Merrill Denison

• Born: June 23, 1893
• Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan
• Died: June 13, 1975
• Place of death: Bon Echo, Ontario, Canada

Other Literary Forms

Merrill Denison not only contributed to the emergence of indigenous Canadian drama for the stage but also was involved in the establishment of radio as a medium for drama. On the invitation of the radio department of the Canadian National Railways, Denison wrote a series of radio dramas based on incidents from Canadian history, which were broadcast as the Romance of Canada series in the winter of 1930-1931. He produced a similar series for American radio, entitled Great Moments in History, broadcast during 1932 and 1933. He continued to write original radio dramas and adaptations until 1944. Denison’s historical writing also took the form of company biographies, histories of large corporations that were more than mere self-serving eulogies or lists of directors. The first of these was Harvest Triumphant (1948), about Massey-Harris Company, the farm equipment manufacturer. He also wrote about Canada’s largest brewery in The Barley and the Stream: The Molson Story (1955) and about the Royal Bank, in Canada’s First Bank: A History of the Bank of Montreal (1966-1967). Denison’s major prose works are Boobs in the Woods (1927), a series of comic anecdotes about tourists and residents of the backwoods of Ontario, and Klondike Mike (1943), a biography of the Yukon Gold Rush prospector Michael Ambrose Mahoney. Both books have been praised as essentially accurate accounts freed from the restrictions of factual documentation. Denison also regularly contributed both fiction and nonfiction to newspapers and magazines. His collected papers are housed at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Achievements

Merrill Denison was the first and most successful of a group of writers in the 1920’s who sought a truly indigenous Canadian dramatic literature. He has been called Canada’s first nationalist dramatist and the founder of modern Canadian drama. This reputation is based on four short comedies and one full-length drama. When these plays were first presented to the public, critics agreed that Denison showed great promise. Edith Isaacs, editor of Theatre Arts Monthly, in reviewing the publication of The Unheroic North, a collection of Denison’s plays, called him a Canadian Eugene O’Neill. Ironically, this praise appeared at the same time Denison was turning his back on the theater and beginning his exploration of radio as a forum for his writing. It was not until 1971, on the fiftieth anniversary of the production of Brothers in Arms, that the Canadian literary community attested unequivocally Denison’s contribution to the evolutionary growth of Canadian literature. Also, it was not until 1974, one year before his death, that his best play, Marsh Hay, received a public performance. Given the small quantity of his contributions to theater and the admittedly flawed nature of his dramatic writing, how can it be that Denison holds such a significant position in the history of Canadian drama?

The answer to that question lies only partly in the barren nature of Canadian dramatic literature before the 1960’s. W. S. Milne, in reviewing The Unheroic North for Canadian Forum in 1932, commented with bitter sarcasm, “Some half dozen plays, mostly of one act; four of them dealing with the same restricted milieu; not a bit of imagination in one of them, unless by accident. A small thing almost perfectly done. That is the dramatic achievement of Merrill Denison, and he is Canada’s greatest dramatist.” At that time, Denison was one of the very few playwrights exploring issues of interest to Canadians and presenting a realistic picture of life in Canada. As a leading member of the first wave, his position in history books is assured; however, the achievement of his dramatic writing is not limited to its historical significance.

A close examination of the plays allows for a rebuttal to Milne’s condemnation of “not a bit of imagination in one of them” and supports the praise given by those dramatists who followed Denison’s leadership and innovation. In his attitude toward contemporary social issues, Denison provided a model for the social realism that became the mainstay of several of Canada’s leading playwrights and theater companies. The same is true of Denison’s commitment to historical subjects. His influence was apparent in the lively theater scene in Toronto in the 1960’s, which was dominated by plays that bore a remarkable resemblance, in form, content, and impact, to Denison’s work. In particular, the docudramas of this period, based on incidents from history or observation of real-life situations and people, followed Denison’s commitment to dramatizing only those situations that he himself had observed.

In retrospect, Denison is worthy of the title Father of Canadian Drama not only because he was the first but also because his plays demonstrate all the potential of a great dramatist as well as all of the flaws of a young writer. The tragedy is that Denison, for whatever reasons, turned his back on playwriting before the promise of his first works could be fulfilled. He needed an ongoing relationship with professional actors and directors and a sympathetic public to grow as a writer, and in Canada at that time, he was cut off from these. One can only speculate that he might indeed have become the Canadian O’Neill—if only he had had a Canadian Provincetown Players.

