3 Hugh MacLennan and the Two Solitudes of Hockey

The French Game

The first part of Two Solitudes takes place in 1917–18 and focuses on the struggles of Athanase Tallard, a wealthy, aristocratic francophone from the town of Saint-Marc on the St. Lawrence River. Tallard wishes to bring greater economic opportunity and the benefits of modern life to his region. He is proud of his French heritage but is also a Canadian patriot and, as a member of parliament, supports the Canadian effort in the First World War, a position that puts him at odds with most leaders in his community. Foremost among the opposition is a conservative priest, Father Beaubien. Beaubien opposes French-Canadian participation in the war and also the building of a factory in Saint-Marc by an investor named Huntley McQueen promoted by Tallard. For Beaubien, the war and the factory both are synonymous with exploitation by the English bosses and will lead to moral decline (MacLennan 1945, 147).

It turns out that Athanase, for a time, is part owner of a professional hockey team. This is revealed in a passage, less than a page long, about a third of the way into part one. This passage reinforces aspects of Athanase’s character. The fact that the team Athanase supports is professional subtly reinforces his commitment to creating greater economic opportunity. That he enjoys hanging out with the players, drinking beer from a barrel “they broached … together” suggests that he is a man of the people as well as an aristocrat (64). The passage also reveals that Athanase enjoys “the French style of hockey, a team with small, stickhandling forwards and defensemen built like beer barrels” (64), which reinforces the fact that Athanase is proud of his heritage. That Athanase’s investment in a francophone professional hockey team ultimately fails hints at complexities below the surface.

In the background of Athanase’s investment is the early history of modern hockey. As Michel Vigneault explains, modern hockey “was invented in the late nineteenth century by a group of Montreal anglophone friends” and remained a preserve of the anglophone elite until francophones joined through a “long and arduous” process (2017, 60). Not only were francophones often excluded from early organized hockey, but the anglophone origins of the game created a certain amount of resistance. As Jason Blake and Andrew Holman explain, “In much of Quebec until the 1940s, hockey was rejected by some francophone Catholic clergy.… In their eyes, a sport created by anglo elite Protestant Montrealers and wildly embraced by English Canadians threatened to assimilate and contaminate francophone youth.” Only near the end of the Second World War did the clergy reverse their stand and champion the game “as an antidote to sloth and a way to develop useful skills and to honour God” (2017, 7).

For these reasons, there were few francophone players on Montreal teams even into the early twentieth century (Vigneault 2017, 39). Two primarily francophone teams, the Nationals and the Montagnards, played in the fledgling professional leagues, but economic pressures forced both to fold by the time the National Hockey League (NHL) formed in 1917, leaving the Montreal Canadiens as the sole team with a francophone emphasis. Athanase would have been part owner of his team during the era of the Nationals and the Montagnards.

Quite a few readers in 1945, when Two Solitudes was published, would have known this early hockey history. They would have known that Athanase’s team folding because of the “complication” represented by the First World War (MacLennan 1945, 64) was code language not only for broader social tensions between the English and the French but for how these tensions were embodied in professional hockey. The hockey business, like other businesses at the time, was dominated by the English-speaking elite. The economic retrenchment required by the war only made this more apparent. With the formation of the NHL in the middle of the war, a league dominated by anglophones began the process of acquiring monopoly control of the highest level of the game.

Old Boy Hockey

Athanase’s hockey investment points to a divide that opened in the early twentieth century between amateur and professional versions of the game. The first hockey organizations—like the Ontario Hockey Association—were fiercely amateur. The ideal of the amateur, as McKinley summarizes it, was that “gentlemen engaged in sport for the honour of competition, for the chance to do one’s best for one’s club or society, and for the love of the game” (2000, 57). The professional game, by contrast, emerged in response to the commercial potential of hockey, recognized by promoters, as well as to certain qualities in the game itself. “Fast, exciting, and vital, hockey was a dynamic game that lent itself particularly well to partisanship,” Holman writes. “Winning felt good, and to win consistently, teams needed to have the best players” (2018, 29). One of the most interesting aspects of the environment of early professional hockey was how wide open it was. Around the time Athanase owned his team, there were four professional leagues in North America competing to pay for the best players. Players went from team to team, and league to league, seeking the best money. From 1910 until the 1925 collapse of the Western Hockey League, after which the NHL became supreme, the Stanley Cup went to winners from a number of different leagues. Only in 1926 did the trustees of the Stanley Cup turn over exclusive control of the trophy to the NHL—an act that some people still consider a betrayal of Lord Stanley’s original wishes.

