The Eye of a Stranger

...In fact, he sees both Canada in general, and French Canada in particular, as examples, at different levels, of the resistance to monolithic authority and the philosophy of the melting pot...

...The surprising thing about Wilson's treatment of Callaghan is that he defends him on the worst possible terrain, as a naturalistic writer to be discussed in terms of psychological probability, when actually Callaghan is, at his best, a very good writer of parables in the moralist tradition which often deliberately flout the demands of plausibility...

...At the same time, O Canada does raise the curious question of the difference between the internal and the external views of a country's literature...

...This is hardly the most informative presentation for American readers, though it is admittedly the most exotic...

...At the same time' it will be salutary for English-speaking Canadians to see the whole Quebec question through the eyes of an intelligent outsider, and also to read a group of first-rate assessments of French-Canadian writers...

...Even the first of these essays, which has something to say about English- Canadian writing, is over-shadowed by Wilson's great preoccupation...

...The fact is that Callaghan has, if anything, been over-praised in Canada, and that, if critics there were mildly annoyed at Wilson's somewhat inapt comparisons, it was not because, as he suggests, mean spirits were trying to martyr an artist, but because the time has come to look honestly at the very uneven work of a novelist who has produced some of the best Canadian writing—and also some of the worst...

...There are writers I have not read—such as Robertson Davies and Ethel Wilson, Ringuet and Vyes Theriault—who I am told are of special interest, and I hope that I shall not be reproached for omitting these figures or others...

...He begins with two brief notes on Morley Callaghan, in which he contends that Callaghan is a neglected novelist, and complains that his own efforts to place him in the same literary league as Turgenev and Chekhov have caused unmerited and ungrateful fury among Canadian critics...

...no Canadian or even a foreigner resident in Canada for a long time could possibly have written them...

...To begin, as the acknowledgments in his preface clearly convey, he has throughout his visits been much in the hands of the Canadian literary establishment, of the successful novelists, superior journalists and editorial mandarins of Toronto and Montreal...

...For what I picked on then as unfamiliar, exotic, worth emphasizing because it seemed to give a clue to a different existence from that I was accustomed to, has now become part of my life, and if I ever write of it again it will be with the accustomed eye of the participant and not with the eye of a stranger...

...His journeys have led him to the East, and it is understandable that Montreal should have been more congenial, more exotic and more interesting to him than Toronto...

...In the same way, to Wilson, the strange morbidities of French-Canadian fiction are, for the present at least, more piquant than anything that younger English-Canadian writers have to offer, and the separatist terrorists of Quebec are more interesting, evidently, than the Doukhobor terrorists of British Columbia...

...I have come across no English-Canadian study of the fiction of Anne Hebert or Marie-Claire Blais as sensitive and penetrating as Wilson's...

...Wilson, of course, is the first to be aware of this, and to anticipate possible attacks by a frank admission...

...Even so, and accepting this admission as our guide in judging O Canada, there is no doubt that Wilson's readings of what he has encountered are curiously idiosyncratic in both emphasis and conclusion...

...I do not want it to be supposed," he remarks, "that I am attempting here an adequate survey of even current Canadian literature, or even, necessarily, the best of this...

...In all, Wilson devotes at least three quarters of his space and attention to French Canada, and no more than a quarter to English Canada...

...I am not pretending here to do more than try to call attention to some writers who have attracted my own attention...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Editor, "Canadian Literature," Author, "The Writer and Politics" Ever since childhood, Edmund "Wilson has been an off-and-on traveler to Canada, first in family summer trips to eastern Canada, and once, long ago in 1915, across the continent by the Canadian Pacific Railroad to Vancouver and through the island-studded Strait of Georgia to Victoria...

...Fifteen years ago, when I returned to a Canada left so long ago in childhood that it had become a completely strange country, I wrote a book of travel impressions of the Canadian West Coast, and whenever I look at it again I realize that I could not possibly write a similar book now, after so many years as an intermittent resident...

...In considering Smith's anthology, Wilson deals equally with French and English writers, and spends more time on the Canadian Rimbaud, Emile Nelligan, than he does on E. J. Pratt, the Grand Old Man among the English-speaking poets...

...the third to an inquiry into French-Canadian nationalism and separatism in their political rather than literary aspects...

...At the same time one can observe French Canada, with its inner ferment and its rebellion against the real or imagined tyranny of the majority, taking shape in his mind as a North American symbol of the need—which he so passionately feels—to rebel against the creeping uniformity that is afflicting the modern world...

...In continental Europe, for example, Mazo de la Roche is still the favorite Canadian author...

...He ends with a cry of rebellious brotherhood which most Canadians will welcome even if they do not feel it to be entirely deserved: "And all power in its recalcitrance to that still uncoordinated, unblended and indigestible Canada that is obstructing assimilation not only abroad but within itself...

...I have not tried to be comprehensive, and it may well be thought that my subjects have been chosen rather arbitrarily...

...The problem we all have to face is the defense of individual identity against the centralized official domination that can so easily become a faceless despotism...

...An American's notes they certainly are...

...But the really striking aspect of Wilson's Notes is the fact that, to this American litterateur with strongly social inclinations, the most interesting part of Canada is obviously Quebec, and the most interesting Canadian literature is that written in French...

...His book has clear limitations which it is well to notice at once...

...It is this discovering eye which Wilson brings to the culture of Canada, or rather to certain of its aspects, principally literary and political...

...I am not suggesting that their views have affected Wilson's judgments, but undoubtedly the prospects they opened to him were limited...

...In part, of course, this is due to the accidents of Wilson's recent travel...

...During the last winter he devoted three long articles in the New Yorker to the results of his inquiries, and these, slightly edited and supplemented by some extra material on the Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan, are now published in volume form as O Canada: An American's Notes on Canadian Culture...

...My own magazine, Canadian Literature, and A. J. M. Smith's Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, both of which cover writers from all regions of Canada, are mentioned specifically because they are bilingual publications, and the two English-writing novelists with whom Wilson deals lengthily and well are Hugh MacLennan, with his concern, for the national identity of Canada and the two solitudes of its linguistic regions, and John Buell, Montreal author of The Pyx and Four Days, who thinks of his own work as French in spirit and whom Wilson describes as "a good bridge for a transition to French Canada...

...Within the last decade, his trips have led him to Montreal and Quebec, to Toronto and Stratford, but not again, as far as one can gather, to places farther west on the map than southern Ontario...

...In these most recent trips Wilson has carried with him the observant and inquisitive eye of the cultural natural historian, on the lookout for exotic phenomena...

...The second of his three major essays is devoted entirely to a study of French Canadian fiction...