Canadian Literature

C

Humor and Social Criticism

The works of Odell, Haliburton, and De Mille had sounded an early note of wit and social criticism in Canadian writing. But toward the end of the 19th century there were signs of that wit becoming formulaic and conventionalized, partly because it was demanded by the magazines in which such work appeared. Writers such as Edward William Thomson, Robert Barr, and Grant Allen, who sought to publish in American and British periodicals, produced polished if not enduring stories about amorality (the absence of moral standards) in society and city life. This trend in their writing failed to gain dominance, however. One reason was the success of writers such as Stephen Leacock in humorously debunking the conventions used by Barr and Allen. In Nonsense Novels (1911), for example, Leacock parodied 19th-century literary forms such as melodrama, dialect anecdote, and romance-adventure. In Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914) he punctured the pretenses to sophistication of the urban rich by showing those pretenses to be nothing more than ego, faddishness, and greed. Another reason that the trend failed to take hold was an overall cultural impulse to identify Canada more in wilderness than in urban terms, a tendency that continued through much of the century. In his most coherent and enduring work, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Leacock portrayed the foibles of small-town life, specifically the desire of small-town inhabitants to resemble their urban counterparts, whom they mistakenly took to be more sophisticated.

Leacock’s success tended to overshadow the artistry of two other worthy prose writers of the time, Duncan Campbell Scott and Sara Jeannette Duncan, both of whom address the comedy of human life, although they rely less on parody. Scott's “Labrie's Wife” (1923) and Duncan’s The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893), for example, incisively deal with the ironies of mistaken identity in Canada’s north and with the ironies of race and class in British India. Just as Scott’s experiments as a poet had expanded poetic technique, so too his experiments in fiction expanded prose forms. In the sketch sequences of In the Village of Viger (1896) and The Witching of Elspie (1923)—set in Québec villages and on fur-trading posts—Scott depicted the shifting realities of people's inner lives as industrialization reached these once-secluded areas. The modern Canadian short story, emphasizing characters’ psychological realities, has its source in Scott’s work.

Duncan was a spirited newspaper reporter and extensive traveler whose writings furthered the cause of feminism in Canadian literature. Many of her works centered on an intelligent, independent female protagonist. A Social Departure (1890) is a fictionalized version of a trip Duncan took around the world with a friend. A Canadian Girl in London (1891), Those Delightful Americans (1902), and Cousin Cinderella (1908) wittily portray the lives of three young women, contrasting the different manners and mores of Canada, the United States, and England.

Later 20th-century humorists—including Peter McArthur, Robertson Davies (writing under the name Samuel Marchbanks), Robert Thomas Allen, Gregory Clark, Erika Ritter, Ray Guy, Sondra Gotlieb, and Eric Nicol—published in newspapers, using their columns to debunk current social foibles, such as technological confusion, gender uncertainty, and increasing Americanization. Paul Hiebert’s Sarah Binks (1947) parodies literary pretensions of grandeur, while David McFadden’s Trip Around Lake Ontario (1988) deals comically with issues of nationality and the American border. Some critics have asserted that the sharp sense of irony used by these humorists characterizes the Canadian literary voice.

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C

1

Fiction: War and National Identity

World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945) altered communications systems, destroyed whole communities and much of a generation, and changed immigration patterns. However, by providing a common experience, the wars also provided Canadian writers with a means for expressing national unity. Examples of such war fiction include Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930), which attacks war itself and the hierarchy of authority that sacrifices ordinary lives in the name of order, and Earle Birney’s Turvey (1949), which satirizes the Canadian intelligence service. Barometer Rising (1941) by Hugh MacLennan uses the Halifax explosion of 1917, when a Belgian ship and a French munitions ship collided and exploded in the Halifax harbor, as an allegory of war and as a defining moment in national self-awareness.

Many popular writers of the 1920s and 1930s provided escape for their readers through romances set in the past. But even period romances often commented, although sometimes indirectly, on the disruption and disorder that followed the wars. Among these works are the rural and historical narratives of Frederick Niven, such as Mine Inheritance (1940), and the pro-British Empire saga of the fictional Whiteoaks family of Ontario, beginning with Jalna (1927), by Mazo de la Roche. But other works explored sterner realities, as for example Douglas Durkin’s work The Magpie (1923). Durkin criticized Canada’s urban, economic, and sociopolitical structures in depicting a war veteran’s struggles to rebuild his life after World War I. Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925) reveals the constricted lives of women in a small rural community. Irene Baird's Waste Heritage (1939) portrays conflicts between individuals and industry during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The autobiographical Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter (1939), by Laura Goodman Salverson, renders in realistic detail the efforts of a community of Icelandic settlers in Canada to maintain its identity.

