Return of the Sphinx, page 1
RETURN OF THE SPHINX
RETURN OF THE SPHINX
HUGH MACLENNAN
Introduction: Collett Tracey
General Editor: Michael Gnarowski
©McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009
ISBN 978-0-7735-2490-3
Legal deposit third quarter 2009
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
The characters and events in the novel are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental. If the name of any actual person has been given to any character, it was unintentional and accidental.
The lines (slightly adapted) from “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” by Pete Seeger used by permission (copyright 1961, Fall River Music, Inc.) All rights reserved.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
MacLennan, Hugh, 1907–1990
Return of the sphinx / Hugh MacLennan.
ISBN 978-0-7735-2490-3
I. Title.
PS8525.L54R4 2009 C813’.54 C2009-901384-3
Francescae Alinae Carissimae
Dust jacket of the Scribner’s edition (1967), a rather ominous, dark marbelled effect in what is essentially a typographic design.
CONTENTS
General Editor’s Note MICHAEL GNAROWSKI
Chronology
Select Bibliography
Introduction COLLETT TRACEY
RETURN OF THE SPHINX
Book One
Book Two
Epilogue
Cover of the Laurentian Library #10 paperback edition (1970) with a modern office block backgrounding two worried faces.
GENERAL EDITOR’S NOTE
The present text derives from the original edition published by Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York and the MacMillan Co. of Canada in 1967. The novel had a long gestation, with MacLennan saying in December of 1958, “I think possibly I have the cloudy outline of what may be another novel” and, four years later in October 1962, “started a new novel which is probably going to be difficult.” The book was released by MacMillan as a paperback – number 10 in its Laurentian Library Series – in 1970/1971.
Cover of MacLennan’s copy of the paperback (1970) of the Polish translation of Return of the Sphinx.
CHRONOLOGY
1907 John Hugh MacLennan born on 20 March in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, son and second child of Katherine MacQuarrie and Samuel MacLennan, a medical doctor employed by the coal mining industry.
1915 The MacLennan household moves from Cape Breton Island to Halifax where Dr. MacLennan sets up his practice after having been invalided out of service in the First World War.
1917 MacLennan lives through the catastrophe of the Halifax Explosion, which will become the subject of his first published novel, Barometer Rising (1941).
1924 MacLennan graduates from Halifax County Academy with a University Entrance Scholarship and the Yeoman Prize in Latin and Greek. Enrols in Dalhousie University to study Classics, at which he excels.
1928 Having distinguished himself academically and in sports, MacLennan graduates from Dalhousie University, disappointed at not having won the (expected and hoped for) Rhodes Scholarship for Nova Scotia but is then chosen Rhodes Scholar for Canada at large. Sails for England and Oxford in September of that year.
1928–32 Once settled in at Oriel College, MacLennan finds his studies in Classics rigorous and demanding. He has little social life other than sports (rugby and tennis, at which he was a champion player at the University); writes frequent letters to his family, and takes advantage of his vacations to travel modestly on the Continent in France, Italy, Austria, and Germany, where he encounters strong right wing nationalism and the rising tides of fascism and communism. Earns his BA in Classics from Oxford in 1932 and wins a Fellowship at Princeton to continue his studies for a Ph.D.
1932 Sailing home from Oxford, meets an American woman, Dorothy Duncan (1903–1957), a writer (Bluenose: A Portrait of Nova Scotia, 1942) as well as a graphic artist, and marries her four years later.
1932–1935 Unable to find suitable employment, MacLennan, offered a modest fellowship at Princeton, decides to study there for his Ph.D in classical history. While at the University he tries his hand at writing fiction, leading to two early novels, both of which remain unpublished. In 1935 receives his doctorate and his dissertation, “Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study,” is published by Princeton University Press. He moves to Montreal and takes up a position as schoolmaster at Lower Canada College.
1936 Hugh MacLennan and Dorothy Duncan are married on 22 June in Wilmette, Illinois, returning via Boston and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, to settle in Montreal.
1937–1939 MacLennan struggles unsuccessfully to arrange for the publication of his two novels in manuscript, “A Man Should Rejoice” which is rejected by Random House and “So All Their Praises” which is rejected by Longmans Green, both in New York. He reportedly reads Ringuet’s Trente Arpents, which had appeared in 1938 and without which, MacLennan later confesses, Two Solitudes could not have been written. Predicts that war will begin in September of 1939.
1936–1941 Continues at Lower Canada College and begins to develop a career at writing for magazines. He is prompted by his wife to turn his fiction to Canadian themes. She, having written a guide book, Here’s to Canada! (1941), is embarked on her book Bluenose (1942) and is credited with MacLennan’s choosing the Halifax explosion of 1917 as the focus of his novel Barometer Rising, which launches his career as a novelist.
1941 Barometer Rising is published and is well-received. MacLennan continues to teach at Lower Canada College but feels financially constrained and endeavours to supplement his income by writing for magazines.
