Writing War: The Colin McDougall Archive

Zachary Abram*

In 1958, Colin McDougall’s first novel, , won the Governor General’s award for fiction. The reading public, in Canada and abroad, eagerly awaited a follow-up that would never come. In the decades since its publication, the novel has been critically neglected despite its worthiness as a text that provides crucial insight into the study of Canadian war literature. An examination of the Colin McDougall Archive, housed in the McGill Rare Books and Special Collections Department, proves to be equally fruitful. The “archive,” little more than a battered banker’s box haphazardly stuffed with notes, some letters, and a notebook, contains multitudes. The McDougall fonds offers unprecedented access to the harrowing process of representing war from experience and raises significant questions of authorship. Why did McDougall never write again? The McDougall papers leave the archivist with the impression that transmuting the experience of war onto the page is a uniquely fraught process. The veteran-penned novel has proven to be a lightning rod for postmodern critics. According to Evelyn Cobley, war, fundamentally, cannot be represented. The desire of many war writers to pay tribute to their brothers in arms is problematic because “the commemorative gesture thus finds itself compelled to name the unnameable again and again.”1 Paul Fussell concurs, writing that war literature is complicit in the way in which the “drift of modern history domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable.”2 The humble box of McDougall paraphernalia in Montreal serves as a crucial antidote to this way of thinking and reveals the process of writing war to be a complex one, characterized by guilt, responsibility, and anxiety.

1* Zachary Abram is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa. His dissertation is about representations of the soldier in Canadian novels. 11 Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 3. 12 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 74.

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The most revealing aspect of the archive is McDougall’s notebook. Written concurrently with Execution, the notebook spans the five-to-six-year time period it took him to complete the novel. Described initially as “a running record of the battle to produce,”3 the notebook transforms into a vehicle for McDougall’s anxieties as well as a meditation on the particular challenges of writing a . McDougall prods himself with strained encouragement: “It is necessary to retain confidence, courage, and desire”;4 elsewhere he simply writes, “must force and compel self on.”5 He is hard on himself in the notebook, which sometimes results in pained resignation or outright anger at his inability to express what he wants to say about war and the men who fight it: “Balls! This is petty.”6 The unpredictable nature of McDougall’s notebook entries stands in sharp contrast to the notebook itself, which is organized with military precision. The twin impulses in McDougall to encourage and to deride his writing come to an interesting and maddening climax when between late 1954 and early 1956 he stops writing altogether.

Figure 1. Pages from Colin McDougall’s notebook, entries from 1953. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McLennan Library, McGill University, Montreal.

13 Colin McDougall, notebook, 16 May 1953, McDougall Papers, MS 642, Rare Books and Special Collections, McLennan Library, McGill University, Montreal. 14 Ibid., 9 April 1953. 15 Ibid., 28 April 1953. 16 Ibid., 22 April 1953.

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Recounting the story of a group of Canadian soldiers during the Italian Campaign of the Second World War, the novel features two executions. Having met only minimal resistance from the Italian army, the Canadian 2nd Rifles take on two Italian deserters, nicknamed Big Jim and Little Joe, to cook for the Canadian soldiers despite the orders of the platoon’s commanding officer, Brigadier Kildare, that all deserters be summarily executed. When he discovers this insubordination, Kildare orders the men be killed in immediately. The novel’s main characters, John Adam and Padre Doorn, have to “acquiesce” to the execution. This initial execution prompts both men to question their ontology and the ethics of warfare. Adam gives himself over to efficiency and competence, unable to fill the “aching emptiness inside himself.”7 Padre Doorn slips further into madness and becomes obsessed with relics of the True Cross in order to regain his faith. Eventually, a member of the 2nd Rifles, the cognitively challenged but good-hearted Jones, is wrongfully arrested for the murder of an American soldier and sentenced to death. Adam and Doorn see this as an opportunity to redeem themselves for the crime of killing the two Italian deserters. Tragically, their attempts to free Jones are thwarted by Kildare, and Jones is executed by his own men. In the logic of the novel, though, this execution atones for the first and moral order is restored. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Canadian Forces maintained that it had executed none of its own men during the war. McDougall, however, did base the execution of Jones on a real-life incident. On 5 July 1945, months after the war was over, twenty- three-year-old Private Harold Pringle became the only soldier of the Canadian Army to be executed for military crimes. After his father was honorably discharged for poor eyesight, Pringle became a chronic disciplinary problem, who went AWOL several times. After the battle of the Hitler Line, he once again went AWOL to Rome where he became involved with a gang of small-time smugglers and dealers in black-market goods. Eventually, one of its members was shot dead and all members of the gang were arrested. At the trial, one gang member testified against the rest in exchange for immunity; Pringle was found guilty of murder and executed by firing squad. Through an examination of Pringle’s life and ordeal, Andrew Clark makes a convincing argument for reasonable doubt in the case and

