our great national habie This is curious, when you come to think of it, because so many of us are of British origin. A few days ago a scholar from India wrote in che London Times that che English consider their primary ‘national vice to be hypocrisy, but he said, “I must insise om first things first. The root and beginning is self-admiration, and hypocrisy only its most distinguished produce.” Now that’s an interesting epigram but its reception in England is more interesting. In Canada we would resent it, bue the English loved it. They have had so tnuch experience, they ate sv sure of themselves, that they can laugh at the impudence of outsiders. We don't laugh because we lack any self-admiration, and we're not very good at hypocrisy, either. We are hurt by the foreigner’s criticism because we have a sneaking suspicion that ie must be true, 6 suspicion that would not occur to an Englishman. Never has there been @ people in all history which has accomplished so much as che Canadian people and thought so little of ie. An Indian scholar won't find self-admiration here. He'll find self-apology writcen in big black letcers across our Canadian map — no, not in big letters. We write everything small if it’s Canadian. ‘This, perhaps, lies close to the root of another national characteristic — we are a conservative and steady people, hardly daring to believe in our own capacity in the more complex affaiea of seateceafe, find to exe chat capacity too fir with new systems and experiments. The Canadian audience at a political meeting (a significant little test, if the glummest) is the most stolid and dead-panned ever known —a collection of dull and sceptical haddock eyes to daunt the boldest politician; and our politicians truly reflect us in their stodgy competence, their unvarying pedestrianism, their high ability, their positive terror of colour and flair And we are a lonely people, isolated from one another, in a land where the largest city is a frail wink of lights in the darkness of the night. Lonely, and awed by the immensity f space around us, by the cold sweep of the prairies, by the stark presence of mountains leaning upon us, by che empty sea at our door, and by the fierce northern climate, which colours and toughens the weather of our spirit. And we are closer t0 the soil still, all of us, even in paaaey than the people of any o industrial and urban nation. "we aresmoe aware than over ofthe ental physical fe of the earth, of growth, of harvest and decay. This land sense dominates all our national thinking, 7 politics earecsar as system, and our personal habits. It makes our artists instinctively ms ou o pln, not the alstrcion othe artists, but the hard material of rock and pine tree. This deep instinct for ehe land, our constant feling of cruggle against a harsh nature — this and our concentration on the mete task of survival, mst be one ofthe things tha,aI mmm eto OO eo oe‘makes us an unimaginative people, prosuic, pitifully inarticulate, and singularly lacking in humour. (We haven't even developed the great Canadian joke yee ot learaed to laugh at ourselves.) It may turn out chat we are really filled with fire, poctry, and laughter, which we have repressed, thinking it inferior to other peoples’, and perhaps these things will érupe some day, with shattering violence. So far thete has been hardly a rumble, nor any tinkle of a national song, nor the vague shape of @ national myth, On the evidence so far you might almost say thar we have Scnstructed a national character hy refusing to construct one, The great void almost becomes a solid thing, the weuum begins co take on substance, the national silence begins to speak in a clear Canadian voice. We have taken a nothing — our Pathological horror of expression —and erected a sometbing Which distinguishes us from all other people. ‘This is not enough to make a character, I admit, but you won't find it anywhere else. And perhaps the refusal to admit achievement is an achievement in itself Bur there is something about us mote important and more distinctive than any of these obvious qualities, We ate among the few peoples still in the first throes of collective growth. While’older people have settled down end accepted certain conventions, conditions, attitudes, and limitations as permanent, we accept nothing, least of all limitations. We live in a constant expectation of change, Which we don't particularly relish and rather suspect, bue cannot avoid. We have, every one of us, the feeling that we are Involved in a process of perpetual expansion, development, and revision, whose end we cannot see We have the feeling, not of an old and seetled residene in his father’s honse, bur of a young mau building a new house for himself, without any clear plan in his head and wondering how large his future family will be Ours is the doube and tisk, but the unequalled sat'staction of the man who builds and makes something with his own 8 hhands, perhaps the bese satisfaction chat life offers; and chis sense of being only at the beginning of things, this expectation of a greater structure still ro be built — this, I think, is the universal and most distinctive feature of che Canadian. We are, above all, a building people, a nation of PDs my American feo anys al hs dee 26 ap sl national character, and hence he concludes there is none. All right, then. We have failed to define that character, as I col you we would, But consider this: We have buile here agains every obstacle of geography, economics, racial division, and | the magnet of our American neighbour — we have built here she greatese nation of its population in all recorded history How did we do ie? Why didn't we break up into inevitable splinters, why didn't we throw in the sponge and join the United States long ago? No policical decision, no economic planning, will explain that. Something much more than politics or economics was ae work — the unshakeable will to make a