The Elected Squares (3)

The White Americans

By MORDECAI RICHLER ANADA, remember, is a two-headed culture. V./The French is protected by language, the English isn't. We English-speaking, but not neces- sarily Anglo-Saxon, Canadians, make up the touchiest of all North American minority groups. Like Jews and homosexuals, we are quick to claim international celebrities and people of dis- tinction living elsewhere as our very own. So as a boy I was armed with a double-hook. Danny Kaye, my father told me, was one of the tribe, a Yiddish boy, and Walter Pidgeon, my Scots school master assured me, was Canadian-bred. I was expected to support both of them at the box office.

A recent special issue of Maclean's, devoted en- tirely to a study of the US, includes an item that will be familiar to any reader of the old-style Jewish press. It lists the Canadian Americans, that is, those who have been accepted and are making out among the Goyim. These include Mort Sahl; the mayor of Gooding. Idaho (bless him, and he should remember our people); J. K. Galbraith (when it comes to brains, you know); Oscar Peter- son; Bea Lillie; the editor and publisher of the Daily Racing Form; Saul Bellow;Jack L. Warner, and many more. We're not boasting, you know. (Actually, even typically, our claims on many of these people are slight. Sahl's family lived in Canada for a short period and Bellow's people moved to Chicago when he was eight years old.) But wouldn't you think, after all that, the Americans would stop handling us like we were second-rate and of no account? No. They made a bigger fuss in Washington over Nehru, an Indian, than they ever did over our most obliging John. When Dick Nixon went to Africa he handed out ball-point pens to all comers, and what has he ever given us? Missile bases for the Russians to aim at. Maybe what's called for is a spit in the face. We're certainly not getting any attention by being well-behaved.

Again, like the Jews, Canadians have mixed feelings about those who have left the ghetto/ . . in the strictest confidence, Sir William . . Canada. So, while Maclean's may single out for approval those who have triumphed elsewhere, other, coarser spirits, the show biz or plain light- ing-Canuck columnists, take a different tack. What, for instance, has happened to Bernie Braden? It serves him right! Where did our old, unspoiled Ted Allen pick up that hoity-toity limey accent? Norman Levine must be very un- happy to say such things about us.

The quarrel, between patriot and expatriate, is a real one. It is also something different from what went on in the US in the Twenties or seems to be true, to a lesser degree, of South Africa today. American artists went to Paris because they were romantics, disgusted by their country, while today's South African expatriates are surely the next closest thing to political refugees. Well, many Canadians do feel some disgust for their country, there are always the romantic reasons for leaving, but the most important factors are: young people are leaving, one, because they feel there is no opportunity for them at home, and, two, because they are bored. Canada is too bland for their taste. True disgust, or political anger, would be far healthier. Even more significant, it is not only the artists and entertainers who are leaving, but some of the country's most gifted scientists, teachers and businessmen. Emigration to the US, an easy feat for Canadians, far out- strips US immigration to our country. Further- more, the Americans who emigrate to Canada usually do so because they have been attached to the Canadian branch of an American concern. Canadians go south because they feel the oppor- tunities are better.

Taken at its extremes the argument runs some- thing like this. The patriot has it that those who have left are rootless failures, of no account, or, to enter into the idiom of some columnists, cry- babies. The expatriate would say that only those who prefer being big fish in a small pond—that is, those who dare not leave—have stayed behind. Well, naturally some have failed and will con- tinue to fail in London and New York, and there are clearly others who appear to be whales in a pond of Toronto's dubious standards, but there are also many people of unquestioned talent and integrity who have chosen to stay in Canada.

Morley Callaghan, who lives in Toronto—and who, as Jack Ludwig remarked in the Tamarack Review, needs no cultural protectionist tariff to screen him away from the outside world—re- cently told a reporter, 'I hate to say it, but there's really nobody in Canada I want to impress.' Cal- laghan, described by Edmund Wilson as 'the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English- speaking world,' has also told me, 'I'd never leave Toronto. It's my village.'

What Canada seems to require of its artists, what it attempts again and again, is to reduce them to personalities. And so Callaghan, author of innumerable first-rate short stories, has found his greatest use here as a TV personality.

In the quiet of the winter here there are men of real talent making splendid short films for the National Film Board, such as Les Racqeteurs, but their work is seldom seen inside Canada. Nourished by the CBC and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Glenn Gould was widely acclaimed here only after his triumph in New York. Unsuspected by most Canadians we had the likes of Malcolm Lowry in Vancouver and, more recently, Brian Moore in Montreal. Neither one created real excitement here. For what this country demands of an artist is that he become a personality. Can he make TV? Will he amuse? This widespread attitude co-exists with the paternalism of the Canada Council, the CBC, and what few serious publishers we now have in Toronto. But grants, and a longing by an influen- tial minority, though making for more favour- able conditions, will not in themselves create a national literature.

