AND NOW, in this record, I have arrived at a point where I have to explain a development which I find it the most difficult of any I have touched on to make clear. For the first time in our lives, after seventeen years of marriage, my wife and I owned property; and when I look back on the dozen years elapsed since we acquired it, I am more than ever convinced that property you own, owns you.
     While the land I had bought comprised some of the best soil in the county, and while barns and sheds were in fair repair, the house, one hundred and three years old when I bought it, was little more than a windbreak. It was a

loose-jointed, ramshackle affair of eight rooms, with floors of pine, two inches thick, which, in a century of hard use, under the hob-nailed shoes of pioneers, had been worn into a series of hills and valleys; with walls which had never been properly kept up but patched here and there as the necessity arose. The outside covering was of axe-hewn clap-boards hanging precariously on hand-forged, square nails which had rusted holes into the wood. Every breeze penetrated the worn-out shell. When I brought my fist against the bottom of the weather-boarding, a wave ran through it to the eaves; and of the last coat of white paint only the faintest traces were left. In places, one could see daylight through the walls from inside.
     Yet this house had possibilities. The window-sashes needed replacing in order to bring back its colonial dignity; but the dignity was still there. What had attracted me more than anything else was a grove of cedars and spruces between the house and the highway that ran past the property. Behind the house, though not on my land, towered an elm which was one of the most magnificent trees I had ever seen in my life. The fields, too, were divided from each other by rows of fine trees: basswood, elm, ash, maple. A meadow behind the barn-yard was crossed by a pleasant creek.
     My wife, not perhaps taking full account of my agricultural antecedents, was horrified to think that I meant to work a farm. I, on the other hand, was convinced that it would be possible to combine the tasks of a farmer and a writer. For a while, of course, I should lie fallow; I had been lying fallow for some time; but, under the load of anxiety caused by the precarious state of affairs in the Graphic business, there had been no mental rest.

     As for my books, The Yoke of Life had appeared while we were at Ottawa; and at least one reviewer, Carleton Stanley, soon to become president of Dalhousie University, had hailed it as a great book. A year or so after our settling on the farm, Fruits of the Earth appeared in England and Canada. The following year brought me the one single honour that has ever come to me out of Canada; the Royal Society awarded to me the Lorne Pierce gold medal for literature. A few major plans remained to be attended to: The Master of the Mill,* the Ant Book, Two Generations, and one or two others; of minor plans, a few more were to emerge in the course of the next few years. I looked forward to the same sort of life which I had been leading before my marriage. I worked, to the limit of my strength, on the farm; and in my scant leisure hours, I tried to write.
     But between that remote past and the poignant present there was one essential difference. In the past, my farm-work had been a mere routine; often it had been a hard routine; but it had left me mentally free because the farm had not been mine. While, in a sense, my time had been less my own than it was now, there had been no worry; my only real preoccupation had been with my books. That, of course, had also been the case while my wife had made our living; though even then pressure on my power of production had been noticeable; I had always felt that I must justify her extraordinary exertions by extraordinary achievement on my part; and pressure and anxiety are mental states in which artistic achievement becomes impossible. I have never been able to do my

* Master of the Mill, 1945. The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. Selected as Required Reading, Modern Literature, University of Toronto.

best unless I could allow ideas, moods, expressions their spontaneous life. There is a fundamental difference between books that are "made" and books that have "grown". I have already tried to make it clear that I am so constituted as to be able to produce books only that have grown. Which is equivalent to saying that, in order to evolve matter for artistic formulation, I must, to borrow Lamb's expression, be so acted upon by my subject that it seems to direct me - not to be arranged by me; it must "impress its leading and collateral points upon me so tyrannically that I dare not treat it otherwise lest I should falsify a revelation".
     Which implies that I could never be a "professional writer"; nor do I believe that the greatest books have been written by professional writers. By this I do not mean, of course, that the writer can remain an amateur in the American sense; like any other craftsman he has to master his craft. What I do mean is that he cannot do his best and most essential work - the kind of work that no one else can do, and the kind which integrates him in the spiritual history of his country - if, for his material existence, he makes himself dependent on the financial success of his work.
     It implies further that, to me, the greatest good on earth is leisure; not the scanty leisure which I had had, nibbled off from hours of preoccupation with other things: absolute leisure, available at all times. I am the man who looks on; as life flows by, he sees and fashions a few things which have come to him and which, slowly, but inevitably, demand artistic formulation.
     A wealthy friend of mine once said to me that, to make me produce, poverty was essential. As in most sincere