17 Colin McDougall, Execution (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005), 49.

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points to a grievous miscarriage of wartime justice, characterizing Pringle as a victim of the war and its system and likely suffering from post-traumatic stress.8 It is not difficult to see the parallels between Pringle and Jones, both men victims of a system that refuses to acknowledge the nuances of wartime ethics. Clark had access to historical documents that McDougall did not because the case was ordered sealed by the Canadian government for forty years. There is no mention of Pringle in the McDougall papers. Although it is not known how much McDougall heard through the military grapevine, he heard enough to make execution the central theme of his war epic. Colin McDougall was born in Montreal in 1917 and, except for his deployment in Italy during the Second World War, lived there for his entire life. Immediately after achieving his BA from McGill University in 1940, he enrolled in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. While overseas, Major Colin McDougall excelled as a soldier and was recommended for a Distinguished Service Order three times, winning it in 1945 after a strong recommendation from his men. The recommendation describes his heroism: “This officer has twice before been recommended for gallantry in operations. He has proved at all times to be a most dashing and fearless officer of great skill and determination. This has been a real inspiration as example to his men, and largely responsible for the success of his company.”9 These exploits are conspicuously absent from the archive, where there is little evidence of McDougall’s military career at all. In fact, McDougall reminds himself often to guard against slipping into autobiography. It is certain, however, that some of his experience in the Canadian campaign in Italy did provide inspiration for Execution. After returning to Canada, McDougall took a position at his alma mater, which would be his place of employment for the rest of his life, serving as counsellor, registrar, and secretary general. His relationship with McGill University explains why his notebook and personal correspondence are housed in the McGill Rare Books and Special Collections Department. Execution was his only novel, though he did publish several short stories in the magazines, Maclean’s and New Liberty. One short story, “The Firing Squad,” won the Maclean’s fiction contest and the President’s Medal from the University of

18 Andrew Clark, A Keen Soldier: The Execution of Second World War Private Harold Joseph Pringle (Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2002). 19 Recommendations for Honours and Awards (Army), 19 January 1945, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.

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Western Ontario; it provides the basic structure for Execution. The notices for these awards are all housed in the archive. The McDougall papers also include a brief publication history of Execution written by the author himself. He writes rather nonchalantly, “From the year 1949 until 1953 I was engaged in writing short stories. Five of these were published; and in general this was a period, to use Hemingway’s phrase, during which I served my ‘savage apprenticeship’ in learning to write for paid publication.”10 The notebook indicates that work on Execution began in 1953 and was finished by January 1957. McDougall notes that he logged 1400 work hours on the novel, which is no easy feat for anyone, let alone someone with a full-time job. To explain his two-year hiatus from writing the novel, he writes that his first drafts “did not seem satisfactory.”11 Given the viciousness with which he chastises himself in the notebook, one might be forgiven for speculating that there might be more to it. The Macmillan Company of Canada finally published the novel on 26 September 1958. (The archive includes a photocopy of McDougall’s copyright certificate.) Macmillan also served as his UK publisher, while St. Martin’s Press handled the American distribution. Shortly thereafter, the novel was published in translation in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. The archive also has the original dust jackets for the Canadian, British, and American first editions. The Canadian cover is the starkest; it is mostly black and white featuring a blindfolded infantryman in the foreground and a firing squad in the background. Bizarrely, the inside cover features a couple in a loving embrace. The British cover is purple with orange accents and features an Italian town in the background. In the foreground is a man’s hand hung up on barbed wire. The American cover, reflecting American patriotism, is red, white, and blue. It foreshadows the novel’s themes of guilt and responsibility by including a pair of men’s eyes staring out intently. (See figures 2–4). The McDougall archive contains a cache of letters from famous authors heaping praise on McDougall. Journalist Gregory Clark wrote of Execution, “I cannot help but remind you that trying to put War into a book, as Tolstoy and many another found out, is close to impossible. How then, in 227 pages you have effected the

