The Precipice Read online

  Fraser was not the only one to formulate ideas for The Precipice. As with Barometer Rising, Dorothy Duncan made a suggestion to her husband that was crucial. The couple had seen the New York City ballet Pillar of Fire in 1946, and had stood with the cheering crowd at its conclusion. They saw Anthony Tudor's ballet a second time. Both times it aroused in MacLennan “an immediate, strong, creative feeling.”17 Dorothy pronounced, “There, Hugh, is the plot for your novel right there.” MacLennan's working title for his new book became Pillar of Fire.18

  Hugh Laing and Nora Kaye in Pillar of Fire.

  MacLennan had already decided – probably at Dorothy's prompting – to make his central character a woman for the first time. His electric response to this modern erotic ballet had much to do with its principal dancer, Nora Kaye. Kaye danced the role of Hagar, the middle sister of three, who undergoes a sexual awakening in a small puritanical Victorian community.19 Kaye – who bore a strong resemblance to Dorothy – gave a performance that was passionately sexual. Hagar's Elder Sister is a rigid, church-going spinster who dominates the household; her Younger Sister is a pretty, superficial flirt. The two men competing for Hagar are generically named the Friend and the Young Man from the House Opposite.

  The ballet was inspired by Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 twelve-tone composition Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). Schoenberg in turn had based his lyrical, dissonant music on the 1896 poem “Weib und die Welt” (Woman and the World) by the German romantic poet, Richard Dehmel. This erotic sequence of poems – scandalous in its time – could have been familiar to MacLennan from his readings in The Oxford Book of German Verse, which he owned when he was a student at Oxford. The poem describes an altercation between two lovers involved in a love triangle. The woman is pregnant with a baby fathered by one man who she now believes is worthless; the other man, her true friend and love, eventually forgives her.20

  MacLennan framed his characters on those in his sources. Lucy Cameron – who physically resembles Nora Kaye, even to her dark hair and graceful walk – became his central character. Lucy's older sister, Jane, is taken almost exactly from the Elder Sister in Pillar of Fire, as is Nina from the Younger Sister. Bruce Fraser, Lucy's nextdoor neighbour, is the Friend, especially in his decency and loyalty. Their names are suggestive of their characters: Lucy suggests “light,” Jane brings to mind “plain Jane,” Nina is the Spanish word for “child.” The surname “Cameron” signifies the Scottish puritanism of small-town Ontario. “Fraser” is doubtless taken from Blair Fraser – a tribute to his suggestions for the novel.

  That's where the similarities to MacLennan's sources end. While Stephen Lassiter resembles the unbridled seducer in Pillar of Fire (and “Weib und die Welt”), the Man in the House Opposite, whose casual sexual encounter with Hagar (and the unnamed woman in the poem) results in the pregnancy so central to their plots. Yet MacLennan does not have Lucy become pregnant until after she marries Stephen.

  Why would MacLennan forego the very tension that propels his sources and stimulated his excitement at the ballet? He had already made clear his revulsion from “decadent” fiction. He wanted sales as big as Two Solitudes, but did not want to resort to salacious scenes to gain them. His fictional bête noire at the time was Forever Amber, a 1944 costume novel by Kathleen Winsor set in the seventeenth century. In this novel, the destitute orphan Amber rises through her sexual exploits to become the mistress of King Charles II. The novel sold an enviable 100,000 copies in the first week and was made into a movie in 1947. In sidestepping the central raison d’être of his sources, MacLennan ironically shows himself to be somewhat puritan at the same time that he is critical of both Canadian and American puritanism.

  He had other intentions for Stephen Lassiter in addition to that of a seducer. Stephen was intended to represent the American puritanism of action in stark contrast to the stronger Canadian puritanism of repressed passivity. By refocusing Stephen's role in this way, MacLennan shifted the plane of his fiction from the close-up of an overwrought love triangle to a panoramic view of the two main North American cultures. The result feels mismatched, passionless, jarring.