utterances, there is a kernel of truth in this. If I had been wealthy throughout, I might have become an artist in spending. It is most unlikely that, after my twentieth year, I should have spent a great deal on luxuries; by that time I had had my fill of them. But a good many poor people - writers, artists, poets, pioneers - would have led easier lives; I was a born Geissler. If wealth is intelligently used - it rarely is - it provides its own preoccupations.
     Till I was twenty, I had had all the money I had ever had any use for, at least after my mother's death. I had travelled wherever and whenever I wanted; I had never dreamt of going to a hotel of the second rank when one of the first rank was available; I had dressed and dined regardless of expense.
     I had not been born in poverty; it had never occurred to me that I might be born to poverty. In spite of my middle-class descent, I had, in childhood and youth lived like, and considered myself, a grand seigneur; not consciously, of course, for I did not know that there was any other mode of living. Clerks that waited on me seemed to belong to a different race; just as a seal does. As such, I was ready to face privation in any form; as a pioneer or an explorer; that is, for a purpose. What I could not have faced was mediocrity in any form, for instance in the mode of life necessitated by a small income, as a superior clerk or a lower Civil Servant, without motivating aim; and that disability has remained with me. It was the reason why, when urged by influential friends to seek a living from the government, I asked for the appointment as a lock-master or a light-house keeper rather than for that as an assistant archivist. The irony of it is that, had

I asked for it, I might have received the latter whereas the former was denied. One does what is needed to achieve a purpose; but one despises mere gentility.
     Into my old life of careless spending there had, at the age of twenty, come the amazing break. By one step, within one week, I had had to make the change from a life in which I had drawn nothing but the great prizes, to a life in which my daily bread depended on manual labour. But that had not changed my aims in life.
     The strange thing was that, had I become wealthy again by means of my books - such things have happened - at no matter what stage of my subsequent life, I could never again have become the careless spender. I had looked at the under side of life on this planet; I had seen slavery persisting into this so-called civilization. Had I not remained a slave myself, I should have devoted my wealth to the task of abolishing slavery in no matter what shape. Wealth, unshared, would have been sin.
     Even with a salary of six thousand dollars - though we had it only for a few months - we did not change our mode of living. We did not buy a more expensive car; we did not rent luxurious quarters; we did not have servants to wait on us.
     Yet, I repeat, I hold no brief for poverty as such; and to the fulfilment of my task, that of formulating what came to me, the grinding sort of poverty in which I had lived presented at least as many obstacles as great wealth could have done. Poverty, in the sense of a lack of luxuries, has nothing repulsive to me; on the contrary, it may be the hallmark of an aristocracy of the spirit. What I revolted against was that the mere essentials were not forthcoming without a continual struggle which

