The Deserter, page 1
VOYAGEUR CLASSICS
BOOKS THAT EXPLORE CANADA
Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor
Dundurn presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.
This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions, the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.
The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.
OTHER VOYAGEUR CLASSICS TITLES
The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Dr. Collett Tracey 978-1-55002-666-5
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology, edited and introduced by Germaine Warkentin 978-1-55002-661-0
Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative by Scott Symons, introduced by Christopher Elson 978-1-55488-457-5
The Donnellys by James Reaney, introduced by Alan Filewod 978-1-55002-832-4
Empire and Communications by Harold A. Innis, introduced by Alexander John Watson 978-1-55002-662-7
The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada by William Kilbourn, introduced by Ronald Stagg 978-1-55002-800-3
In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton, edited and introduced by Harold Rhenisch 978-1-55002-769-3
The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser 1806–1808, edited and introduced by W. Kaye Lamb, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-713-6
Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of French Canada by Louis Hémon, translated by W.H. Blake, introduction and notes by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-712-9
The Men of the Last Frontier by Grey Owl, introduced by James Polk 978-1-55488-804-7
Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary by Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe, edited and introduced by Mary Quayle Innis, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-768-6
Pilgrims of the Wild, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-734-7
The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada by Benjamin Drew, introduced by George Elliott Clarke 978-1-55002-801-0
The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune by Ted Allan and Sydney Ostrovsky, introduced by Julie Allan, Dr. Norman Allan, and Susan Ostrovsky 978-1-55488-402-5
Selected Writings by A.J.M. Smith, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-665-8
Self Condemned by Wyndham Lewis, introduced by Allan Pero 978-1-55488-735-4
The Silence on the Shore by Hugh Garner, introduced by George Fetherling 978-1-55488-782-8
Storm Below by Hugh Garner, introduced by Paul Stuewe 978-1-55488-456-8
A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Benjamin Lefebvre 978-1-55488-403-2
The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside by Patrick Slater, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-848-5
Duncan Campbell Scott: Selected Writings, edited, selected, and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45970-144-1
The Town Below by Roger Lemelin, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-803-0
Pauline Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose by Pauline Johnson, selected and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45970-428-2
The Kindred of the Wild: A Book of Animal Life by Charles G.D. Roberts, introduced by James Polk 978-1-45970-147-2
All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion by Peregrine Acland, introduced by Brian Busby and James Calhoun, and with a preface by Ford Madox Ford 978-1-45970-423-7
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems by John McCrae, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45972-864-6
Ringing the Changes: An Autobiography by Mazo de la Roche, introduced by Heather Kirk 978-1-45973-037-3
The Regiment by Farley Mowat, introduced by Lee Windsor 978-1-45973-389-3
God’s Sparrows by Philip Child, introduced by James R. Calhoun 978-1-45973-643-6
Flying a Red Kite by Hugh Hood, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45973-855-3
Copyright © Dundurn Press, 2019
Originally published by McClelland and Stewart, 1964
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
LePan, Douglas, 1914-1998, author
The deserter / Douglas LePan ; introduction by Scott Rayter.
(Voyageur classics : books that explore Canada)
Originally published: Toronto : McClelland & Stewart, 1964.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-4326-7 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4327-4 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4328-1 (EPUB)
I. Rayter, Scott, 1970-, writer of introduction II. Title. III. Series: Voyageur classics
PS8523.E67D4 2019 C813’.54 C2018-906349-1
C2018-906350-5
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITOR’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
EDITOR’S NOTE
MICHAEL GNAROWSKI
There is some ambiguity associated with the spelling of the LePan name. Douglas LePan (1914–98), the author of The Deserter, seems to have used different spellings, as evidenced in his personal archive at the University of Toronto. The record, of course, is in the way Douglas LePan approved the spelling of his name in his published works. The name is spelled as two words in his first two collections of poetry, The Wounded Prince and Other Poems (1948) and The Net and the Sword (1953) for which he won the Governor General’s Award. Both collections of poetry were published by the distinguished London publisher Chatto and Windus, and the spelling is confirmed in Reginald Watters’s authoritative bibliography, A Checklist of Canadian Literature (1959 and 1972).