Biography

Merrill Denison was born in Detroit, Michigan, on June 23, 1893. That he was born an American rather than a Canadian resulted from the fact that his mother wanted her child not to be a subject of the British Crown. Shortly before the birth, she had traveled from her home in Toronto to Detroit in order to accomplish this. A well-known feminist, Flora MacDonald Denison was a descendant of Nathaniel Merrill, who had left Connecticut in 1774 to settle in Kingston as part of the second exodus of United Empire Loyalists. Flora continued the family tradition of outspoken individualism. In 1905, after five years as a manager of the women’s wear department of a large department store, Flora refused to punch in on the newly installed time clock, on the grounds that the newfangled system fostered class distinctions.

Merrill Denison was an only child, and the influence of his mother on his private and public life was strong. He supported her stand on women’s issues, and he was president of the University Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in Canada. By contrast, Denison’s father, Howard, had little influence. A commercial traveler, he was at home only irregularly, although his son remembers him as a friend. Flora was responsible for Merrill’s literary bent as well as his social awareness. She contributed a regular column on women’s suffrage to the Sunday World of Toronto and took every opportunity to speak and write about religious, social, and political controversies. Another enduring love that passed from mother to son was of the Bon Echo resort on Lake Mazinaw in northern Ontario. This backwoods area not only became Denison’s holiday and retirement home but also provided the setting and characters for his most significant dramatic writing. Flora first took the eight-year-old Denison to Bon Echo in 1901; in 1910, she bought the twelve-hundred-acre resort; Denison managed a summer hotel there from 1921 to 1929; and in 1959 he turned the property over to the Ontario government for use as a provincial park.

As a young man, Denison studied at the University of Toronto for one semester and then departed “by mutual consent.” After a series of odd jobs, including work as a journalist, drama critic, advertising agent, and timekeeper in a steelworks plant, he returned to the University of Toronto to study architecture. In 1916, he departed to serve two years with the American Ambulance Field Service in France. In 1919 and 1920, he worked as an architectural draftsman in Boston and New York, but architecture was not to be his career. In fact, he wrote a critique of his architectural education, which appeared in 1922 in The American Architect. The magazine’s publishers reportedly offered him the editorship, which he refused. After he returned to the family home in Toronto, he was approached by Roy Mitchell, the dynamic and forward-looking director of Hart House Theatre at the University of Toronto, to become the theater’s art director. His first stage designs were for a production of Euripides’ Alkēstis (438 b.c.e.; Alcestis, 1781) in February of 1921. He also tried his hand at acting and became a playwright by the end of the season.

Denison tells an amusing story of how this came about. Mitchell had planned an evening of three Canadian plays for April, but only two, both tragedies, had been found. Five weeks before the opening, Denison and Mitchell were joking about where to find a true Canadian. Denison claimed that the only untainted Canadians he had known were the backwoodsmen near Bon Echo, the subject of so many of the amusing stories with which he had regaled his friends. The result: He was locked in the director’s room and told to turn out a play based on his famous story of the Upper Canada College principal trying to acquire the use of a boat from a backwoodsman. As Denison reports, “Well, with no inhibitions and a deadline, I was able to accomplish the feat in about four and a quarter hours.”

Brothers in Arms, as this play was called, enjoyed remarkable popularity, appearing in ten editions from 1923 to 1975, and was performed an estimated fifteen hundred times from 1921 to 1971. The initial response, however, was not undivided. Hart House was governed by a theater committee that had to give approval to all scripts. This group, shocked by the ungrammatical language of backwoodsmen and by the satire of patriotism that fuels the comedy, rejected Denison’s script. After Mitchell threatened to resign, however, the play was added to the program, and theater history was made.

Denison continued with Mitchell at Hart House Theatre and saw productions of The Weather Breeder on April 21, 1924, and The Prizewinner on February 27, 1928. The one-act format was necessitated by Mitchell’s commitment to an evening of short plays by three different writers, but in 1929, Denison was given a chance to provide an entire evening’s entertainment. He wrote Contract, described by the Toronto Star as “good-natured satire . . . charged with local allusions . . . convincing and clever.” Other reviews were equally positive, but this was to be Denison’s last major stage production. The first twentieth century English-Canadian playwright to attempt to make a living from his writing in Canada was forced to abandon the stage in order to earn enough money to survive.