10 Colin McDougall, “Publication History,” McDougall Papers. 11 Ibid.

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epic and tragic sense I cannot for the life of me figure out.”12 Farley Mowat wrote to McDougall: “I am not sure whether to curse or bless you.” Execution caused him to “suffer from an emotion which is a rarity with me – jealousy of another writer. It is, however, the right kind of jealousy. I simply wish to heaven that I had written the book … Execution is the closest approximation of the matter I have encountered.”13 Citing his own desire to write a war novel, Mowat laments that “Execution probably makes the novel which has haunted me superfluous – so in a sense you have freed me from my incubus. On the other hand I shall miss my devil.”14 Fellow war novelist and personal friend Hugh MacLennan, who served as the de facto editor of the later drafts of Execution, praised the novel and looked to the future: “Your difficulty, of course it is every writer’s difficulty will be with the books you write after this. I’ll be fascinated to know what they will be like.”15 MacLennan’s curiosity would never be satisfied, for other than a pedestrian article on Canadians at Vimy Ridge, McDougall never wrote for publication again. Despite awards, accolades, and acclaim, he would never complete or, according to the available evidence, attempt a second novel. McDougall’s notebook entries suggest that the particular responsibilities of writing a war novel played a role in his subsequent literary silence. McDougall wrote in 1952 that he hoped that writing the novel would result in a “purging of the whole war experience.”16 In the notebook’s first entry, however, despair has already slipped into his consciousness: “The despair that came today in the dining room of the Faculty Club when the question rioted to my mind: ‘But what can anyone say about man’s plight, about life? It is deadening to think that even the greatest works can say so little. Is it worth trying to say anything?” At first, he rationalizes his despair and tries to see it as a positive for the writing process: “At least [the despair] points to how primitive and universal this work should be, a work of man’s agony of triumph.” He soon realizes that this rationalization is an equivocation and shifts his point of view to one of sad resignation: “those who live contented, useful lives have long since decided the matter insoluble and dismissed it from their immediate consciousness. Anyway, there is nothing to be gained by brooding on the metaphysics

12 Gregory Clark to Colin McDougall, 24 October 1958, McDougall Papers. 13 Farley Mowat to Colin McDougall, 29 January 1960, McDougall Papers. 14 Ibid. 15 Hugh MacLennan to Colin McDougall, 6 October 1958, McDougall Papers. 16 Colin McDougall, loose-leaf notes, McDougall Papers.

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of the thing.”17 The rest of the notebook entries reveal this statement to be false resignation. McDougall is never able to shake the despair that causes him to question what one writer, even an ex-soldier, can ultimately say about war. Well, do I mistrust the concept? No, at all – I think it is real and valid. It is my own ability to organize and phrase it in the best possible terms for itself that I seem to doubt. But the answer to this is simple: I can only write and visualize both as I am. I cannot always be chasing ideals, and visions of perfection. No writer can – successfully. I can only think and write to my own best ability at the given time. The result may be a great work; it may not; but it is all I can do, and what I must do.18 This preoccupation anticipates later postmodern concerns about historical verisimilitude and the ethics of representing war. It also demonstrates a self-awareness that is rarely acknowledged among war writers. Despite veering between confidence and despair, McDougall is explicit about what he wants to achieve with Execution. No one could accuse him of not being ambitious: “[The novel] is to be successful – both as a work of art and commercially. It is to sell. To be read, and bought, as much in Tucson, Ariz. as in Montreal. It is to be great. More than a novel, it is to be a work. A complete work of art which is also a smash hit on the best seller list.”19 A cursory examination of the McDougall papers reveals this moment of unabashed confidence to be an anomaly. In asking himself why he wants to write the novel, McDougall reveals the intensely personal stakes of this enterprise and is characteristically humble: Because I have to. I have to write and after reflection, it is clear the novel is the most effective and satisfying form. I have to write to fulfill myself: it is the most important function in the world to me. I have to write, and write successfully, to find pride in myself. More than this, it is the only way I can make any real contribution to the life to which I was born. With all humility, this is the way in which I can help to better the world. It must be a pure kind of striving, and there I will find my satisfaction and salvation. I have to write to be the best man I can be.20

