The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler
"The Mountain and the Valley" is a novel by Ernest Buckler that intricately examines the life and psyche of its protagonist, David Canaan, within the rural context of Nova Scotia. The narrative unfolds largely through David's introspective thoughts and memories as he grapples with his identity and aspirations, often feeling isolated from the physical labor of his family and community. The story begins with David's longing for a life beyond the confines of the village of Entremont, symbolized by the mountain he gazes upon from his kitchen window.
As the novel progresses, David's relationships, particularly with his family, friends, and romantic interests, are explored through a series of flashbacks, revealing both joyful and tragic moments that shape his experience. David's sensitive nature and quest for linguistic precision set him apart from those around him, ultimately leading to feelings of guilt and defeat, especially following the loss of loved ones. Buckler uses David's character to reflect on the struggles of an artist navigating the complexities of human connection and self-expression.
The novel is noted for its contemplative pace and depth, providing a critical perspective on the life of an artist in a rural setting. Despite its rich thematic content, "The Mountain and the Valley" has not achieved widespread popularity, although it is considered a significant work in Canadian literature for its exploration of the internal conflicts of a young man coming of age amidst profound personal and communal ties.
The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler
First published: 1952
Type of work: Psychological regionalism
Time of work: The 1920’s and 1930’s
Locale: The village of Entremont in Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, Canada
Principal Characters:
David Canaan , the protagonist, a sensitive farm boy developing into a writerAnna Canaan , his twin sisterChristopher (Chris) Canaan , their older brotherJoseph Canaan , their father, a farmerMartha Canaan , their motherEllen Canaan , their elderly grandmother
The Novel
Much of the action of The Mountain and the Valley takes place within the growing consciousness of the protagonist, who reads novels that have “more to do with the shadow of thought and feelings which actions cast than with the actions themselves.” These cerebral actions reflect David Canaan’s and Ernest Buckler’s own mental processes, their concern with precision in thought and expression, their quest for the right word.
As the novel opens, David stands at his kitchen window and stares at the highway and mountain that represent his life’s goal beyond the village or valley of Entremont, where he has lived for thirty years. Behind him, his elderly grandmother is engaged in hooking together a rug from rags and cast-off garments that once belonged to various members of the Canaan family. While the opening and closing frames (“Prologue” and “Epilogue”) repeat this scene of isolation, the intervening sections of the novel consist of a series of flashbacks revealing incidents from the past within this agricultural community in Nova Scotia.
As a child, David always looked forward to climbing the mountain, but when he begins his ascent with his father and brother, they cannot proceed because of an accident in which two men from their community have been killed. Both drowned men, it turns out, were the fathers of David’s and his brother Chris’s girlfriends, Effie and Charlotte. The ever-sensitive David is drawn closer to Effie in her sorrow, and during the school Christmas play he kisses her onstage, much to her surprise and to the heckling of some of the local members of the audience. An embarrassed David flees the auditorium and suffers his humiliation in isolation away from the rest of his family and community. While most of the other characters engage in farm work, David excels at school; he examines every shade of meaning in their manual dexterity, but he can never fully participate in their lives.
While Chris and Charlotte easily experience sex, David’s sexual initiation with Effie at the age of fourteen results in a sense of loss when they are discovered by some boys. Later, after David repeats the act with her in a damp field although she has a cold, she dies from leukemia, and David carries the burden of guilt with him for the rest of his life. At this same time in his life, he forms a friendship with Toby Richmond from Halifax, but once again this relationship ends in a kind of defeat when Toby marries Anna and they leave the region. David himself seems determined to depart from this parochial milieu after a disagreement with his father over moving rocks and cutting logs, but he turns back. He again suffers during farm work when his father and brother slaughter pigs: A nail rips along the back of his hand and he falls from a scaffold. His life is further scarred with the death of his parents and the departure of Chris.
The novel comes full circle as David stands at his window and his grandmother hooks together the rug of memory, knitting together the past. David leaves the farm and heads up the mountain in an almost mystical union with nature. As he approaches the summit, all the voices of the past rush in upon him, and he realizes that he wants to be the best writer in the whole world even as at the beginning of the novel he wanted to be the greatest general. Having reached his Promised Land, David Canaan dies with the snow covering him. “A partridge rose in the grey-laden air. Its heavy body moved straight upward for a minute, exactly. But David did not see that.” David’s greatest insight, the climax of the story, comes at the moment of his death when he is finally able to find the exact word to fuse language, vision, and action.
