Romantic Recognition in ’s Michèle Rackham McGill University

wethalyn graham’s novel Earth and High Heaven is one of Can- Gada’s great literary success stories: in addition to winning the Governor General’s award in 1944, this popular romance was the first Canadian novel to top the American bestseller list, Collier’s Magazine paid $7,500 to serialize it before its publication, and Sam Goldwyn (of Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer fame) bought the movie rights for $100,000. The novel’s popularity peaked with Goldwyn and Graham casting Gregory Peck and Katharine Hepburn in the major movie production as protagonists Marc Reiser, a small-town Jewish Ontarian, and Erica Drake, a wealthy socialite Gentile (Cameron 157)—two star-crossed lovers whose romance is thwarted by religious prejudice in wartime . In spite of the novel’s convenient mise-en-scène and the script-like dialogue of Graham’s characters,1 the

1 In a recent review of the novel, Eva-Marie Kröller remarks that “Earth and High Heaven is a true contemporary of women’s movies like Warner Brother’s Now Voyager [1942],” and she discusses the novel’s detailed wardrobe and smoking scenes as part of this movie genre (198). The filmic quality of 1940s fiction was identified as early as 1945 by Anthony Lane. In an article published inThe New Yorker, Lane explored the top ten bestsellers of the year, remarking that “[m]ost of the top ten books of 1945 are bulging with envy, but they’re not envious of Tolstoy, they’re envious of ‘Gone with the Wind’ and not of Margaret Mitchell,

ESC 36.2–3 (June/September 2010): 121–140 movie version of Earth and High Heaven was never made. Production was called off in part because Laura Z. Hobson’s novelGentleman’s Agreement (1947) beat Graham’s novel to film. Released in 1948, and starring Gregory Michèle Rackham Peck, Gentleman’s Agreement was similarly based on a romantic narra- Hall is a doctoral tive about anti-Semitism. Elspeth Cameron notes that the release of this candidate in the movie sealed Earth and High Heaven’s fate; immediately after the success English department at of Gentleman’s Agreement, “Sam Goldwyn announced that he did not wish McGill University. Her to make another film on the same subject” (158). dissertation investigates Goldwyn’s decision not to proceed with the film version of Graham’s the relationships novel, however, was inspired by more than just the recent release of a simi- between ´s larly themed film. He was not happy with the script, which he felt focused Modernist poets and too closely on the novel’s preaching against anti-Semitism (Cameron 157). visual artists and the Having little desire to make a film that condemned racial prejudice in historical, thematic, and North America, Cameron remarks that “Goldwyn was interested almost aesthetic intersections solely in the novel’s romantic plot” (157). between their poetry and While Goldwyn was attracted mainly to Earth and High Heaven’s paintings. A graduate unapologetic love story, surely it is this romantic plot that has led to the fellow with the Editing novel’s “forgotten” status in the Canadian canon (Cameron 146). “Earth Modernism in Canada and High Heaven was a success for all the wrong reasons,” writes Cam- Project, she was recently eron: “This banal romance … attracted droves of unsophisticated readers awarded a sshrc and obscured the remarkable literary skills and complex profile of social, postdoctoral fellowship political, ethnic, and feminist issues that the novel displayed” (161). For to edit a hybrid digital Cameron, the novel’s romantic plot veils the sociopolitical message of the catalogue raisonné of text and stands in stark contrast to its literary merits. John Moss might P. K. Irwin’s visual art disagree with this comment, but only in its claims of literary merit. He as part of the Collected writes, “[w]ere it not for the ‘timeliness’ of the topic, this novel would Works of P. K. Page. Since more properly belong in the company of drug-store romances” (102). Even 2008, she has been a the more recent reviews of the novel’s 2003 edition are flippant about its docent at the National romantic sentimentality. Consider, for example, Fiona Foster’s 2004 review Gallery of Canada, of Earth and High Heaven in which she jokingly remarks,“[i]f Oprah had where she has delivered been around, she would have slapped an endorsement on its cover quicker public lectures on the than you could say, ‘It made me cry, it made me laugh, it made me hope’ ” Contemporary Arts (d14). Although Foster’s review of the novel is favourable, she is also criti- Society and the work cal of Earth and High Heaven’s popular romantic element. of Paul-Émile Borduas, More recent criticism of the novel, conversely, has turned a blind eye Marian Scott, Alfred to its glaring romantic elements to focus exclusively on its important social Pellan, and John Lyman. critique. Patrick Coleman and Michael Greenstein both explore the ways

either, but of David O. Selznick” (72). Earth and High Heaven was number nine on Lane’s bestseller list.