nation, a home, a life of our own, for which no inconvenience was too great, from hich no temptation could swerve us—a dim, impalpable, | and dumb thing beyond our power to express or even name. hee is the hard, silent, and unyielding core of Canada, | the final mystery which, like all che other things chat mace in life, like life self is forever inexpressible and can only be intimated in myths and parables which, so far, we have been| 00 busy and too reticent to invent. They will come in time, but the thing itself, which they will vainly ery co voice, is already here, and has been here since Champlain shivered on the rock of Quebec, in that first cruel Canadian wineer, and has been carried by every Canadian boy, dumbly in his hearc, to the battlefields ar che ends of che earth — this dream of high mountains and deep forests and prairie skies, of summer crops and winter snow, and Canadian ways, and all the vast compact of familiar, precious things, making up together the substance of Canada which, through more chan three hundredyears, we have refused to abandon, to sell, or even to mention, If this is not yet a rounded and settled national character, it is, assuredly, the soil out of which a character is growing as surely as a boy grows into a man. It has grown these last few years faster chan we have stopped to realize — of which the best proof, perhaps, is that, as never before, we now pause in our huge labours to ask ourselves what we are and what we hope to be. We cannot answer yet, but we know that we have within us, as our fathers had, one dominant feeling which is so general and unquestioned that we take it for granted. We quacrel about methods, political theories, economic systems, bue such things do not make up a national character. Our character is not being built on them but on something much larger, a truly common denominator, the space, the beauty, and the free life of Canada itself Well, I wonder what haystack my American fiend is searching in tonight for a needle which he could noc recognize even if he found ie ‘ f | CANADA Charles G. D. Roberts © Child of Nations, giant-limbed, Who stand’st among the nations now Unheeded, unadored, unhymned, With unanointed brow, — How long the ignoble sloth, how long ‘The crust in greatness not chine own? Surely the lion's brood is strong To front the world alone! How long the indolence, ere thou dare Achieve thy destiny, seize thy fame, — Ere our proud eyes behold thee bear A nation’s franchise, nation's name? ‘The Saxon force, the Celtic fire, These are thy manhood’s heritage! ‘Why rest with babes and slaves? Seek higher The place of race and age I see to every wind unfurled The flag that bears the Maple Wreath; Thy swift keels furrow round the world Its blood-red folds beneath; Thy swift keels cleave the furthest seas; ‘Thy whice sails swell with alien gales; To stream on each remotest breeze The black smoke of thy pipes exhales. O Falterer, let thy pase convince Thy future, —all the growth, the gain, The fame since Cartier knew thee, since ‘Thy shores beheld Champlain! "oO oO oO OO eS eee eeMontcalm and Wolfe! Wolfe and Montcalin! Quebec, thy storied citadel Attest in burning song and psalm How here thy heroes fell! © Thou that bor'st the battle’s brane ‘At Queenston and at Lundy's Lane, — On whose ‘The battle broke in vain! — ant ranks but iron front Whose was the danger, whose the day, From whose triumphant throats the cheers, 12 Ac Chrysler's Farm, at Chateauguay, Storming like clarion-bursts our ears? On soft Pacific slopes, — beside Scrange floods chat northward rave and fall, — Where chafes Acadia’s chainless tide Thy sons await thy call. They wait; but some in exile, some With strangers housed, in scranger lands, — And some Canadian lips are dumb Beneath Egyptian sands, © mystic Nile! Thy secret yields Before us; thy most ancient dreams ‘Are mixed with far Canadian fields And murmur of Canadian streams. But thou, my country, dream not thou! Wake, and behold how night is done, — How on thy breast, and o'er thy brow, Bursts the uprising sun! 13two sons; and more neighbours and yet more neighbours co the end of the concession and the end of the parish. Now let us sty —I do not know precisely that it is the case everywhere, but it ought to be—let us say that every man of them like myself is on the land that belonged to his people. You would have a whole parish rooted in the soil, wouldn't you? And then in che centre stands the church; alongside ic, the burying-ground; close by, the auré’s house and the curé himself inside it. After our parish there is another parish, and another, and another, all alike; and each with its church steeple, its cazé, its buried dead, its old soil worked by fathers and fathers’ fachers, which one loves more than one's self — There you have it, this country of ours!” Unele Jean had risen to his feet, and now I saw that che sweep of his hand, widened in the fallen night, covered the whole breadth of the land inherited from those of old time — the memories, the traditions, the beliefs ‘Aunt Melanie's voice summoned us: “Jean, are you coming for evening prayer?” ‘We entered the room where the figure of the Christ with a branch blessed on Palm Sunday hangs upon the wall, and below it a long musket with powder-flask and shot-horn, As the uncle was about co kneel beside Aunt Melanie his glance fell on the old gua, and I heard him mutter: “Yes indeed! I should like to see the American who would come and take my land from me! —In she name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen. Let us enter inso the presence of God and worship Him...” 48 THE AUTHENTIC VOICE OF CANADA Robert Fulford are the people who survived the hard land,” writes a biecer, angry correspondent. “We are che descendants of the people who cut che trees co plant a crop, froze to death in the winter, were eaten alive by bugs in the summer, fished in the streams as free men “That is Canadian culture; noc