1943 MacLennan is awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which provides some financial relief and frees him somewhat to work on his next novel, Two Solitudes, which he had apparently begun the previous year. MacLennan’s declared project is to write a novel of Canadian life in the years 1917–40. Announcement of the fellowship generates a series of letters from American publishers (J.B. Lippincott; Doubleday, Doran; Houghton, Mifflin) expressing interest in publishing his next novel.
1944 MacLennan begins correspondence with Willem L. Graff, professor of German, as he tries to pin down the exact wording and location of the “two solitudes” reference in the work of the German poet Rainer-Maria Rilke. In July he dispatches a copy of the 582 page typescript of Two Solitudes to Blanche Gregory, his literary agent in New York, and the publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce. A third copy will go to Collins in Toronto, who will publish in Canada.
1945 Two Solitudes is published (publication date is mid-January although copies had been made available in December of 1944). The book is well-received with congratulatory letters from friends and literary associates and excellent reviews and good sales. The success of Two Solitudes and its financial returns enable MacLennan to resign from Lower Canada College, a position that he had never enjoyed. He wins the Governor General’s Award for fiction.
1948 MacLennan publishes The Precipice, which, while it wins the Governor General’s Award for fiction, is not a commercial or critical success.
1949 Cross Country, a collection of ten previously published essays/articles, half of which had appeared in Maclean’s magazine, is published. The collection wins the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction.
1951 With his wife’s health beginning to fail and medical bills becoming a burden (there had even been a suggestion the previous year that he accept financial help from the Canadian Writer’s Foundation), MacLennan accepts a part-time position in the English Department of McGill University, entering the academic profession in which he will remain until his retirement. Each Man’s Son is published in May in spite of paper shortages.
1954 Thirty and Three, MacLennan’s second collection of essays, is published and wins the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction.
1957 Dorothy Duncan, MacLennan’s wife for twenty-one years, dies after a prolonged struggle with chronic illness.
1959 MacLennan marries Frances Aline Walker, known as Tota, who had been a family friend for some years. The Watch that Ends the Night is published and wins MacLennan’s fifth and last Governor General’s Award.
1960 Scotchman’s Return and Other Essays is published.
1964 MacLennan takes a sabbatical leave from McGill and goes to live in Grenoble, France, where he continues writing his next novel and works hard at mastering spoken French.
1966 The Molson Prize, a rich cash award in the second year of its existence, names MacLennan as the recipient of this honour.
1967 Return of the Sphinx is published; MacLennan is inducted as a Companion of the Order of Canada.
1968 Alarmed at the general malaise in society and the militancy of the young – student riots in Paris; a mob marching to demand a “McGill français”; the burning of the computer centre at Sir George Williams University in Montreal – MacLennan retreats into himself to incubate the themes of personal dysfunction and social alienation that become strong and prophetic elements in his last novel, Voices in Time.
1980 Voices in Time, blurbed as MacLennan’s finest novel, is also his last.
1990 MacLennan dies on 9 November at his country home in North Hatley in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.
Note: MacLennan won many awards and distinctions in his time. He was made a Chevalier of the National Order of Quebec, elected a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada, and had honorary degrees conferred on him by several Canadian Universities.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS BY HUGH MACLENNAN
Barometer Rising (New York/Toronto, 1941)
Two Solitudes (New York/Toronto, 1945)
The Precipice (New York/Toronto, 1948)
Cross Country (Toronto, 1949)
Each Man’s Son (Boston/Toronto, 1951)
Thirty and Three (Toronto, 1954)
The Watch that Ends the Night (New York/Toronto, 1959)
Scotchman’s Return and Other Essays (Toronto, 1960)
Seven Rivers of Canada (New York/Toronto, 1961)
(With the camera of John De Visser)
Return of the Sphinx (New York/Toronto, 1967)
The Colour of Canada (Toronto/Boston, 1967)
The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan: Selected Essays Old and New. Edited by Elspeth Cameron (Toronto, 1978)
Voices in Time (Toronto, 1980)
Hugh MacLennan’s Best. Edited By Douglas Gibson (Toronto, 1991)
BOOKS ABOUT OR RELATING TO HUGH MACLENNAN
Dorothy Duncan, Bluenose: A Portrait of Nova Scotia (New York/London, 1942)
Robert Cockburn, The Novels of Hugh MacLennan (Montreal, 1969)
George Woodcock, Hugh McLennan (Toronto, 1969)
Paul Goetsch, Hugh MacLennan (Toronto, 1973)
Elspeth Cameron, “Hugh MacLennan: An Annotated Bibliography” in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors, Vol. 1. Edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David (Downsview, 1979)
Elspeth Cameron, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life (Toronto, 1981)
Helen Hoy, Hugh MacLennan and His Works (Toronto, 1990)
Mari Peepre-Bordessa, Hugh MacLennan’s National Trilogy: Mapping a Canadian Identity 1940–1950 (Helsinki?, 1990)
Frank M. Tierney, ed., Hugh MacLennan (Ottawa, 1994)
Christl Verduyn, ed., Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence (Ottawa, 1995)
Anne Coleman, I’ll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers (Toronto, 2004)
INTRODUCTION
John Hugh MacLennan was born in Glace Bay, a mining town in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, on 20 March 1907. His mother, Katherine (Katie) MacQuarrie, born of Scottish and United Empire Loyalist parents, was raised in Cape Breton. She was artistic, vivacious, and a warm and loving mother to MacLennan and his older sister, Frances Annie Stewart, born in 1902. MacLennan’s father, Samuel, was a medical doctor whose parents had immigrated to Glace Bay from Scotland in 1832. A strong Calvinist, serious, strict, and pious, he was demanding of his children and had a profound and lasting influence on their lives.
