Each Man's Son (27 page)

This denouement also marks the final stage of Ainslie's salvation. For the third and last time the tight-skinned dog (his sense of guilt) growls at him, but not on this occasion because of the “sin” of sex or his denial of God. Now Ainslie, as a result of his spiritual crisis, sees the beast in a different light. He realizes that his determination and rational ethic are simply veiled Puritanism, based as they are on distrust of human “weaknesses.” Even in his agnosticism he had not been free of its influence. Wanting God, but not the Puritan's God, he had set himself up as his own standard in the very same image, stern and unloving, and had thus been guilty of pride in self, the primal sin. Mollie had become his saviour. Crucified by his selfishness, she (like his mother) had given her life that he might be saved, for through her death he had come to appreciate fully his egotism. The final phase in Ainslie's regeneration develops from Alan's plight and his rejection of Ainslie. Led by this little child, he recognizes the
need of sympathy for the human situation and of giving oneself in love, discovering at last the meaning in life he had so long denied himself.

MacLennan affirms life, and his novel deals dramatically with its ultimate values. Wrong in denying God but right in denying the Calvinist's oppressive God, Ainslie wrestles with problems that each man's son of us must face. Unable to live without an ideal, a religion, a god, man will accept one or find one for himself. Ainslie's great discovery is that God is love. No other answer, MacLennan implies, can long satisfy. Not the science of an Ainslie caring nothing for man's spirit and even denying it, nor the socialism of a Camire, setting man against man and seeing his salvation in materialistic terms, nor yet the “rugged individualism” of a MacNeil, struggling in a world where the law of the jungle prevails, answers the needs of man as a social being. Man can find no happiness within himself either, if he lives like the rationalist Ainslie, the sentimental romantic Camire, or the animalistic MacNeil. Unless he holds values spiritually greater than theirs, he exists in isolation and discontent, pointlessly trying to lift himself by his own bootstraps. Only by giving in love, not through restraint, can man break the barriers between self and society and self and God. Setting the Old and the New Testament concepts of God in opposition,
Each Man's Son
transforms a story about Puritanism into one of universal application. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit….”

 

BY HUGH MACLENNAN

ESSAYS

Cross-Country
(1949)

Thirty and Three
(1954)

Scotchman's Return and Other Essays
(1960)

The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan: Selected Essays Old and

New
[ed. Elspeth Cameron] (1978)

FICTION

Barometer Rising
(1941)

Two Solitudes
(1945)

The Precipice
(1948)

Each Man's Son
(1951)

The Watch that Ends the Night
(1959)

Return of the Sphinx
(1967)

Voices in Time
(1980)

HISTORY

Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study
(1935)

TRAVEL

Seven Rivers of Canada
(1961)

The Colour of Canada
(1967)

Rivers of Canada
(1974)

 

The Author

HUGH MACLENNAN
was born in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 1907. He took his B.A. (1928) in Classics from Dalhousie University, then travelled as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford University where he obtained another B.A. and his M.A. (1932); he completed graduate studies in Classics at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. (1935).

MacLennan returned to Canada in 1935 to accept a teaching appointment in Latin and History at Lower Canada College in Montreal, which remained his home. In 1951 he accepted a position in the Department of English at McGill University, where he taught for three decades.

Barometer Rising
was MacLennan's first novel. His seven novels as well as his many essays and travel books present a chronicle of a Canada that often mediates between the old world of its European cultural heritage and the new world of American vitality and materialism.

MacLennan's many honours include five Governor General's Awards and nineteen honorary degrees.

Hugh MacLennan died in Montreal, Quebec, in 1990.

 

Copyright © 1951 by Hugh MacLennan
Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Hugh MacLennan
Afterword copyright © 2003 by Alec Lucas

This book was first published in Canada by the Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd. in 1951. New Canadian Library edition 2003

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher–or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency–is an infringement of the copyright law.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

MacLennan, Hugh, 1907-1990
Each man's son / Hugh MacLennan; afterword by Alec Lucas.

(New Canadian library)
Includes bibliograpical references.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-166-5

I. Title. II. Series.

PS
8525.l54
E
23 2003    
C
813'.54    
C
2003-900372-8
PR
9199.3.
M
334
E
23 2003

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

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