In 1929, Denison was approached by Austin Weir, who was then in charge of radio programs for the Canadian National Railways, with the idea of presenting episodes from Canadian history over the air. At first, Denison was dubious about the potential of such a venture, having an ambivalent regard for the medium and questioning, as he later admitted, anyone’s ability to discover in Canadian history the material out of which half a dozen, let alone twenty-five, romantic dramas could be written. He soon warmed to the task, however, and became fascinated with the potential of radio for dramatic presentation. The result was the radio series known as Romance of Canada directed by Tyrone Guthrie and broadcast in the winter of 1930-1931 over a transcontinental chain by Canadian National Railways’ Radio Department. Six of the scripts were published in 1931 under the title Henry Hudson and Other Plays. So successful was this series with both audiences and critics that Denison was commissioned by the J. Walter Thompson Company to write a similar series dealing with U.S. history. Denison produced a forty-week series of half-hour programs, broadcast during 1932 and 1933, entitled Great Moments in History, and he continued to earn his living writing for American radio networks through World War II. He was best known for his ability to dramatize historical events in a manner both educational and entertaining. During the war, he wrote for U.S., British, and Canadian radio, including the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Home Hour, for which he produced dramatized commentaries explaining the U.S. war effort to United Kingdom listeners.

Denison’s storytelling skills led him to several prose treatments in both short and full-length form. Klondike Mike, a biography of Michael Ambrose Mahoney, a survivor of the Klondike Gold Rush, was a best-seller within weeks of its publication and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It was reprinted in 1965 and received the accolades of another generation of Canadians. Nevertheless, playwriting and storytelling were insufficient sources of income, and Denison’s attempt at resort management was also not a financial success. His alternative career was in journalism. As a regular contributor to leading daily newspapers and monthly magazines, Denison spoke out on cultural and social issues that concerned him deeply. These included the state of drama in Canada, the potential of radio as a social and cultural force, the hardships endured by those trying to survive in the less developed regions of Canada, and the need for a strong conservationist policy to protect the natural beauty of the unspoiled north.

In 1922 and 1923, Denison was a contributing editor of The Bookman, from which position he analyzed the causes of the slow emergence of indigenous Canadian literature. His theory, that Canadians suffer from an inferiority complex—or “an intellectual timidity born of a false feeling of inadequacy or inability”—has profoundly influenced subsequent theories and later practitioners. Being an American by birth and citizenship and a Canadian by choice of residence, Denison was also able to comment insightfully on relations between these neighbors. Though he opposed nationalism as a divisive international force, Dension remained throughout his life an ardent advocate of Canadian nationalism because of his sense of the feelings of inferiority suffered by Canadians, despite prodigious accomplishments in many areas. “You will have to find out about yourselves and know and appreciate yourselves before you can expect other people to know and understand you,” he advised in 1949. In 1967, the year of the Canadian Centennial, his message had altered as little as the problem he addressed: the ignorance of Canadians about their own past achievements.

An interest in history, biography, and journalism made Denison a logical choice for the Massey-Harris Company when it celebrated its one hundredth birthday in 1947 with a booklet outlining its history. Denison admitted that “farm implements had never been numbered among my irrepressible enthusiasms,” but he soon became fascinated with the technological advancements pioneered by the firm, as well as the position of the company in the social, economic, and international history of Canada. He received permission to prepare a full-length biography, which was published in 1948 as Harvest Triumphant. Company biographies usually are of little interest save to those members of past and present management who receive the praise that seems to be the sole motive for their production, but in this case, Denison’s book not only was an overwhelming commercial success but also set a creative precedent for the company biographies that followed.

