Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan

First published: 1945

Type of work: Regional realism

Time of work: 1917-1939

Locale: The Saint Lawrence River valley, Montreal, Nova Scotia, and Maine

Principal Characters:

• Athanese Tallard, a French-Canadian Member of Parliament and Seigneur of Saint-Marc-des-Erables
• Kathleen Tallard, his second wife, thirty years his junior, of Irish descent
• Marius Tallard, his son by his first wife, a radical sectarian and segregationist
• Paul Tallard, Athanese’s bilingual younger son by Kathleen
• Father Emile Beaubien, a reactionary young parish priest
• John Yardley, a retired Nova Scotian sea captain
• Janet Methuen, his daughter and the widow of a member of Montreal’s monied Protestant society
• Heather Methuen, Janet’s younger daughter, an independent thinker and would-be artist
• Huntly McQueen, a financially powerful bachelor friend of the Methuens and parvenu of Montreal aristocracy

The Novel

Two Solitudes has much of the panoramic quality of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1922), though it is informed by a more partisan attitude. Superficially a chronicle of two generations of Canadians in the Montreal region~, it is in fact a penetrating study of the beliefs and behaviors, the myths and animosities, that have caused French-Canadians and English-Canadians to resist amalgamation into a homogeneous nation and to exist as two separate peoples, uncommunicative and isolated. Yet the novel transcends the communal barriers and abstractions in its delineation of individual differences, attitudes, and yearnings; not only are the two racial groups solitary, but also individuals fail to establish meaningful communications.

When Athanese Tallard, the Seigneur of Saint-Marc-des-Erables, introduces the non-Catholic Captain John Yardley to the parish as purchaser of the Dansereau farm, he arouses latent hostility in the closed society; when he proposes building a small power station and a factory in association with Huntly McQueen, Father Emile Beaubien interprets this as a threat to his hegemony and to the parish’s traditions. Marius, a protegee of Beaubien, believes that his father is a heretic, “a traitor to his race and religion,” and speaks against conscription, which Tallard supports. Marius’ animosity to his father, however, is largely the result of his having heard Athanese having sex with Kathleen while Marius’ mother was dying.

Captain Yardley’s daughter, Janet Methuen, a war widow, informs on Marius, who is a conscription dodger. Beaubien persuades the villagers to ostracize Athanese, who decides to send his younger son, Paul, to a Protestant school near Montreal and becomes a Presbyterian and advocate of scientific education. He and Kathleen move to Montreal.

Part 2 opens with a victory parade in Montreal and McQueen’s dissolution of his partnership with Athanese on the ground that his departure from Saint-Marc-des-Erables has created ill will that jeopardizes the projected industrialization. Athanese is a ruined man: he has lost the respect of Marius, his village property and position, his political future, and his financial stability. He dies after a heart attack, and Marius and Kathleen vie for custody of Paul, though both are in quite straitened circumstances as a result of Athanese’s bankruptcy. Paul sees Heather Methuen, with whom he had played when she visited her grandfather, Captain Yardley, at Saint-Marc-des-Erables, having riding lessons.

Part 3 resumes the story, after a thirteen-year hiatus, in 1934. Paul is now a professional hockey player, though lonely; Heather is a university graduate with Socialist inclinations; Kathleen is the wife of a Pittsburgh entrepreneur; Captain Yardley is a McGill University part-time student; and McQueen is a portly, sanctimonious financier. Heather’s older sister Daphne, who has married an English aristocrat for wealth and position, confides that she is lonely and sexually abused; Heather, equally lonely, visits her grandfather, who is being coached in Greek by Paul. Heather and Paul reminisce, go on a picnic, but resist a compelling intimacy: they remain “Two solitudes in the infinite waste of loneliness under the sun.” Paul becomes a merchant seaman, studies at Oxford, and goes to Greece to write a novel, “Young Man of 1933,” which he destroys. He returns to Canada.

Part 4 is devoted to events during 1939. Janet Methuen visits the captain, now reduced to a room in a residential hotel in Halifax, and explains her worry over a possible union between Paul and Heather, who are secretly married two days after Yardley’s death. Heather vacations with her mother and tells her of her marriage; Paul starts work on a new novel about Canada but puts it away and announces his intention to enlist.