at times absorbed every last ounce of my powers. The mere mechanics of making a livelihood, by a conspiracy of circumstance, seemed a Chinese puzzle to me.
     And thus we reached the point where we seemed to be settled.
     Up to a certain point, my wife would also have been satisfied with the mere essentials; we had been satisfied with them in the past; it was she who had voiced the desire to live in the wilderness. All this was suddenly reversed. A limit appeared to her readiness to go without. It was an inexorable, perhaps it was an inevitable thing.
     If May had lived, she would, in all probability, have been self-supporting by this time; my wife and I could have done as we pleased. Now there was once more a little child who was entitled to a proper start in life. He was to receive an education opening all avenues; he was to be raised in a manner which would enable him to harbour a proper pride in himself. I had welcomed his birth for the very reason that it provided my wife once more with a task that led beyond her. After May's death, she had one day said, "The terrible thing is that there is nothing left to worry about."
     There was also this that, in spite of our poverty, I had become "somebody". Friends as well as strangers called. Occasionally they came from distant parts of Canada and even from Europe. Neither my wife nor I cared for display; but there came a time when she demanded a minimum of comfort and the decencies of civilized life; she was entitled to have them.
     But about the social life of eastern Canada there is a peculiar atmosphere; there is only one standard, the money standard. People saw how we lived; they turned their noses up. That, my wife could not bear.

     Finally, property imposes demands of its own. A plot of grass has its private life. Unless it is that of an aristocrat, it is that of a ragamuffin. A house that has its possibilities cries out for their realization.
     Add to all this a certain weariness. For forty years I had lived a life below the standards native to me. That atmosphere of exploration or pioneering of which I spoke had exhausted itself; there remained the naked facts. For forty years I had never had a bathroom; my bath I had taken over a tub or a basin; the fact that Niels Lindstedt had done the same was no longer a remedy. And at last we owned this property; any improvements we made would be our own. It is true that, from the moment when we had acquired it, I had realized that, from the point of view of my literary aims, it was a mistake to have bought it. But what had been done could not be undone. We were caught by the depression as in a trap; all values were falling; we had to make the best of it. I was getting old.
     Above all, I was getting old. Till we had come east, we had felt that life lay ahead. At over sixty, life lay behind. Even my wife had to acknowledge the fact. She was herself no longer the young girl who, at Falmouth, or even at Ashlield and Eden, had valiantly fought; she, too, was forty; and the realization of it sent her into an occasional panic. Worse still, she felt as if it were time for her to resign herself; life had given her nothing but empty promise. I, apparently, was going to remain what I had always been, a failure. She, too, faced that possibility at last. Whenever we looked at the list of those who applauded me, we became doubtful; the list had grown; among them were people from all over the Dominion, from England, from continental

Europe. I knew that my books stood on the shelves of great European libraries, in the British Museum, in the state library of Berlin; among the antipodes at Canberra. The character, the abilities, even the standing of those who composed the list seemed to furnish a guarantee of the validity of their judgment. But there was, after all, the possibility that they were one and all mistaken. That possibility even my wife could no longer deny. Besides, they were all so-called intellectuals; and in Canada, so far, intellectuals counted for nothing. Intellectually, Canada is a chaos; the light has not yet been divided from the darkness.
     For decades I had contended that nothing is in itself either great or small; its sequel makes it so. Certain actions - and artistic "creation" is an action - may or may not determine the future when it has become the present, quite apart from their internal merits. All interpretation of the past is teleological; it is meant, it is constructed as an explanation of that which is. No matter what has happened in the past, its importance is solely determined by its share in moulding the present. It is never what might have been; it is only what happened to happen which decides the value of any deed. It is, of course, futile to speculate on what might have been. Inexorably, at the end of the individual life stands death. Only the future could decide whether my work was to count for anything in this world; and that future I was certainly not going to see. It made me laugh when a certain book-reviewer called a novel of mine "a classic". "Why does he not wait a few hundred years," I asked, "before using such a grandiloquent word?"
     I have said that the word posterity is too rarely used these days; I still believe it is. The artist should always