Denison was much in demand following the success of Harvest Triumphant to record the achievements of other companies. The most respected of these biographies were The Barley and the Stream, a history of the powerful Molson brewery empire; The People’s Power: The History of Ontario Hydro (1960); and Canada’s First Bank. In each of these company biographies, which involved several years of historical research and for which Denison demanded freedom from interference by company management, Denison remained true to his commitment to the importance of the country’s history for an understanding of what it meant to be a Canadian. He did not limit his definition of history to political events. History, he said,

is to be found in the nature of the land itself, dominated by the Laurentian Shield. It is to be found in the struggles of a tiny population to subdue that and other regions, in the long wait for the tools with which to master the Prairies and the Far North, the Shield and its inaccessible forests and once-useless water power. It is linked to canals, railroads, hydro-electric power, diamond drills, airplanes and caterpillar tractors, far more than it is to fluctuating fortunes of political parties or the decisions of the Privy Council. The story is to be found in the mineshafts and the lumber camps and the holds of the Great Lakes Freighters; in the tellers’ cages of banks from Canso to the Yukon; in the custom brokers’ records of a hundred ports around the world.

Master storyteller Denison dedicated his life to transmitting, in a variety of forms, incidents from real life, contemporary and historical, that would hold a mirror up to the Canadian people, in which they might more clearly see themselves. He tried to battle the inferiority complex that he saw around him in order to give the citizens of his adopted country the same love for the land and its people that he so fervently felt.

Analysis

Merrill Denison was one of the group of Canadian writers who, in the 1920’s, first attempted to dramatize the uniquely Canadian aspects of their national experience. If this were his only achievement, he would be a provincial writer of interest only to his immediate contemporaries and to theater historians. It is his unique attitude to the Canadian experience that marks his contribution to dramatic literature and gives it enduring value.

Three aspects of Denison’s dramatic writings distinguish his work. His plays are first and foremost realistic, based entirely on personal experience and observation and written with careful attention to believable dialogue, setting, action, and characterization. Second, he is both antiheroic and antiromantic, dedicated to debunking the false image of Canada as the home of Mounties and noble, simple hunters—natural heroes of the virgin wilderness. Finally, he brings to his writing a sense of comedy tempered with commitment to justice—a commitment that leads him to explore social problems objectively and in defiance of contemporary morality. The result is a group of plays that have not become dated with the passage of time.

From Their Own Place

In his short comedies, Denison uses character types, two-dimensional creations that function within a limited plot line. The plays turn on a single narrative device, usually a reversal. In From Their Own Place, city dweller Larry Stedman turns the tables on the backwoodsmen who have attempted to sell him the furs from illegally trapped animals for an inflated price (while arguing over who is the rightful owner of the furs) by calling in the game warden to witness all three men deny ownership. The tricksters are tricked into parting with the furs, and the naïve city dweller pays only for the cost of the trapping license.

Even within the limitations of the one-act structure, Denison creates evocative and well-crafted explorations of life in the northern areas of Ontario. His attention to language demonstrates the fine ear of a raconteur adept at mimicry. The ungrammatical utterances of the locals might offend university committees, but this language provides authenticity and a rich comic texture. Denison does not use foul language, but he still manages to capture the flavor of backwoods speech. When Alec, one of the tricksters, swears that half of the furs are his, he vows, “If they aint will the Lord strike me down right here where I’m stanin and send me to burnin hell for ten thousand years wiv a cup of cold water just beyond my lips and me not able to reach it.”

Denison does not incorporate these vivid colloquialisms for mere comic effect; language is always tied to the characters and to their social environment. Sandy, caretaker for the Stedmans, and Cline, who habitually sells them worthless objects, debate the relative morality of their positions: Sandy attacks first, saying, “You’ve sold him enough trash now to satisfy anybody but a MacUnch.” Cline indignantly defends his family name with “That’s a fine thing for you to say, and you married to a MacUnch yourself and had three children by her. And the hull of you half starved till you got a job from the old lad. It aint everyone can get a job caretakin and not have nothin to do.” Sandy retorts, “No, there aint but one can get it and that’s me and it wouldn’t matter if Emmy had twelve children and all of them twins, I wouldn’t be like yous MacUnches trying to sponge off’n the only friend the backwoods has.” Buried in this amusing exchange is the presentation of a serious socioeconomic situation. The duplicity of Sandy and Cline evolves into a hilarious farce of entrance and exit, lie and counterlie, as they conspire to cheat Stedman and then betray each other, but their convoluted relationship also points to a condition of inbreeding that Denison had observed and on which he had commented in his letters and articles, and their actions are motivated by a poverty that is tragic. “It’s a hopeless country to try and make a living in. Even if it is the most beautiful spot in the world,” comments Harriet Stedman, in an effort to excuse the stealing and lying of Sandy, Cline, and Alec.