The Characters

Hugh MacLennan’s epigraph, from Rainer Maria Rilke, is “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other,” and the novel is dedicated to his wife. From these facts, one can conclude that domestic harmony between complementary characters—the total absorption of self and other—is seen as a sign or effect of love. Ironically, there is little protecting, touching, or greeting in the novel except that sort of protection which becomes smothering. Only at the end do Paul and Heather consider “the tangled roots and residues of their separate lives” and visualize their future as one. (She even disapproves of the word husband, believing it a word for other people, “a tence put up to keep others out.”)

The French-Catholic and English-Protestant communities are given female and male characteristics, respectively: the one is subservient, domestic, religious, complaisant; the other is dominant, gregarious, secular, belligerent. Accordingly, they attain the status of parties in a domestic tragedy. The fictive characters possess these community traits in different degrees.

When Heather reads Paul’s manuscript, she comments, “Your characters are all naturally vital people. But your main theme never gives them a chance. It keeps asserting that they’re doomed.” This is a valid criticism of Two Solitudes, in which the characters’ vitality is sapped continually by hate, mistrust, jealousy, and ignorance and their future is determined largely by economic and social forces over which they exercise no real control.

Only Paul and Heather exhibit normal sexuality. Athanese and his first wife, Marie-Adle, had no sex after the birth of Marius; Kathleen’s sensuality has had to be assuaged by casual acquaintances, both before and after her marriage. Marius has had to overcome incestuous impulses. Daphne Methuen’s husband, Noel Fletcher, rapes her and attempts to seduce Heather. McQueen, Father Beaubien, and the magnate Sir Rupert Irons are celibates. The village women in Saint-Marc-des-Erables are childbearers. That is, normal love that results in consummation is the exception—men and women pursue their lives and their sex as solitaries. Only Paul and Heather experience true fulfillment: “He recalled the expression on her face when they loved each other: a sort of easy graciousness opening into ecstasy.” In their union is MacLennan’s symbol of Canadian unity.

The first-generation characters are remarkably well drawn. Athanese, “the institution,” is a complex individual: He has known carnality and piety; he is a traditionalist and yet yearns for modernization; he is a man of principle yet seeks compromise; he is a heretic in religion and an advocate of modern, scientific education; he is a Seigneur and a would-be industrialist. Yardley, a man of the world, is yet comfortable on the land in a small village; he is trusting, compassionate, and friendly—almost a paragon. McQueen, though a financial success, is a social failure: He is incapable of rapport, understanding, and generosity; cupidity and business ambition are his weaknesses; pride in achievement is his principal flaw—though deviousness and hypocrisy are also major weaknesses. Father Beaubien (ironically named) is a malign representative of institutionalized authority, small-minded, and reactionary—though beautifully individualized.

Of the second-generation characters, however, only Paul and Heather are convincingly portrayed. Marius and the others are seen only seldom, and then fleetingly, and hardly rise above many of the sixty minor characters mentioned by name who represent a remarkable range of occupations and personalities.

Critical Context

MacLennan has been awarded a number of honors. Several of his novels have won for him a Governor-General’s Award, he has had Guggenheim and Canada Council fellowships, and he has been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Companion of the Order of Canada. In large measure, these honors reflect the stature of Two Solitudes, which has been correctly described as one of the few major achievements of Canadian literature, as a national historical romance of immense scope, and as a national allegory.

In the sections that treat Paul’s development as a novelist and in those that present Heather’s political and social philosophy, one occasionally suspects MacLennan of becoming rather too didactic. Yet the observations are totally in character and appropriate to the context, even where they are mildly deterministic.

The great majority of minor characters are introduced in brilliant vignettes. Set pieces, such as Yardley’s and Athanese’s deaths, are written with great tenderness and detail. Scenes of potential sexual satisfaction are handled with consummate skill, so that they are neither prurient nor routine and predictable. Aphorisms, though few, are pungent and occasionally truculent: Ontario is said to have “the mind of the maiden aunt,” for example.

MacLennan has long been an admirer of Lytton Strachey, whose Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (1931) he regards as the precursor of a new genre and as that author’s masterpiece, because the short biographies read like short stories by Guy de Maupassant. It is MacLennan’s skill in the depiction of his minor characters and in his narration of their actions that—added to his major theme and near-allegorical principal characters—supports the claims for the major status of Two Solitudes.

Bibliography

Buitenhuis, Peter. Hugh MacLennan, 1969.

Lucas, Alec. Hugh MacLennan, 1970.

MacLulich, T. D. Hugh MacLennan, 1983.

Stevenson, Warren. “A Neglected Theme in Two Solitudes,” in Canadian Literature. No. 75 (Winter, 1975), pp. 53-60.