Hugh MacLennan

Template:Short description Template:For-multi Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox person John Hugh MacLennan Template:Post-nominals (March 20, 1907 – November 9, 1990) was a Canadian writer and professor of English at McGill University. He won five Governor General's Awards and a Royal Bank Award.

Family and childhood

MacLennan was born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, on March 20, 1907.Template:Sfnm His parents were Samuel MacLennan, a colliery physician, and Katherine MacQuarrie; Hugh also had an older sister named Frances.Template:Sfnm Samuel was a stern Calvinist, while Katherine was creative, warm and dreamy, and both parents would be large influences on Hugh's character.Template:Sfn In 1913, the family spent several months in London while Samuel took on further study to become a medical specialist.Template:Sfn On returning to Canada, they briefly lived in Sydney, Nova Scotia, before settling in Halifax.Template:Sfn In December 1917, young Hugh experienced the Halifax Explosion, which he would later write about in his first published novel, Barometer Rising.Template:Sfnm From the ages of twelve to twenty-one, he slept in a tent in the family's backyard, even in the cold winter, possibly as an escape from his strict father.Template:Sfnm Hugh grew up believing in the importance of religion; he and Frances regularly went to Sunday school, and the family attended Presbyterian church services twice each Sunday.Template:Sfn He was also active in sports, and became especially good at tennis, eventually winning the Nova Scotia men's double championship in 1927.Template:Sfn

Education

MacLennan and his sister were pushed extremely hard by their father to spend long hours learning the classics.Template:Sfn While this was very difficult for Frances, who had no interest in Greek, Hugh grew to enjoy this field of study.Template:Sfn Their father had an ambitious educational path planned for Hugh: studying the classics at Dalhousie University, getting a Rhodes Scholarship, and then continuing his studies in England.Template:Sfn

While at Dalhousie, he realized that his inner wish was to pursue an artistic career, the influence of his creative mother.Template:Sfn At Oxford, he struggled with balancing his passion for Greek and Latin studies with these artistic instincts.Template:Sfn In his first year at the university's Oriel College,Template:Sfn MacLennan worked incredibly hard at his classics courses, but was only able to achieve second-class honours.Template:Sfn By his second year, he had resigned himself to such results, and while still working diligently, decided not to overwork himself as before.Template:Sfn In his fourth year, he was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on his studies and spent more and more time at tennis and writing poetry.Template:Sfn In letters to his family from around this time are hints that he hoped to be a successful writer.Template:Sfn In late 1931, MacLennan sent some of his poetry to three publishers, including the firms of John Lane and Elkin Mathews, but it was turned down.Template:Sfn

MacLennan's four years in Oxford gave him the opportunity to travel throughout Europe, and he visited countries such as Switzerland, France, Greece, and Italy.Template:Sfnm He spent some of his holidays lodging with a family in Germany, through which he acquired a very good proficiency in German.Template:Sfn His travels and his exposure to different political ideas caused MacLennan to begin to question his father's puritanical, conservative attitudes that he had until then taken for granted.Template:Sfn

MacLennan won a $400 scholarship to continue his studies at Princeton University, and despite his growing disinclination to keep studying the classics, he decided to go there.Template:Sfn This was partly to appease his father, and partly because the Great Depression meant that there were few jobs available.Template:Sfn In June 1932, while sailing home from England, he met his future wife, American Dorothy Duncan.Template:Sfn Falling in love with her made him change his mind about Princeton.Template:Sfn For one thing, his father insisted he should not get married before becoming financially independent, which would mean delaying marriage at least until his graduation. In addition, MacLennan was already unhappy about having to accept money from his father for the part of his Princeton studies that would not be covered by his scholarship.Template:Sfn However, his applications were rejected from both of the Canadian universities he applied to that had classics department positions opening; thus, he grudgingly agreed to go to Princeton after all.Template:Sfn

His three years at Princeton were unhappy. The style of classical study there was very different from what he was used to at Oxford, with Princeton's scholarship "consist[ing] of extremely detailed analyses of classical texts and sources—thorough, but unoriginal."Template:Sfn He began to rebel against his father's ideals: he stopped going to church and put increasing energy into his writing at the expense of his studies; furthermore, in addition to resenting his financial dependence on his father, he continued his relationship with Dorothy even though he knew his father would not approve of her American, Lowland Scottish, Christian Science, business-world background.Template:Sfn

Unpublished novels

At Princeton, MacLennan wrote his first novel, So All Their Praises. He found one publisher who was willing to take the manuscript, as long as he made certain changes; however, this company went out of business before the book could be published.Template:Sfn In spring 1935, he finished his PhD thesis, Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study, about the decline of a Roman colony in Egypt,Template:Sfnm which was published by Princeton University Press and reprinted in 1968 by A.M. Hakkert.Template:Sfn