Preoccupation with Europe colored the work of the two most important prose writers of the time, Frederick Philip Grove and Morley Callaghan. Grove's life was perhaps even more interesting than his fiction. His so-called autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), is a tissue of fiction; he invented a European past for himself that went unchallenged until a biography of Grove, FPG, was published by Canadian literary scholar D. O. Spettigue in 1973. Spettigue showed that Grove was the name adopted by German translator, novelist, and convicted felon Felix Paul Greve, who had disappeared from Germany in 1909 and was presumed dead. In 1922 Grove published his first work set in Canada, Over Prairie Trails, a book of purportedly autobiographical essays about travels over the Manitoba countryside. The essays use changes in season and landscape to explore a series of psychological perspectives. The work was followed by 11 more books, mostly novels about European settlers on the Canadian prairies, that record a passionate yet largely pessimistic view of human beings in stolid conflict with the land, their fellows, and themselves. Settlers of the Marsh (1925), A Search for America (1927), and Fruits of the Earth (1933) are representative of Grove’s accomplishment.

Unlike Grove, Callaghan did not strive to portray grand views of human destiny. In Such Is My Beloved (1934) and The Loved and the Lost (1951), Callaghan’s characters are ordinary urban people—priests, boxers, street workers, small-business people—who, in the name of something they hold to be good, find themselves in moral predicaments. In The Loved and the Lost, one character struggles with his desire for money and fame and his love for a woman who has rejected those values. In many of Callaghan’s works, social structures, such as the legal system, are portrayed as unable to distinguish the pure motives that have led to individuals’ social transgressions, and they punish the wrong people. A contemporary and friend of American writer Ernest Hemingway and a follower of the experiments in vernacular style initiated by American writer Sherwood Anderson, Callaghan published in avant-garde American literary journals of the 1920s and 1930s, such as transition. His sketches, represented in Morley Callaghan’s Stories (1959), are among his most lasting works.

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2

Poetry: Modernism

As Callaghan refashioned the concerns and techniques of Canadian prose after World War I, focusing on urban settings and social issues, a group of poets and painters rose to challenge Canadian wilderness mythologies and the conventions of landscape art. The painters included Emily Carr, whose writings in Klee Wyck (1941) record her discovery of West Coast indigenous art; and Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, young artists, mainly from Toronto, who advocated a painting style that was distinctly Canadian in spirit. These painters influenced poets of the period, particularly A. M. Klein, F. R. Scott, and A. J. M. Smith. These poets, along with poet Leo Kennedy, were known as the Montréal or McGill Group (after McGill University in Montréal). They published in the McGill Fortnightly Review, which Scott and Smith edited between 1925 and 1927, and other academic literary reviews.

The Montréal Group introduced modernism into Canadian poetry, incorporating techniques adapted from contemporary European and American writers. They emphasized fragmentation, alienation, and urban sophistication. Smith's 'The Lonely Land' (1936) melds the imagism (reliance on precise images) of American poet Ezra Pound with a depiction of northern Ontario landscape, while Scott's incisive lyrics, such as in his 1927 poem “The Canadian Authors Meet,” mercilessly satirize outmoded literary convention. Smith, who immigrated to Michigan, nonetheless became one of Canada’s most influential anthologists.

Poems by the Montréal Group were collected in the 1936 anthology New Provinces, along with poems by Newfoundland writer E(dwin). J. Pratt. Pratt, who was more than 20 years older than the Montréal poets, belonged intellectually and chronologically to an earlier generation. However, along with Smith he became the chief influence in Canadian poetry from the 1930s until the 1950s. Pratt's reputation was based on his stirring narrative verse, his extravagant comic rhymes, the intensity of short poems such as “From Stone to Steel” (1932), and his national mythmaking in Towards the Last Spike (1952). This romantic narrative, which describes the construction of the Canadian transcontinental railroad, adapts epic conventions such as the hero, the catalogue (list of items), the extended metaphor, and the idea of nation-building.

Scott and Klein gradually superseded Smith and Pratt in critical reputation. Scott, a reform-minded lawyer and political theorist who championed civil rights, honed the poetic use of the ordinary speaking voice in works such as The Eye of the Needle (1957). He also invalidated the aspirations of Pratt’s railroad epic, for instance, by pointing to the racial tensions that Pratt’s text seemed to conceal: One poem wryly asks “Where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?” (Coolies was a derogatory term for the Asian laborers who built the railroad.) Klein was a rabbinical scholar, an enthusiastic follower of Irish writer James Joyce, and a glittering wordsmith. He wrote intense intellectual meditations on being a Jew, attacks both subtle and brittle on prejudice, and clear-sighted reflections on the beginnings of nationalism in Québec. His work explored both the cultural contradictions of being “a Jewboy” from “the ghetto streets” of Montréal, as he wrote in 1951 in “Autobiographical,” and the fierce pride “of being Canadien.” He detects in this use of Canadien the threatening “body-odour of race” and racism, as he stated in his 1948 poem “Political Meeting.” Klein’s novel The Second Scroll (1951) is an eloquent parable about the wanderings of modern Jewry following the Holocaust of World War II.