this mincing, aping pseudo-European has-been stuff you call Culture with a large en I recognized the tone of voice and the ideas behind ie as soon as I opened che leccer. This was my regular commu- nication from The Authentic Voice of Canada. The authentic woice writes to me often. ‘The letter always comes from a different person, and the wording is always different; but the theme is constant. My correspondent always insists chac he (or, as in this case, she) speaks for the true Canada, while I speak for something false, alien, effete, and shallow When the letter is postmarked west of Ontatio, then che conflict is described as West (tough, solid, hockey-playing) versus Fast (soft, undependable, ballet-loving). When it comes from a rural address, my correspondent tells me that country people are honest and crue whereas city people are decadent| In this case the writer of the lecter — who for some reason docpn't want her name used — lives in Toronco. | My definition of culture,” she writes, “is what a nation) represents, its past, present, and hopes for the fucure, Your definition of Canadian culture seems ¢o be Art.” But arc in this councry, she says, is meaningless, Ballet, symphonies, art galleries — chese things macter so little to Canadians that they have to be shoved down our throats by committees of rich women with nothing else to do, “We are Canadians," she writes ‘2 hardy pioneer, if you like, rustic people, not a bunch of . . . court fops, ot dainey ladies doing a minuet. We are of the land, the rocks, the rivers, the mountains, the sea. “We are not displaced Europeans, trying co ape whac we 49lefe behind, We are the people who left Europe because it was decadent and dead. We rejected the American way and we still reject it.” She goes on to say that the Stratford Festival is phony. What is really Canadian is hockey, foothall, trotting races, camping. “This is what being 2 Canadian is; che embodiment of all the inner strengths ic takes to live in this land, in which only the strong can survive.” There is much more of the same in this passionate, anxious letter. My correspondent’s rage at what she sees as phony culture — set off, incidentally, by a talk I gave over the radio from the Couchiching Conference — is deeply felt. I mean it ironically when I refer to this as the authentic voice of the country, but authentic it cercainly is. There are many people who think this way. The least we can do is to cake chem seriously They are victims, it seems to me, of an unfortunate by-product of artistic life: exclusivity. There is something about all arc which is not democratic, or anyway not obviously democratic. I believe, as much as I believe anything, thae art is for all of us, in one way or another. But I would have to be blind to fail to notice that devotees of every art — from Renaissance painting to The New Thing in jazz—have a nasty habit of erecting barriers around what they love. Many otherwise kind and intelligent people suffer from a burning desire to advance their own status and depress the status of others. They use art co this purpose. Through condescension, through snobbery, through the use of special languages, they make it as hard as possible co get close to art. They make it so j hhard, in fact, that many people are repelled and offended. These people turn into refugees from culcure, They end up. writing letters to the papers about how un-Canadian it is to go to the baller. ‘The idea that nature, outdoor life, and Canadian history are 50 on one side of a great divide, and art on the other, is of course nonsense. Canadian writing, painting, music, and dances — they are all, at some point, on intimate cerms with the landscape. I have a friend who has won national prizes as both a paddler and an abstract artist; his life is a particularly striking example of a constant factor in che culture of Canada. On the other hand, of course, Canadian art ~ like Canadian life —is increasingly urbanized. And here I find myself, when I receive these authentic-Canadian-voice letters, almost intimidated. I've never lived anywhere but in cities, and never wanted to. At this point begin stuttering about how “my people” (as they say) have been in this country for more than a century, and I may even throw in my great-aunt whose husband was shot by Big Bear's braves in 1885. Bue of course that means nothing: what matters is who you are now, not whete your family lived then. So I telephoned my correspondent, prepared to be put down once again by pure, native Canadianism. Who could she be? A female bush pilot? A teacher of Eskimos in the Arctic? The wife of a wheat farmer at least? None of these, it curned out She moved to Toronto forty-five years ago, and she's lived here ever since 51So oOo PMO oOo oO Om OO MO eae SP oeCHASING THE PUCK Raymond Souster Viewing shoot-for-the-corner slap-shot, drop-pass ancics of Hockey Night in Canada — Leafs versus Red Wings in Mr, Smythe’s well-heated ice-palace, it’s not hard co let the mind wander, to put skates on twelve-year-old ankles, to clear ice at Second Marsh and dodge the tips of the bull-rushes sticking through; to find one five-below morning (spent under echo-bouncing curve of Old Mill Bridge) my right foor well-frozen, and taking me five minutes’ agony with snow rubbed almost chrough che skin to bring it redly back To come to that afternoon my shor caught their goalie on the eye, and the game ruined, him turning away from me after that . But now Gordie Howe side-steps, fakes, and moves in, and I'm righe there behind him poised for the shor, the net-bulge, the electric roar! 64 CONFEDERATION LAMENT Chief Dan George (A speech by Chief Dan George of the Burrard Indian Reserve at the Centennial Birthday Party in Empire Stadium, Vancouver) How long have I known you, Oh Canada? A hundred years? Yes, and many many “seelanum" more. And coday, when you celebrate your hundred years, Oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land. For I have known you when your forests were mine; when they gave me my meat and my clothing. I have known you ia your streams and rivers where your fish flashed and danced in the sun, where the waters said come, come and eat of my abundance. I have known you in the freedom of your winds And my spirit, like the winds, once roamed your good lands.y Buc in the long hundred years since the white man came, T have seen my freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea. The white man’s strange customs which I could not understand pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe. ‘When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage, When I neither understood nor welcomed this way of life, I was called lazy. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority. ‘My nation was ignored in your history textbooks — they wete little more important in the history of Canada than che buffalo that ranged the plains. I was ridiculed in your plays and motion pictures, and when I drank your firewater I got drunk —very, very drunk. And I forgot. ‘Oh Canada, how can I celebrate with you this centenary, this hundred years? Shall I thank you for che reserves that are left to me of my beautiful forests? For the canned fish of my rivets? For the loss of my pride and authority, even among my own people? For the lack of my will co fight back? No! I must forget what's past and gone. ‘Oh God in Heaven! Give me back the courage of ehe olden chiefs. Let me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me again, as in the days of old, dominate my environment, Let me humbly accept this new culture and through it tise up and go on. ‘Oh God! Like the Thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success —his education, his skills, and with these cew tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society. Before I follow the great chiefs who have gone before us, Oh Canada, I shall see these things come to pass. I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedoms of our great land. So shall we shatter the barriers of our isolation. So shall the next hundred years be the greatest in che proud history of our tribes and nations. 66 W.L.M. K. F.R. Scott How shall we speak of Canada, Mackenzie King dead? ‘The Mother's boy isi the lonely room With his dog, his medium, and his ruins? He blunted us. We had no shape Because he never took sides, ‘And no sides Because he never allowed them to take shape. He skilfully avoided what was wrong Without saying what was right, And never let his on the one hand Know what his on the other hand was doing. ‘The height of his ambition Was to pile a Parliamentary Committee on a Royal Commission. To have “conscription if necessary But not necessarily conscription’’ To let Parliament decide — Later. Postpone, postpone, abstain. Only one thread was certain: After World War I Business as usual, After World War II Orderly deconerol. Always he led us back to where we were before He seemed to be in the centre 6737 ooo OO e Oe eon eeBecause we had no centre No vision To pierce the smoke-screen of his politics. 68 Truly he will be remembered Wherever men honour ingenuity, Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longeviey. Let us raise up a temple To che cult of mediocrity, Do nothing by halves Which can be done by quarters. JUST A PINCH OF SIN Harry Boyle Je may have been the “Roaring Twenties”, but to me, growing up on an Ontario farm tucked away in a valley near Lake Huron, it was a time of peace, dominated more or less by God and the Methodists! First of all chere was God, Father Morrison kept impressing us about the Divine Presence in our weekly catechism lessons to the point where you could look up in the sky and sense chat you were being constantly watched. I was perplexed over the heavenly system of checks and balances in bookkeeping my faults and scanty virtues. There was further confusion ia contrasting the habit of my mother in offeriag up trials and tribulations to “Our Blessed Lord”, while it seemed that Father and Grandfather naturally reserved a good deal of their awe of the divinity for Sundays, Then there were the Methodists! We had the white-brick Methodists on our concession in Clover Township. The red-brick Methodists, or what the township people called the “shouters”, held forth in Clover, our nearest village. Now, if God didn’t have time to pay much attention to the hamlet during the week, it was a cinch God coulda’e overlook it on a Sunday when all our churches assaulted the heavens with full fervor. In summertime they might be joined by a revivalist teat meeting. In winter the revivalists used a sample room in che Commercial Hotel or che Oddfellows Hall. On the concession, things were a little quieter. We were divided about half Catholic and half Methodist, with an occasional Anglican, and a Welsh family who bemoaned the lack of what they called “chapel”. They finally joined the Baptists in the village. We went to Mass every Sunday morning, as well a3 on suche holy days as Christmas and New Year. An earlier priest had Devotions with Benediction on Sunday evenings, but Father Morrison compromised by saying Benediction after Mass on Sunday mornings. There were also Stations of the Cross during 69YOO OO PO IRM Oe ee eee= disorders. I was much older before I learned at a towaship dance that the patent medicines, because of their high alcoholic content, were in great demand as a stimulant during che time of the Canada Temperance Act ‘One counter held nothing but overalls, smocks, and work shires and rough sweaters with big collars. I desperately wanted a red and white mackinaw and red peaked cap, but somehow never managed co get them, In the storeroom there was a collection of everything from flour and feed co plowshares and harness and tangled rolls of barbed wire ‘Then my aunt would call me for dinner. That was a treat, because she always had something