Put plainly, the trouble is that Canada is not so much a nation as a North American region, and those writing or painting in the east have more in common with big-city American artists than they do with their fellow Canadians out west. This, in effect, has already been said by Callaghan, and Jack Ludwig recently wrote in Canadian Literature:

Just how significant is it to be or sound Cana- dian anyway? . . . May I run the risk of sound- ing rather brutal? If I choose to stand in a tradition why not the one to which Tolstoy and Flaubert and Dickens belong, rather than the one that includes Leacock. dc la Roche, and Buchan?

But not all nationalism is bad. Some truly third- rate artists have been sheltered by Canada, but, at its best, self-conscious Canadianism has made for at least two writers who deserve attention, Hugh MacLennan and Robertson Davies.

If we had such a thing as a novelist laureate here he would be Hugh MacLennan.. This, I'm sure, is not his fault, the role has been thrust on him. MacL1nnan, of all our serious artists, is the one most honourably concerned with putting Canadian problems on the literary map. Unfor- tunately, this often makes him appear parochial, like the sort of Jewish novelist who worries about whether to eat or not to eat pork. Yet he loves Montreal. He writes about it with warmth. And his most recent novel, The Watch that Ends the Night, was a big critical and commercial success in the US. Robertson Davies has written at least one very amusing novel, Leaven of Malice, a book of naughty schoolboy essays, The Tabletalk of Samuel Marchbanks, and is currently, if you read the New York book ads, Alfred Knopf's favourite critic. His most recent book, a collection of urbane literary essays, A Voice from the Attic, was well received in the US, as was MacLennan's last book of essays, Scotchman's Return. Both men, as essayists, have been compared with Haz- litt and other nineteenth-century figures, and this brings me to the point.

Canadian artists and entertainers are enjoying a new vogue in the US that represents nostalgia

for the unhurried nineteenth century. MacLennan

and Davies, for instance, are both literary gents. '1 hey can be counted on not to eat your favourite

book with their fingers, call your boyhood literary

hero a honio, or you (gentle reader) a mutton- head. They are an antidote to the pressures of Dwight MacDonald, Leslie Fiedler, and other contemporary savages, and, significantly, it is the

older men, critics of a school past, who have come out of their shelters to bless them. On the level of entertainment Barbara Ann Scott, Giselle MacKenzie, Alan Young, and even Wayne and Shuster are a relief from the antics of such as Sinatra, Judy Garland, Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce. They can be relied upon not to take an overdose of sleeping pills, use abusive language, and generally uphold the older decencies, which is the role we Canadians are being cast in. Less kindly put, we are the elected squares.

Our status in England amounts to a vari:.tion on the same theme. We are the acceptable ones. The white Americans.

Living in Canada again, as I am right now, one is immediately struck by the fact that there is no indignation here. I mean the sort of anger you got in England after Suez, or have over Africa today. As some here prefer one supermarket's service to another, so others vote Progressive- Conservative or Liberal. (Which management do you prefer, that's the question.) There appear to be no concerned young men, no Universities and Left Review or Bow Group, needling their politi- cal elders. Most sophisticated people, it's true, would rather we had Lester Pearson, a man of some stature, in office rather than the continued embarrassment of Dief the Chief. But Pearson, so far, has been unable to gather a Stevensonian type of enthusiasm round him, and sonic of us have begun to worry a little. For we're told that Lester, on the advice of his PR man, has discarded his bow-tie. He's going to try to create a more favourable brand image for the next election.

Meanwhile. neither party seems overly worried about the young, their boredom and departures. Rather, the contest seems to be over who can be more Canuck. i.e., anti-American. So Mr. Diefen- baker assures us unemployment is just as bad, worse maybe, in the US; and the Liberals, putting their collective heads together at a recent party conference, have promised us—yes—a Canadian flag. (Send your design, marked FLAG, to Grits, Ottawa.) Anyway, what's wrong with this country is clearly not Time magazine. And what Robert Fulford, one of our ablest critics, has called Can- cult is not going to help. A Canadian film, TV or publishing industry for its own sweet sake is nonsense.

If I may return to the Jewish analogy just once more, no heritage is worth preserving that can't resist the sun, the mixed marriage or the foreign periodical. Finally, some of the best damn in- fluences in the world reach us from New York. Our Canadian society lacks excitement and direction. We are one of the underdeveloped countries. And though we laugh at China, the campaign against the flies, or mock Khrushchev's northern development scheme, you won't find any Canadians heading out for the tundra, unless it's on a flying visit with a Geiger counter. There's

nothing to do here but make more money than

your neighbour, and anti-Americanism is reach- ing such a pitch that I can foresee the day of Castro on our five-dollar bills and an un-Canadian activities committee. Fellows will he called up and asked did they ever read Time, admire Hollywood films, and what, exactly, were they doing in Miami on the night of . . .

It could he. you know.

(Concluded)