17 Colin McDougall, notebook, 9 September 1953, McDougall Papers. 18 Colin McDougall, loose-leaf notes, McDougall Papers. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

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According to the notebook, Execution was only a working title, with Amos, Amas, Amat and Men at War considered as possible “serious titles.”21 From the beginning to the completion of the writing of the novel, the concept of execution, with its double meaning in wartime, was always the central theme, and the novel would ultimately retain its working title in order to reflect the significance of this concept to the text. In the notebook’s section entitled “Theme,” McDougall states, “The execution is the execution of man. The execution is the evil of the story. In the background there is the daily ‘execution’ of the fighting soldiers; in the foreground this particular execution. This must be so if it is to be true to its title, to trust its unity and its circular storyline.”22 Yet, is it not incongruous for a novel that purports to present “execution,” in both its forms, as the central evil of war to restore moral order through an execution? The notebook attempts to resolve this central tension. McDougall worried that Execution might be perceived as an “indictment of man,” and he took measures to prevent such a misconception. For him, the cathartic and unifying final execution of Jones does not contradict the central theme of the novel – the evil of execution. He writes that this ending is necessary to bring about change in the main characters of Adam and Padre Doorn: “The curse of the book is what the final execution of Jones does to Adam and Padre. (It forces them to Victory, of course).”23 McDougall never specifies what he means by “Victory,” but judging by the end of the novel and the reactions of Doorn and Adam, it is the realization of communion with humanity and the recognition of execution as evil. Adam recognizes his own transformation after the execution of Jones: “Today he felt himself to exist at the central suffering of all humanity. He was filled with a huge compassion and love and understanding for every man who had ever lived.”24 For Doorn, “Victory” allows him to return to Christianity after a crisis of faith prompted by several disappointments in the novel’s first two sections: “It seemed to Adam that the Padre looked younger. Why, he looks like a man of God again, Adam thought, one who has been away, and has at last returned.”25

21 Colin McDougall, notebook, 15 May 1953, McDougall Papers. 22 Ibid., 16 March 1953. 23 Ibid., 19 July 1953. 24 McDougall, Execution, 269. 25 Ibid., 263.

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McDougall laboured over the execution of Jones as the ending of the novel for months. He was unsure whether “Jones as victim would provide sufficient impact.”26 Originally, another character named Mitchell was to be the victim of the final execution. Well into the planning stages of Execution, however, McDougall still had not decided who would be the final victim of execution, the one who would lead the rest of the Canadian soldiers to the victory he envisioned. He wrote, “Big question for story: Who is executed? (And why? Of course).”27 He decided against using Mitchell: “At the moment the execution of Mitchell does not seem integral (necessary enough, and even seems contrived). If this can’t be overcome, a new ending will simply have to be devised.”28 The solution was to make young Jones the victim and the terrain upon which Adam and the Padre could make their way to “Victory.” The desire to represent victory, as opposed to humanity’s malevolence, was one of the central struggles in writing Execution, and, indeed, is so in writing any war novel. McDougall devotes a great deal of space in his notebook to finding a unifying image to represent his compassion for those trapped by the regimented constructs of war and execution. He found it in horses, holdovers from the First World War. The novel begins with Krasnick’s impassioned and ironic declaration, “Jesus … I ain’t gonna shoot no horses!”29 Krasnick has no moral qualms about shooting the enemy but draws the line at killing horses. His dilemma evokes the absurd way in which humans draw distinctions about the act of taking a life. It is in acting morally under constraint that the soldiers of Execution are able to transcend their experience. By the end of Execution, Krasnick’s unwillingness to shoot at cavalry comes to represent a universalizing recognition of the plight of humanity. In the novel’s final pages, he has been killed, and his former machine-gun runner, Ewart, asks Adam if he remembers how Krasnick refused to shoot horses; Adam responds, “Of course, none of us would.”30 It would be easy to read Execution as a sharp indictment of war as an absurd endeavour that robs its participants of their innate humanity. For McDougall, regardless of the order that his soldiers follow, they are not bereft of humanity. This compassion for the soldiers is evident

26 Colin McDougall, notebook, 23 April 1953, McDougall Papers. 27 Ibid., 20 March 1953. 28 Ibid., 23 March 1953. 29 McDougall, Execution, 3. 30 Ibid., 271.