build his work as if it were meant to last through the centuries; and only the great commonplaces of life are worthy of being forever repeated and expounded anew.
     But I will admit, when there are other, realizable aims to claim one's attention, it may be a discouraging task to hammer away at what is beyond the reach of man, namely, perfection. "Alas, what boots it with incessant care . . .?" Why not snatch at the day and squeeze from it what sweetness it may contain?
     My depression was deepened by the fact that most of my friends were among the older people of this generation: the people who had lived their lives; who, like myself, belonged to the past rather than to the present or to the future. Perhaps I was already potentially dead?
     Had it been possible for me, at this stage, to repeat that extraordinary burst of production by means of which I had, under similarly depressing circumstances, written Over Prairie Trails, things might have been different; but, for that, too, I was too old, it seemed.
     What, then, more natural than that I should focus my eyes definitely on the present?
     Some work I could still do? Some . . . "job"? My friends, or some of them, were bestirring themselves. What did I want? They laughed when I said, "Give me a lock, or give me a light-house to look after." But they tried to get that for me; in vain, of course; I might have saved myself the humiliation of asking. To those in whose power it lay to hand out such appointments, my work counted for nothing. In Canada, anyone who has seen service as a political heeler takes precedence over a mere writer. It is very natural, indeed.
     One man I cannot omit mentioning in this connection,

though - a man genuinely desirous to do something for Canadian letters. I am emphatic about the last two words.
     The man in question is Senator A. C. Hardy of Brockville. I had met him; he had met me; but our acquaintance was of the slightest. In 1928, he had heard me speak at Ottawa; after my lecture, we had exchanged a few words, ineffectually, for we were both deaf. I don't suppose it was a secret that I was a poor man. He, being wealthy, wished to ease my life; and, if I am correctly informed - it was years later that I heard about it - he placed certain funds in the hands of an intermediary known both to him and myself. For several years, my struggle for a living going on unrelieved, Senator Hardy lived in the comfortable consciousness of having done a generous deed. He did not know that the intermediary had embezzled the funds for himself.
     Years later the whole matter came out in an entirely casual and yet dramatic way the details of which need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that, shortly after, we had a talk in Senator Hardy's office at Brockville -the only real talk we ever had in the absence of a crowd which prevented us from understanding what was being said. In the course of it he dropped a remark which has remained in my memory. "People," he said, "who devote their time and energy to public service should not mind accepting help from others who are able to help. You should not mind it." Ever since, he has from time to time helped out of his own accord. Thus, in 1933, when he heard that I was doing manual labour, he sent an entirely unexpected cheque, telling me, in a covering letter, to use the money for hiring help so I could reserve

my own time and energy for the work that was proper to me.
     Naturally, while I accepted this, I never felt justified in revealing to him the full extent of my needs. Had I done so, I feel convinced that his generosity would have been equal to the demand. I have given his name because it is due to him. It is a strange fact that his gifts nearly always came at a moment of extreme need. More than once, when receiving a cheque from him, I have said to my wife, "The Lord will provide," If my work should at any time prove to have been of some value to this country, not only I, but Canada, owes him a debt of gratitude.
     I have more than once spoken of the need for leisure.
     All art is the product of leisure. The nomad hunter of the neolithic age could not hunt at the same time and carve the image of a running deer or a couchant lion. It might be said that he could hunt one day and carve the next. The argument would be fallacious for two reasons. In the first place, the hunter is more frequently unsuccessful than successful; starvation hangs over him like a threat; nobody has ever been "creative" under a threat. The task of hunting is an absorbing one; even while not actually engaged in the chase, the hunter is preoccupied with that task. He must explain to himself why this or that game escaped him, so that he may avoid his mistake the next time; he must fashion bow and arrows and sharpen the flint tips; he must recover his own powers of endurance. While, during the chase, he may be thrilled by the line, from head to tail, of the fleeing deer - in other words, while he may have artistic or aesthetic appreciation, rare as it must be - his chief concern is necessarily with the deer as representing so much meat, not so much