The uneasy relationship between amateur and professional versions of the game is illustrated in the second half of Two Solitudes. The hockey references in this half relate to Paul Tallard, the son of Athanase. Athanase invests his hopes for the future in Paul and decides that he will go to an elite English-language boarding school to learn “to mix naturally with English boys” and hence to feel that “the whole of Canada” is his land (MacLennan 1945, 127). Father Beaubien is predictably scandalized, not just that Paul should mix with English speakers but that he should go live in the wider world where “infidelity awaits.” Saint-Marc, he tells Athanase, has everything “a Christian farmer could hope to have” and reminds him of “the trivial, futile kind of life materialism has produced in the States” (127). Eventually, after much conflict, Athanase sends Paul to a school named Frobisher.

Frobisher is described in the novel as “an English-style school run for the sons of prosperous Canadians” (205). Graduates are referred to as “old boys” and are destined for posts in Canadian business, government, or the military. Ninety-two of them were killed in the First World War (187). The education is a mix of traditional subjects and sports, very much like Rugby School as described in Tom Brown’s School Days, and the masters are all Englishmen, some of them ex-military. Sergeant-Major Croucher, for example, teaches boxing and tells Paul that “he was a natural at it” (204). Though the school is overtly English, its culture is altered by the character of the young Canadian students. New masters, for example, “discover that Canadian boys mistook their exquisite English accents for a proof of softness” and end up having to prove how tough they are (205). In the matter of games, the school teaches the classic English public-school games, but the boys have their own preferences. In early summer, they “played cricket very badly” and “threw baseballs about behind the school at recess” (204).

In the winter, the boys play hockey. Games take place on “an open-air rink behind the school with the snow piled ten feet high back of the boards” (204). In 1921, at the age of eleven or twelve, Paul plays “for his house in a junior inter-house league.” He is a “centre-forward” and his game is a model mix of team play and individual ability: “He was a natural play-maker and fed his wings generously, but he also had a quick low shot of his own” (204).

Though the text doesn’t state it explicitly, the environment at Frobisher makes clear that hockey, like other sports, is part of an English public school-like emphasis on character building among the students, an emphasis that comes straight out of the pedagogical ideals of Thomas Arnold, the historical master at Rugby upon whose philosophy Hughes based Tom Brown’s School Days. Colin Howell points out that all private schools in Canada of this era emulated the English public school ideal of character building, mostly by having their boys participate in “manly” games, and for this reason “endurance and toughness fashioned on the field of play … were prized as much as literary and mathematical skills” (2001, 32). This environment, in turn, was governed by the amateur ideal of competition between gentlemen. The class-based character of this philosophy is laid bare at Frobisher, where sport is explicitly associated with the education of the sons of the Canadian elite. The environment of Frobisher would exclude, by definition, those “undesirables” excluded by the amateur ideal. Though Two Solitudes does not say so explicitly, you can be sure that, like the Montreal Pedestrian Club whose charter I cited in the last chapter, there are no “laborers or Indians” at Frobisher.

The class-based character of Frobisher hockey is illustrated in a brutal way for Paul when his father dies and leaves him penniless (Huntley McQueen should not have been trusted after all). Afterward, Paul must leave the private school and enroll in public school in Montreal. At such schools, the novel explains, “[no] games were provided” (MacLennan 1945, 221).