  In “On Discovering Who We Are,” written when his novel was well underway, MacLennan tussled with how these two cultures differed. He confidently claimed that he had an insider's view of the United States due to the fact that he had spent a year at Princeton and half a year in New York, and was married to an American. The proceeds from Two Solitudes had bought the MacLennans a cottage named Stone Hedge in North Hatley near the US border, a popular summer spot for wealthy Americans. No doubt the couple often observed and discussed such differences with their American friends there. They had driven across the States in December 1946 (on Dorothy's doctor's advice that she find a warmer climate) to visit Dorothy's retired parents in Laguna Beach, California. Everywhere along the way, MacLennan had chatted with locals and garnered sociological and political details, which he then discussed with Dorothy. Her effect on his specific works, as well as on his overall career, has been greatly underestimated. MacLennan himself knew this full well and often acknowledged her influence. “It was my wife who persuaded me to see Canada as it was and to write of it as I saw it…It was she who helped me discover Canada…for she, in her own way, found another framework of differences when she came to live in my country.”21

  What MacLennan discovered about the differences between Americans and Canadians was this: “Americans are proud of what they do. The excessive puritanism of Canadians make them proud of what they don't do.”22 A weakened American puritanism had led to “mechanized feelings,” a “superiority complex,” and “irresponsibility.” In an observation that presaged The Precipice, he wrote, “it seems that nothing but catastrophe can check the furious progress of Americans into a still more dangerous desert of technology.”23 The same idea is more elaborately stated by Lucy, who has come to agree with her friend Bruce:

  The other night after we heard about the atomic bomb [destroying Hiroshima] I began to think of the Americans the way you do – like a great mass of people and not as individuals. I saw them moving in a vast swarm over a plain. They had gone faster and farther than any people had ever gone before. Each day for years they had measured out the distance they'd advanced. They were trained to believe there was nothing any of them had to do but keep on traveling in the same way. And then suddenly they were brought up short at the edge of a precipice which hadn't been marked on the map. There they were with all their vehicles and equipment, jostling and piling up on the front rank. For of course the ones behind didn't know the precipice was there and couldn't understand why the ones in front had stopped advancing. The pressure from behind kept increasing on the front ranks and they were all shouting at each other so loudly nobody could hear anything. (336)

  The larger-than-life athletic American businessman Stephen Lassiter embodies this blind, thrusting, dangerous progress. He has established a branch plant for Sani-Quip, the bathroom equipment business his father established in the U.S., in sleepy Grenville. The Cameron girls, particularly Jane, represent the Canadian puritanism that stifles emotion and resists any change from the ways of their severe, controlling late father, John Knox Cameron. Feelings in this family can surface only through the arts (Jane's piano music and Lucy's gardening). Lassiter is ruthless, athletic (he plays tennis), and reckless.24 Jane is rigid, controlling, anhedonic. This scheme structures the novel at the expense of individual characterization. For example, it is uncharacteristic for Lucy to make such a long, intellectual comment about Americans. Nor is it probable that she would tell Bruce that “Stephen…made me see that what counts is not what you keep yourself from doing, but what you do” (336). These are among many examples of MacLennan's proselytizing through his characters.

  MacLennan was particularly proud of the structure of The Precipice. He believed it had a well-constructed plot, one that resembled Barometer Rising rather than the sprawling Two Solitudes. When the novel was two-thirds written in March 1947, he wrote to h
is publisher Charles Duell, “the book is such a tightly knit organism, is in my belief such a great advance over Two Solitudes both in scope and depth, and even in construction, that every attempt to hurry it has been a failure.”25 His attempts to hurry the novel arose from his need to pay Dorothy's medical bills, the recent financial burden of the cottage in North Hatley, and from the sudden unaccustomed expectations of writing full-time. When Dorothy suffered a serious embolism on New Year's Day 1948, six months before his novel was finished, the pressure increased. She would have only nine more years to live.