Brothers in Arms

Brothers in Arms, like From Their Own Place, features two-dimensional characters, simple plot devices, comic exchanges, and serious social commentary. J. Altrus Browne, a businessman, and his wife, Dorothea, have ventured to a hunting camp in the backwoods. Dorothea exhibits all of the romanticism of an outsiders’ view of Canada; she wants to meet a coureur de bois (a French or half-breed trapper), one of the romantic figures of whom she had read in books or seen in movies about Canada. Her husband is presented even less sympathetically, as an impatient, insensitive, and pompous fool. Having received word of a business deal worth twenty-five thousand dollars, he is determined to catch the next train to Toronto but must wait for Charlie to drive them out in the only car. Dorothea views her environment through a glaze of romanticism: “I think your camp is adorable. It’s so simple, and direct. So natural.” Browne judges by a different standard: “I should never have come up into this God-forsaken hole at all.” Syd, an authentic coureur de bois, unrecognized by Dorothea, and a fellow veteran (a brother-in-arms), unrecognized by Browne, sees his surroundings with the clear vision of a man who is resigned to the reality of survival in a “wild, virgin country,” where there are a few deer left, although most have been scared off by the neighbor’s hounds. Although Syd lives far from civilization, that “keeps folks outa here in the summer. City folks is a kinda bother. . . . They’s always tryin to get a feller to work. One way and another they figger they’s doin a feller a favour to let him work for em.” Dorothea tries to fit Syd into her preconceived notions, suggesting to him that he wants to be left alone to lead his own simple life, but Syd defies romanticism. His relaxed manner and unconventional attitudes might entice audience sympathy, but Denison undercuts this by also presenting his laziness and destructive shortsightedness. The hunters tear up the floorboards rather than split firewood, so the abandoned farmhouse they use for their camp is slowly being destroyed.

Denison has some pointed comments to make about the army. Syd and Browne were both soldiers, but their experiences in the war were quite different. Syd’s view of “their war” is “they wasn’t no sense to it to my way of thinkin.” Syd’s version of sentry duty—“They wasn’t a German this side of the ocean and they wasn’t no sense hangin around in the cold. So I went in and went to bed”—horrifies Browne but arouses in Dorothea continued romanticism: “Don’t you love his sturdy independence? It’s so Canadian.” Denison tempers this satire with a bitter image when Syd voices his most pointed criticism of officers and businessmen: “Perhaps you ain’t used to listenin much in your business. We got a feller up here that got his eyes blew out in France can hear most a mile away.” Finally, Denison, having created a vehicle for his satiric portrait of romanticism and the army, ends the piece with the comic reversal. Charlie arrives at last, only to inform the Brownes that Syd, with whom they have been talking all along, could just as well have driven them to the train, being half owner of the car. Browne explodes with the question, “Why didn’t you say you could drive us?” to which Syd replies, “You never ast me.”

The Weather Breeder

In The Weather Breeder, Denison explores a theme that plays a part in all of his dramatic writing: the relationship between character and natural environment. Old John, a backwoods farmer, is gloomy when the weather is glorious because he is certain that a storm is blowing. When the storm arrives, he is overjoyed because his sour predictions have come true; when the storm passes by and causes minimal damage to the vulnerable crops, he becomes gloomy again. Old John’s attitude toward the weather becomes a metaphor for his pessimistic outlook: “It aint natural to have three weeks without a storm and the longer she waits the worse she’ll be. We’ll have to pay for it.” As Jim, John’s young helper, notes, John makes life miserable for everybody with his sour prophesying of inevitable doom. Even the most perfect of days becomes merely an excuse to prophesy that an entire summer’s worth of bad weather is building up, waiting to descend on them all at once.

Denison based The Weather Breeder, like all of his plays, on attitudes that he had observed in the communities around Bon Echo. For the bare subsistence farming such an environment provides, weather can destroy the hopes of a lifetime. Old John expects a certain amount of hardship every year, and, when it holds off for a time, he expects his share of disaster to occur in one huge cataclysm. This bleak outlook, ingrained in Old John’s personality, is largely played for comic effect, and the serious implications of his pessimism are further undermined by a rather mundane motivation for his sour spirits: Old John has been laid up with a serious injury; his foot was caught in a thresher.