Playing for Money

One aspect of Two Solitudes often noted—and mocked—by critics, is the way the novel’s second half makes Paul Tallard into an impossibly idealized figure. It is as if MacLennan, having decided on the didactic purpose of having Paul become a model of modern Canadian manhood, felt the need to elevate Paul’s status. To this end, he piles on heroic and romantic qualities. In the second half of the novel, Paul is portrayed as a brilliant student of classical literature, a labourer, a sailor and world traveler (he delivers guns during the Spanish civil war and spends time in Greece), an Oxford scholar, and—by the last part of the novel, set in 1939—a published author of short stories who is working on a novel. The Hemingway-like aura is not, I think, an accident. All that’s missing is a scene in which Paul and Ernest don the gloves outside a Paris café, so that Paul can school the American with a little of what Sergeant-Major Croucher taught him.

Paul is also a professional hockey player. Early in part three, we learn that he has put himself through the University of Montreal by playing professional hockey. The nature of this hockey is fleshed out during Paul’s courtship of Heather Methuen. Before the courtship, Heather learns that Paul had played varsity hockey and had then become a “semi-professional,” playing on a “tough outfit” made up of “garage hands and factory workers,” who played “for the money they could make” (MacLennan 1945, 237). Paul was so good that there was talk of his making “a club in one of the major leagues” (238). When Heather is told that Paul was “a big-time hockey player,” she looks at him with “shyness” (266). Paul claims to have only been “medium” good, but Heather tells him she has heard differently, and Paul responds, “Well, I ought to be [good]. I played sixty-four games a season for four years. Besides, I was paid to be good” (266).

The subject returns during a long courtship scene in which Heather sees Paul in a bathing suit. It turns out that he has scars on his thigh, chest, and lower back. Heather asks how he got them, and he tells her “hockey” (285). From there, Heather asks if he “loves” the game, and he replies, “I used to,” after which he waxes nostalgic about playing at the Montreal Forum and how he knew “every scratch on the paint along the boards” (285). Then he explains that he fell in love with the game at age sixteen when he saw “Joliat, Morenz and Boucher” play, but now he was “an old man” and his playing days were over. He stresses, in the passage that is the second epigraph of this chapter, that he played professional hockey because he “needed the money” (285).

A first step in analyzing Paul’s professional career might be to try to find a historical parallel for the team he plays on. This is tricky. The details about the team in the novel are ambiguous—probably deliberately so on MacLennan’s part. The team, as noted above, is “semi-professional” but Paul is said to play “sixty-four games a year,” as many, or more, than the NHL at the time, and also to have a deep intimacy with the Montreal Forum. Perhaps MacLennan realized that there would be believability problems to have Paul playing in the NHL in the later 1920s while also attending university, but the NHL, by this period, was the most recognizably professional game in town. So he created a fictional team that isn’t the Montreal Canadiens, but that, like the Canadiens, plays at the Forum, in order to confer on Paul a similar kind of status.

What qualities are conferred on Paul by professional hockey? There are two main ones, I think. The first is that hockey gives him the bona fides to be a model of Canadian identity. This is straight out of the hockey myth, of course. MacLennan’s choice to add hockey to Paul’s list of heroic activities suggests how the hockey myth has taken hold in Canadian society. That this choice was a conscious decision is hinted at by how MacLennan adopted his own history to create Paul. Various critics have noted the parallels between the two. Robert Cockburn, for example, suggests that Paul is “mainly a projection of [MacLennan] himself” (1969, 65). Both Paul and the historical MacLennan are/were classicists, star athletes, Oxford students, and, of course, writers. What MacLennan changes from his own background, however, is more telling than what he keeps. Paul, for example, attends the University of Montreal, a French language school, instead of Dalhousie, in the heart of Anglo-Scottish Nova Scotia—a way for MacLennan to stress Paul’s French roots. Paul also pays his own way to Oxford rather than attending, as MacLennan did, as a Rhodes scholar. This emphasizes Paul’s self-reliance and affinity with the working class, which, combined with his elite upbringing, suggests that his character is intended to bridge class as well as cultural differences. Most significantly for this analysis, however, MacLennan’s main sport was tennis: he played for Dalhousie as an undergraduate, won the Maritimes singles championship in 1929, and the university singles championship at Oxford in 1930 (Leith 1990, 10; Cockburn 1969, 13). MacLennan probably understood that making Paul a tennis player would have conflicted with his goal of having Paul represent Canadian identity; to represent an ideal of Canadian identity during this time in Canadian history, Paul needs to be adept at what has become Canada’s defining game.