  What is the novel's structure? It falls into two sections of equal length. Part One, describes Grenville's puritanism and gives the backstory of the Cameron family. It introduces all of the main characters but one (Marcia Stapleton, Stephen's twice-divorced sister). The plot develops after the meeting of Lucy and Stephen, through Lucy's sexual blossoming, to their impulsive elopement to New York City. The second section includes Parts Two to Five. These parts address the dilemmas of the main characters, showing them in various combinations, to complicate what happens after Lucy and Stephen's marriage. These include the growing tensions in that marriage and its ultimate fracture. In a short unexpected (and unbelievable) reversal in Part Five, Lucy decides to return to Stephen.

  The progression of all five parts of the novel are temporally and thematically linked to the larger context of World War II. The story begins in the summer of 1938, and Neville Chamberlain's trip to Munich (which resulted in the “appeasement” of Hitler and Germany's annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland) is mentioned. The futility of the Munich Agreement and the inevitability of war are paralleled by Lucy and Stephen's doomed “international” union.

  MacLennan marks the passage of time with references to the war. Part Two shows the uniformed Bruce Fraser in New York in 1940. He is on leave from the RCAF and is putting in time before visiting Lucy and Stephen at their fashionable New York City apartment. In a bar, he chats with an atypical American lieutenant. Their conversation draws attention to the fact that Canada joined the war effort from the outset, whereas the United States in 1940 has not. In Part Three, the Japanese bombing of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 finally precipitates American entry into the Allied war effort. In Part Four, the death of Hitler (30 April 1945) is mentioned at the same time Stephen begins the affair with Gail Beaumont that will break Lucy's trust. Part Five is set in the final phase of the war with the bombings of Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (three days later). These horrific events parallel the shattering of Lucy's marriage. They simultaneously illustrate the cold, relentless American pursuit of technological brilliance that MacLennan believed would catapult the United States over the edge of a precipice.

  This penultimate section of the novel seems more conclusive than the softer ending MacLennan seems to have tacked on without much conviction. He leaves us with an unconvincing situation in which Canadian puritanism is mollified, represented by Jane's acceptance of Lucy and her children after a long rejection. A new stronger Canadian identity has emerged, represented by Bruce, who has been disfigured terribly in the war, yet returns to Grenville and his teaching job stronger and wiser. Stephen, who has represented the blind American drive towards greater mechanization and a consumer society, drops away from the corrupt world of advertising in Carl Bratian's Madison Avenue agency, hoping to return to an engineering career that will build rather than destroy things.

  Compact though it is, this structure is flawed. The two sections of the novel are as unbalanced as a see-saw with one long side and one short side. Part One is far more leisurely, detailed, and rhythmic than the subsequent block of curt, at times preachy, parts in the second half. Part One resembles Two Solitudes; Parts Two through Five resemble the more succinct Barometer Rising. Their juxtaposition is awkward, giving the impression that MacLennan was indeed hurrying the completion of his novel.

  MacLennan's attempt to make his central character a woman is also unsuccessful, and he would not attempt it again. Lucy is simply too good to be true – she has no flaws at all. Unlike Hagar, she does not succumb to Stephen until they are married. MacLennan, a year and a half later in an essay called “Changing Values in Fiction,” seemed to realize that something about Lucy was not right. “ [A] good woman is enemy to a good plot,” he wrote. “[N]othing is harder to deal with in a rapid-action novel than a good woman…[f]or it is the nature of a good woman to absorb conflict rather than create it.”26 Had MacLennan stayed true to the Pillar of Fire plot that so excited him, and had Lucy become pregnant out of wedlock, the novel would have been far more dynamic. His determination to avoid “decadent” sexuality and the fact that Lucy was based largely on Dorothy and her North Hatley garden, preclude the portrayal of Lucy as a fallen woman. Cultivating roses may have been as close as MacLennan wanted to come to sensuality. His later essay “The Secret and Voluptuous Life of a Rose Grower,”27 is playful, but it also sounds a serious note that suggests he idealized the women he loved. His loyalty to his friend Blair Fraser also ensured that Bruce Fraser would not falter in his ethical behaviour; he destroys his love letter to Lucy without sending it.