Hugh MacLennan grew up in Halifax and went to school there, graduating in 1924 with the Yeoman Prize in Latin and Greek and a university entrance scholarship. He went to Dalhousie University to study Honours Latin and Greek, in which he excelled, eventually fulfilling his father’s ambitions for him by winning not only the Governor-General’s Gold Medal for Classics but also a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. During the following three years, before graduating with third class honours in 1932, he traveled extensively to Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and Germany. In addition to exposure to European culture and history, MacLennan saw at first hand the upheaval and change occurring there as events moved countries closer and closer to war.
In 1932 MacLennan began his Ph.D. at Princeton University. His dissertation was entitled “Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study” (1935). In it MacLennan explores the disintegration of a Roman colony after it is separated from its parent civilization. Through his work on his dissertation and his travels, MacLennan formed many of the beliefs and ideas that would serve as the foundation for the novels he began to write around the same time.
MacLennan was unable to publish his first two manuscripts, which had an international setting, on the basis that the novels were elusive as they followed neither a British nor an American model. This led MacLennan to realize that Canadian writing had not yet developed to the point that it was accepted as a national literature, not only from an international perspective but by Canadians themselves, and he committed himself to remedying the situation. In 1936, after having married Dorothy Duncan (1903–1957) and begun teaching Latin and History at Lower Canada College in Montreal, MacLennan started Barometer Rising.
The novel was self-consciously Canadian in setting and theme, based on his own experiences as a boy when he viewed the destruction of the Halifax explosion of 1917. In it MacLennan records part of Canada’s history during the First World War when the Imo, a Norwegian ship en route to pick up relief supplies for Belgium, struck the French ship the Mont Blanc, which was loaded with explosives and ammunition. The blast, which occurred at 9:06 AM on 6 December, devastated the town. More than 1, 900 people were killed; many victims were not found and some were never identified. Hospitals treated more than 4, 000 wounded and thousands more were left homeless.1
MacLennan himself, who usually left his house at 9 AM and would have been in the blast area, had been saved because his mother had made him wash his dirty knees before he left home. He never forgot how such a small and unimportant event had had such a profound influence on his life; indeed, it led him to begin questioning the role of arbitrary forces in the world and the way in which they undermine preconceptions of the universe as ordered and controlled. When Barometer Rising appeared in 1941, it was a major success; MacLennan was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and there were requests for another book.
MacLennan then turned his attention to another Canadian concern: the two founding peoples in Canada – the English and French – the tensions that existed between them and the ways in which they touched and defined each other. The novel, entitled Two Solitudes, was published in January 1945 to great literary and commercial acclaim. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in Canada and won MacLennan his first Governor General’s Award. By this time reviewers were beginning to view MacLennan as a driving force behind Canadian fiction and a means by which Canadians might come to know themselves.
Building on this momentum, MacLennan produced The Precipice in 1948; it also became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was awarded a Governor General’s Award. MacLennan toured the country giving lectures and interviews about the novel. He was later awarded Governor General’s Awards for his two collections of essays, Cross-Country (1949) and Thirty and Three (1954).
Despite his literary success and acclaim, MacLennan’s personal life was troubled. The chronic rheumatic fever that affected his wife, Dorothy, became acute and the resulting financial pressures due to health care costs motivated MacLennan to take a part-time post at McGill University. There he began Each Man’s Son (1951) in which he recreated the mining town of his youth. The book won him the Lorne Pierce Medal (1952) and election to the Royal Society of Canada (1953).
In 1957, after a long and agonizing decline, Dorothy died. Devastated by her suffering, by months of hospital visits, bedside vigils, and rising debts, MacLennan funneled his pain into writing what many critics believe is his most moving and profound novel, The Watch that Ends the Night (1959), for which he was awarded yet another Governor General’s Award.
Emotionally spent, MacLennan consciously avoided writing fiction in the following year, preferring to work on essays instead. In 1960 he produced Scotchman’s Return and Other Essays and a series of essays on the rivers of Canada, which were published individually in Maclean’s magazine and eventually collected in book form under the title Seven Rivers of Canada (1961). Then he took a break from writing altogether.
The next several years were a period of great anxiety for MacLennan. The changes that he saw occurring around him were dramatic and profound; as he walked through the halls of McGill University, he felt the increasing hostility of his students as they reacted to the transformations taking place in Quebec. In many ways, as MacLennan looked around him, he saw a totally different world than the one with which he had been familiar before Dorothy’s death.
