Hugh MacLennan

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In his novels and nonfiction writings Hugh MacLennan articulated views about Canada’s identity that were widely shared in the mid-twentieth century. John Hugh MacLennan was the only son and second child of Dr. Samuel and Katherine (MacQuarrie) MacLennan. His mother was warm, outgoing, and romantic, while “Dr. Sam,” as he was known in the mining community of Glace Bay, was an austere, reserved, dedicated physician who maintained a strict Presbyterian atmosphere in the home. Determined that his son should become a classical scholar, he would spend hours every night drilling him in translating Latin and Greek. The family moved to Halifax in 1915, and Dr. Sam enlisted in the Canadian army. He was sent to France. Wounded, he was returned home a year later. Observing these events and the catastrophic munitions explosion in Halifax in 1917 helped shape MacLennan’s horror of war.

After receiving his degree from Dalhousie University in 1928, MacLennan won a Rhodes Scholarship. Upon returning in 1932 with a degree in classics from the University of Oxford, he was turned down for an appointment at Dalhousie in favor of an Englishman, a decision which he attributed to the continuance of a colonial mentality in Canada. He spent the years from 1932 to 1935 acquiring a Ph.D. at Princeton University; he found the methods of the American graduate school narrowly pedantic, but he contrived to write a dissertation about a declining Roman colony in Egypt that can be seen as expressing his lifelong concern with national identity.

During this decade of intense studying, MacLennan pursued other interests as well. He excelled at tennis, winning the Maritime Provinces singles championship in 1929. His first novel, “So All Their Praises,” was accepted in 1933 by a publisher who unfortunately went bankrupt before the manuscript could be published. Unable to secure a university post during the Depression, he reluctantly accepted the drudgery of schoolmastering in Montreal’s Lower Canada College, a job he labored at from 1935 to 1945. On an Atlantic voyage he met Dorothy Duncan, an American who painted and was to write several nonfiction books; they were married in 1936.

After several publishers had rejected his second novel, “A Man Should Rejoice,” his wife persuaded MacLennan to switch from the foreign settings of his first two novels to a Canadian setting for his third. The result was Barometer Rising, in which the climax for the main characters is the Halifax explosion of 1917, which MacLennan had witnessed and vividly re-creates. He voices the idea that Canada had come of age through its participation and sacrifices in World War I. The considerable success of this novel was to be exceeded by his next, Two Solitudes. Here he addresses the deep-rooted gulf in Canada between French Canadians and English Canadians. In a turn of plot reminiscent of that in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (but without their deaths), the marriage of Paul Tallard and Heather Methuen is designed to suggest what a real union between the two founding nations could do for Canada. After the success of this second novel he resigned from Lower Canada College. Following a period of journalism and broadcasting and the publication of Each Man’s Son in 1951 he took a part-time teaching position in the English department at McGill University; he assumed a full-time post in 1964, becoming a professor emeritus in 1979.

The declining health of MacLennan’s wife—she suffered a series of embolisms—added greatly to the pressures he experienced. She died in 1957, after a successful career as a nonfiction writer. He dedicated The Watch That Ends the Night, originally entitled Requiem

(This entire section contains 871 words.)

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Requiem, to his deceased wife.

The turbulent 1960’s, with the rise of separatism and terrorism in Quebec, further contributed to MacLennan’s reevaluation of the simplistically optimistic view of that province’s future which he had suggested in Two Solitudes some twenty years earlier. In Return of the Sphinx Alan Ainslie has become prominent in Canadian politics, but his career is ruined by his son’s involvement with French Canadian terrorists. Threatened in this novel, civilization was virtually eradicated in his next. Voices in Time, MacLennan’s last novel, is set in Montreal fifty years after a computer error has caused a nuclear holocaust. John Wellfleet, one of the few survivors, struggles to make sense of the recent past from diaries, tapes, and other records that escaped destruction. Using a technique of narrative time shifts that he had employed successfully in The Watch That Ends the Night, MacLennan reiterates his major theme, that civilization will be destroyed if the lessons of history are ignored.

Combining Canadian regionalism in setting with national and international concerns and plots derived from myth, MacLennan steadily developed an international audience (most of his novels have been translated into several foreign languages). Some critics have found in his work a tendency to didacticism, labored dialogue, repetitiousness, and stereotyping of characterization. Nevertheless, his ability to write gripping narrative in such episodes as the Halifax explosion in Barometer Rising, Jerome’s boyhood flight downriver in The Watch That Ends the Night, and Conrad Dehmel’s tragic involvement with Nazism in Voices in Time is widely recognized. In 1982 MacLennan retired from McGill after more than thirty years of teaching there. He died in Montreal on November 7, 1990, at the age of eighty-three.