122 | Rackham in which Graham’s novel challenges readers to question stable conceptions of racial and social identities.2 While both Coleman’s and Greenstein’s exceptional studies of Earth and High Heaven have repositioned it as more than just a dime novel, both studies also gloss over the importance of the novel’s genre to its socio-political message. A closer reading of Earth and High Heaven reveals that it is highly self- reflexive about its status as romantic fiction; such introspection suggests the novel’s romantic elements may play a larger part in staging its social critique than previous studies have admitted. In chapter 4, for instance, the novel’s narrator (speaking through Marc’s consciousness) remarks that “[a]­p­­­­­parently the more you talk about being in love, the more you sound like a dime novel” (137). Considering the novel’s recurring self-consciousness about its status as romantic fiction, the romantic narrative of Earth and High Heaven works with—not against—Gwethalyn Graham’s polemic. The popular romance novel serves as an ideal genre through which to explore issues of citizenship and national identity precisely because its narrative elements work toward recognition. In this way, the romantic narrative of Graham’s novel facilitates the re-establishment of a Canadian heritage of tolerance and inclusion and a reworking of the Canadian national identity to include hyphenated subjects. As Pamela Regis remarks, “[t]he term ‘romance’ is confusingly inclu- sive, meaning one thing in a survey of medieval literature, and another, not entirely distinct, in a contemporary bookstore” (19). Although the romance novel is certainly related to the medieval romance, it differs from the older genre in a number of important ways.3 According to Pamela

2 Patrick Coleman investigates the novel’s geographical settings and the tension created between urban and rural environments, which define “the context out of which a new ‘Canadian’ identity must emerge” (168), while Michael Greenstein argues that Earth and High Heaven “questions racial identity and strangeness” (2) through Graham’s creation of “realistic Jews alongside stereo- types” (4). Greenstein’s essay on the novel is part of larger study on Canadian female novelists rewriting Semitic stereotypes in modernist literature. Neither Coleman’s nor Greenstein’s studies, however, addresses the role of the novel’s romantic narrative in staging debates about racial or religious prejudice and Canadian identity. 3 According to Kristin Ramsdell, “[s]tories of love and adventure (and usually war) were also popular throughout the Middle Ages, and it is from these epic tales of derring-do that our current term ‘romance’ derives” (5). These popular tales were written or translated into the vernacular languages of the time, what we now call the romance languages of French, Spanish, and Italian. “Eventu- ally,” notes Ramsdell, “the term came to include not only the language, but the subjects and qualities of the literature itself. Thus, a romance came to be identi- fied as a popular tale that centered around a theme of adventure and love” (5).

Romantic Recognition | 123 Regis, there are eight features of the romance novel: “the initial state of society in which the heroine and hero must court, the meeting between heroine and hero, the barrier to the union of heroine and hero, the attrac- tion between the heroine and hero, the declaration of love between the heroine and hero, the point of ritual death, the recognition by the heroine and hero of the means to overcome the barrier, and the betrothal” (30). Having established these narrative events as integral to the genre, Regis defines the romance novel as “a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines” (22). While I concur with Regis on the importance of the heroine to the genre, I find troubling the cancellation of the possibility that a hero’s participation in the act of betrothal could be as significant as the heroine’s. Instead, I agree with John Cawleti’s assertion that “[t]he crucial defining characteristic of romance is not that it stars a female, but that its organizing action is the develop- ment of a love relationship” (41). I would thus replace the word “heroines” in Regis’s definition with “characters”; this alteration would account for the diverse configurations of the act of betrothal in romantic fiction (as seen in queer literature) and place the emphasis on the narrative elements of the genre. Among those elements, the recognition scene is central to Earth and High Heaven, and it hinges on the hero’s recognition—not the heroine’s—as we shall see. When Graham wrote Earth and High Heaven at the end of World War II, Canada’s national identity was called into question. As Eva Mackey explains, “[f]rom early versions of Canadian history through to the Qué- bec referendums … official definitions of English-Canadian history and identity present the past as a ‘heritage’ of tolerance” (2). Although this national identity of tolerance and “inclusion” was established as early as the nineteenth century, it has in no way been consistent, and Mackey’s study maps its “contradictions and ambiguities” (3). One of the contradictions identified by Mackey is Canada’s immigration policy. “Up until the Sec- ond World War, when most immigration ceased,” notes Mackey, “Canada had a strict hierarchy of preferred racial groups for immigration” (29). In 1919, amendments to Canada’s immigration act called for the country’s right to exclude races based on their “peculiar customs, modes of life and methods of holding property” (Mackey 34). Canada’s official immigration

Ramsdell adds, however, that “[a]lthough bits and pieces of earlier love stories might have had an effect on the current romance genre, it is generally held that the direct antecedent of today’s romances is the 1740 epistolary novel by Samual Richardson titled Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded” (5).

