Voices in Time Page 3

  “le nationalisme québécois et les répercussions de ce nationalisme au plan d’actes terroristes – sans que l’auteur nous donne des perceptions suffisantes des sociétés montréalaises, anglophone et francophone, pour que les descriptions de celles-ci contribuent assez à une tentative d’explication du problème. Nous devons conclure que l’auteur nous présente trop peu les institutions québécoises qui contribuent à l’existence d’un nationalisme québécois, donc le terrorisme ne serait qu’une manifestation exceptionnelle.”8

  But Brazeau went on to recognize that The Return of the Sphinx and Voices in Time are principally socio-political studies whose focus is not primarily Quebec and the political aspirations of its nationalism.

  MacLennan, however, had some interesting light to throw on the question of his understanding of Quebec. In a 1979 interview with unnamed secondary school students, MacLennan, speaking informally at a time when he had just about completed Voices in Time, said of a French-Canadian Protestant colleague he had once known at Lower Canada College, who had died a few years before the interview:

  “He was a man of remarkable intelligence and a free thinking man. He was somewhat like a father to me, he was older. And I think without realizing it, I learned more about Quebec and its realities with more sympathy from him than I learned from anybody else.”9

  But it was not only the insight into French Canadian life provided by a lifelong francophone friend that enabled MacLennan to write with confidence about Quebec (especially Montreal) and its customs and travails. Admittedly, like the vast majority of Montreal anglophones, MacLennan lived all his life west of St. Lawrence Boulevard, that great divide between the two major linguistic groups of that city which, with the two or three streets on either side of it, inhabited by Jewish and other fairly recently arrived immigrant communities10 (which significantly enough, never made it meaningfully into MacLennan’s fiction), formed a kind of cordon linguistique between English and French. As far as one can tell, he rarely ventured into east end Montreal. He was, however, well read in French Canadian writing, as is evident from the texts he assigned in his Canadian Literature course at McGill. In addition to Ringuet’s Thirty Acres, we read and discussed Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine, Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute and The Cashier, and Roger Lemelin’s The Town Below, all works dealing with French Canadian life and society and, fortunately for students of near impoverished means, made available and accessible in the New Canadian Library, Jack McClelland’s brilliant initiative to bring Canadian writing out in an affordable format.11

  So, to suggest that MacLennan had an inadequate understanding of French Canadian life is to sell him short on sensitivity and awareness. He not only read the literature and taught and discussed it but he freely admitted its influence on his writing

  Finally, we have come full circle and can make sense of the epigraph drawn from Goethe’s Faust Part One with which Voices in Time is launched. If, as one critic has suggested, Goethe’s Faust Part One is a union of passion and wisdom, then it stands to reason that MacLennan would have had recourse to a piece of writing that had been many years in the making and had resonated in the Western mind for almost two centuries. Almost mystically, MacLennan calls upon that wisdom to inform his own journey through the collected, hovering memory of difficult times as he begins to work on his last novel, acknowledging that the “forms and faces seen long ago with troubled, youthful gaze” have come back to haunt him.

  NOTES

  1 See Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 345–71.

  2 Language was always a cardinal issue in the nationalist discourse in Quebec. In earlier times it was significant as the anchor of culture, but in the twentieth century it became a rallying point for a sense of francophone grievance in Quebec as well as Manitoba and Ontario. One of the gurus of intellectual nationalism, Abbé Lionel Groulx (1878–1967), who had written an influential and seminal work in his Histoire du Canada Français (1950–51) as well as his pseudonymous novel L’Appel de la race (1922), had inspired and influenced many members of the educated elite through almost a half century of teaching at the University of Montréal. Intellectual agitation was one thing, but what would have been seriously disquieting for MacLennan was the retreat of the Canadian “brand” in Quebec. The Provincial Legislature had become the National Assembly and Canadian flags had disappeared from its chambers as well as from provincial buildings, French-Canadians had become Québécois/e, “English Go Home” graffiti had begun to appear, and stencilled images of a be-tuqued habitant with a rifle – symbolic of the patriotes of the rebellion of 1837 – popped up on the walls of business buildings and on the stationery of the FLQ’s manifestos.