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in the novel: “The trouble was that they were men, and being such, they were caught up in the strangling nets which man’s plight cast over them, they could not always act the way their goodness wanted them to.”31 For McDougall, it was of the utmost importance that he maintained what he called his passion and compassion for execution and its consequences. He wrote, “Above all, each section must be imbued with my passion, and compassion about execution. My feeling should be a) Passion against execution b) Compassion for those trapped by it, its victims.”32 His compassion for the soldiers trapped by execution and the mechanisms of war is what keeps the anti-war message of Execution from slipping into an indictment of the soldiers. In his notes, McDougall attempts to reconcile what he considers to be a “profound distinction.”33 For him, there were only two views of humanity: one characterized by Guy de Maupassant – “These poor devils are human” – and the other characterized by F. Scott Fitzgerald – “These poor humans are bedeviled.” McDougall sided with the Frenchman. With his final sacrifice, which somehow atones for the sins of the Canadian army, the character of Jones takes on Christ-like significance. It is clear that McDougall meant for Jones to be read as a Christ figure. Near the end of the notebook, after his prolonged hiatus from the novel, McDougall writes, “If Jones is to be ‘Christ,’ he must be planted and maintained as such throughout (from start).”34 From the beginning of Execution, Jones is indeed marked for death, through his characterization as a tabula rasa and resulting willingness to obey any order without thinking. His commanding officer Brigadier Ian Kildare believes that this quality marks him as a “damn fine soldier.”35 It is plain to those who serve with him that this trusting, unthinking obedience is not the asset Kildare believes it to be. Writer and critic Warren Cariou argues that “it is patently clear to every other man in the battalion that Jones is anything but a fine soldier, precisely because he obeys every order unthinkingly. He cannot be trusted to think for himself at all, cannot evaluate the orders he is given, and thus he is vulnerable to manipulation by others.”36

31 Ibid., 270. 32 Colin McDougall, notebook, 18 March 1956, McDougall Papers. 33 Colin McDougall, loose-leaf notes, McDougall Papers. 34 Colin McDougall, notebook, January 1956. 35 McDougall, Execution, 21. 36 Warren Cariou, afterword to Execution (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005), 274.

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Jones’s mind “had simply not ripened at the same rate as his body; he retained the innocence of a child; he trusted everything in the world, and he would do anything he was told.”37 This characterization marks him for doom from the beginning and opens up a Christ parallel. On leave in Bari, Adam has an encounter with a prostitute named Elena who has a profound impact on him through her insistence that he tell her that he loves her, “Ti amo,” before they have sex. Originally, Elena was to be named Gina but McDougall changed her name fairly early in the writing process. In his notes, McDougall simply wrote “Gina – Elena (Helena).”38 The similarity of the names Elena and Helena reveals Elena’s allegorical significance. Helena of Constantinople was the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great and is traditionally credited with recovering the relics of the True Cross, for which she was canonized as Saint Helena. In Execution, it is Elena who wakes Adam out of the ontological self-negation into which he has reverted after the first execution. Adam is described as thinking, “Io ti amo … He knew they meant something of immense significance; at this moment they were the only words in the world that mattered.”39 Elena reminds Adam of the existence of love, in both the physical and Christian sense. Of course, the name Helena is also reminiscent of Helen of Troy from Homer’s war epic, The Iliad. If Helen of Troy had the power to launch a thousand ships and start war, then Elena is her opposite. In the pretense of love, Elena shows Adam what is to be gained by abandoning war as an enterprise. Elena’s similarity to Helena of Constantinople is also significant considering her connection to the retrieval of the True Cross. According to legend, Helena was in charge of an excavation journey to Jerusalem to find the physical remnants of the True Cross, which, in the Christian tradition, are believed to be from the cross upon which Christ was crucified. In Jerusalem, Helena discovered three different crosses, one used in the execution of Jesus and two others used to crucify two thieves, Dismas and Gestas. A miracle revealed which one was the True Cross, which Helena then brought back to Constantinople.40 Helena’s affiliation with the True Cross echoes the obsession of Padre Doorn to find pieces of the True Cross in the second book of Execution. In an attempt to atone for his own

37 Ibid., 277. 38 Colin McDougall, notebook, 15 July 1953, McDougall Papers. 39 McDougall, Execution, 102. 40 Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image (Boston: Brill, 2004), 109.