different, such as small, crispy gherkins or “boughten” chili sauce to go along with fresh boiled ham, and, to finish, a dessert to please the sweet tooth of a curious boy. She never once said, “You'll ruin your teeth!” My uncle moved to a couch for a rest while my aunt ‘gathered up the dishes, and I knew it was time t0 go. Then she gave me the comic papers saved from packing cases in the store, and I set out for home. (On the way I met Henry Higgins, and he and I looked for someplace to spend an hour poring over the papers and catching up on Mutt and Jeff and Barney Google, but we had to do it quietly, because his father was very strict about Sunday and allowed only religious reading on that day. I felt a licele guilty, until [asked my grandfather about it. He smiled and said, “Don’e worry too much. Take when your mother is making a stew. She puts a pinch of spice in it. ‘That's what makes it good. Well, boy, life is a kine of stew, and no matter what anybody says it goes better with a pinch of sin. Noc too much, mind you. Just a pinch.” He winked thea and added, “But I'd keep thae to myself.” I did, and it was a wonderfully comforting philosophy co combat the pangs of an easily stimulated conscience 76 CANADA: CASE HISTORY; 1945 Earle Birney ‘This is the case of a high-school land, deadset in adolescence, loud treble laughs and sudden fists, bright cheeks, the gangling presence This boy is wonderful ae spores and physically quite healthy; he's taken to church on Sunday still and keeps his prurience stealthy He doesn’t like books except about bears, collects new coins and model planes and never refuses a dare. His Uncle spoils him with candy, of course, yet shouts him down when he talks ac table. You will note he’s got some of his French mother's looks, though he’s not so witty and no more stable. He's really much more like his father and yet if you say so he'll pull a great face. He wants to be different from everyone else and daydreams of winaing the global race. Parents unmarried and living abroad, relatives keen co bag the estate schizophrenia not excluded, will he learn to grow up before it’s too late? 7A SOVEREIGN NATION Joe Wallace Ours is a sovereign nation Bows to no foreign will But whenever they cough in Washington They spit on Parliament Hill. 78 AN ORANGE FROM PORTUGAL Hugh MacLennan 1 suppose all of us, when we think of Christmas, recall Charles Dickens and our own childhood. So today, from an apartment in Montreal, looking across the street to a new acon siga, I think back to Dickens and Halifax and the world suddenly becomes smaller, shabbier, and more comfortable, and one mote proof is registered that comfort is a state of mind, having little co do with the number of springs hidden inside your mattress or che upholstery in your car. Charles Dickens should have lived in Halifax. If he had, that brown old town would have acquired a better reputation jin Canada than it now enjoys, for all over che world people would have known what it was like. Halifax, especially a generation or two ago, was a town Dickens could have used There were dingy basement kitchens all over the town where rats were caught every day. The streets were full of teamsters, hard-looking men with lean jaws, most of them, and at the entrance to the old North Street Station cab drivers in long coats would mass behind a heavy anchor chain and terrify travellers with bloodcurdling howls as they bid for fares. Whenever there was a southeast wind, harbour bells moaned behind the wall of fog that cut the towa off from the rest of the world. Queer faces peered at you suddenly from doorways set flush with the streets. When a regiment held a smoker in the old Masonic Hall you could see a line beginning to form in the early morning, waiting for the big moment at midnight when the doors would be thrown open ¢o the town and any man could get a free drink who could reach the hogsheads. For all these things Dickens would have loved Halifax, even for the pompous importers who stalled to church on Sunday mornings, swinging their canes and complaining that they never had a chance to hear a decent sermon. He would have loved it for the waifs and strays and beachcombers and discharged soldiers and sailors whom the respectable never 79a moo & = ana mem& co =a seemed to notice, for all the numerous aspects of the town that made Halifax deplorable and marvellous. If Dickens had been given a choice of a Canadian town in which to spend Christmas, that’s where I think he would have gone, for his most obvious attitude toward Christmas was that it was necessary. Dickens was no scientist or organizer. Instead of liking The People, he simply liked people. And so, inevitably, he liked places where accidents were ape to happen. In Halifax accidents were happening all the time. Think of the way he writes about Christmas —a perfect Christmas for him was always a chapter of preposterous accidents. No, I don't think he would have chosen to spend his Christmas in Westmount or Toronto, for he'd be fairly sure that neither of those places needed it. ‘Today we know too much. Having become democratic by ideology, we are divided into groups which eye each other like dull strangers at a dull party, polite in public and nasty when each other's backs are turned. Today we are informed by those who know that if we tell children aboue Santa Claus we will probably turn them into neurotics. Today we believe in universal justice and in universal war to effect it, and because Sanca Claus gives the rich more than he gives the poor, lots of us think it better that there should be no Santa Claus a¢ all, Today we are technicians, and the more progressive among us see no reason why love and hope should not be organized in a department of the government, planned by a politician and administered by trained specialists. Today we have a super-colossal Santa Claus for The Customer: he sits in the window of a department store in a cheap