  MacLennan's moral improvement of Hagar in his portrayal of Lucy is important. What flattened the effect in MacLennan's novel was part of the essential MacLennan. Decency, stability, and loyalty lay deep in him. Even a decade later, in The Watch that Ends the Night, he protects Catherine's reputation by having her second marriage to George occur only because her first husband, Jerome, is (wrongly) believed dead. Like Lucy, Catherine is partly based on Dorothy, just as George follows in Bruce's fictional footsteps. It was this conservative moral quality that partly distinguished MacLennan as a Canadian writer. To energize his fictions, he needed passages of strong physical action writing, such as his description of the Halifax Explosion of 1917.

  The books published elsewhere by writers younger than those he used as models for The Precipice, offer a stark contrast to this quality. In the United States, Russian-American Ayn Rand had already published The Fountainhead in 1943; Atlas Shrugged, with its revolutionary rejection of religious faith and altruism in favour of egotistic self-interest, followed in 1957. The Kinsey Report on male sexuality appeared the same year as The Precipice. Five years later the companion report on female sexuality was published. These reports revealed, what seemed to many people, shockingly candid information. Yet they opened the door to more and more sexually explicit fiction.

  In the United States, a new generation of creative writers was writing about illicit sexual acts and drug use while expressing these subjects in spontaneous, unrevised writing peppered with profanity.28 One novel MacLennan especially disliked was Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, also published in 1948. Jack Kerouac began On the Road in 1949;29 it was published in 1956, the same year that Allen Ginsberg's Howl appeared. Sexual content fast-forwarded from the pre-Kinsey era. In 1952, J.D. Salinger's iconic Catcher in the Rye and John Steinbeck's East of Eden were among two of the early manifestations of a new zeitgeist that would drive American fiction in a direction far from Canada's. In 1956, Elvis Presley released his No. 1 single “Heartbreak Hotel,” ushering in a sexualized popular music revolution that paralleled what was happening in American fiction.

  William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) explored the inevitable disintegration of morality without law and the acceptability of pedophilia, respectively. Grace Metalious's best-selling Peyton Place (1956), which dealt with incest, abortion, and adultery in a small New England town, made MacLennan's descriptions of Lucy's sexual awakening in Grenville seem Victorian. If MacLennan hoped to join the “American branch cycle” of modern fiction, he could not write novels like The Precipice and expect much enthusiasm south of the border.

  Just as the Beat generation with their penchant for black clothing and communist politics appeared in the United States during the mid-1950s, a new generation of British writers – the so-called Angry Young Men – beg
an to publish their fictional rants of disillusionment against the upper classes. John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956) gave the loosely associated group its name. The gritty realism and agitated resentments of working-class novels like John Braine's Room at the Top (1957) and Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1958) heralded a radical change from the refined, elitist work that preceded them and inspired MacLennan.30 It would not be long before the Beatles expressed these sentiments with their working-class Liverpudlian accents in popular music.

  In Canada, the regional novels MacLennan disdained, such as W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind (1947),31 and novels of more sophisticated quests for religion (Morley Callaghan's Catholic work) or Anglo-British culture (Robertson Davies)32 were the two main strands of what was still a fledgling Canadian fiction at the time.33

  As critics T.D. MacLulich, Robert D. Chambers, and Barbara Pell have all observed, MacLennan's central interest in The Precipice is not the love triangle presaged by Pillar of Fire, nor is it an exploration of Canadian versus American identity, nor is it a commentary on World War II. MacLulich argues cogently that the novel's main theme is failure.34 Yet, while it is true that most of the characters “obsess about failure,” MacLennan's central focus is the theme he would later treat more deeply and extensively in The Watch that Ends the Night. What was needed for this theme to become central was to shift away from a female main character like Lucy and to make Bruce the central character (as MacLennan did with George Stewart in The Watch). That central theme in The Precipice hinged on two questions. What is the meaning of life, once all the crutches of organized religion, political visions, humanism, and even human relationships are knocked away? What can alleviate the profound and painful aloneness of every man, and his desperate need to belong to something greater than himself?