Man Should Rejoice, by Hugh MacLennan

A Critical Edition

Hugh MacLennan, Colin Hill, Colin Hill

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780776628011
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

Man Should Rejoice is one of two hitherto unpublished novels by acclaimed novelist Hugh MacLennan. Completed in 1937 and left unpublished due to economic conditions during the Great Depression, it lay in the McGill archives until now.

This critical edition of Man Should Rejoice, which is also the first-ever publication of the work, is comprised of a critical introduction, a bibliography of published and unpublished sources, a fully-edited text based on a typescript of the novel, a list of textual emendations, and explanatory notes.

The introduction draws upon extensive research undertaken in three Canadian archival collections located in Montreal and Calgary. It provides relevant historical, cultural, and biographical context for the novel.

From hundreds of archival documents, Colin Hill reconstructs a textual history of the novel's production that acknowledges the crucial contribution of Dorothy Duncan, who heavily revised the text and assisted MacLennan behind the scenes. Hill also explores the critical reception of MacLennan's fiction from the 1930s to the present.

This book is published in English.

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Man Should Rejoice est un des deux romans inédits du grand romancier Hugh MacLennan. Terminé en 1937, il fut victime de la Grande Crise et fut conservé dans les archives de McGill jusqu'à maintenant.

Cette édition critique de Man Should Rejoice comprend une introduction critique, une bibliographie des sources publiées et non publiées, le texte révisé tiré d'un tapuscrit du roman, une liste des emendations textuelles, et des notes explicatives.

L'introduction, qui repose sur des recherches archivistiques poussées de trois collections canadiennes situées à Montréal et à Calgary, fournit le contexte historique, culturel et biographique du roman.

Colin Hill érige l'histoire textuelle de l'écriture de ce roman à partir de centaines de documents d'archives qui jettent la lumière sur la contribution clé de Dorothy Duncan, qui a révisé en profondeur le texte et a aidé MacLennan en coulisses. Il explore par ailleurs la réception critique de la fiction de MacLennan, des années 1930 jusqu'à aujourd'hui.

Ce livre est publié en anglais.

Man Should Rejoice

A novel by
HUGH MACLENNAN

“Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?” Ecclesiastes

Preface

Here in Nova Scotia I am alone again. From the house where I live I can look across granite rocks to the ocean, which now is calm and flat in the sun. I live here all alone where glacier-scraped boulders have assumed unbelievably interesting forms, and already I have painted a few of them, and I know there are many more left to paint and that new compositions will occur as long as I wish to continue the kind of painting I have done here.

It is also pleasant to work with my hands and I have quite a lot of such work to do, for when I came here I took over an old cottage and for several weeks lived in it and hardly noticed the drip of fog and rain through parts of the roof. But the habit of living as well as one can was too strong, and after a time I began to make repairs. Now I enjoy being a carpenter. So during the days I paint or hammer nails into boards and in the nights I read a little and have lately begun to write. Even in the old days I used to come to Nova Scotia. It was half outside the world; I could feel for a time that my painting was all that mattered and staying here made me seem better than I really was.

I have not made a recluse of myself to spite anyone, not even to spite my old ambitions. I came here to live because I could think of no other place to go, and I live alone because I suddenly discovered that no one was left with whom I could stand living or who would live with me. And there was a job I had to finish. If I stayed here away from cities and people who reminded me of myself and my old friends, meeting only the inhabitants of the out-ports who exist almost without machines, I had a conviction I would sometime be able to finish that job. And then, perhaps, start living properly once again.

This will to live, which has nothing to do with reason but is founded merely in experience, was the only dignity I had left when I came here. There is no mystery about my past life; we lived hard and tried to change the world by thinking about it, and were beaten from the start by attempting the impossible. Being a painter, I see the form and rhythm of things before I see anything else. Now I want to create, in a book, something of the form and rhythm of the most rapid transition from one era to another that mankind has ever known. Whether this is possible, whether I can freeze a durable form out of a state of flux, I don’t know. If I succeed I may rid myself of the past, not by burying it but by recreating it and giving it a separate life of its own. At least it should not be too difficult to set down what happened to my friends and myself as though it had happened to other people, for I see us all vividly, as though I were a stranger looking back from a long distance. The stress of our lives and ideas seem to me now to have been a pattern of our time. In ourselves, perhaps, is the form in the flux of things. We were not agents in a drama and we never changed things with our decisions, but we very consciously were participants in the ritual that is history.