red suit, stringy whiskers, and a mask which is a caricature of a face, and for a month before every Christmas he laughs continually with a vulgar roar. The sounds of his laughter come from a record played over and over, and the machine in his belly that produces the bodily contortions has a number in the patent office in Washington, In the old days in Halifax we never thought about the 80 4 meaning of the word democracy; we were all mixed up together ina general deplorability. So the only service any picture of chose days can render is to help prove how far we have advanced since then. The first story I have to tell has no importance and not even much of a point. Ie is simply the record of how one boy felt during a Christmas that now seems remote enough to belong to the era of Bob Cratchit. The second story is about the same. The war Christmases I remember in Halifiee were not jolly ones. In a way they were half-cragic, but there may be some significance in the fact that they are literally the only ones I can still remember, It was a war nobody down there understood. We were simply a part of i, swept into it from che mid-Victorian age in which we were all living until 1914. On Christmas Eve in 1915 a cold northeaster was blowing through the town with the smell of coming snow on che wind. All day our house was hushed for a reason I didn’t understand, and I remember being sent out to play with some other boys in the middle of the afternoon. Supper was a silent meal. And then, immediately after we had finished, my father put on the great-coat of his new uniform and went to the door and I saw the long tails of the coat blowing out behind him in the flicker of a faulty arc light as he half-ran up to the corner. We heard bagpipes, and almost immediately a company of soldiers appeared swinging down Spring Garden Road from old Dalhousie. It was very cold as we struggled up to the corner | after my father, and he affected not to notice us. Then the pipes went by playing “The Blue Bonnets”, the lines of khaki) men went past in the darkness, and my father fell in behind the last rank and faded off down the half-lie street, holding his head low against the wind to keep his flac military cap from blowing off, and my mother tried to hide her feelings by saying what a shame the cap dida’t fit him properly. She cold my sister and me how nice it was of the pipers to have turned out on such a cold day to see the men off, for pipe music was the only kind my father liked. It was all very informal. The 81Ao mM OOOO CO OeEY RT ad — men of that unit — almost entirely a local one — simply left their homes the way my father had done and joined the column and the column marched down Spring Garden Road to the ship along the familiar route most of them had taken to church all their lives. An hour later we heard tugboat whistles and then the foghorn of the transport and we knew he was on his way. As my sister and I hung up our stockings on the mantelpiece I wondered whether the vessel was no farther out than Thrum Cap ot whether it had already reached Sambro. It was a bleak night for children to hang up their stockings and wait for Santa Claus, but next morning we found gifts in chem as usual, including a golden orange in each coe. It was strange to think that the very night my father had left the house, a strange old man, remembering my sister and me, had come into ic. We thought it was a sign of good luck. ‘That was 1915, and some time during the following year a boy at school told me there was no Santa Claus and put his case so convincingly that I believed him. Strictly speaking, ehis should have been the moment of my first step toward becoming a neurotic, Maybe it was, but there ‘were so many other circumstances to compete with it, [ don’t know whether Santa Claus was responsible for what I'm like now or not. For about a week after discovering the great deception I wondered how I could develop a line of conduct which would prevent my mother ftom finding out that I knew who filled our stockings on Christmas Eve. I hated to disappoint her in what I knew was a great pleasure. After while T forgot all about it. Then, shortly before Christmas, a cable arrived saying that my father was on his way home, He hadn't been killed like the fathers of other boys at schcol; he was being invalided home as a result of excessive work as @ surgeon in che hospital. We had been living with my grandmother in Cape Breton, so my mother rented a house in Halifax sight unseen, we got down there in time to meet his ship when it came in, and then we all went to the new house. This is the part of my 82 story which reminds me of Charles Dickens again. Five minuces after we entered che house it blew up. This was not the famous Halifax explosion; we had to wait another year for thac. This was our own private explosion. It smashed half the windows in the other houses along the block, it shook the ground like an earthquake, and ie was heard for a mile, Thave seen many queer accidents in Halifax, but none which gave the reporters more satisfaction chan ours did. For a house to blow up suddenly in our district was unusual, so the press felt some explanation was due the public. Besides, i¢ was nearly Christmas and local news was hard to find. The moment the first telephone call reached the newspaper offices to report the accident, they knew the cause. Gas had been leaking in our district for years and a few people had even complained about it. In our house, gas had apparently backed in from the city mains, filling partitions between the walls and lying stagnant in the basement. Bue this was the first time anyone could prove thac gas had been leaking. The afternoon paper gave the story Docror Hunts Gas Leak with BuRNinG Matex—Favps In:When my father was able to talk, which he couldn't do for several days because the skin had been burned off his hands and face, he denied the story about the match, Acccrding to