beauty. In the second place, it is a singular, perhaps regrettable, but nevertheless inevitable fact that the appreciation of beauty, and the desire to reproduce it, is almost invariably the attribute of him who is more or less unfitted for the chase. Suppose he is not afflicted with a physical disability - an improbable assumption - he is at least likely to suffer from a disinclination to exert himself physically; and often from a disinclination to kill that which appeals so strongly to his aesthetic sense. If the hunter sees that curve from head to tail, the chances are that, at the moment when he should launch spear or arrow, he will stand and look instead. At the decisive moment he will be, with his aesthetic sense, the deer instead of being the hunter. But, by a singular dispensation or compensation, the aesthetic sense usually develops in connection with some physical or mental disability, Perhaps it is merely because physical disability confers leisure; but I believe the thing goes deeper than that. Long observation and study have convinced me that, even under the conditions of civilized modem life, aesthetic appreciation and, a fortiori, a creative urge is almost invariably bound up with a disability of some sort, be it temperamental only. To the absolutely healthy human animal the chase, whether after meat or after money, is more important than anything else.
     Here is another point. His preoccupation with the chase leads him to despise the other man to whom the result of the chase seems vastly less important than the fact that, in deer or hunter, it brings out certain lines, certain attitudes, certain tensions which, to him, seem to be of cosmic significance; which are of cosmic significance. This is quite irrespective of the further fact that, when the artist - for he of the aesthetic sense is the artist - reproduces

that line or that attitude in bone or stone, in song or tune, even the hunter falls under the spell of the work of art. That the artist is not a hunter constitutes him a cripple, physical or mental, and therefore an object of contempt as well as, paradoxically, of a reluctant admiration. For his work partakes of the nature of a miracle which, to the primitive mind, confers a "power" - perhaps the power of enabling the beholder to hunt with greater success: the work of art becomes a fetish endowed with the functions of magic.
     Apply this reasoning to mankind as a body. Only where there are leisure classes is art in demand; only there does a feeling for beauty, for style, for expressiveness develop. Unfortunately it is rare that the creative gift is joined to the gift of appreciation. The leisured class is an aristocratic class, for in the last resort aristocracy means plutocracy or arises from it; and aristocrats do not, as a rule, favour, in their own ranks, gifts other than physical. A certain very great Hungarian nobleman whom I knew prided himself on the fact that, when a document had to be signed, he affixed his cross and left it to such menials as his notaries to attend to the rest. As a rule, I say; for there are exceptions; but these exceptions are viewed with profound misgiving by other members of the class.
     Yet, so long as the demand for beauty, style, and expressiveness is more or less confined to an aristocracy, the case of the artist - that is, of the cripple - is not the worst; for noblesse oblige; the aristocrat takes pride in brushing the crumbs from his table so that the needy may pick them up, especially those who, like minstrels or sculptors or so-called "fools" - those privileged to speak the truth - give him pleasure.

     The artist, it is true, resents the necessity of picking up those crumbs; socially, he is, therefore, a rebel; he claims the crumbs as his right. Often he assumes the airs of one who, in his turn, despises the normal people who devote themselves primarily to the acquisition and the enjoyment of the good things of life - which means the aristocrats, or, nowadays the "bourgeois". That is the reason why so many artists, some of the greatest among them, Beethoven or Michelangelo, so often seem crabbed, ungrateful, irritable, yes, perverse. They know that what they are doing is more enduring, perhaps more important than what their patrons are doing, even though they may be ruling states and empires. What they receive in return is at best a pittance which, so it often seems to them, is ungraciously given.
     For the artist, the case has become much worse since aristocracy has vanished from the world. The creative mind has seen itself forced to be the public entertainer who, like any organ-grinder, must rattle the tin-cup. He who succeeds in that office of a public entertainer, it is true, may reap all the rewards of a seller of hardware; but he can do so only by striking a compromise between the thing which only he has to give and the thing which the public has already been schooled to accept as entertainment. Unfortunately, the real artist is intransigent; it may take him a long while to change the public taste. As Landor has said, "The poet must himself create the beings who are to enjoy his paradise."
     Meanwhile he remains, if not physically, at least temperamentally unfitted for what appears to him the paltry task of making a success of his material life. The aristocrat who was the Maecenas, as often hated as loved, has disappeared; a more or less stupid public has taken his