As the Great Depression advanced during the 1930s, literary and political journals such as Canadian Forum and New Frontier championed reformist causes. Dorothy Livesay and Earle Birney were among the voices emerging during this period. Both published in these left-leaning journals as well as elsewhere, and they remained important in Canadian poetry through the 1970s. Livesay, a social worker, combined a political commitment to socialism with an increasingly articulate feminism. Her poetry is concerned with individual efforts to overcome internal and external forces of destruction. Her writing, as represented in The Unquiet Bed (1967), Collected Poems (1972), and The Phases of Love (1982), seemed to become more youthful and accomplished as she grew older, revealing a sensitive, understanding mind. Birney, a scholar of 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, was adept at a variety of poetic and prose forms. The development of Birney’s poetry follows the 20th-century shift of Canadian poetry from its conventional, rural beginnings to experiments in concrete verse (poetry of visual pattern and impact) and poetry of pure sound that marked the 1970s. Birney’s David (1942), set in the Canadian Rockies of his youth, continues to captivate readers with its powerful language and intriguing story of a man’s search for truth through encounters with nature. Birney’s lyrical style and controlled humanism never faltered in later works, such as Ice, Cod, Bell, or Stone (1962) and Near False Creek Mouth (1964). His Collected Poems appeared in 1975.

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3

The Rise of Drama

Early theater did not foster a distinctive Canadian drama in English, although melodrama (drama characterized by exaggerated emotions, stereotyped characters, and interpersonal conflicts) and verse drama did enjoy a short vogue in the 19th century. Performances were often disguised forms of historical pageant, with an occasional written play, such as Sarah Anne Curzon's Laura Secord; or, the Heroine of 1812 (1887), achieving some degree of success. With the opening of Hart House Theatre in Toronto in 1919, however, opportunities arose for Canadian playwrights to have their works staged. Merrill Denison, who was involved in the early development of the Hart House Theatre, wrote short satires that exposed the emptiness of myths about the heroism of European settlers of the Canadian north, as in the series entitled The Unheroic North (1923). Bertram Brooker in Within (1935) and Herman Voaden and Lowrie Warrener in Symphony (1930) probed ways to dramatize philosophical conditions.

Several other playwrights emerged during the 1930s. John Coulter’s early plays, including The House in the Quiet Glen (1937), are set in his native Ireland. However, he acquired his Canadian reputation with Riel (1962), about Louis Riel, leader of the Métis (people of mixed white and indigenous ancestry). Riel’s failed rebellions in 1870 and 1885 came to epitomize the conflict between two cultural orders as Canada expanded westward. Gwen Pharis Ringwood was most noted for her dramas of psychological realism, Dark Harvest (1945) and The Rainmaker (first produced in the 1940s but not published until 1975). Drama of the 1930s also included socialist workers’ plays by various authors, which were intended to instruct. Some of these were collected in 1976 as Eight Men Speak.

During the 1940s and 1950s Canadian theater developed significantly. The annual Dominion Drama Festival, a cooperative effort of theater companies from all over Canada, was established in 1933. It encouraged the opening of small theaters, and the establishment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1932 had, by the 1940s, encouraged the development of lively radio drama. The radio plays of Earle Birney, Andrew Allan, Mavor Moore, and Fletcher Markle marked the first sustained Canadian dramas. Moore's mother, Dora Mavor Moore, established the New Play Society in Toronto in 1947, while various regional companies and revues formed. New dramatists who emerged at mid-century include Patricia Joudry, Lister Sinclair, John Reeves, Robertson Davies, and James Reaney.

D

The Later 20th Century

The second half of the 20th century witnessed increasingly rapid cultural ferment and social transformation, as access to media and communications introduced into the Canadian scene a growing multiplicity of voices, languages, and perspectives. Various modes of debate, dissent, alliance, and identification—combined with vigorous experimentation with forms and styles—led to the emergence of a distinctively Canadian multiculturalism. Instead of forcing a unified national consciousness of diversity, as happened in the United States, multiculturalism in Canada produced a literature that challenged and rethought the ways in which a nation can accommodate that diversity.

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