On Being a Maritime Writer

Bruce Whiteman is Head of Rare Books at the McGill University Libraries
and author of The Invisible World Is in Decline, Books II to IV.

This little pamphlet consists of two public lectures that Hugh MacLennan gave at Mount Allison University when he was there in 1982 as a holder of the Winthrop Pickard Bell Chair of Maritime Studies. Though gathered under one title, the two lectures have a significantly different focus. The first (and stronger) is more personal in nature. MacLennan speaks about his own upbringing in Nova Scotia and about some of the formative elements that both made him a Maritimer and yet took him west in 1932 to a job as a schoolteacher in Montreal. Despite the fact that the remainder of his life was spent in central Canada, MacLennan has obviously retained an affection for the east, and this feeling is warmly and articulately expressed in his reminiscences of his childhood in Glace Bay and Halifax.

The second lecture is, as he says, “less personal”; it is also, it seems to me, less focused, indeed somewhat rambling. He begins with a discussion of provincialism, from ancient Palestine to the Hollywood attitude to Barometer Rising. There follows a discussion of the contribution of literature to the development of cultural and national identity, and the lecture ends with a brief note on the threat that technology poses to culture in general and literature in particular. MacLennan’s response to this threat is to propose a re-emphasis on the proper teaching of reading.

These lectures were apparently intended to be casual and anecdotal, and MacLennan has carried out his terms of reference capably. It is obviously the novelist and not the scholar in MacLennan who was speaking. On Being a Maritime Writer will be of interest to all readers of MacLennan’s fiction.