In 1935, there were very few teaching jobs available as a result of the Depression,Template:Sfn and MacLennan's field of study, the classics, was in particular becoming less significant in North American education.Template:Sfn He took a position at Lower Canada College in Montreal, Quebec, even though he felt it was beneath him, as just his Dalhousie BA would have been a sufficient qualification for the job.Template:Sfn He generally did not enjoy working there, and resented the long hours required of him for low pay, but was nonetheless a stimulating teacher, at least for the brighter students.Template:Sfn MacLennan would later poke fun at Lower Canada College in his depiction of Waterloo School in The Watch That Ends the Night.Template:Sfn On June 22, 1936, he and Dorothy were wed near her home in Wilmette, Illinois, and settled in Montreal.Template:Sfn

Meanwhile, in 1934–1938, MacLennan was working on his second novel, A Man Should Rejoice.Template:Sfn Longman, Green and Company and Duell, Sloan and Pearce both showed strong interest in the novel, but in the end neither published it.Template:Sfn

In February 1939, MacLennan's father died after suffering from high blood pressure. It was a huge surprise to MacLennan, as in the previous year they had just begun to become closer and to reconcile their opposing views.Template:Sfn For several months after his father's death MacLennan continued to write letters to him, in which he discussed his thoughts on the possibility and implications of a war in Europe.Template:Sfn

Barometer Rising

Template:Main Dorothy convinced MacLennan that the failure of his first two novels was due to his having set one in Europe and the other in the United States; she persuaded him to write about Canada, the country he knew best.Template:Sfn She told him that "Nobody's going to understand Canada until she evolves a literature of her own, and you're the fellow to start bringing Canadian novels up to date."Template:Sfn Until then there had been a sporadic tradition of Anglo-Canadian literature, with such writers as Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865), Susanna Moodie (1803-1885), L. M. Montgomery (1874-1942), Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Morley Callaghan (1903 – 1990), and W. O. Mitchell (1914-1998). MacLennan set out to define Canada for Canadians through a national novel.Template:Sfn

Barometer Rising, his novel about the social class structure of Nova Scotia and the Halifax Explosion of 1917, was published in 1941.

Later novels

His most famous novel, Two Solitudes, a literary allegory for the tensions between English and French Canada, followed in 1945. That year, he left Lower Canada College. Two Solitudes won MacLennan his first Governor General's Award for Fiction. In 1948, MacLennan published The Precipice, which again won the Governor General's Award. The following year, he published a collection of essays, Cross Country, which won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction.

In 1951, MacLennan returned to teaching, accepting a position at McGill University.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1952, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and awarded the society's Lorne Pierce Medal.Template:Sfn In 1954, he published another essay collection, Thirty and Three, which again won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In 1956, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.Template:Sfn

One of MacLennan's students at McGill was Marian Engel,Template:Sfn who became a noted Canadian novelist in the 1970s. He served as her master's supervisor in Template:Circa.Template:Sfn Another notable student was Leonard Cohen, the popular songwriter, poet and novelist.

Dorothy Duncan died in 1957.Template:Sfn MacLennan married his second wife, Aline Walker, in 1959. That same year, he published The Watch That Ends the Night, which won his final Governor General's Award.

In 1967 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1985 he was made a Knight of the National Order of Quebec.

MacLennan continued to write and publish work, with his final novel Voices in Time appearing in 1980.Template:Sfn He died on November 9, 1990, in Montreal, Quebec.Template:Sfn

The Canadian band The Tragically Hip, on their album Fully Completely, have a song called "Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)". A passage from The Watch That Ends the Night is adapted for use in the song.

Bibliography

Novels

• Man Should Rejoice, a critical edition by Hugh MacLennan; edited and with an introduction by Colin Hill, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, April 2019, Template:ISBN
• Barometer Rising (1941)
• Two Solitudes (1945)
• The Precipice (1948)
• Each Man's Son (1951)
• The Watch That Ends the Night (1957)
• Return of the Sphinx (1967)
• Voices in Time (1980)

Non-fiction

• Oxyrhyncus : An Economic and Social Study (1935)
• Canadian Unity and Quebec (1942)
• Cross Country (1949)
• The Future of the Novel as an Art Form (1959)
• Scotchman's Return and Other Essays (1960)
• Seven Rivers of Canada (1961). US title The Rivers of Canada: The Mackenzie, the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, the Red, the Saskatchewan, the Fraser, the St. John (1962).
• The Colour of Canada (1967)
• The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan (1978)
• On Being a Maritime Writer (1984)
• Dear Marian, Dear Hugh:The MacLennan–Engel Correspondence (1995; ed. Christl Verduyn)

See also

• Two Solitudes (film)

References

Works cited

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Further reading

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External links

• MacLennan project at McGill University