Psyche (4 page)

Phyllis Brett Young's early success with
Psyche
gave her financial independence and the title, according to Donald Goudy of the
Star Weekly Magazine
, of “Canada's bestselling novelist.”
³⁵
While a bestselling novel in Canadian terms was in the order of 5,000 copies,
Psyche
reached a much larger audience and, as described by a
Toronto Star
columnist, promised the “pulsating longevity achieved only heretofore among Canadian works by Mazo de la Roche's
Jalna.”
³⁶
Serialized in the German magazine
Stern
, which typically reached 2,000,000 readers, Young's work had incredible exposure abroad.
³⁷
It was also serialized in the magazine
Woman and Beauty
, with vivid illustrations by Walter Wyles, the first installment of a condensed version appearing in the April 1961 issue.
³⁸
The novel was published in 1959 in Canada and then released in the United States in the fall of 1960 and in Britain in the spring of 1961. By 1962, the novel appeared in a German edition as
Die Tochter des Zufalls
and had been translated into a number of other languages for audiences on the Continent.
Psyche
is thus one of Canada's most successful bestsellers, described variously as “a contemporary tale that brought both urban and rural Ontario into view,”
³⁹
one that provided evidence of the “increasing exportability of our literature,”
⁴⁰
and “an excellent suspense story set in Toronto.”
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Film rights were quickly sold, with Victor Saville as producer and British actress Susannah York in the role of both mother and daughter (a casting decision that appropriately underscored the similarity in appearance and character of these two characters). Ironically, given Young's patriotism and her conviction that the novel is distinctly Canadian,
⁴²
she is quoted by Toronto reporter Lotta Dempsey as agreeing that Saville's plan to shoot the film in Great Britain will enable him to capture “the complete essence of the milieu.” “I've seen the mining areas in England and Wales, and they're perfect for background,” she explains, “And when I found Victor Saville wanted it, the man who did ‘Goodbye Mr. Chips' and ‘Mystery Ship' was good enough for me.”
⁴³
Unfortunately, Saville was ultimately unable to make the movie.

Despite the novel's success, its ability to evoke a tingle of recognition in Canadian readers who recognized “a realistic background so palpably our own,”
⁴⁴
and its exploration of a theme that emerged as a key concern of Canadian writers and critics alike during the latter-half of the twentieth century (the search for identity),
Psyche
has been out of print for a number of years, little mentioned in histories of Canadian literature, and notably absent from
The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature
as well as surveys of bestselling genre fiction in Canada. Particularly striking in this regard is
Psyche's
absence from the
Chronological Index of Crime Fiction by Canadians
compiled by Skene-Melvin. Its absence is all the more curious when one realizes that all Young's other books -with the exception of
The Torontonians
and
Anything Could Happen! -
are listed:
The Ravine
(1961) by Kendal Young (an alias used for that one novel) is listed as crime fiction written by a Canadian but set elsewhere
Undine (1964)
and
A
Question of Judgment
(1969) are also included. One wonders whether, had
Psyche
been listed, it would have appeared as fiction written by a Canadian and set in Canada, or whether the absence of particular place names and privileging of plot over locale would also have placed it within the category of Canadian fiction set “elsewhere.” That
Psyche was
not categorized as crime fiction per se is not entirely surprising. Whereas
The Ravine
(which appears in a film version as
Assault)
focused on the criminal act,
Psyche
, by contrast, used the initial criminal act only to set in action the chain of events that drive the novel - a chain of events that subsequently involve other crimes (a shooting, prostitution, and the various deceptions of everyday social interaction). Skene-Melvin's very useful and broad definition asserts that crime fiction “encompasses adventure, crime, detective, espionage, mystery, suspense, and thriller fiction and includes tales of intrigue and violence as well as those of crime and investigation, with or without a solution.”
⁴⁵
He identifies four particular branches of crime fiction: crime, detective and mystery, espionage, and the thriller.
Psyche
, on Skene-Melvin's scheme, belongs to crime literature, which draws its inspiration from the picaresque - a narrative tradition in which the protagonist gathers experience and self-knowledge as s/he moves from one place to another. Skene-Melvin points out that Canada has a long history of crime fiction with a strong and vibrant writerly community. While it “hasn't lacked artists ... it has lacked the audience,”
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and many Canadian crime writers found themselves publishing abroad and appealing to British or American audiences. During the twenties and thirties, for example, Canadian writers often masqueraded as British or American, a subterfuge adopted even by members of the Montreal Arts and Letters Club. William Lacey Amy, for example, who wrote as “Luke Allen,” set his Blue Pete series in Canada but all his detective stories outside Canada, with the exception of
The Black Opal
(1935). But a number of Canadians, even early in the twentieth century, wrote under their own names and set their fiction on Canadian soil, including Morley Callaghan, who set
Strange
Fugitive
(1929) in Toronto, and Leslie McFarlane, who set
Streets of Shadow
(1930) in Montreal. By the 1940s, SkeneMelvin argues, crime fiction in Canada was typically set in urban locales - Margaret Bonner's 1946
The Shapes That Creep
in Vancouver, Janet Layhew's
Rx for Murder
in Montreal -with detectives linked to particular cities - Toronto for E. Louise Cushing's Inspector MacKay and Montreal for David Montrose's detective Russell Teed, for example. Long before the watershed appearance of Howard Engel's Benny Cooperman in 1980, Canadian writers were exploring the potential of crime fiction and experimenting with the appeal of Canadian characters and settings to audiences at home and abroad.