place. What is everybody's task is nobody's task; the artist starves, metaphorically, if not in fact. Since he is unsuccessful, as any artist who is worth his salt, barring fortunate accidents, is bound to be for at least a considerable length of time, he is, socially and economically, as much of a rebel as he used to be under the aristocratic regime; and now he is an impotent rebel.
     One might protest that there are two ways out. He may combine his work as an artist with some "practical" occupation; or he may, for a time, degrade his art in order to catch the public pennies. Grillparzer did the former; Arnold Bennett, the latter. In either case the result is there for everybody to see. Intentionally I choose two supreme talents to illustrate. Arnold Bennett's case is the more easily understood of the two. He wrote the Old Wives' Tale to save his immortal soul; and he wrote scores of other books to provide him with expensive living quarters and a fine motor-car. Consequently, this man, more highly gifted perhaps than any of his contemporaries, simply does not exist as a force moulding the spiritual destinies of his country. It has been said that it was success which spoiled him; there is this truth in it that success gave him a glimpse of what material wealth could do for a man. He changed his milieus from the middle-class population of the five towns to that of the London plutocracy; but that does not, in itself, account for his artistic downfall. If, after this change, he had waited till he could understand his new milieu, he might have continued to produce great works; but economic pressure was upon him; and he yielded; he forced his great talent; it left him in the void.
     To a certain point I had done what Grillparzer had done; but there was a fundamental difference between

him and myself. Throughout his life, Grillparzer lived in the country of his birth; he was familiar with all the grooves in which he could run; he chose the civil service. I had come from Europe to America; at every gate through which I might have passed into a career which would not absorb me completely, as trade would have done, there were thousands waiting to enter; and they knew "the ropes" as the vulgar phrase goes. Whenever I tried to improve my occupational status, I felt like one who must scale a ladder in competition with others who are physically more powerful than he. The things I attempted seem almost ludicrous. I applied for the position of a book-adviser in a department store; for that of a proof-reader in a publishing house, at thirty-five dollars a week. Always without success.
     I was willing to reduce my chance to do literary work to a minimum; at the age of sixty-five I was back where I had been at twenty-one. I am shy; I am reluctant to put myself forward; I am sensitive to humiliation; I am easily discouraged. Those were the last two attempts I made to break into any of the standard careers.
     The thing had other consequences. The profound discouragement which was the outcome of such experiences prevented me from making use of the leisure which was thus forced upon me. I was one of the great army of unemployed.
     I must at least try the other way - the way which Arnold Bennett had deliberately chosen of his own free will. I must try to write pot-boilers. But I am I; and I had four decades of the opposite endeavour behind me. Invariably, when I tried to write what the public seemed to want, my work turned into a parody of the prevailing fiction which commanded success. In one case, when I

had set out to write a mystery story, relying on an ever-increasing tension of curiosity to carry the reader forward, the story as such took charge; the result was a study of criminal procedure-at-law the significance of which entirely escaped the two or three publishers to whom I offered it. They wanted mystery, not a criticism of legal procedure.
     I had not the patience, not any longer, to go on; I refused to send out manuscripts to hundreds of publishers as I had done in the past. Yet, in a single year I had written four full-length novels of that type; but, having made the attempt with one of them, I decided not to offer the other three. I had wasted my year; what is worse, I had enormously increased my discouragement.
     I made up my mind that I was a failure. Failure breeds failure. At the end of this period of eleven years since we left Ottawa, I had a decided inferiority complex. In that time I had, in addition to the four pot-boilers, written three novels which derived their being from decades of thought. These satisfied my own standards. But I simply added them to the long line of manuscripts which stood already on my shelves.
     Meanwhile The Chronicles of Spalding District, rechristened Fruits of the Earth had appeared in England and Canada and fallen flat (1933). There is much in the book which is unique; and if my whole situation had been half-way normal, I should have viewed its commercial failure with perfect equanimity. But even in my dealings with publishers, I was now under a handicap. Many a publisher is willing to take his chance with an untried author when he is reluctant to back one who has failed; and I had two commercial failures to my debit: The Yoke of Life and Fruits of the Earth.

