Hill Colin - Man Should Rejoice, by Hugh MacLennan

The University of Ottawa Press (UOP) is proud to be the oldest of the francophone university presses in Canada and the only bilingual university publisher in North America. Since 1936, UOP has been enriching intellectual and cultural discourse by producing peer-reviewed and award-winning books in the humanities and social sciences, in French or in English.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Man should rejoice / by Hugh MacLennan ; edited and with an introduction by Colin Hill.
Names: MacLennan, Hugh, 1907-1990, author. | Hill, Colin, 1970- editor.
Series: Canadian literature collection.
Description: A critical edition. | Series statement: Canadian literature collection | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190089555 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190089601 |
ISBN 9780776627991
(softcover) | ISBN 9780776628004 (PDF) | ISBN 9780776628011 (EPUB) |
ISBN 9780776628028 (Kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: MacLennan, Hugh, 1907-1990. Man should rejoice.
Classification: LCC PS8525.L54 M36 2019 | DDC C813/.54dc23

Legal Deposit: Second Quarter 2019
Library and Archives Canada
University of Ottawa Press, 2019

Printed and bound in Canada

The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund, by the Canada Council for the Arts, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, and by the University of Ottawa.

.

.

I would like to express my gratitude to the many colleagues, friends, students, librarians, editors, archivists, and publishers who have provided assistance, expertise, and support in various ways during the preparation of this critical edition. I am especially grateful to Dean Irvine, editor of the Canadian Literature Collection and director of the SSHRC-funded EMiC project, which contributed grant money to this project; the staff, past and present, at the University of Ottawa Press; the estate of Hugh MacLennan, at McGill University, and my colleagues and students at the University of Toronto, where my departments at the St. George and Mississauga campuses generously supported this project with research space and funding. It would be cumbersome to enumerate the specifics of the support I have received from many people, so I will simply list their names and offer apologies to anyone who has been forgotten: D. M. R. Bentley, Gregory Betts, Alan Bewell, Jared Bland, Nick Bradley, Michael Carriero, Philip Cercone, Marium Chowdhury, Brian Corman, Ravneet Dulai, Alex Gillespie, Zeenat Haq, Ann Henley, Chris Klippenstein, Lara Mainville, Brandon McFarlane, David McKnight, Tom McLean, Heather McNabb, Heather Murray, Eric Nelson, Veronica Omana, Olivia Pellegrino, Angelica Radjenovic, Tasneem Rakla, John Roda, Rebecca Ross, Laurel Ryan, Elizabeth Schwaiger, Olivier St-Hilaire, Paul Stevens, Holger Syme, Bev Taylor, Dominike Thomas, Leslie Thomson, Brian Trehearne, Allison Wagner, Brent Wood, and Kailin Wright.

M an Should Rejoice, published for the first time in this critical edition, was completed by a young Hugh MacLennan shortly after his thirtieth birthday. It was 1937, one of the darkest years of the Great Depression, when the catastrophes of the Great War were still relatively fresh in Canadas collective memory and troubling international events seemed daily to portend a new and exponentially more destructive global conflict. Although MacLennan had enjoyed the privilege of completing degrees at Dalhousie, Oxford, and Princeton, the Depression-era job market meant bleak prospects for recent graduates and reduced him to accepting employment at Lower Canada College, a private school for wealthy boys in Montreal; it was a demanding job for which he was overqualified and one he disliked thoroughly (Cameron, Hugh MacLennan 10106). In the evening and weekend hours that MacLennan could irregularly claim for himself during these austere times, he wrote Man Should Rejoice, a remarkable novel that embodies the Zeitgeist of its transitional age.

* * *

The novel is narrated by David Culver, an articulate young American painter who, along with the woman he loves and a circle of memorable friends and acquaintances, finds himself caught up in the titanic ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century. His tragic story ranges over vast intellectual and geographical terrain as it explores labour politics in Americas industrial heartland, contemporary life in 1930s New York City, an idyllic Nova Scotia on the cusp of modernity, imprisonment in a New Jersey penitentiary, artistic pursuits in cafs on the left bank of Paris, the Viennese modern art scene during the rise of fascism, and utopian life in a small, fictional town in the Austrian Alps. David Culvers experiences in all of these situations and locales, recounted from memory for the reader in psychologically charged first-person prose, make him an early-twentieth-century, Anglo-American everyman who both participates in and is overwhelmed by socio-political forces beyond his control. If the novel is at times remarkably precise and specificthe final sections that take place during the Austrian Civil War, for example, are meticulously grounded in historical references and detailsits protagonists experiences are often, paradoxically, universal. Through a sustained focus on a single consciousness, MacLennan explores some of the weightiest themes and concerns of one of the most turbulent and uncertain periods of modern times. In this sense, Man Should Rejoice is arguably the most ambitiousif not the most successfulCanadian novel of its period.

Despite their pivotal importance in the cultural and political development of Canada, the 1930s were still scandalously underrepresented in the national literature when the University of Ottawa Press published its first critical edition as part of its Canadian Literature Collection in 2007. Likely, much of this had to do with the extreme economic challenges that faced writers and publishers during the Depression, as well as a general disinterest of later critics and publishers in revisiting a time that many would prefer to forget. Since 2007, many new editions of lost and forgotten Canadian works of the 1930s have been published, including Charles Yale Harrisons Meet Me on the Barricades, Ted Allans This Time a Better Earth, Robert J. C. Steads Dry Water, Irene Bairds Waste Heritage, and Malcolm Lowrys In Ballast to the White Sea. Man Should Rejoice contributes to this reawakening of interest in the 1930s, and, like many other novels of its time written in Canada and beyond, depicts modern individuals negotiating large historical forces that deterministically shape their lives. It plunges into violent ideological clashes and labour struggles and depicts the horrors of armed conflict and its impacts on the lives of ordinary people. MacLennans novel also explores societal transformations that come about because of industrialization, the decline of traditional religious structures, increasing globalization, evolving gender roles, and the transformation of daily lives by dehumanizing technologies. All of this amounts to a dramatic and expansive novel that serves as an essential document of its time.