  The high point of the language “wars” was reached in 1977 with the passage of Bill 101, La charte de la langue française, which relegated English to an unofficial secondary status in Quebec. The mob howling at the McGill gates for a “McGill français” would have felt too close to home. Voices in Time was strikingly contextualized and framed by this all-important decade in Quebec politics, from the October crisis of 1970 to the first attempt at sovereignty with the referendum of 1980.

  3 In March of 1963, three military armouries in Montreal were attacked by incendiary bombs, ushering into public awareness the presence of a violent political movement, the Front de Libération du Québec, which would become known by its initials, FLQ, and would issue a “call to arms” exhorting workers, students, and peasants to form an underground movement against Anglo-American domination. Its leaders began a radical publication which they called Parti Pris (To Take a Stand), the first issue of which appeared in October of 1963. The lead editorial was titled “De la révolte à la révolution” and lamented that “rien ne change au pays du Québec.” In a sense this was a revolution against the “Quiet Revolution” of 1960, which had propelled Quebec into its post-Duplessis era.

  4 The FLQ had been engaged in an ongoing series of acts of violence during which, in addition to demonstrations leading to clashes with the police, explosives were planted in mail boxes and public receptacles, resulting in the maiming of a military bomb disposal expert and the deaths of a night security guard across the street from the McGill campus and a female factory worker who opened a booby-trapped parcel. All of this finally culminated in the kidnapping of a British diplomat, James Cross, and the kidnapping and murder of Pierre Laporte, a provincial cabinet minister. For MacLennan, as for many thoughtful Montrealers, such as Frank Scott, poet and great civil libertarian, and Louis Dudek, poet and university professor, colleagues of MacLennan’s at McGill University, the imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970 was an appropriate response to a situation teetering on the brink of insurrection. To the rest of Canada, cocooned from the violence, the actions of the Government appeared unduly harsh.

  5 It should be noted that MacLennan was exposed to the early days of Fascist hooliganism in the streets of Germany. The more violent and vicious Nazi excesses occurred following Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship of Germany in 1933.

  6 MacLennan was haunted all his life by the austerely devout Presbyterianism in which he had been raised. There is no better witness to the emotional coldness of the family in which he grew up than that offered by his young wife, Dorothy Duncan, who described her first Christmas with the MacLennans:

  “No one had yet mentioned Merry Christmas, and no candles or holly or decorations or special treats were in evidence.” A page and a half later, that Christmas having fallen on a Sunday, Dorothy Duncan went on to say: “After dinner the Sunday ritual continued on its way. An hour or two of reading, but no knitting or listening to radio programs or playing of games. I couldn’t be sure whether these activities were forbidden or merely considered undesirable. At three o’clock a walk was in order with overshoes and stick and Sunday muffler … At six there was a request – after the departure of the [tea] guest for the son [Hugh] to play a few psalm tunes … At seven they were back at St. Matthew’s for t
he evening service, this time minus me. A cold supper awaited their return, and by ten-thirty the house was quiet and everyone was once again in bed.” Bluenose [:] A Portrait of Nova Scotia (Toronto: Collins, 1946), 110–13

  7 The German element is an important backdrop in Voices in Time, so much so that Jacques Brazeau (quoted at greater length at the end of this essay) has written “Ce qui s’est passé en Allemagne constitue le gros de ce roman” and we have been given a worm’s eye view of MacLennan’s sojourns in Germany during his Oxford days by his biographer. There are also the epigraph that MacLennan took from the dedication in Goethe’s Faust and the name Dehmel, borrowed from Richard Dehmel (1863–1920), a German lyric poet, dramatist, and philosopher, as well as many German phrases and expressions which, while they are intelligible by virtue of context, MacLennan deliberately left untranslated.