     On the other hand, I was now too old to do much else; so, what was there for me to do but to go on? This is the place to speak of one more striking episode of my writing life.
     One June day of the following year Hugh R. Dent, of J. M. Dent and Sons, visited my house. He was still enthusiastic about Fruits of the Earth which he had published. He wanted another book. I outlined to him the pattern of the one on which I was working, The Master of the Mill and he wanted the manuscript then and there. In my diffidence I insisted on working it over once more and estimated it would take me another six months. He promptly offered me an advance of five hundred dollars for the first refusal. This sum, he added, was not to constitute a charge against my estate - an expression which amused me vastly, for what was my estate? But I did the exactly wrong thing; I accepted.
     The book went forward under insuperable difficulties; but it was not they which ultimately defeated me; it was the fact that, to me, this advance constituted what, to the business man, is a draft presented by his bank at a critical moment - a moment when the draft reveals his bankruptcy. I had accepted money for work which, for that very reason, I now found, myself unable to do; for in spite of Mr. Dent's assurances I felt tied down to a schedule; henceforth I could not wait for the moment when things clicked in my brain; I had to force myself. There are, of course, plenty of writers who would not be disturbed in the least; the fact might even act as a stimulus. To me, it amounted to an inhibition. Everlastingly I was in a hurry; by October the book must be finished; Mr. Dent wished to publish it by next spring. Well, I rewrote the book and disimproved it. Even while I was at work

I felt that I was ruining what had been the makings of a great book. In its old form, of course, I could not send it out; among other things, the first draft was much too long for publication. In 1928 I had made an exhaustive study of the flour-milling business which formed the background of the story. Everywhere, in the old manuscript, the traces of this study were still discernible; processes were explained in full which should have been merely hinted at; every character, even the least important, carried his full biography attached like an amnion. Thus a certain clerk who appeared in the book only for the purpose of opening a door to one of the major characters, was not only minutely described but mentally derived from his antecedents for three generations, with his future career at least adumbrated. I know of only one other writer whose technique, in building the hidden background of his work, resembled my own; Henrik Ibsen.
     The task of rewriting this book clearly consisted in this. Out of materials carefully assembled and submitted, in the body of the manuscript, to every available test, historical and biological, I had to shape a final structure in which these details formed the skeleton overlaid by the flesh. Whatever was mere skeleton had to be covered or pruned out; a scenic perspective had to be established; the significance of every development which I saw clearly enough was all that concerned the reader. I could not do it; I could not step back far enough to gauge the effect; I was unable to see what had to be left out.
     I was in a constant panic; and it did not take me long to become aware of my impotence. I had taken money for a task which remained to be done; and that fact incapacitated me for doing it. Again and again I told myself that this was ridiculous; but there it was. I felt

I had undertaken a thing beyond my powers. Strange to say, when, years later, I attacked the book once more, this time without the prospect of immediate publication, I at once succeeded in finding the inevitable form - the only form in which the book can convey its message. To recast it in that form took less time than I had had available in 1934.
     When the manuscript had gone to England and been returned - a fact which meant nothing; how many times had not my other books been rejected? -I reread it and found that every minutest detail about that clerk whom I have mentioned remained in the text as if he were one of the major characters. Instead of reducing him to the shadow he ought to have been, I had tried to force him down the reader's throat. I laughed at it; the publisher's readers were quite right in disadvising publication; as it stood, the book could not be printed. It took me years before I could see the thing in its proper light. When I did, my verdict was very different from theirs. What these readers should have said was this: "The manuscript contains the materials for a fine book. Let the author write it." But nobody said that; least of all myself. The readers paid me compliment after compliment; but that was merely a sugaring of the pill. Curiously, some of the very executives of the firm through whose hands the manuscript had gone were furious; "What can you do with such people?" one of them said to me; to which I replied, "Don't you think they are right?"
     As I said, it took me several years before I could see matters in their true bearings myself. The reason was, at least partly, that my preoccupations were with other things, above all with Two Generations of which I am going to speak in a moment.