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hypocrisy and restore righteousness to the Canadian mission in Italy, Padre Doorn becomes a zealot for the True Cross. Doorn’s quest falls short when God fails to respond to his call to end execution, even though Doorn holds a piece of what he believes to be the True Cross. Walking onto the battlefield, “The Padre stood waiting, his gaze fixed on the sky, the True Cross thrust demandingly at heaven. The Padre stared unremittingly at the sky, waiting for the parley to open – and nothing happened. Nothing except air burst.”41 It would take more than pieces of Helena’s True Cross to stop the execution. Cariou argues that the execution of Jones functions in much the same way as the performance of love between Elena and Adam in Bari. The final sacrifice is a “ceremonial performance Adam creates in order to transform the act of execution from the most vicious, pointless slaughter to something else – perhaps something humane and dignified, and perhaps sacramental.” The execution mirrors that act of love in Bari: “The execution is really a ritual of love, in which amo becomes ammo, and Jones becomes a Christ-like figure who does not die in vain because the ceremony of his death enables the moral salvation of others.”42 After Jones’s execution, Adam notes that each of the Canadian soldiers “was changed, in a sense, perhaps, restored to whatever they had been before Sicily.”43 Thanks to Elena and Jones, Adam and the rest of the soldiers are pushed to love, life, victory, and salvation. The overtly Christian, optimistic, redemptive ending of Execution is indicative also of a shift in the tone of Canadian literature of the Second World War from that of the First World War, which was often characterized by outrage and cynicism. Novels of the Second World War do not lack passion or genuine anguish but there is a strong case to be made that they do not have the same violent outrage expressed by First World War writers like Charles Yale Harrison. Harrison saw war as the nullification of the individual: “Out on rest we behaved like human beings; here we are merely soldiers.”44 There is little possibility for redemption: “We do not know what day it is. We have lost count. It makes no difference whether it is Sunday or Monday. It is merely another day – a day on which one may die.”45 Execution, on the other hand, is congruous with a thematic trend in Canadian war literature,

41 McDougall, Execution, 145. 42 Cariou, afterword, 277. 43 McDougall, Execution, 263. 44 Charles Yale Harrison, Generals Die in Bed (Toronto: Annick Press, 2007), 49. 45 Ibid., 14.

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that of the “little man.” The trope is named for another war novel written by a veteran who won the Governor General’s award, Little Man, by G. Herbert Sallans. Dagmar Novak writes that, in these novels, a “constant tension exists within the individual’s consciousness as he attempts to come to terms with his role as a soldier.” This tension results in an increasing isolation both from “the cause for which he is fighting and from his own moral identity.”46 This moral ambiguity is what McDougall is trying to express in Execution. During a bout of writer’s block, he expresses his desire to “settle on all the unbearably sad, aching, tender things I want to say about war, men at war, and write them down.”47 This tendency away from representing soldiers as a mass of cannon fodder or as pawns and towards personal redemption and individual suffering is the central difference between Canadian novels of the First World War and the Second World War. This shift in tone and focus is evident in Execution, especially when it is read in concert with McDougall’s notebook. John Adam, whose character is described in the notebook as “semi-autobiographical,” senses a similar tension. In his initial character sketch, McDougall describes Adam as “not yet formed … the story completes his character. He is searching for himself.”48 Like so many protagonists of Canadian literature of the Second World War, Adam’s story is one of personal, psychological development and ultimately redemption. Adam is the “centre sin” who “signifies man’s plight,” an everyman and the ultimate “little man.” After the first execution, his psychological state drifts into nihilism; life and the war become “a series of grayish nightmares through which he moves like an automaton.”49 His illusions about war are shattered. Adam realizes that although modern war may provide men with the opportunity to live at the extremity of experience and occasionally releases heroism and compassion in its participants, it is fundamentally a blasphemy against the human spirit: “execution is the ultimate injustice, the ultimate degradation of man.”50 In the notebook, McDougall vacillates between the tragic redemptive ending of Execution and a more traditionally uplifting one. In his original conception of the ending, the novel does not have its

46 Dagmar Novak, Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 97. 47 Colin McDougall, notebook, 11 April 1953, McDougall Papers. 48 Ibid., 17 April 1953. 49 McDougall, Execution, 50. 50 Ibid., 115.

