John Hugh MacLennan CC CQ FRSL FRSC was born on March 20, 1907, and passed away on November 9, 1990. He was a Canadian writer and taught English at McGill University. He received five Governor General's Awards and a Royal Bank Award.
Family and childhood
MacLennan was born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, on March 20, 1907. His parents were Samuel MacLennan, a coal mine doctor, and Katherine MacQuarrie. Hugh had an older sister named Frances. Samuel was a strict Calvinist, while Katherine was creative, warm, and dreamy. Both parents greatly influenced Hugh’s character. In 1913, the family lived in London for several months while Samuel studied to become a medical specialist. After returning to Canada, they briefly lived in Sydney, Nova Scotia, before settling in Halifax. In December 1917, young Hugh experienced the Halifax Explosion, an event he later wrote about in his first published novel, Barometer Rising. Between the ages of twelve and twenty-one, Hugh slept in a tent in the family’s backyard, even during cold winters, possibly to escape his strict father. Hugh believed religion was important; he and Frances regularly attended Sunday school, and the family went to Presbyterian church services every Sunday morning and afternoon. He was also active in sports and became especially skilled at tennis, winning the Nova Scotia men’s doubles championship in 1927.
Education
MacLennan and his sister were strongly encouraged by their father to spend long hours studying the classics. This was very difficult for Frances, who did not enjoy learning Greek, but Hugh came to like this subject. Their father had a planned educational path for Hugh: studying the classics at Dalhousie University, earning a Rhodes Scholarship, and then continuing his studies in England.
At Dalhousie, Hugh realized his true interest was in an artistic career, influenced by his creative mother. At Oxford, he struggled to balance his love for Greek and Latin studies with his artistic interests. During his first year at Oriel College, MacLennan worked very hard in his classics courses but only received second-class honors. By his second year, he accepted these results and chose to study less intensely. In his fourth year, he found it harder to focus on his studies and spent more time playing tennis and writing poetry. Letters from this time suggest he hoped to become a successful writer. In late 1931, MacLennan sent some of his poetry to three publishers, including John Lane and Elkin Mathews, but it was rejected.
MacLennan’s time at Oxford allowed him to travel across Europe, visiting countries like Switzerland, France, Greece, and Italy. He spent holidays with a family in Germany, which helped him learn German well. His travels and exposure to new political ideas made him start questioning his father’s strict, traditional beliefs.
MacLennan won a $400 scholarship to study at Princeton University. Even though he no longer wanted to study the classics, he decided to go partly to please his father and partly because few jobs were available due to the Great Depression. In June 1932, while returning home from England, he met his future wife, Dorothy Duncan, an American. Falling in love with her made him reconsider Princeton. His father insisted he should not marry until he was financially independent, which would delay marriage until after graduation. Additionally, MacLennan was unhappy about relying on his father’s money for part of his studies. However, his applications to Canadian universities with classics positions were rejected, so he reluctantly agreed to attend Princeton.
His time at Princeton was difficult. The way classics were taught there was very different from Oxford’s style, focusing on detailed but unoriginal analysis of classical texts. He began to reject his father’s ideals: he stopped attending church, focused more on writing than studying, and continued his relationship with Dorothy despite knowing his father would disapprove of her American, Lowland Scottish, Christian Science, and business background.
Unpublished novels
At Princeton University, MacLennan wrote his first novel, So All Their Praises. He found one publisher willing to accept his manuscript, but only if he made specific changes. Unfortunately, the publisher closed before the book could be released. In spring 1935, he completed his PhD thesis, Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study, which examined the decline of a Roman colony in Egypt. This work was published by Princeton University Press and later reprinted in 1968 by A.M. Hakkert.
In 1935, few teaching jobs were available due to the Great Depression, and the study of classical subjects was becoming less important in North American schools. MacLennan accepted a teaching position at Lower Canada College in Montreal, Quebec, even though he believed it was below his qualifications, as his degree from Dalhousie University would have been enough for the job. He did not enjoy the work, as it required long hours for low pay, but he was considered an inspiring teacher for more capable students. Later, he humorously described a similar school in his novel The Watch That Ends the Night. On June 22, 1936, MacLennan married Dorothy near her home in Wilmette, Illinois, and they moved to Montreal.
Between 1934 and 1938, MacLennan worked on his second novel, A Man Should Rejoice. Two publishing companies, Longman, Green and Company and Duell, Sloan and Pearce, expressed interest in the book, but neither published it.
In February 1939, MacLennan’s father died from high blood pressure. This event surprised MacLennan, as he and his father had recently started to grow closer and resolve their differences. For several months after his father’s death, MacLennan continued to write letters to him, discussing his thoughts about the possibility of war in Europe.
Barometer Rising
Dorothy convinced MacLennan that the failure of his first two novels was because he had written about Europe and the United States, places he did not know as well as Canada. She encouraged him to write about Canada, the country he understood best. She told him, "Nobody will understand Canada until it has its own literature, and you are the person who can help update Canadian novels." Before this, there had been an occasional tradition of Anglo-Canadian literature, with writers such as Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865), Susanna Moodie (1803–1885), L. M. Montgomery (1874–1942), Stephen Leacock (1869–1944), Morley Callaghan (1903–1990), and W. O. Mitchell (1914–1998). MacLennan aimed to help Canadians understand what Canada is like by writing a national novel. Barometer Rising, his novel about the social groups in Nova Scotia and the 1917 Halifax Explosion, was published in 1941.
Later novels
In 1945, MacLennan published his most famous novel, Two Solitudes, a story that highlights the tensions between English and French Canada. That same year, he left Lower Canada College. Two Solitudes earned MacLennan his first Governor General's Award for Fiction. In 1948, he published The Precipice, which also won the Governor General's Award. The next year, he released a collection of essays titled Cross Country, which received the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction.
In 1951, MacLennan returned to teaching and joined McGill University. In 1952, he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received the society’s Lorne Pierce Medal. In 1954, he published another essay collection, Thirty and Three, which again won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. In 1956, he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
One of MacLennan’s students at McGill was Marian Engel, a well-known Canadian novelist in the 1970s. He helped her with her master’s degree around 1958. Another notable student was Leonard Cohen, a famous songwriter, poet, and novelist.
Dorothy Duncan died in 1957. In 1959, MacLennan married his second wife, Aline Walker. That same year, he published The Watch That Ends the Night, which earned his final Governor General's Award.
In 1967, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 1985, he was honored as a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. MacLennan continued writing, and his final novel, Voices in Time, was published in 1980.
Death and legacy
He passed away on November 9, 1990, in Montreal, Quebec.
The Canadian band The Tragically Hip used part of The Watch That Ends the Night in the song "Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)" from their album Fully Completely.