Here in Nova Scotia the sight and sound of breaking water, the sense of space that goes far away to the horizon and whitens down to an unpaintable colour at the sea-rim, have made what happened to me when I was in the United States and Europe seem proportionate; this, and the stir of the ocean in constant flux and sometimes the roar of a storm smoking inland so fast that the spume flies a mile or more over the ridge like driving snow, and the birds wheeling and plunging, and often sheer quiet and the passionless absolute of moveless form. This kind of solitude can make a man sane. It may not make him warm or eager to do things, but at least it can make him sane.

Last week we had a storm here. The breakers were thirty feet high and I saw some women standing on the rocks looking out to sea at the fishing boats riding home. The boats went up and down valleys of water and I could see that the men were bailing hard, but they all came in and anchored, and when I went over the wet rocks to the haven I saw ten fishing boats hauling on their cables, and some of the men going up the ridge with the women. At that instant the sun broke out, a rainbow lifted over the sea and the grey water took on colours; soon the whole coast was glowing. I watched, and felt a peculiar pleasure because I had seen a pattern completed and because I knew that the fishermen had survived the storm.

Shadows

1

Making money was a habit with Bernard Culver and he knew it. When he was a young man he contrived to make people take him for granted and he worked hard and became prominent before they really knew he had arrived. Today they still take him for granted even while they do what he tells them.

All his life Culver has preferred the darkness to the light, and I believe that some teacher of his, or someone he admired when he was a boy, must have shown him that a commonplace man can become prominent only if no one sees clearly what he intends to do. So Culver’s life has been a technique of negation and the fruits of it have been dividends so large he can hardly estimate them. At present he owns three rolling mills in Pittsburgh, controls two banks and is president of the Oil and Service Company of America. The country has had many more brilliant millionaires than Culver, but no sounder ones, and when he tells people that his success is the result of work and habit he means exactly what he says. He is not a remarkable man or even an interesting one, but something rarer. He is a successful man.

A few years ago I was with Culver in his office in Pittsburgh. It was a winter evening and the lights of the city made the thick darkness look like fog, eastward over the steel-works a ruddy glare came and went as the slag was poured, and I seemed to feel the whole district throb like a stationary engine and had a vision of monsters opening and closing furnace doors. Culver, his large face grave and unreadable, his suit dark and inconspicuous, his shirt white, sat quietly upright, hands folded in front of him. The window was open and a slow sound filled the room. It was ominous and insistent, like the breathing of an animal you have never seen but know to be terrifying, an atavistic monster blinded by the light. And the robot figures of Culver’s workmen surged through my brain, I had been seeing so many of them lately, and the face of each one of them was fixed in a senseless, efficient stare at whatever he was doing. It was like walking in a bad dream to be in this maze of figures and lathes and bolts and engines, for they kept revolving. I was tired and they revolved smoothly through my brain like ball-bearings relative to the turning rod until I seemed to revolve myself and the slag-illumined acrid sky to revolve too. Culver, who had not spoken for a long time, suddenly said, “I wish Mom were living. She’d have liked to see me here.”

Perhaps that remark gave away his secret. Perhaps I never was able to understand him at all in those days when he seemed as impersonal as the power he had accumulated, but this was certainly the most personal remark I ever heard him make. All his life he had possessed this gift of eloquent silence, this faculty for being neither in the way nor out of the way, that made more talkative people respect him and attribute his habitual silence to the natural reserve of an able man. None of the people who paraded before his desk waiting for orders suspected that he wanted always to see himself in the mirror of another person. To them he seemed to live for one thing only, to organize men and things. Yet this was the evening of the day on which he had been made president of the oil company, the day of his supreme elevation.

To those who knew that Culver was married to his work it was a mystery why he had a wife at all, much less a woman like Arina. She was a Russian, and during all the years I knew her the revolution in her own land had less reality for her than the novels of Tolstoy and Turgenev. One of her grandfathers had been of noble blood and had earned a barbaric reputation in his own neighbourhood, but her immediate family was discretely bourgeois and saturated with the liberal-romantic literature of the day. Arina, who came from a small mining town not far from Kharkov, grew up thinking of herself as a character in fiction; indeed she looked at everyone through such a thick haze of literary references that when Bernard Culver appeared in the town she thought of him as some giant of fiction and took his inability to express himself in any language as a proof of silent strength in action.