124 | Rackham policy post–World War I, then, could be qualified by this amendment as assimilationist. The Jewish community became a primary target of the 1919 amend- ments to Canada’s immigration act, which established a hierarchy of pre- Anti-Semitism ferred immigrants. As Gerald Tulchinsky points out, new regulations implemented in the act “against the immigration of ‘enemy aliens’ ” essen- was a tially prohibited “the landing of Austrian, German, Bulgarian, and Turkish Jews” in Canada (189). Irving Abella and Harold Troper have noted that the growing Canadian public was rather accepting of these amendments: “[w]hether in or English Canada, few saw Jews as desirable settlers” (281). problem in William R. Young further explains that despite efforts by the Canadian gov- ernment initiated at the onset of World War II to promote “unity” among Quebec, where Canadians from a variety of backgrounds (46), the long-held prejudices of the nation remained intact. As Max Beer notes, the province’s [t]he decisive attack against Jewish Immigration came on premier was November 7, 1943, when Maurice Duplessis, leader of the Union Nationale and former premier of Quebec, in a pre- election meeting, threw a political bombshell at the oppo- deploying sition Liberals, both federal and provincial.… Duplessis charged that in return for financing Liberal candidates [the] rhetoric just “International Zionist Brotherhood” would be permitted to settle one hundred thousand Jews in Quebec. His anti- short of that Semitic outburst found a welcome audience. Duplessis was elected premier. (202) used in Nazism. Anti-Semitism was a growing problem in Quebec, where the province’s premier was deploying rhetoric just short of that used in Nazism; mean- while, as Prime Minister King learned quickly, “nativism and bigotry” were a nascent problem in the rest of Canada, a nation that claimed a history of tolerance and equality for all (Beer 203). Faced with a “mood” sweeping the country that was “decidedly against immigration” (Beer 203), Prime Minister King and the federal government attempted to recall and reinforce Canada’s heritage of tolerance through a public relations campaign “echoed over the airwaves, on the movie screens, and in print” (Young 32). This message was strategic: Young explains that it was meant to boost “national morale” and unite “the population behind the war effort” (32).Earth and High Heaven works in a similar vein: this Governor General’s Award-winning novel attempts to recuperate Canada’s inclusive politics for the benefit of the home front and for the war effort abroad. Published in 1944, the novel’s action is set exclusively in Canada two years earlier in 1942—the middle of World War II. While the temporal

Romantic Recognition | 125 setting of the novel and its young male characters traipsing about in Khaki suits qualify it as a “war novel,” it does not depict artillery warfare or com- memorate soldiers lost abroad. Instead, the narrative focus is on the war at home, a war that began before 1939 and that continues long after 1945. The novel begins by informing the reader that Marc Reiser, the roman- tic hero, leaves for battle in Europe in September of 1942, which is where the novel, ostensibly, ends. In this way, Marc is never actually seen leaving for Europe: his departure overseas is deferred for the reader and replaced in the narrative by the most basic element of the romance novel, the betrothal. The ending of the novel is significant because, as Pamela Regis explains, the betrothal scene represents the freedom of the heroine from societal constraints (16). In Earth and High Heaven, it is equally, if not more significantly, the hero’s freedom that is achieved in the final scene. By the end of the novel, Marc is freed from the anti-Semitism that defines the society to which he wishes to belong. Throughout the novel, Graham plays with the romantic novel genre as she shifts the focus of the narrative between hero and heroine. In Read- ing the Romance, Janice Radway explores the ways readers read romantic fiction, noting that many readers believe “a good romance focuses on an intelligent and able heroine who finds a man who recognizes her special qualities and is capable of loving and caring for her as she wants to be loved” (54). The readers Radway interviewed stipulated that “a romance is, first and foremost, a story about a woman,” the heroine (64). This is not exactly the case in Earth and High Heaven. Although Erica, the heroine, has a central role in the novel, Graham stages Marc as the focus of the narrative, since the novel introduces the reader to him before Erica. Marc is the “still self-conscious and rather shy” hero who stands alone in the middle of the Drake drawing room, in a city much different than his rural home in Northern Ontario (4). He is intelligent and sensitive, but he has one special quality about himself that seems to be keeping him from find- ing a proper home in the city: his “Jewishness.” Erica, for her part, plays the role of the hero as much as she plays the role of the heroine. Romance novels typically position the heroine in need of the love and validation of the hero. In Earth and High Heaven, however, the kind of validation Erica requires is qualified as less urgent than Marc’s need for validation because the novel is set during World War II, when the genocide of European Jewry was rampant. Erica, moreover, exhibits an agency in the Drake home that is characteristic of the romantic hero (Radway 82). Although her ability to move freely about the home, from one room to the next, might typically be associated with the agency of