We use the term “writers” here, rather than “crime writers,” because some of Canada's most enduring crime fiction was written by authors who moved between genres and aimed their work at a wide variety of audiences from general readers to scholarly audiences. Sheila Watson's
The Double Hook
(1959), long recognized as both a pivotal example of Canadian modernism and a challenging read on any standard, is one of the novels included in Skene-Melvin's chronological index as a work of Canadian crime fiction. Other well-known and respected texts set in Canada include Malcolm Lowry's
Under the Volcano
(1947), Timothy Findley's
The Last of the Crazy People
(1967) and
The Butterfly Plague
(1969), Marie-Claire Blais'
L'Exécution
(1970), Robertson Davies'
Fifth Business (1970)
, Anne Hébert's
Kamouraska
(1970), and Rudy Wiebe's
The Temptations of Big Bear
(1973) and
Where Is the Voice Coming From?
(1974). With the exception of
The Butterfly Plague
, all are set in Canada.

Phyllis Brett Young used the opportunity of the earliest media interviews for her successful first novel to underscore Canada's potential as both the setting for literature and a context for the emergence of talented writers. But, since she insisted that Canadian writers should advocate for their own country and
on Canada's remarkable potential for a fictional setting, why is she reluctant to identify specific locales in
Psyche
, her first novel? Like many other writers of her day, in the decades prior to the institutionalization of Canadian literature and a sense of confidence in Canada as a viable setting for literature, not to mention as a country able to nurture and support Canadian writers, Young establishes a balance between the particular and the general. At one level, then, Young's intentions and her content are in opposition: although the Ontario setting is clear to anyone familiar with the slag heaps of Sudbury, for example, the specific locale is never mentioned. Her second novel,
The Torontonians
, is explicit not only about its urban Canadian locale but also about the socio-historical context of its pre-Betty Friedan era setting. Young's advocacy for Canadian content is consistent with the Massey Commission that, in 1951, signaled the need for a national literature, and argued that “to be truly national, [a literature] must be recognized as characteristic of the nation by other nations, and that it must in consequence have the human appeal and the aesthetic value to awaken the interest and sympathy, and to arouse the admiration of other peoples.”
⁴⁷