Marsh Hay

Thus, in his short plays, Denison did not give full expression to his harsh vision of Canadian life. In his full-length drama Marsh Hay, however, he directly addressed the devastated state of the northern backwoods, where, as a result of unrestricted lumbering from 1850 to 1890 and ravaging forest fires, the land had been transformed. As Barnood, a struggling farmer in Marsh Hay, recalls, “I can remember when a man could drive a team through a stand of white pine for days . . . but the lumber companies and the fire gouged her clean. Turned it into so much bare rock and scrub popple.” The farms of the area were abandoned by those with the resources and vision to escape. Those who remained were forced into a cruel, grasping search for survival. Outsiders such as Thompson, the city lawyer (a less satiric portrait than Browne), might call them lazy and shiftless, but Barnood defends his fellow survivors: “I don’t know as you call a man that works fourteen or sixteen hours a day, lazy. They don’t make much of a livin, Mr. Thompson. Pick up a few dollars from the city people that summers on the lakes back here . . . do a little trappin . . . kill a deer or two . . . raise a few potatoes between the rocks and cut marsh hay.”

Marsh Hay tells the story of the Serang family. John, the father, like the John in The Weather Breeder, is a sour, bitter man, so broken by the desperation of his effort to scratch a living in this desolate region that he is incapable of any positive feeling. He summarizes his life thus: “Twenty years of a man’s life gone into workin fifty acres of grey stone . . . cuttin marsh hay to keep a couple of sows and a half dead horse alive. Cuttin marsh hay because the land won’t raise enough fodder to winter a rat. A dozen scrawny chickens . . . twelve children. Five dead, thank God. Twenty years of a man’s life.” There is an alternative, to travel west to the fertile land of the prairies, but for John Serang, this is the bitterest twist of fate he must endure: When he was young enough to go, he could not break free, and now he is too worn out to summon the energy and too poor to finance the trip. As he ironically notes, “If we’d lived in England they’d a paid our fare.”

John sees no hope for change in his situation and expects no help from a change in government. As he says to his neighbor Barnood, “Andy, the only thing a change in government ever changes, Andy, is the government.” A government cannot make the weather good or make the hay stand shoulder high in the marshes, nor is the government even likely to build railroads all through the back country, a more realistic hope at which John also sneers.

John’s wife, Lena, shares this desolation, so reflective of the barren environment. Their marriage is one of continued accusation and bitterness. John calls her a damned sow, and she replies, “It’s a wonder I aint killed you before this John. Callin me . . . look at me! Look at me! Worn out before my time . . . bearin your children. And you call me that. It’s a wonder I aint killed you.” Denison’s stage direction notes, “Lena comes slowly to John, vehemence and heat forgotten and nothing but cold, bitter rage left her.” John replies, indifferently, “I wish you had.”

In this sort of home, it is not surprising to find that the children are dispirited, cruel, and desperate for any means of escape. John’s bitterness has been passed on like a disease to his surviving offspring. Sarilin, fifteen years old, says, “Paw don’t like us to do nothin. It don’t make no difference to him but he won’t let nobody have no fun. He never has done hisself and he don’t know what it is.” Her solution is to follow in the path of her sister Tessie, who runs off with a boy at the beginning of the play. The result is that Sarilin finds herself pregnant. Walt, who is the father of the child, tries to escape an forced marriage, which, as even old John admits, would be a cruel trap. This has been John’s own experience, but Denison does not wholly doom the next generation to this horrible cycle. Pete, John’s youngest, is determined to continue to attend school despite the eight-mile walk each way. “I want to get some learnin so’s I can get out a this back country and go out front. I aint goin to spend my life workin this farm.”