Hockey itself is characterized in Two Solitudes as a possible national unifier. The game is portrayed as something that distinguishes Canada from both America and England, consistent with the pattern of national self-identification evident in the early history of the country. At Frobisher, for example, hockey—like other hardy outdoor activities—is how the Canadian boys modify the English school environment to reflect their own characters. Athanase’s francophone professional team and Paul’s team of “garage hands and factory workers” suggest economic models opposed to the rapacious capitalism of America. Hockey is also portrayed as creating social bonds, be it the bond between Athanase and his players, Paul and the other boys at Frobisher, or Paul and his working-class fellows on the semi-professional team. The fact that Paul plays hockey in an English setting at Frobisher and a French setting at the University of Montreal, as well as on amateur and professional teams, hints that these different environments can be brought together in him. The power of hockey to bridge the two solitudes is hinted at when Paul talks about his professional heroes. His first list combines the English and French superstars of the 1920s Montreal Canadiens, Howie Morenz and Aurèle Joliat (MacLennan 1945, 285). Paul’s second list, of the artists of the game, displays a similar cultural diversity (286).

The second quality Paul acquires through hockey is an association with an aggressive version of masculinity. Two Solitudes, remember, emphasizes that his team is a “tough outfit” and that his body has a number of scars. These details hint at what Gruneau and Whitson call the “John Wayne” model so often associated with hockey: the man of “few words … with a powerful sense of his own abilities and toughness” who “respects the rules that govern social life, but knows how to work outside them if necessary” (1993, 191).

That Paul is associated with aggressive masculinity is especially important, I think, because his true vocation is to become a writer of Canadian stories—perhaps, ultimately, to write a novel like Two Solitudes. At the best of times, proposing a writer as a model of Canadian identity would be problematical. A recurring theme of mid-twentieth-century Canadian literature is that Canada is an inhospitable place for literature. E. K. Brown goes on at length about this in his 1943 essay “The Problem of a Canadian Literature.” Brown identifies a number of obstacles for Canadian literature, including Canada’s colonial mentality, its sparse population, and the division in the country between the English and French. The most powerful obstacle, however, is that the “standards [of] the frontier-life” still define the country:

Books are a luxury on the frontier; and writers are an anomaly. On the frontier a man is mainly judged by what he can do to bring his immediate environment quickly and visibly under the control of society.… No nation is more practical than ours; admiration is readily stirred … by the man who can run a factory, or invent a gadget or save a life by surgical means. (Brown 1961, 48–49)

MacLennan seems to have shared Brown’s sense that a Canadian hero at this time—even an educated one with writing as his destiny—had to be able to revert to a hard man of action when necessary, like a hockey player who fights if he can’t help it. True to form, Paul puts his writing dreams on hold at the end of Two Solitudes in order to enlist in the Second World War (MacLennan 1945, 368).

Solitudes Bridged/Not Bridged

Two Solitudes shares with Glengarry School Days the quality of being powerfully stirring at times while also containing important blind spots. One blind spot is hinted at by the title. The novel’s concentration on English and French subcultures hints at the novel’s failure to acknowledge the multicultural nature of Canadian society, especially the society of Montreal at the time of the novel’s setting and publication. The absence of First Nations people, of course, is another blind spot, and common in Canadian novels of this time. The lack of First Nations people is particular troubling in Two Solitudes because of the novel’s explicit aim to establish a model of identity for Canada.