The Massey Commission cites a number of factors behind the lack of a national literature in mid-century Canada, including the isolation of Canadian writers. The response to its report was not only the establishment of funds and mechanisms to support Canadian author travel abroad but also the shipment of Canadian books abroad and, in the longer term, a recasting of Canadian studies as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy. As Robert Fulford points out, this was the second part of Vincent Massey's vision. “The Massey Report politicized the subsidy of the arts. Its central argument was that the nation should support the arts so that the arts could support the nation.”
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The report triggered a number of events, including the creation of the Canada Council and the National Library. It also fostered the creation, recognition, and publication of works focusing on Canada and the creation of a national identity. It was in the post-Massey Report era that the critical work of Northrop
Frye, Margaret Atwood, and D.G. Jones found an immediately receptive audience.
⁴⁹
Arguably, until 1990 the institutionalization of Canadian literature and the direction of publishing were shaped by the initiatives launched by the Massey Report. As Robert Lecker notes, the emerging Canadian canon, with relatively few exceptions, privileged works that represented the realities of Canada - its landscape, people, and search for its own identity. Books that failed to follow this formula tended to slip off the course lists, particularly off McClelland and Stewart's influential and inexpensive list of Canadian books in the New Canadian Library (NCL) series.

Young's comments on the need for Canadians to recognize and nurture their own literature anticipated those of Margaret Atwood in her watershed book of criticism,
Survival
. In that 1970 publication, Atwood introduced Canadian audiences to their own literature and literary tradition and, as the book's title implied, focused her attention on the emerging theme of the individual's survival in the face of obstacles. From Atwood's
Survival
, as well as Northrop Frye's
The Bush Garden
and D. G. Jones'
Butterfly on Rock
, Canadians began to get a sense of their literature as not only deeply rooted in the great scripts of western civilization, particularly of the Old Testament, but also as bearing witness to the socio-cultural shifts of the day.

As Canadian literature gained recognition, the works being taught in university classrooms tended to be those mentioned in the critical trilogy (Frye, Atwood, and Jones) and had a doubled perspective - one eye on history and the deep structures of myth, the other on the contemporary moment. Sinclair Ross's novel
As For Me and My House
, for example, was intended to capture the dustbowl depression era as well as explore the individual's relationship to God captured by the closing phrase of the title's originating context, “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
⁵⁰

Other works appearing on course syllabi in the early decades of the institutionalization of Canadian literature included novels by Morley Callaghan, whose archetypal characters walked
the streets of twentieth-century Canada; Robertson Davies, whose Deptford trilogy evoked Jungian archetypes and also depicted Ontario in the twentieth century; Margaret Atwood, whose novel
Surfacing
Opened with a road trip that served both to introduce its readers to an archetypal quest story and also to remind them of the particular landmarks of a highway leading to northern Quebec; and Hugh MacLennan, whose works captured socio-political events of the twentieth century in generalized patterns of binary opposition and dialectic while also portraying Canadians, with their admirable tendency towards moderation, as a valuable paradigm for diplomacy. This Canadian literary canon or shortlist of works of significant cultural currency emerged for practical as well as for intellectual reasons. Drawing on a questionnaire distributed to Canadian writers and academics, three shortlists of works to be included in the NCL list were announced, to heated controversy it must be said, at the now infamous 1978 Calgary conference: “the most ‘important' 100 works of fiction” (List A); the ten most important novels (List B); and the ten most important works of various genres (List C).
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Of the ten novels appearing at the top of the “most important 100,” Montreal figures as the setting in four (Roy,
The Tin Flute
, 1945; MacLennan,
Two Solitudes
, 1945; Richler,
The Importance of Duddy Kravitz
, 1959; MacLennan,
The Watch that Ends the Night
, 1959), Toronto in one (Davies,
Fifth Business
, 1970), and rural Canada in the other five (Ross,
As For Me and My House
, New York 1941, Toronto 1957; Leacock,
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
, 1912; Buckler,
The Mountain and the Valley
, 1952; Mitchell,
Who Has Seen the Wind
, 1947; and Laurence,
The Diviners
, 1974). List B, the ten most important novels (“novels,” that is, as opposed to “books”) replaces
Two Solitudes
with Sheila Watson's 1959
Double Hook
, and Leacock's
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
with the first novel of Laurence's Manawaka Series,
The Stone Angel
, 1964 .
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