Two Solitudes (62 page)

BOOK: Two Solitudes

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He has studied in Europe. He tries to write about Europe. It is Heather who, after looking at a draft of the story, says to him, “Paul, why didn't you set the scene in Canada?”

At first he tries to defend his decision. “Because no world trends begin hereâ¦. A book about Canadaâit would be like writing of the past century!”

Then, as he wonders if that is really true, he debates with himself; at once fearful and excited, he makes a decision:

But Canada was a country that no one knewâ¦. The background would have to be created from scratch if his story was to become intelligible. He could afford to take nothing for granted. He would have to build the stage and props for his play, and then write the play itself.

Paul Tallard, the aspiring novelist, has written a manifesto, a statement of intent that might speak for MacLennan as well as for himself. One night after a long silence he goes home from a visit with his brother Marius.

He drew a chair up to the table, found a stack of yellow paper and sharpened a pair of pencils. Now he wished he had seen his brother days ago. Out of Marius, out of his own life, out of the feeling he had in his bones for his own province and the others surrounding it, the theme of his new book began to emergeâ¦. He was not formulating sentences; he was drafting the design of a full novel.

Out of the complexities of his own experience, out of his own manifesto, Paul begins to write.

At the end of the novel, September 1939, literally as the Second World War is beginning, Paul tells his wife's mother, “Heather and I have been waiting all our lives. Now there's hardly any time left for us. Tomorrow I am going to enlist.” He will enlist. And that is not to say he will simply go with the Canadian forces into war. He will enlist as a Canadian writer; he will, in spite of all, engage life and celebrate life. He will accept what memory insists upon. He will turn that knowledge into a dangerous but promising future.

The novelist Hugh MacLennan stands at the beginning of the current flourishing of Canadian literature. There in the idea of two solitudes he dramatizes for all of us, writers and readers alike, the predicament and the opportunity. He gives us as well history, philosophy, religion, politics. His novel becomes a web, a narrative filled with necessary digression, a container as full and various as Canada itself.

BY HUGH MACLENNAN

ESSAYS

Cross-Country (1949)

Thirty and Three (1954)

Scotchman's Return and Other Essays (1960)

The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan: Selected Essays Old and

New [ed. Elspeth Cameron] (1978)

FICTION

Barometer Rising (1941)

Two Solitudes (1945)

The Precipice (1948)

Each Man's Son (1951)

The Watch that Ends the Night (1959)

Return of the Sphinx (1967)

Voices in Time (1980)

HISTORY

Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study (1935)

TRAVEL

Seven Rivers of Canada (1961)

The Colour of Canada (1967)

Rivers of Canada (1974)

THE AUTHOR

HUGH MACLENNAN
was born in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 1907. He took his B.A. (1928) in Classics from Dalhousie University, then travelled as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford University, where he obtained another B.A. and his M.A. (1932); he completed graduate studies in Classics at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. (1935).

MacLennan returned to Canada in 1935 to accept a teaching appointment in Latin and History at Lower Canada College in Montreal, which remained his home. In 1951 he accepted a position in the Department of English at McGill University, where he taught for three decades.

Barometer Rising
was MacLennan's first novel. His seven novels as well as his many essays and travel books present a chronicle of a Canada that often mediates between the old world of its European cultural heritage and the new world of American vitality and materialism.

MacLennan's many honours include five Governor General's Awards and nineteen honorary degrees.

Hugh MacLennan died in Montreal, Quebec, in 1990.

The following dedication appeared in the original edition:
TO DOROTHY DUNCAN
â¦with admiration and love

This book was first published in Canada by Wm. Collins Sons & Co. in 1945
New Canadian Library edition 2003
This New Canadian Library edition 2008

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisherâor, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agencyâis an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

MacLennan, Hugh, 1907-1990
Â Â Â Â Â Two solitudes / Hugh MacLennan; with an afterword by Robert Kroetsch.

(New Canadian library)
Originally publ.: Toronto: Macmillan, 1945.
e
ISBN
: 978-1-55199-280-8

I. Title. II. Series.

PS
8525.l54
T
8 2008 Â Â Â Â Â Â
C
813'.54Â Â Â Â Â Â
C
2008-900915-0

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.