126 | Rackham the heroine within a domestic realm, in Earth and High Heaven the Drake drawing-room functions as a microcosm of Montreal. Erica’s agency is not restricted to a domestic space but extends to the public sphere. Erica, after all, is the Woman’s Editor for the Montreal Post. Her position is undeniably a gendered one, but Erica has the “office boy” Weathersby Canning work- ing under her (27), and she is also a socially active member of “The Guild,” which is really a union she joined “partly on general principles and partly because Pansy Prescott,” her boss at the Post, “fired Tom Mitchell after he’d been on the Post for ten years, because … Tom was the chief organizer for the Guild” (11–12). Erica believes, evidently, that she can effect social change in her city, and she is willing to risk her job in the process. Marc, on the other hand, finds Montreal to be “a place where no mat- ter how bad social conditions are, [he] can’t change anything” (23). Marc’s statement is somewhat ironic, since we have just learned that he is a lawyer (15). Although his profession is one generally associated with the ability to effect social change, Marc is a junior partner in a Jewish law firm, Maresch and Aaronson, and, as he later tells Erica, he finds that “you can’t change anything outside your own little racial category” in Montreal (23). Marc’s lack of agency in the public space of Montreal is mirrored in the Drake home, as he tells Erica that he has spent most of the beginning of the novel “trying to look like a piece of furniture” (14), stuck in the middle of the drawing-room, treated more like an object than a subject. In addition to the agency that Erica exhibits in the first part of the novel, Graham characterizes her as a masculine heroine throughout the narrative. From her short “hair almost to her shoulders” to her “strong preference for tailored clothes” (10), Erica is no Rapunzel. She had the audacity, we are told, to wear one of her suits to her friend René’s cousin’s “very formal wedding” (10)—a fashion faux pas that presumably would have had Emily Post up in arms. There are no dresses or ruffles for this romantic heroine, whose family and friends affectionately alternate between calling her Erica and Eric. As Radway argues, “in ideal romances the hero is constructed androgenously” (13). Graham, however, takes Erica’s androgyny to the next level, even positioning Erica as a surrogate son for Charles, who “never really got along well” with his real son, Tony (38). In so doing, Graham disrupts the expectations of the romance reader while still working within the conventions of the romance novel. Despite her manipulation of the standard constructs of hero and hero- ine in romantic fiction, Graham’s novel moves toward the freedom of both Marc and Erica from the societal constraints that inhibit the marriage between Gentile and Jew. This freedom, however, is only “provisional”

Romantic Recognition | 127 (16). Regis explains that in the romance novel “[t]he heroine’s freedom in the form of her life, her liberty, or her property may be in doubt not only in the original society that promotes the barrier, but also in the new society at the end of the work” (16). For both Marc and Erica, not much is different about Montreal society following their union. As the narrator, reflecting back on the events of Mark and Erica’s love story, explains at the beginning of the novel, Montreal society is divided roughly into three catego- ries labeled “French,” “English,” and “Jewish,” and there is not much coming and going between them, particularly between the Jews and either of the other two groups; for although, as a last resort, French and English can be united under the heading “Gentile,” such an alliance merely serves to isolate the Jews more than ever. (1)