modern theory this denial should have precipitated my second plunge toward neurosis, for I had distinctly seen him with the match in his hand, going down to the basement ¢o look for the gas and complaining about how careless people were. However, those were ignorant times and I didn’t realize I might gee a neurosis. Instead of brooding and deciding to close my mind to reality from then on in order to preserve my belief in the veracity and faultlessness of my father, I wished to God he had been able to tell his story sooner and stick to it. After all, he was a first-class doctor, but what would prospective patients think if every time chey heard his name they saw a picture of an absent-minded veteran looking for a gas leak in a dark basemene wich a lighted match? Te took ewo whole days for the newspaper account of our accident to settle. In the meantime the house was temporarily: ruined, school children had denuded the chandelier in the living-room of its prisms, and it was almost Christmas. My sister was still away at school, so my mother, my fether, and I found ourselves in a single room in an old residential hotel on Barrington Street. I slept on a cot and they nursed cheit burns in a huge bed which opened out of the wall. The bed had a mirror on the bottom of it, and it was equipped with such a strong spring that ic crashed into place in the wall whenever they got out of it. I still remember my father sitting up in ie with one arm in a sling from the war, and his face and head in white bandages. He was philosophical about the situation, including the vagaries of the bed, for it was his Calvinistic way to petmit himself to be comfortable only when things were going badly. ‘The hotel was crowded and our meals were brought to us by a boy called Chester, who lived in the basement near the kitchen. That was all I knew about Chester at first; he brought our meals, he went to school only occasionally, and 84 his mother was ill in che basement. But as long as my memory lasts, chat Cheistmas of 1916 will be Chester's Christmas, He was a waif of a boy. I never knew his lase name, and wherever he is now, Tm certain be doesnt remember me ue for a time I can say without being sentimental that Bot fo ’ being sentimental that I He was white-faced and thin, with lank haie on top of a head that broke back at right angles from a high nartow forehead. There were always holes in his black stockings, his hhanded-down pants were so badly cut that one leg was several inches longer than the other and there was a pacch on the right seat of a differene colour from the rest of the cloth, But he was proud of his clothes; prouder than anyone I've ever seen over a pait of pants. He explained thae they were his father’s and his father had worn them at sea For Chester, nobody was worth considering seriously unless he was a seaman, Instead of feeling envious of the people who lived upstairs in the hotel, he seemed to feel sorry for thetn because they never went 0 sea. He would look ae the old ladies wich the kind of eyes that Dickens discovered in children’s faces in London: huge eyes as trusting as a bieddo's, but old, as ehough ehey had forgotten how co cry long ago. T wondered a loe about Chester — what kind of a toom they had in the basement, where they ate, what his mother was like. Bue I was never allowed in the basement. Once I walked behind the hotel to see if I could look through the windows, but they wete only six or eight inches above the ground and they were covered with snow. I gathered that Chester liked it down there because it wns warm, and once he was down nobody ever bothered him. The days went past, heavy and grey and cold. Soon ie was the day before Christmas again, and I was still supposed to believe in Santa Claus. I found myself confronted by a double crisis J i: 85nooo OOOO ooSPEAKING OF CRITICISM . Morley Callaghan (Grom a conversation with Donald Cameron) cauacian: ... this country has some kind of an ingrown hatred of excellence. The way to being ignored in this country is to seek and crave and love excellence. People in this country shy away from excellence. One qualification that a critic is required to have is — they got this unforcunately from Northrop Frye — chat he has to have a different scheme of evaluation of Canadian poets than you would of any other poetry on earth. Forget that Canadian poetty is in the English language. Pretend that it’s of a special order, and bring a special scale of evaluation to it. The person who takes thae attitude to Canadian poetry —and the Canadian poets expect it — is no friend of the poet, and if I were a poet I'd be inguleed. When I started to write stories here, I was twenty-two, and iffa guy had come upon my stories and said, Now I want ¢6 regard them within the framework of the five or six writers of stories around here, 1 would have hit him over the head. I wasn’t incerested in his lousy kind of nationalism because that kind of nationalism can simply conceal a lot of third-rate opinions and an insufferable bad taste, and an utter ‘unawareness of what is going on in the English language. The real friend of this country is the guy who believes in excellence, seeks for it, fights for it, defends ic, and tries to produce ie He will be exported, because people will want to see it; he won't have to have it spuriously backed by spurious politicians posing as culcural figures. The real friend of the artist in this country is the man who loves excellence, the man who will see wheeher you come close to it, whecher you fail. He may love you for your failures and all that, but he will know that \ there’s something worth seeking. But the man who just \buteers up third-rate stuff and palms ic off as being in a hpecial category because it's Canadian is a real enemy of this country, in my opinion. Right now the nationalism that's floating around has the poets turning politicians, novelists 92 turning politicians, novelists hating the Americans, novelists basing their whole sense of character identification and the measures of their talents in che strength of their opposition to the United States. Let them run for the C.C.F.