The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a profound change in Canada’s material and cultural conditions. What had become a dominantly urban society had begun to develop a culture that was both more North American in its flavour and more urban in its preoccupations. Frederick Philip Grove, whose novels written in the early decades of the century had mirrored the problems of a rural society, published The Master of the Mill in 1944. It was a story of class conflict familiar to those struggling for a living in the 1930s. Morley Callaghan’s work dealt in a more sophisticated fashion with the social and spiritual tensions of urban living, while Hugh MacLennan, first in Barometer Rising {19Al), in which he evoked the Halifax disaster
May 8, 1945, was ve Day, marking the victory in Europe. In Ottawa, as in other cities and towns, thousands turned out to express relief, joy, and thankfulness with cheers and ticker tape. Canada’s third war in less than half a century was almost over; the A-bomb and victory in the Pacific were just four months away.
Of 1917, and then in Two Solitudes (1945), a novel about French-English relations, sought to create a literature out of distinctly Canadian themes. So too in Quebec, the old hymns to rural values were gradually being set aside. Ringuet’s Trente arpents (1938) exploded the arcadian myth, while Gabrielle Roy’s magnificent Bonheur d'occasion (1945) revealed the human dimensions of French-Canadian urban life. New poets also emerged. The old patriotic romanticism of both English and Erench Canada was replaced by modernist writing. Saint-Denys Garneau led the way in Quebec, while such writers as E. J. Pratt, Earle Birney, and Dorothy Livesay represented the new trends in English Ganada. In 1946, E. R. Scott’s “Laurentian Shield” expressed the hopefulness of the new spirit this way;
But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines.
The scattered camps and mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.
The dominance which the Group of Seven painters had established by the end of the twenties gradually gave way to new techniques and subjects in the next decade. Miller Brittain and Paraskeva Clark evoked the social distress of the Depression years. Lawren Harris moved on to abstraction, while John Lyman and Goodridge Roberts demonstrated that Canadian landscape and still life could be evoked in tones and shapes less harsh and more varied than in the work of the Group and its many imitators. LeMoine EitzGerald and Carl Shaefer turned to local and regional subjects and made no claim to express a national aesthetic.
It was among Quebec artists that the most radical new currents were running. There Paul-Emile Borduas, church decorator turned surrealist, gathered around him a group of young followers, including Jean-Paul Riopelle and Fernand Leduc, who were dubbed automatistes. These abstract artists faced the future and called for the erasure of the past. They brought the schools of Paris and New York together in an arresting and original fashion. In their manifesto of 1948, entitled Refus global, they demanded a complete remaking of French-Canadian society and full freedom for the creative imagination. But in a world where Canadians, and other peoples, had to come to terms with the annihilating power set loose by the split atom at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, not even Borduas and his friends realized the full meaning of their assertion that “The frontiers of our dreams are no longer what they were.”
World History
