Books and Canada

DR. C. C. GOLDRING: The birth of a child is usually a time of rejoicing for the parents. According to reports, the fathers on such occasions sometimes show unusual hilarity. An event somewhat similar to the birth of a child is the publication of a book. On the day it makes its public appearance the writer surely experiences a sense of realization, high hopes, and perhaps some fears for the treatment which might be meted out to the book which is so real a part of him.

Today, we welcome as our guest Mr. Edward Weeks, whose new book "The Open Heart" is being published in Canada today, October 12th. As in the case of a blessed event, we offer Mr. Weeks our congratulations and best wishes on this occasion.

After graduating from Harvard University and taking a post-graduate course at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr. Weeks became a manuscript reader and book salesman. Since 1924 he has been associated with the Atlantic Monthly in various capacities. From 1927 to 1937 he was Editor-in-Chief of the Atlantic Monthly Press. In 1938 he was appointed Editor of the magazine and, under his editorship, it doubled its circulation. He became a Director of the company and in 1944 he was appointed Vice-President.

Mr. Weeks has written books and articles, he has conducted many lecture tours, and for two years he conducted a half-hour radio programme over Station WJZ. He has participated in many civic and public service activities and his contribution to culture and to community service has been recognized by eight universities who have conferred on him honorary degrees.

It is a privilege to present to this audience, Mr. Edward Weeks, author of "The Open Heart" and editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

MR. WEEKS: One of the rewards of age is in coming back, coming back to old friends and to new reunions in places you hold dear. Toronto has been dear to me since the spring of 1927 when I came here to participate in the dinner in honour of Miss Mazo de la Roche whose novel JALNA had won our Atlantic Prize. That was more than a quarter of a century ago, and since then there have been thirteen novels about the Whiteoaks, a family saga unique in American letters. It is small wonder that a family as loyal and warm-hearted as the Whiteoaks should compel the love of other families in Canada, the United States and Great Britain; but when the books were translated in foreign editions, in seventeen foreign languages the dispossessed-people uprooted by Hitler-displaced persons from all over Europe-came to regard Jalna, that imaginary estate in Ontario, as a sanctuary second only to the homes they had lost. No other Canadian author has ever had such an international following. To read the letters that come to her from Balts, Estonians, Hungarians, Germans, Czechs is to be deeply touched.

I came to Canada first as an editor; then as an angler seeking the wildness and challenge of your salmon rivers; and, today, in the unfamiliar role of an author. (Editors rarely write books.) On these many visits I have noticed some things that have changed, some things that are very different from our side of the border, and some things that seem as unchanging as Gibraltar.

My approach is usually by way of the Eastern seaboard, and across the border at Vanceboro, Houlton, or Presque Isle. As I pass through the Customs I know I am in a new country: The colours and emblems are different; the civility - your candid, fair-spoken civility - is different; you are not as spendthrift as we - that is the Scotch in you - and you seem so much more intent on obeying the law. These I call your constant qualities; they have not changed in my life time and I hope they never will.

The sense of right and wrong is deep in you and this I think is your English heritage. If there is a motor accident on a Canadian highway and someone is fatally hurt, do you know what happens? As soon as the injured has been attended to, the witnesses and the first Canadian Mountie to reach the spot go right to work to determine who was responsible. Yes, honestly. I don't mean that in the States we roll the bodies into the nearest ditch and drive on; no, we are more considerate than that. But there is a reluctance to serve as a witness and at the back of our minds is the thought that the insurance companies will straighten things out in the end, so why worry; thus the fierce urgency to determine who was right and who was wrong and that it shall not happen again is not as uppermost as it should be. This is surely one case where we can profit by your example.

In times past we have each nourished illusions about the other and it pleases me to see that some of these are now fading away in the mist. In Canada you have nourished the illusion that we in the United States were simply waiting for the most opportune moment to invite you to become our Forty-Ninth State; in short, that we had friendly designs on you. Some people among us did have that notion in times past but they were always a minority and today we have too much respect for your independence to believe in any such fantasy.

We for our part have nourished the illusion that Canada was a young country cousin, in the awkward stage and a little short of cash, but in the end he'd make out all right. Well, to my benighted countrymen who still think that way I feel like saying "Lord, how Cousin Willie has grown! You ought to go up and see him some time!" A friend of mine, a Bostonian who has oil interests in Texas and Canada, was speaking to a small group of us about some of the extraordinary developments in the Dominion and he ended with this: "You know what Canada is like?

It's like a really prosperous Texas!" When you consider that Texas is the richest and most resourceful of our forty-eight states, you will see that this Yankee was trying hard not to exaggerate.

Canada's new-found resourcefulness and her ability to speak her independent mind are among the most exciting things that have happened to our Northern Hemisphere in the Twentieth Century. When Canada quietly determined to go ahead with the St. Lawrence Seaway on her own; and when last March Mr. Lester Pearson, your Secretary for External Affairs, speaking to the Canadian Parliament, said that while Canada "could not stand aloof from a major war which threatened the very existence of the United States," he did not consider a conflict over the Chinese coastal islands to be such a situation,-in each instance we listened to your calm voice of independence and it did us good.

In a world of tumult such as ours your almost measureless resources provide reassurance and a solid foundation on which to build. More first-grade iron ore than we have in the Messabi Range, more hydroelectric power than you can possibly use for yourselves, uranium which will soon be processed at the rate of 10,000 tons a day, and in Pembina, the biggest oil field on this continent, three times the size of the East Texas field-and the end is not yet.