*! Lee chem go out as candidates! Most of them will end up doing that anyway. What has this goc to do with the writing of novels and poems? Nothing whatever. cannon: Would you agree, though, thet when something excellent comes along, we don't notice ie? . Cauusciian: Of courre you can't notice it, because you're trained not to notice it. It just doesn’t look right camenow: You learn to regard anything which is produced here as second- or third-rate. cauacuaN: You must, inevitably. And if any critic throughout the world comes along and says that here you've got something actually bred in Toronto that is comparable with the best in che English language, you know what you'd say to him? Aw, get out; I've known that guy thirty-five years; aw, ‘get out. The great thing about excellence is that it’s never immediately recognizable. It's unfamiliar, nacurally. But you must not misunderstand me, this is not a harsh view of Toronto or even Canada. Every country s ia danger of going through this kind of hing. The thing is thar you must not have a kind of nationalism which is an insistence on the protection of the third-rate, do you see? All you should say is, I know it’s excellent, and the world will discover it it : excellent. They'll discover ie’s Canadian, becuse they'll ask where it came from, SC.G.E. The Goopenive Communnesth Fdentio, «poi! party that in 19 ‘ith ther groupe re he New DeonceticPe Teen 8 ial2 oO OOO eesCANADA: CASE HISTORY: 1973 Earle Birney No more the highschool land deadset in loutishness ‘This cat's turned cool the gangling’s gone guffaws are for the peasants Inside his plastic igloo now hhe watches gooks and yankees bleed in colour on the telly But under a faded Carnaby shirt ulcers knife the rounding belly Hung up on rye and nicotine and sex- y flicks, kept off the snow and grass he téeters tiptoe on his arctic roof (cen brieele legs, no two together) baring his royal canadian ass white and helpless in the global winds Schizoid from birth, and still a sado-masochise this curkey thinks that for his sins he should be carved while still alive: legs to Québec, the furure Vietnam; the rest, self-served and pre-digested, to make a Harvest Home for Uncle Sam, ‘Teeth shot and memory going (except for childhood grudges), ‘one moment murderous, the next depressed, this youth, we fear, has moved from adolescence into what looks like permanent senescence. SPEAKING OF IDENTITY .. i Robertson Davies (Brom a conversation with Donald Cameron) ‘casteRoN: Kroetsch* thinks that instead of seeing polar oppositions all the time, we [Canadians] tend to see two sides of a conflict as aspects of the same thing. ) Davies: Yes, and tending to run into one another. You know,, we had a very extraordinary evidence of that, in something which I think of as enormously important and significant | ‘about Canada: in the character of Mackenzie King, who was | our Prime Minister for longer than any other man in any British country in the world. Mackenzie King seemed to be | the quintessence of dullness. When you read in his diary that when he met Barbara Ann Scote, the skater, ic seemed that he was expected to kiss her, and he “acquiesced” —a duller, | ‘more pedantic, dreary man you could scarcely think to find, But what was he in reality? A man who communed with the | portrait of his dead mother to get political advice; a man whe never set the date of a general election without consulting Nan Skinner, che Kingston fortune-teller; a man who could —and I know this from my father, who knew Mr. King quite well | — burst into the most highly coloured and inflammatory kind of blasphemous, evil language when he was discussing certain, copics; a man who wooed and sort of managed to keep peace with Québec, but who could talk about French Canadians in a way that would take the paint off a barn door — this was Mackenzie King, this was the opposites running into one another, and this is very Canadian. We now blackmouth him and pretend that we knew about him all the time, but he got elected over and over again; he knew this country marvellously, because he was essentially one of us, We're great withholders, Canadians. This is the sort of thing that my Australian-born wife has pointed out to me. Accept the bland, quiet, rather dull Canadian for what he scems to be: it’s juse like pucting your hand into a circular saw, he'll have the hand ‘Rober Kroes, Canadian novelist.2m oOo nO OOO TMSbefore you, know what's happened. I think this is very characteristic of our country, and when we really come to ourselves, we're going to be a very formidable people. We're going to be as formidable, I would say, as the Norwegians, or the Swedes, who are very formidable nations indeed; perhaps as formidable as the Russians. I was asked in connection with Fifth Business co say what I was trying to do, and I said that I was trying to record the bizarte and passionate life of the Canadian people. Well, I was dropped on by some Canadian ctitics who said, There I was again, trying to make an effect and talking silly so that people would look at me and think what a fancy fellow I was. They were the ones who didn’t see what it was. I was speaking the exact truth, but they didn’t see it. They will not see it. 96 NATIONAL IDENTITY FR. Scott ‘The Canadian Centenary Council Meeting in Le Reine Elizabech To seck those symbols Which will explain ourselves co ourselves Evoke unlimited responses And prove that something called Canada Really exists in the hearts of all Handed out to every delegate At the start of proceedings A portfolio of documents On the cover of which appeared In gold letters not A Mari Usque Ad Mare not Dieu Et Mon Droit not Je Me Souviens not E Pluribus Unum but COURTESY OF COCA-COLA LIMITED. |Too ooo eee