Hilda Neatby's 1950s and My 1950s

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2006 by Dewar, Kenneth C

Out of its formal debates and informal discussions subsequently emerged new university courses in Canadian literature (offered on their own, instead of as part of North American literature), the New Canadian Library series (which McClelland & Stewart began publishing, under Ross's editorship, in 1958), and, after further meetings in Vancouver among Daniells, Earle Birney, and George Woodcock (1912-95), the journal Canadian Literature (1959) (Djwa 2002, 310-13). At about this time as well, Carl Klinck asked Northrop Frye (1912-91) if he thought Canadian literature could be measured against international standards. Frye replied that he could see no reason why not, as long as judgement was based on adequate research. Encouraged, Klinck formed a working committee of literary historians and critics-Daniells, Frye, A.G. Bailey, Desmond Pacey (1917-75), Claude Bissell (1916-2000), and himself-to plan and write what would become The Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, which was published nine years later, in 1965, and immediately became the foundation of literary study in English-speaking Canada (Klinck 1991, xviii-xxi, ch. 8).

The segment of Neatby's generation best known to historians of twentiethcentury Canada is the group associated with the administration of the federalthen "dominion"-government. They were, many of them, among the "Ottawa men" and the "government generation": those who, in the first half of the century, presided over the expansion of the federal government bureaucracy, the making of the modern welfare state, and the defining of a new international role for Canada in response to the decline and fall of the British Empire (Owram 1986; Granatstein 1982). As a teenager, I knew nothing of their existence, nor anything, of course, of the 1945 white paper on reconstruction, or of tax rental agreements, or of Article II (the "Canadian article") of the North Atlantic Treaty. I did have a very strong sense, however, of Canada as a "middle power," which was in large part their creation-of Canada, that is, as a member of the "Western alliance" but at the same time as a kind of fellow traveller of those countries that pursued neutrality in the Cold War and of those (sometimes the same) that had recently achieved national independence or were in the process of doing so. The international order of which I was aware, if only superficially, included the Colombo Plan, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, the Suez crisis and the UN Emergency Force, and Dag Hammarskjold among its chief points of orientation. One source of this awareness was the CBC news, particularly its foreign correspondents and, among them, especially James M. Minifie (1900-74), whose book, Peacemaker or PowderMonkey: Canada's Role in a Revolutionary World (1960), made a strong case for Canadian non-alignment.

The idea that Canada played a distinctive international role contributed a great deal to my sense of national identity. I was not self-consciously nationalistic (as I was later to become), but I had no doubt that I was a Canadian citizen, even if (as I also knew) I was at the same time a British subject. My idea of Canada was also national; that is, it was not local or provincial, and while I had no knowledge of Ottawa, I had an idea of national government. This meant that, a little later, as a University of Alberta undergraduate in the early 1960s, I was receptive to the nationalism of John Diefenbaker (1895-1979) and Alvin Hamilton (1912-2004)-an anti-localist, anti-provincialist sort of nationalism. My first selfconscious political activism consisted in joining with David Shugarman (now a political scientist at York University) and other like-minded fellow students in the forming of a new campus party, the Constitutional Party, the chief (and maybe only) plank of which was to uphold and expand the powers of the federal government.