The novel’s blind spots about gender are particularly evident in its treatment of Heather Methuen. The last name of Paul Tallard’s love interest suggests her symbolic role as the English half of the Canadian power couple that she and Paul are to form at the novel’s end. MacLennan also tries to portray her as a modern, independent woman, an equal partner in the ideal modern Canadian relationship: she resists her overbearing mother, persists in being an artist, and takes care of herself when Paul is off symbolically outdoing Hemingway. Yet the novel’s affirmation of Paul’s hockey player-like masculinity undermines Heather’s character. The fact that she reacts to the news that Paul is “a big-time hockey player” with “shyness,” as well as her swooning over the scars on Paul’s body, suggests that Heather’s independence dissolves in the presence of a hockey player’s masculine display (266). She never asks Paul about any of his goals, assists, or championships but only dwells on whether he “[got] into fights and [got] penalties” (MacLennan 1945, 286). The novel, then, promotes the idea that the most attractive quality of a hockey player, and the most seductive from the point of view of even a modern woman like Heather, is the rough masculinity earned in the most violent aspects of the game.

Heather’s response to Paul’s hockey career magnifies the gender stereotyping already evident in both of their characters. This stereotyping—like the absence of First Nations characters—makes Two Solitudes feel dated today, but it is instructive of where Canada was at in 1945. Heather’s responses are consistent with the limited roles available to women in traditional hockey culture. Like Mrs. Murray and the “gurls” who cheer on the boys in Glengarry School Days, females in hockey have more often than not been consigned to “supportive roles” (Blake 2010, 208).

The Persistence of History

The hockey myth stresses how the game brings people in Canada together. Building community requires shared rituals and traditions. These rituals and traditions, in turn, become more powerful as they are repeated, as they reproduce values more widely shared, and as their historical origins, inevitably more messy and complicated than what remains in the repetition of them, are forgotten. Sometimes the past is deliberately elided or falsified in order to give rituals greater authority. Whether history falls away by accident or design, once a ritual or tradition seems “natural” or “timeless” it has taken on the characteristic of myth.

What is so fascinating about earlier representations of hockey like those found in Glengarry School Days and Two Solitudes is that you can see how the hockey myth is becoming embedded in Canadian society, while at the same time—like the steam trailing behind a Zamboni as it creates a glassy sheet of near perfect ice—there remain traces of the history out of which the myth was formed.

Two Solitudes enlists aspects of the myth to bolster its larger project of creating a model for Canadian identity. Yet traces of the history out of which the myth emerges can still be seen in the novel. Despite the portrayals of hockey’s ability to build community, Athanase’s failed investment hints at a division between English and French that is not easily bridged. Despite the characterization of hockey as a Canadian-specific activity, Frobisher’s use of hockey suggests the exclusive, class-based nature of the amateur ideal that influenced the definition of “Canadian” ascribed to hockey.

The novel does express skepticism about certain aspects of the myth. Once the hockey myth takes hold in Canada, professional hockey becomes a “field of dreams” for young Canadian boys and men (Gruneau and Whitson 1993, 133). Two Solitudes downplays this elevation of the professional game in the 1930s and 1940s. Paul’s professional career is portrayed not as a great achievement or the fulfillment of a personal quest, but as a pragmatic, perhaps even cynical, attempt to make money at a sport he was good at. The fact that he professes to be an “old man” at twenty-four also hints at the physical cost of his having made this decision. Paul’s lost love for hockey suggests that his experience as a professional has dulled his earlier, more spontaneous and joyful, experience of the game.

Even with its ambivalence towards the professional game, Two Solitudes is not a critical response to hockey in the manner of Al Purdy’s “Hockey Players” or the later texts in this study. The novel’s largely conservative view of the game is in keeping with MacLennan’s 1954 essay “Fury on Ice,” which reproduces the key themes of the hockey myth, from a celebration of hockey’s violence and the toughness of the players who play it to the role of small towns and the northern climate in making hockey “the game it is today” to the game’s specifically Canadian nation-building potential (MacLennan 1978, 79). Nevertheless, the disquieting history hinted at by the hockey in Two Solitudes points to fractures in Canadian society that the hockey myth, even at its most powerful, cannot smooth over. History, like the scars on Paul Tallard’s body, will leave its traces, and later writers, as we shall see, will read these traces in a way that exposes some of the history obscured by the formation of the hockey myth.

Works Cited