The most profound hope for the family comes from an unlikely source. Sarilin’s pregnancy, which is viewed by the community as a shameful and tragic event and by the minister as a heinous sin, is for Lena an inspiration for dignity and renewed caring. This comes about through a chance meeting with a city woman (based on Denison’s mother), who shares with Lena the unconventional philosophy that no child is illegitimate. As Lena reports it, “She said it was natural . . . she told me people is ruled by laws . . . just like a tree is . . . and she says no one was to blame.” Lena resolves to follow unflinchingly the woman’s recommendation never to let Sarilin feel ashamed, and to give the baby the best chance they can. The strength of her conviction has a profound effect on the family. The two boys, Jo and Pete, share in her caring for Sarilin, and even John finds himself half believing her. The house itself reflects the transformation. In his stage direction, Denison says, “Where before was a feeling of extreme squalor, poverty, tragic futility, there is a feeling of regeneration. The place lacked self-respect before . . . all echo the evident attempt to make the place decent to live in.”

The regeneration, however, is short-lived. Tessie infects her younger sister with a cynical realism that arises naturally out of being reared in hatred. Children are only another mouth to feed, another link on the chain of entrapment. She suggests a self-induced abortion, and Sarilin complies. The final act of the play brings us full circle, to a scene of abject misery. The despair is palpable, made all the more bitter by John’s begrudging respect for Sarilin’s decision: “I don’t know but what she showed pretty good sense, too.” The same recriminations are voiced by John and Lena, and even Lena’s last residue of gentle feeling, “We must’ve been kinda fond of each other to stick together all these years, John?” is shattered by John’s brutal and uncompromising reply, “Fond? Fond be damned. We stuck together because we couldn’t get away from each other. That’s why we stuck. We’re chained here. That’s what we are. Just like them stones outside the door, there. Fond? Bah!”

The dramatic writings of Denison exhibit many of the weaknesses of any young dramatist. He has been criticized for simplistic characterization, particularly of the women in his short plays, who have a tendency to utter the most inane superficialities. Even Marsh Hay, his most ambitious work, suffers from a lack of complexity in the delineation of the relationships and emotions of the central characters. In dramatic structure, his plays rely on twists of plot that are at times difficult to believe, and his language, though vigorous and amusing, is also repetitious, particularly in the longer drama, which is weighted with so many references to “fifty acres of grey stone” that it begins to read as though it were “fifty acres of grey prose.”

These flaws, however, do not outweigh Denison’s real achievement. It is his unflinching commitment to the recording of events, attitudes, and problems he observed in the area around his beloved Bon Echo that merits most praise. Unfortunately, his most exciting attribute as a dramatist may well have been a factor in Denison’s unwillingness to write another play after Marsh Hay. The documentation of observed social phenomenon was fine when it was sugarcoated with comedy, but in a serious form it was unpalatable to audiences. Denison was passionately committed to the social message he wished to convey, but the public was not ready to hear it. It is to be regretted that this gifted playwright did not find the environment within which to fulfill his early promise.

Bibliography

Fink, Howard. “Beyond Naturalism: Tyrone Guthrie’s Radio Theatre and the Stage Production of Shakespeare.” Theatre History in Canada/Histoire du Théâtre au Canada 2 (Spring, 1981): 19-32. Denison wrote scripts for Tyrone Guthrie when he came to Canada in 1931 to produce radio plays. Guthrie returned to Canada in 1952 to found the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Fink traces the influence of Denison and radio on Guthrie’s staging of Shakespeare’s plays.

Guthrie, Tyrone. A Life in the Theatre. London: Hamilton, 1961. Guthrie’s autobiographical reminiscences cover his time with Denison producing the radio series Romance of Canada in the early 1930’s. Denison wrote all the scripts for that series, and Guthrie remembers that the playwright gradually grew exhausted and drained of new ideas.

Savigny, Mary. Bon Echo: The Denison Years. Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1997. A historical examination of Denison, his mother, and Bon Echo, the backwoods area that was at the heart of Denison’s plays. Includes bibliography and index.

Wagner, Anton. Introduction to Canada’s Lost Plays. Vol. 3 in The Developing Mosaic: English-Canadian Drama to Mid-Century, edited by Anton Wagner. Toronto: Canadian Theatre Review Publications, 1980. Wagner describes the Canadian theatrical scene in the early twentieth century and Denison’s place in it. He says that Denison could have been the Eugene O’Neill of Canada except that he was not connected to a theater troupe, so many of his plays were not produced. This volume contains Denison’s play The Weather Breeder.