All this marks your Dominion as one of the coming nations of the future, a country capable of providing happiness for far more citizens than you number today. But I speak as an editor, not as an economist. What I want to know is the effect all this prosperity will have on Canadian Literature. It could be dynamic; it could enable more of your young people to venture into the arts; it could shake you free of certain old traditions and complacencies. I repeat-it could be dynamic.

Good writing is often provoked by change, and the more violent the change the more poignant the writing can be. During the second World War I visited the State of Utah and spoke at two of the Mormon universities. The Mormons are a bucolic people who prefer the quiet life of farming to the turmoil of big business. For decades they have been able to keep the lid on their iron, their coal, their copper; they did not want steel mills and smelters in their green valleys; but in the 1940's when the West Coast lived in fear of a Japanese invasion the Mormon country became our second line of defence, and the Government began the industrial development of its resources the Mormons would have liked to have kept hidden. As I travelled through the Wasatch Mountains I was reminded of that Welsh novel HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, for overnight the face of the land and the way of life were being changed. The same thing is happening to you straight across your country. I see it when I go up to New Brunswick to fish. Guides and their sons who used to take such pride in our river are now driving trucks; the once barren acres of Labrador have become a mining community; the forests of Ontario are being opened up to new highways; oil wells are springing up in your wheat fields; new people are coming in. HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY with its note of regret is only part of this story. The big part is the opening of the country like the opening of our West which took fifty years to get into high gear and fifty years before it got into literature.

There is another theme very close to your hearts of which we hear far too little,-I mean the persistent growth of French Canada, your nation within a nation. Gilbert Parker, a Canadian who settled in London, first began to write about the French Canadians in the days of the vast Seigniories. After him there was silence, silence broken by Louis Hemon with his eloquent MARIA CHAPDELAINE. But that promising young novelist did not live to give us more, and again silence settled in.

What is the impact of the French Canadian upon the Scotch-Irish heritage of Ontario? There must be some intermarriage; there must be some humour in your contacts, at times even some conflict. Yes, of course, it is a sensitive subject; but it is also life, your life, and it is time that some of you wrote about it. I do not recommend Abie's Irish Rose as the best play Broadway has produced in this century, but there is in that comedy laughter, the spirit of reconciliation and an acceptance of human nature you would do well to remember.

From your seafaring provinces come too few books about the sea. One of the best of them I remember in recent years is Evelyn M. Richardson's WE KEEP A LIGHT, which was awarded your Governor-General's Medal and well deserved it. Her story of that tiny island of Bon Portage; of the care of the lamps, of the rescue of mariners washed ashore, of the teaching of the children, of the gunning parties in the fall, of the awakening to a sub-zero house and of the heavenly respite of Christmas and of Laurie's illness-all this is a homely, touching story charged with affection.

But think of your rugged coastline on the North Atlantic; where there are so many fishermen, could there not be another CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS or another playright like Synge? The Canadian Navy gave a splendid account of itself in the Second World War. Why is it that from Nova Scotia, from Halifax, from Prince Edward Island, from Newfoundland there has not yet come a story to compare with THE CAINE MUTINY or THE CRUEL SEA?

In the United States, where so many of the rivers are polluted and so much of the wildlife on the way out, we look to you as the one incorruptible guardian of virgin country. Your care of your forests; your ability to keep your rivers unpolluted and alive; the sanctuaries you provide for the great flocks of wild fowl-these are vital parts of your national responsibility which you may find it more difficult to maintain in the days of your new wealth. For prosperity has always trampled down natural beauty. But with your respect for law and your love of the wilderness, I have faith that you will hold your own.

And where will you find a more lyrical theme for your poets than in this great saga of your North Woods? Your fine descriptive writers who paint in prose, men like Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Farley Mowat, W. O. Mitchell and Roderick Haig-Brown have found their subjects in the tundra, the windswept prairie, the dark forest and the white water. So I am confident will your poets of the future.

I mean no disparagement when I say that the Canadian poets thus far-poets like Bliss Carmen, John McCrae, Robert W. Service - have written in a compliant English tradition. It was natural for them to do so. But in the days to come I believe you will produce a native poet who will break away from the past as sharply as Walt Whitman did; a poet who will never be mistaken for anything but a Canadian, and who will find in the challenging space of your prairies and forests his greatest themes.

Literature always follows after the pioneer and the plow. I realize how long it took us to bring our experiences into print. The prairie schooner started rolling West in 1848, but not until forty years later, in 1888, did Owen Wister find in Wyoming and Montana the source material for THE VIRGINIAN, that grandaddy of all Westerns. The Territory of Nebraska came into the Union in 1867, but it was another fifty years before Willa Cather could write her finest novels about this same country-O PIONEERS! and MY ANTONIA. The first oil well was tapped in Oklahoma Territory near Bartlesville in 1897, but it was not until 1930 that Edna Ferber wrote her glowing story of the Oklahoma Territory, CIMARRON.

I intend these words of mine to be a spur and a hope, for I know that writing takes time; and it takes a long period of assimilation, and it takes independence. You have the makings, and I believe that you have come to a time of ripeness. Fresh hope and expectancy are in the air; change is upon you, the power and wealth of an untapped land and the feeling of destiny that goes with it. So let the new books come - and soon, please, while I am still here to read them.