  The figure of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (1887–1945), who plays a not insignificant role in the novel, is interesting. It appears that MacLennan had an abiding interest in Canaris, who was chief of German military intelligence in Hitler’s regime and was executed days before the end of World War II on suspicion of being involved in the plot against Hitler. (On p. 237 McLennan refers to Canaris as a rear-admiral who was chief of the Intelligence Service. Canaris would actually have held the rank of Admiral, to which he had been promoted in 1940. He was chief of the Abwehr, the arm of German military intelligence, from 1934 to 1944.) Conrad Dehmel’s father, Admiral Gottfried Dehmel, is described as having a naval career not unlike that of Canaris and is executed in much the same fashion and for the same reasons by the Nazis. There is another albeit tenuous connection with Canaris in Two Solitudes. In that novel, Captain Yardley recounts that he lost his leg as a result of action by the German cruiser Dresden, which raided merchant shipping during the First World War and was eventually sunk after being trapped by the British Navy. Its crew was interned in South America, but a junior officer named Wilhelm Canaris made a sensational escape, working his way back to Germany after many adventures, which included slipping undetected through England. For MacLennan, one concludes, Canaris, enigmatically on the side of the civilized and the correct, must have typified the idea of the good German.

  8 Jacques Brazeau, quoted in Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 47.

  9 Ministry of Education, “Hugh MacLennan.” In Three Canadian Writers, (Richmond, B.C.: Provincial Educational Media Centre, 1983), 61.

  10 That bit of urban geography, St. Urbain and Clark streets on the west and City Hall and de Bullion streets on the east, had its own special contribution to make to the literature of Canada through major works by A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Mordecai Richler, to mention its most prominent literary “citizens.” There is a useful discussion of this “other” literature in Michael Greenstein’s Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989).

  11 These paperbacks sold for about a dollar to a dollar fifty and competed in one’s budget with lunch at a local greasy spoon, much favoured by indigent students, warehouse workers, and delivery men from Eaton’s Department Store. A three-course meal (rice soup, chicken à la king, jello, and a coffee) could be had for fifty-nine cents. Anything over fifty-nine cents was taxable.

  VOICES IN TIME

  __________________________

  PART ONE

  JOHN WELLFLEET’S STORY

  A warm morning in June, not a cloud in the sky, another winter and a long cold spring gone over at last and the lilac was in bloom again. The scent of it entering the open window of his room was so intoxicating it brought a mist to the eyes of the elderly man standing beside it. During his illness the past February he had wondered if he would ever smell lilac again. But now the sun was warming his veins and one more summer at least seemed assured to him, his seventy-fifth.

  The buzzer stabbed the silence and made him start, for it had been more than three months since anyone had called him. He went to the instrument eagerly, wondering who it might be who had remembered he was still alive. What he heard was an unfamiliar and apparently youthful voice announcing itself as André Gervais and asking if this was Mr. John Wellfleet.

  “Yes, I’m Wellfleet.”

  The man Gervais then informed him that he had in his possession some papers and had good reason to believe that they were concerned with Wellfleet’s family. The old man’s eagerness vanished.

  “Mr. Gervais, did you say? I don’t think I know you. Did I hear you say something about my family?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said. Your family.”

  “Well, I have no family.”

  “But you must have had a family once. Let me explain. These papers aren’t new. They’re so old I can hardly believe they’re real. There could be quite a situation here. I can’t understand much about these papers, but they might turn out to be very important.”

  The stranger spoke fluent English, but there was an intonation of French in his voice and Wellfleet, thinking he was an official, replied in that language.

  “Je le répète, Monsieur. Ma famille n’existe plus.”

  Gervais went on in English, “I don’t think you understand me. These papers are very old.”

  Oh, for God’s sake, the old man thought, another of them! Papers and questionnaires, this form and that form and that form and this form, his life had been turned into a bog by them. He said nothing and the stranger went on.