Eleven years later, LePan published his novel, The Deserter, in which the confusion around the spelling of his name is marked. The name appears as two words on the front of the dust jacket, its spine, and on the hardcover spine. However, the spelling changes on the back cover of the dust jacket, where it appears as one word — capital L and capital P — as it does on the all-important title page of the book. However, this spelling is not found on the copyright registration entry; there, it is Lepan. He adopted a spelling for his name, with a single word with capital L and P, for later books published during his lifetime, including the particularly important memoirs Bright Glass of Memory (1979) and Weathering It: Complete Poems 1948–1987 (1987). This is the spelling agreed upon with the copyright owners and used in this edition of The Deserter.
Douglas LePan had a remarkable and distinguished life. He attended the University of Toronto, Merton College, Oxford, and Harvard University. He served in the offices of Canada’s High Commission in London during the war, then enlisted as an ordinary soldier in the artillery, where he fought in the Italian Campaign. In civilian life, he had a career in the Department of External Affairs, was an assistant to Lester B. Pearson, and was seconded as Secretary of the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, the Gordon Commission, for which he edited a much-praised report. He also helped to develop the Colombo Plan for the United Nations. Later, he taught at Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, where he was the princ ipal of University College. In addition to the Order of Canada, LePan twice won the Governor General’s Award for literature, held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was awarded half a dozen honorary doctorates. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
INTRODUCTION
SCOTT RAYTER
In a piece entitled “A Bewildering First Novel” — a 1964 Globe and Mail review of Douglas LePan’s The Deserter — Arthur Hammond confesses: “I remain baffled by the intent of the book, but very interested.” Indeed, what can one say, even now, about LePan’s only novel, which went on to win the 1965 Governor General’s award for fiction (beating out the clear favourite, Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel ), but has been largely ignored and forgotten, remaining out of print for nearly four decades?
And what of LePan himself? Despite an impressive military record, a postwar career as a diplomat (working closely with Lester B. Pearson, for example), a position as professor of English, status as an award-winning and much-anthologized poet, all the more notable for a collection of gay love poetry he published late in life, LePan has largely faded from public consciousness and Canadian literary history since his death twenty years ago (1914–98).
In the 1960s, his long poem “Tuscan Villa” was for a few years so widely taught in Canadian secondary schools that a Coles Notes guide to the poem was published.1 But that period was brief. Over the intervening decades there has been very little scholarship on his work — and hardly anything said about the novel. Nor, surprisingly, has anyone sought to undertake a biography, even though the carefully preserved, rich, and substantial archive of his papers (which includes professional as well as personal correspondence, the typescripts and notes for all his works, and even his daily calendars) speaks to a variety of research interests.
A fuller account of LePan’s life seems called for, given the not-able lacunae in his 1979 memoir, Bright Glass of Memory. That book tells of his military, diplomatic, and early literary career in London, where he found himself in esteemed company that included John Maynard Keynes, the foremost economist of the twentieth century; the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis;2 and T.S. Eliot, the pre-eminent Modernist poet, playwright, and literary critic. Remarkably, however, he says very little about what seems to have been the most important formative experience of his life — the eighteen months (autumn 1943 to spring 1945) he served as a gunner during the Italian campaign in the Second World War.
LePan gave up a comfortable London-based position at army headquarters as an officer in order to enlist as an ordinary soldier. Those eighteen months with the Royal Canadian Artillery provided the fodder both for early and more decorous poems, such as “Tuscan Villa” and “Elegy for the Romanga” (the former serving as the inspiration for Michael Ondaatje’s setting in The English Patient), and for much blunter later war poems, such as “Below Monte Casino” and “The Haystack.” And, importantly, that experience provided background material for The Deserter — shaping his views on such questions as the nature of heroism and of individual as well as national duty.
The author at about the time of the publication of The Deserter. He was fifty years old.