The Characters
David Canaan is a complex, precocious, and introverted young man, dissatisfied with the routine of physical drudgery on his family farm. If he is to some extent an autobiographical character, resembling Buckler in his mathematical precision in language and hypersensitivity to philosophical and psychological nuances, he also becomes a Christlike figure in his suffering. Indeed, the family name, the parental names of Joseph and Martha, his brother Christopher, the wounds inflicted on him, his princely role in the Christmas play, and his apotheosis at the end of the novel with the partridge soaring—all these details lend weight to this interpretation of his character. Buckler, however, is mainly interested in presenting a portrait of the artist as a young man.
David’s sensitivity to language becomes excruciatingly painful to him and to the reader as he indulges in similes and repetitions that differ from the repetitive cliches of other characters. By the end of the novel, his linguistic quest places him in a mathematical maze:
Then the forks’ forks fork, like the chicken-wire pattern of atoms.... He heard the crushing screaming challenge of the infinite permutations of the possible ... the billion raised to the billionth power.... Myself thinking of myself screaming ‘Stop,’ thinking of myself thinking of myself thinking of....
His solipsism is literally and figuratively a dead end after the departures and deaths of friends and family. While David always wanted to be close to those around him, his artistic temperament distances him from others and places him in isolation.
David’s grandmother exists as a static character, one who outlives her children and remains constant to her memories despite advancing senility. She refers to David as “child,” not knowing whether she is addressing an eight-year-old or a young man of thirty, for she is totally involved in hooking together her family rug. She associates each color of the rug with a different member of the family or a different incident out of the past, so, like her grandson, she is herself an artistic figure, stitching time and fabrics.
Buckler treats the rest of the Canaan family with affection, proudly demonstrating their dexterity and industriousness in farm labor. Joseph is skilled in all of his work and creates a sense of harmony in all of the family’s activities. David respects his father’s strength but needs to rebel against his limited agrarian scope. Joseph and Martha are closely tied to each other in the routine and rhythm of farm work, reflecting the kind of unity symbolized in Ellen’s hooking together the bits of family clothing. Like his father, Chris excels in physical activities but stands in sharp contrast to his intellectual younger brother. Anna is David’s twin, not only genetically but also in spirit, and there are suggestions of incest in parts of the novel as David loses Effie and Toby takes Anna away. Like the Canaans, all the families in Entremont participate in the closeness of a community that Buckler admires despite its limitations. These limitations are exaggerated because they are filtered through David’s highly discriminating consciousness and sensitivity to language. Even Toby, who represents the larger world beyond Entremont, falls short of David’s expectations.
Critical Context
The Mountain and the Valley was Buckler’s first novel and remains his best. In addition to novels, Buckler published prize-winning short stories and articles in Maclean’s, Saturday Night, Esquire, and The Atlantic Monthly. His short story “The Quarrel” won the Maclean’s fiction award in 1948, and in 1957 and 1958 he won the President’s Medal for the best Canadian short story with “The Dream and the Triumph” and “Anything Can Happen at Christmas.”
While The Mountain and the Valley received some strong critical support in the United States and Canada, it has held little popular appeal. The slow pace of the plot, the unfamiliar rural setting, and the detailed probing of the protagonist’s mind are not the stuff of a best-seller, yet this painstaking portrait of the conflicts within a young artist coming of age is worthy of being considered a Canadian classic. “I will tell it, he thought rushingly: that is the answer. I know how it is with everything. I will put it down and they will see that I know.” Buckler tells his thoughts, not the actions, rushingly; he knows “everything” about his region, and from that knowledge proceeds to universal significance.
Buckler’s later novels were not as successful, partly because he employed the same laborious style and explored the same farming region. His second novel, The Cruelest Month (1963), focuses on Paul Creed, who, like David Canaan, is inwardly scarred; this novel once again explores the nature of perception and intuition. In Ox Bells and Fireies (1968), Buckler examines the unity of interior and exterior, unconscious and conscious, in the pastoral world of Nova Scotia.
Bibliography
Chambers, Robert. Sinclair Ross and Ernest Buckler, 1978.
Cook, Gregory. Ernest Buckler, 1972.
Young, Alan. Ernest Buckler, 1976.