  “I went to the Bureau of Records, of course, before I called you.”

  “What good did that do you?”

  “It’s certainly unreliable, the Bureau. There are many gaps.”

  “Did I hear you say gaps? You must be very young if you’ve just discovered that.”

  “Yes, I’m young, but there is a Bureau. They’ve been trying to restore the data for quite a while now. You must have known that.”

  “I did not know it.”

  “The Bureau can’t be entirely useless. I certainly found the information that there were people called Wellfleet living in Metro a long time ago. So my question is – were you one of them?”

  What’s he after? Wellfleet thought. Then he remembered how vulnerable he was.

  “Yes,” he said bleakly, “I may have been one of them. But when I was young the city I lived in wasn’t called Metro, and what difference does it make where anyone lived that long ago?”

  He was on the point of breaking the connection when he heard Gervais say eagerly, “I have a name here – Stephanie Wellfleet. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  It was so sudden the old man’s throat seized up and for several seconds he could not articulate. When finally he spoke his voice was asthmatic.

  “She was – she – she was my mother.”

  The man called Gervais became excited: “I had hoped she was, but in a case like this I had to be absolutely sure. This is wonderful.”

  Wellfleet felt as though someone had torn stitches from a wound in his soul. Over the years a hard-tested instinct of self-preservation had drilled him to control a naturally impulsive character, but now the control broke.

  “Who the hell are you?” His voice rose almost to a scream. “Why can’t you people leave me alone? My mother? How do you know she even existed? How do you know her name? And what business is this of yours anyway?”

  He was breathing thickly, noisily, because his pulmonary tract was congested. Gervais was talking, his voice was kind, he was trying to soothe the old man, but Wellfleet was hearing nothing. His mother! He had been told that all the records had been destroyed long ago. Completely obliterated. And since then the volume of disappointment, fear, humiliation, and loneliness had been what it had been. This young man, whoever he was, could know nothing of that. He could know very little about anything that had mattered.

  Occasionally his mother returned to him in his sleep and was so real he could hear the caress of her voice. But it was a cold thing, a cruel thing. So often when he tried to remember those he had loved in his youth a
nd younger manhood, tried to remember them when he was awake, they had no more life in them than the faded photographs you find in a drawer when you are looking for something else. And what could this mean but that those we have loved so vastly that they have been translated into the memory cells and the mystery of our minds, and have been so woven into our own lives that they were our reason for existing – after they have been dead long enough we can recover them only when we are asleep.

  “No!” he shouted, and broke the connection.

  When he stumbled to his feet the beauty of the morning was gone and the walls of his room were weaving as though he were drunk or seasick. He blundered outside and collapsed onto a bleached wooden chair on a patch of fresh grass. For several minutes his lungs rasped to his breathing, but gradually his blood pressure subsided and he was still.

  Three other old men were taking the sun but they had no interest in him nor he in them. He watched a robin fly into the lilac bush with a worm in its bill. The sun heated his limbs and stirred a little color into his long, pale face. The sky was enormous this morning, deep blue over the fields and trees. Summer was certainly coming; on a day like this it was almost here. Even the hum of a mosquito was soothing.

  But there was no way this solitary old man could soothe his mind. He went inside again among his books. The walls of his room were double-lined with them and if he still felt human it was they that had kept him so. In his youth he had been lazy and irregular but he had always enjoyed reading. Only when he had been discarded as inoperative had he become a student. These books out of a lost and marvellous past were his only friends. He had collected many before the Destructions and had found many more afterwards in out-of-the-way places where they had been lost or forgotten, but none of his books helped him now. He picked up one he had been reading with pleasure the night before but now the words refused to come alive for him. He sat still and cursed himself for the fool of fools for having cut off this André Gervais, or whoever he was, without having learned a single thing except that somehow he knew his mother’s name. He had no idea how to recover him.