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signature “terrible touch.” McDougall preferred a more traditional, happy ending for Jones: “New ending sounds better: Padre saves Jones by retracting his evidence. They drive up north together.”51 The road to redemption is metaphorically referred to numerous times in his notebook as “the drive up north with calm of mind (catharsis).”52 This ending would have robbed Execution of its more interesting, existential underpinnings. Also, without Jones’s sacrifice, the sins of the Canadian military in Italy would never be absolved and moral order would not be restored. In his final words before the execution, Jones says, “Please don’t worry about me. I am not afraid.”53 Jones’s execution is the terrain upon which the characters who witness it can achieve some kind of victory. It is, according to Ronald Sutherland, “the vital pretense.”54 Removing the execution of Jones would also remove the only moment that comes close to approaching catharsis in the novel: “For Adam and the Padre, Jones’s response to his execution acts as a catharsis … Jones’s love for them, as well as his own unexpected strength renews their own faith.”55 After his unexplained hiatus from writing Execution, between September 1954 and January 1956, McDougall returns to the task with renewed creative energy: “Tomorrow I will be 39. And it is all to be concluded before I am 40.”56 Although conclusion of the novel within the year may not have been the case, gone were any attempts to sanitize Execution through happy endings. McDougall does not devote a great deal of space in the notebook to the idea of style. He writes that he wants Execution to be “as tightly organized as a good short story.”57 What he was reading at the time can be gleaned from scattered notes like “Remember F. Mowat!,” references to Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or his admiration for William Faulkner. McDougall wanted to write the epic of Canada at war in the same way Faulkner wrote about the southern United States. The character of Jones is very similar to Faulkner’s Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s declaration that “No battle is ever won … They are not even fought. The field

51 Colin McDougall, notebook, 15 May 1953, McDougall Papers. 52 Ibid., 25 April 1953. 53 McDougall, Execution, 259. 54 Ronald Sutherland, “The Vital Pretense: McDougall’s Execution,” Canadian Literature 27 (1966): 20–31 (28). 55 Novak, Dubious Glory, 117. 56 Colin McDougall, notebook, 12 July 1956, McDougall Papers. 57 Ibid., 16 May 1953.

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only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools”58 would not be out of place in Execution. The author to whom McDougall’s style was most often compared in contemporary reviews or in his personal correspondence was Ernest Hemingway. The McDougall archive has a folder devoted to contemporary reviews. In the Sunderland Echo, the reviewer writes how McDougall subverts the normal expectations of a war novel: “The reader goes to war with Evelyn Waugh only – suddenly, shockingly – to find himself in Hemingway country, and eventually on unrecognizable literary ground.”59 The reviewer accurately points to how McDougall, at every opportunity, questions and undermines the conventions and clichés of the war novel. This is particularly evident in his characterization of Brigadier Ian Kildare, whose name even evokes Waugh and his ilk. The reviewer writes, “There was never a more Waugh-like figure than Brigadier Ian Kildare … Yet, it is Kildare who, by ordering the men of one of his units to execute two Italian deserters ends the Waugh-like phase and begins the moral disintegration of two of the main characters, Lt. John Adam and Padre Philip Doorn.”60 The subtlety of McDougall’s style, which seems to ape Evelyn Waugh but in fact strives for Hemingway’s stark brutality, has been altogether ignored by subsequent critics. As a result, Execution has been forced to keep the wrong company on the bookshelf. The ubiquity of critics like Evelyn Cobley, and this is certainly not her fault, has resulted in a critical prejudice against war novels that cannot be viewed through the lens of postmodernism, post-structuralism, or historiographic metafiction. Contemporary reviewers were not the only ones to notice the stylistic and thematic affinity between McDougall and Hemingway. Execution’s first reader, Hugh MacLennan, also remarked upon their similarities but noted subtle but important differences between the writers. He wrote that Execution differed from Hemingway in that it was a quintessential Second World War novel: “The Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele were so utterly monstrous that only blind rage emerged in the writers who handled them truly. Hemingway saw war only as a theatrical series of set pieces, and used it as a

58 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House, 1956), 93. 59 K.L., “A Canadian Author Goes to Waugh and Finds… A New Battleground: It’s McDougall Territory,” Sunderland Echo, 17 October 1958. 60 Ibid.