Culver went to Russia at the age of thirty-three. He had been sent out by a Pittsburgh concern to install some mining equipment and it took him several months to do it to his satisfaction. It was the first time he had ever been outside the United States, and the violent change shook his concentration for about the only time in his life. His card-indexes were too small to hold room for the contrasts he saw here. The poverty of the masses, squalor such as he had never imagined existed among white people, began to gnaw at his mind. For Culver had been born poor, and as he had grown up in a family which had always been on the fringe of destitution he hated the thought of poverty simply because he never had been able to conquer the irrational fear that he might one day become poor again himself.

But after a time the scene in this Russian mining town excited him. He saw America as a thing apart, something quite unique, and became proud of himself, a carpenter’s son who had once been to the high-school in Columbus, Ohio, but who now was known as The American. Here he was a sort of magician, and no one took him for granted.

Natural phenomena had never been observed by Culver back in the U.S.A., but when winter came in here and the drifts piled up in the long nights and the steppe beyond the town was like a great white ocean in the moonlight, he felt a sore place in his liver and said to himself, if the fellows back home could picture me here, just for a minute! After a day’s work he liked to visit the taverns and listen to the talk he could not understand, and it was wonderful to feel his own solidity and sureness among the loose-limbed, easy-moving Russians, the multitudinous hordes of this country who seemed as dumb as the shaggy ponies he had seen on their plains.

Yet he was lonely. The Russians could not work at the pace of Americans and he always seemed to have an excess of time on his hands. As he stood or sat around with little to do the physical sense he had acquired of the country made him uneasy with a strange, pervading excitement. He could not disregard or forget about these thousands of miles of rolling land filled with mute peasants, some of them starving, many of them diseased, all of them so silent they could sit without movement or speech for hours on end. And he had also seen a little of the other side of the picture, the great ladies and gentlemen who lived apart with each other, the men inefficient but barbarically splendid and the women easy, their thighs moving with slumberous adequacy, indifferent, unaware of his rigid American competence.

That Culver and Arina should have met during this winter in Russia was inevitable, for she was the daughter of the colliery doctor and one of the few local inhabitants who could speak English. She had one of those inordinately small figures which nevertheless are perfectly formed and smoothly curved, and by suggesting a combination of sensuality and helplessness, attract certain men. Culver spent much of his time in her father’s house, and the strangeness of the environment, her childish reverence for him as the man of action, ultimately wore down his caution. He finally asked her to marry him and the wedding took place the day after his work in the mine was finished.

How long it was before Arina realized the type of life she had chosen I do not know. They left for Moscow immediately, travelled without a break to London, spent a day there sightseeing, then sailed for New York on a ship out of Liverpool. The crowds of the cities astonished her; coming from a land of peasants she was half-stunned by the modern world, and in childish obstinacy rebelled against it. Then the voyage was rough and made her very sick, so that when she caught sight of the granite boulders and the solitary spruce and fir lining the shores as the ship neared Halifax harbour she was strangely comforted. It was doubtless the memory of this which made her return to Nova Scotia later.

Culver, talking business with an older American in the smoke-room, feeling comfortable and sure of himself once again, took no interest in Canada at all, but when they reached New York two days later he was nervous and quietly excited, and pointed out to her the tall buildings and the swarms of immigrants crowding out of other ships onto the docks like slaves in a market.

“Take a look at them!” he said exuberantly. “They don’t know it but they’re power. Cheap labour and the best there is. But it takes the old U.S.A. to know how to use them!”

“I think some of them are Russians,” she said quietly.

“Sure,” said Culver, “why not?”

He led her down the gang-plank into the roar of the dock, pushed his way firmly and indifferently through the crowds of porters and passengers and officials, his bride slightly behind him and to his left, his career in his pocket.

Arina, following him, saw little except the square, shaven back of his neck. Perhaps she was overcome by all this confusion and strangeness; perhaps she hardly knew what was passing through her mind; perhaps the memory of her wedding night was still paramount. Her mind persisted for many years afterwards to return to the scene in the Metropole Hotel in Moscow when ...