Yet he chose not to depict the war itself in the novel. In the introduction to Bright Glass of Memory, LePan briefly touches on this central period in his life:
It follows that there are many sides of myself that are not represented here at all. Others may wonder whether I was accustomed to spend all my time with the great. You [i.e., his two sons, to whom the introduction is addressed] will know differently. You know me well enough to know that the time I spent in the ranks [of the army] meant more to me than any of the passages recounted here, and that the friends I had then in extremity were closer to me in crucial respects than any I have had before or since. One of them, a signalmen, is celebrated in “One of the Regiment.” Another of them, an officer, is in his scout car, leading, in “Reconnaissance in Early Light.” I will be remembering till my dying day all those artillery positions for the attack on [Monte] Cassino, and the crossing of the Rapido, and the breaking of the Hitler Line, and during the pursuit to Rome, when the regiment took up a new position almost every day and when the air was jewelled with the Italian light and the constant danger of death. That part of my experience is not touched on here.
The title of the introduction, “A Letter to My Sons,” would suggest that Nick and Don LePan are the intended audience, but LePan nonetheless tantalizes a general readership with the complexities of his undisclosed subjectivity: “There is another part of me that is missing.… It is that hidden part ‘which is death to hide,’ that broods over secrecies and wildnesses and sometimes fashions them into poems.”
LePan’s novel likewise appears to take as its very subject the inexplicable and the unspeakable. It begins: “If the war had not been over, it would have been easier to understand. Then it could have been put down simply to cowardice. But the armistice had been signed two months before; and now the world, as the newspapers kept reassuring their readers, was slowly returning to normal.” Here, the pronoun “it” lacks a clear antecedent, something previously mentioned that would make explicit what “it” denotes — something, very tellingly, that the narrator suggests cannot be understood. A reader might ask further, who won’t understand? Everyone? Specific individuals, such as fellow soldiers, the top brass, or other characters who have yet to be introduced in the novel? And what is the nature of this thing that cannot be understood? Is it an incident, something that has happened? Or what someone has done, a particular act they have committed? There is, perhaps, an antecedent of sorts we can infer from the title of the novel itself. By replacing “it” with “desertion,” the sentence and meaning become clearer, though we can’t know for certain whether the narrator is referring to the act in general or an action taken by, let’s say, the protagonist of this novel, a young Canadian solider named Rusty.
Douglas LePan in his soldier’s plain uniform circa 1943. His cap badge is that of the Royal Canadian Artillery, which he served in during the Italian campaign in the Second World War.
By remaining vague, the author intends not to baffle the reader, but rather to focus on the reasoning — the wherefore and why — which, as we learn, Rusty himself does not fully understand or accept.
The novel postpones the first use of the word “desert” for several pages, interestingly enough, until a detail about how in the infantry Rusty needed to be at the centre of the action — to “be in the attack company. Always closer to the moment’s glittering sword-edge” — but “[n]ow that impulse seemed to have deserted him”; and so, we learn two pages later, “[a]s soon as the blackouts had been put up again and the lights were switched on, he knew that he was going to desert.” His own desire for “action” — his raison d’être — having now deserted him (the military action having come to an end), he rejects the light of day and deserts his post to explore instead the darkness of both the nighttime world outside as well as the dark forces within himself.
Unlike in many other war (and anti-war) novels, Rusty, neither in his own views, nor as a symbol (think of Timothy Findley’s 1977 novel, The Wars), comes to represent the horrors of war — the protagonist as either victim or perpetrator, or both. Rusty does not appear to carry the trauma of war with him, and it is important not to misinterpret his desertion as coming from a place of fear, protest, or trauma, particularly as he deserts after the war has ended and he is about to be demobilized. Rusty’s growing ambivalence about the war and the army, and the ways they provide structure and give purpose and identity to his life, is made evident by the fact that we learn that he has been decorated with a medal for bravery, but are not given the details of how he came to earn it. Rusty states, simply, that it was “easy,” “by the book.”
By contrast, “the one thing that had ever fully pleased and satisfied him in action” was defying his colonel’s orders and going out to rescue Spike, a fellow soldier who lay wounded in the battlefield. For that act of bravery and humanity, he is “reduced to the ranks … [l]osing his stripes.” This kind of “logic” of war, which became the stuff of the absurdist and satiric novels such as the contemporaneous Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, makes Rusty begin to cast doubt on his identity and how to go forward when the war is over. Only in the upside-down world of war could the saving of a life be seen as a transgressive, even insubordinate and punishable act, while killing, the taking of life, is regarded as a moral and legal crime and is rewarded.