     Among the three books which satisfied my own standards and which were written during the seven years was Felix Powell's Career. It is a serious book which deals with a sexual problem; and it is written with a savage sort of frankness which should have convinced everyone of the sincerity of its purpose. I offered it. Publishers and agents alike failed to see its true import; they put it down as pornography. From that moment on I ceased offering my work; one or two manuscripts were still travelling about. I withdrew them.
     There was also a book which I personally considered a mere trifle but which I liked nevertheless: Two Generations. My wife also liked it; but she insisted that I should add a chapter "to wind up" certain characters. I did not agree with her. I contended that, by adding an epilogue, I should merely destroy the architectural balance.
     Since my wife refused to be convinced, I proposed to arbitrate the matter by asking two competent judges to read the manuscript; for, even though I was content to let the book lie, I wished to bring it as near perfection as I could.
     Long before I took action in the matter, another idea came to me. As I have said, I was suffering from an inferiority complex. Perhaps I had entered upon a decline of my mental powers? I liked the book; did I like it because it was worthless? The plan of having it read by others might decide that question; it might once for all settle my writing career for the future. If it brought the advice to forget about publication, I was going to abide by the verdict. I thought of the awful case of Scott who, at an age younger than mine by several years, went on producing books which his most sincere

friends had the greatest difficulty in persuading him, in the interest of his reputation, to withhold from the public. I was not going to follow his example.
     Between us, my wife and I ticked off the names of those in whose judgment, on a point of technique, we had confidence. We fastened on to those of W. J. Alexander and Barker Fairley. Both very kindly did what I asked them to do; and on the technical point both decided in my favour.
     With regard to the other question, which, of course, I had withheld from my wife as well as from the two critics, the outcome was rather amazing to me. Neither W. J. Alexander nor Barker Fairley suggested that there was a falling-off of my powers; on the contrary, they saw in the book a new departure which they considered as hopeful and promising. Dr. Alexander worked himself up into an enthusiasm over the book which finally induced him to ask a number of others to read it; every one of these shared his opinion of the work.
     In writing it, I had set myself a specific task. The setting was the transition, in Ontario, from pioneer conditions to an urbanized rural life which brought about a conflict between fathers and sons; in fact, Fathers and Sons would have been the logical title; unfortunately, Turgeniev had anticipated it. He had anticipated me once before, for the natural title of Our Daily Bread would have been Lear of the Prairie. The theme was one which did not demand a very profound disturbance of the emotional constitution of the characters; instead, it demanded a careful, nice balancing of the forces, conservatory and initiatory, which actuated them. I felt that here was an opportunity of writing a "pleasant book", in Shaw's sense of the word. Perhaps it was for that reason that the novel,

when completed, seemed to me to be a work of slighter import than my other books.
     Dr. Alexander's estimate contradicted my own; he considered it incomparably the best thing I had done. He found in it a true and significant picture of rural life in Ontario. When he had made the test on a number of others, he wrote me about it; and I could not for a moment doubt the sincerity of the verdict. Those to whom Dr. Alexander submitted the manuscript could not have been influenced by the desire to please me; they gave their opinion to him, not to the author.
     Under pressure from him, then, I made up my mind to act contrary to my previous resolution and once more to offer a book. Three Canadian publishers shared Dr. Alexander's opinion; but, since most Canadian publishers are, after all, mere agents for British and United States publishers, they were under the necessity of securing publication abroad. In this they failed, In the summer of 1938 I withdrew once more.*

     *The book has since appeared, first in a limited edition of 500 copies; then, in the fall of 1939, in the usual trade edition published by the Ryerson Press.