Biography

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John Hugh MacLennan was born in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, on March 20, 1907. He drew on his memories of this birthplace, a coal-mining company town set at the edge of the Atlantic, explicitly in Each Man’s Son, but his impressions of the seagirt land, a topography appropriate to the Scottish Highland character that was his heritage, entered, less directly, into much of his work. In this setting, his father practiced medicine among the miners. A dominating figure, “the Doctor” was to become the prototype of a number of characters in his son’s novels.

In 1915, when MacLennan was eight, the family moved to Halifax, a venerable but lively port that fascinated the boy. The small city, with its sense of community, became a lifelong ideal for MacLennan, as did the contrasting beauty of the Cape Breton countryside where the family spent time in the summer, prefiguring the thematic retreat to the woods of many of MacLennan’s fictional characters. As recounted in Barometer Rising, much of Halifax was destroyed by an explosion in 1917, but the city was rebuilt, and MacLennan was reared there, doing well in both studies and sports, and graduated from Dalhousie University in 1928.

Later in that year, a Rhodes scholarship allowed him to attend Oxford. While there he played rugby and tennis; an excellent athlete, MacLennan, as a novelist, frequently used sports to reveal character. At Oxford, he also wrote poetry and traveled extensively, during vacations, on the Continent. These holidays, especially those to Germany, were drawn upon in his first two, unpublished, novels and returned to in Voices in Time, and some of his own experiences from this time were used in creating those of his character, Paul, in Two Solitudes.

MacLennan also studied at Oxford, quite diligently in fact, and graduated in 1932, proceeding to graduate studies at Princeton. Returning to England, he met, on the ship, an American, Dorothy Duncan, who was to become his first wife. His developing love and his new devotion to becoming a novelist absorbed more of his attention than did his studies. While he did not find Princeton congenial, he completed his Ph.D. in history, with a dissertation discussing the Roman colonial settlement at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

In 1935, in the midst of the Depression, MacLennan’s degree was not able to secure for him the university teaching position he desired; he accepted a job teaching at Lower Canada College, a boys’ school in Montreal. (He was to give a fictionalized satiric portrait of the school in The Watch That Ends the Night.) After a year at the school, he married Dorothy Duncan and settled into a life of working as a schoolmaster during the day and writing at night, sinking in roots as a Montrealer, which he was to remain.

His first novel, So All Their Praises, had been completed while MacLennan was at Princeton; it was accepted by a publisher that ceased operation before the book was published. His second novel, A Man Should Rejoice, suffered a similar fate in 1938; its publication was postponed and finally dropped. These novels, the first owing a debt to Ernest Hemingway, the second to John Dos Passos, although never published, have their virtues. They both present comments on the political situation preceding World War II and employ international settings.

For his next novel, MacLennan turned, at his wife’s suggestion, to Canada. Barometer Rising is set in Halifax in 1917. It was an immediate success. MacLennan continued his teaching and writing career in Montreal; an ear problem kept him out of the war. After the success of his second published novel, Two Solitudes, and the establishment, additionally, of his wife’s successful career as a writer (Dorothy Duncan published nonfiction; one of her books, Partner in Three Worlds, 1944, won the Governor-General’s Award for nonfiction), he resigned from Lower Canada College in 1945. Following a period of journalism and broadcasting and the publication of The Precipice, in 1951 he took a part-time position teaching in the English department at McGill University; he assumed a full-time post in 1964, becoming professor emeritus in 1979.

During the years in which he was establishing himself as a writer in Montreal, publishing Cross-Country, Each Man’s Son, and Thirty and Three (a period described in The Watch That Ends the Night), his wife’s declining health—she suffered a series of embolisms—added greatly to the pressures he experienced. Dorothy Duncan died in 1957. MacLennan dedicated The Watch That Ends the Night to her; the novel, originally titled Requiem, has as its heroine a figure whose characterization owes much to Dorothy Duncan. MacLennan married Frances Walker in 1959 and after a period of producing nonfiction—Scotchman’s Return, and Other Essays and Seven Rivers of Canada—wrote Return of the Sphinx. This novel was unfavorably reviewed by a number of Canadian critics, but MacLennan continued to receive numerous honorary degrees and public recognition. He began consideration of another novel, but interrupted work on it to write Rivers of Canada. His last novel, Voices in Time, appeared to favorable reviews in 1980. In 1982, MacLennan retired from McGill, after more than thirty years of teaching there. He died in Montreal on November 7, 1990, at the age of eighty-three.