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vehicle for his descriptive powers.” On the other hand, McDougall was, according to MacLennan, able to “penetrate all the way down to the sources of Original Sin in every human being.” MacLennan contrasts the way in which McDougall is able to keep his stylistic prowess from dominating the novel: “Hemingway’s style sticks out all over the place. Yours is something one is entirely unconscious of. Yet description after description, phrase after phrase, stick like glue.”61 While First World War writing meant the unabashed anger of Charles Yale Harrison and Ernest Hemingway, the literature of the Second World War allowed for the potential redemption of the “little man.” The style had to change accordingly. wrote to McDougall in 1974 professing to have read the book in one sitting because Execution possessed “something essential under the surface, something of real power, a terrible question: How much execution puts out our human light? What can we endure?”62 (See Figure 5.) In 1953, at the beginning of the notebook, after he resolves not to dwell on the metaphysics of despair, McDougall wonders, “would every novel require the same time and consideration … ? A sobering thought.”63 The laudatory review of Execution in the Sunderland Echo ends, “we can only hope to see more of his work soon.”64 Perhaps McDougall only ever had one story to tell. Or maybe, he could no longer justify his belief in redemption and salvation through sacrifice. MacLennan wrote to McDougall, “I marvel that you live as efficiently and calmly as you do with those not gone where you have been.”65 Perhaps McDougall tired of trying to explain war to those who could not know. , author of the famous autobiography Testament of Youth (1933), which chronicled her own experience in the First World War, wrote to McDougall that “the Second World War will go down to history as the last example of this comradeship and this heightened sense of living, and your book will have an enhanced value as one of the few war books that really convey it.”66 It is hard to believe that McDougall intended Execution to be a chronicle of the excitement of war. All that remains of McDougall is Execution and some lesser short stories written for pay. Perhaps it is fortunate

61 Hugh MacLennan to Colin McDougall, 6 October 1958, McDougall Papers. 62 Saul Bellow to Colin McDougall, 5 January 1974, McDougall Papers. 63 Colin McDougall, notebook, 23 April 1953, McDougall Papers. 64 K.L., Sunderland Echo, 17 October 1958. 65 Hugh MacLennan to Colin McDougall, 6 October 1958, McDougall Papers. 66 Vera Brittain to Colin McDougall, 17 February 1959, McDougall Papers.

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Figure 5. Handwritten letter from Saul Bellow to Colin McDougall, 1974. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University.

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that we have anything at all. The Italian writer Primo Levi wrote about his own difficulty representing the violence of the twentieth century, “We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.”67 McDougall was not struck wordless. Sadly, though, the process of writing war meant that saying anything took all of him.

SOMMAIRE

Prix du Gouverneur général en 1958, l’unique roman de Colin McDougall intitulé Execution n’a pas bénéficié d’une réception critique des plus satisfaisantes en dépit de la qualité indéniable d’un texte qui a cependant ouvert d’intéressantes perspectives en littérature de guerre au Canada. Un examen des archives de Colin McDougall conservées à la bibliothèque de l’université McGill s’est avéré pertinent en ce sens. Il est en effet question d’un trésor archivistique qui vaut son pesant d’or contenu somme toute dans une boîte où l’on découvre au petit bonheur des notes, quelques lettres et un cahier. Le fonds McDougall offre une vision de ce qu’a pu représenter l’expérience horrible de la guerre. Tout l’attirail contenu dans cette humble boîte lève le voile sur le processus de rédaction d’un livre sur la guerre et, plus important encore, la transposition sur la page blanche d’une expérience traumatisante.

67 Quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1994), 1.

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