The narrator’s description of the city is in the present tense, suggesting that little has changed since the romantic drama between Marc and Erica was resolved in September 1942. This description of the current state of the city is significant: it establishes the importance of the romantic tale that succeeds it as relevant, educational, and offers its conclusion as a potential resolution to the divisiveness of contemporary Montreal in 1944. To readers of the twenty-first century, Graham’s description of Mon- treal in the narrative present might have a different effect. Coleman remarks that “nowhere in this novel … is it ever suggested that this social prejudice might be overcome any day soon” (168). He calls Graham’s treat- ment of anti-Semitism “a particular kind of imaginative outlook” (168). For readers of Earth and High Heaven in 2007, hindsight may heighten the utopianism of the text. Over sixty years have passed since the novel’s publication, and Graham’s description of Montreal (although limited in its pluralism) is still accurate in its depiction of cultural segregation and prejudice. Anti-Semitism is far from an anachronism to Montrealers today. Recently, the city’s Jewish community was the target of a bombing at the Skver-Toldos Orthodox Jewish Boys School in Outrement in September 2006 (Peritz A6). Only six months later, in April 2007, a second bomb- ing hit the Ben Weider Jewish Community Centre, during the week of Passover, nonetheless (“Montreal”). In addition to these hate crimes, a highly publicized survey conducted by Leger Marketing in January 2007 found that “[f]ifty-nine per cent of Quebecers admit to being racist to some degree” (“59% of Quebecers”). Considering the continued racial and religious prejudice that exists in Canada, despite the now socially accepted

128 | Rackham practice of exogamy and miscegenation, today’s reader of Earth and High Heaven might read its conclusion as an “imaginative outlook” as Coleman suggests (168). He or she probably would not consider the betrothal scene as a fait accompli or even a potential resolution to racial and religious prejudice in Canada as earlier readers of the novel might have done. Reading the novel in 1944, before the end of World War II, would have positioned the romantic narrative as instructive and forward-looking, rather than retrospective, despite its earlier setting in 1942. Immediately following the narrator’s description of Montreal, the reader is thrust into the domestic space of the Drake drawing-room, which serves as the con- ventional setting for the romantic narrative but also as a microcosm of contemporary 1940s Montreal. According to Pamela Regis, the first nar- rative element of the romance novel is that it immediately depicts, “the initial state of society in which the heroine and hero must court” (30). In Earth and High Heaven, that society mirrors the narrator’s description of the city in 1944 but on a smaller scale. On page 4, the narrator explains that Marc “found himself all alone out in the middle of the Drakes’ long, light- walled drawing-room, surrounded by twenty or thirty men and women, none of whom he knew and all of whom appeared to know each other” (4). Marc finds himself “lost” in the middle of the Drake drawing-room (4), a metaphorical no man’s land, where he is isolated from the conversation of the other guests. Although not the only Jewish person in the room (Mrs Oppenheim, a Viennese refugee, is also present), Marc is the only person located linguistically apart from the French guests and religiously apart from his English hosts. His personal isolation in the domestic space replicates the Jewish isolation that persists according to the narrator’s description of Montreal. The initial scene in the Drake home does more than just describe the conditions of the society in which Marc and Erica will court; it also estab- lishes an exclusive Canadian identity through a modern trope that Carla Kaplan calls “undesirable desire” (2). Kaplan describes this trope as “desire for that which is marked as undesirable, that which ‘ought not to be desired’ or even ‘that may not be desired’ ” (145). She explains that through the recu- peration of the romance narrative, “modernists were able to participate in complex on-going cultural debates about citizenship, identity, and race,” adding that this narrative offers “a complex promise of public and private recognition to the dual threats of personal and national undesirability” (2). In Earth and High Heaven, Marc is the object of “undesirable desire,” both on a personal and a national level. He is undesirable mainly because he is not recognized as a Canadian citizen.

Romantic Recognition | 129 Recognition, according to Charles Taylor, is an integral aspect of identity formation. Taylor contends that “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others.… Non- recognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppres- sion, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (98). In Earth and High Heaven, Marc’s exclusion from the national identity is represented within the domestic space of the romance as a series of misrecognitions or non-recognitions, which he internalizes. Mis- recognition limits the possibilities of Marc’s identity, where he is trapped into being recognized as one thing only—Jewish—if he is recognized at all. Marc, however, exhibits a number of different identities throughout the novel, and the romantic narrative works toward his self-recognition of the multiple identities that make him Canadian. The misrecognition of Marc begins immediately following his isolation in the Drake drawing-room. After being misrecognized for a man named George, Marc bumps into an artillery lieutenant only to avoid someone who had bumped into him. These near misses suggest that Marc is invis- ible or nonexistent to these military figures who are supposed to be his colleagues. As the chapter proceeds, Marc is misrecognized as a refugee by Mrs Drake, and he experiences overt non-recognition when Charles Drake refuses to acknowledge him at the bottom of his staircase. Even Marc is guilty of internalizing his own misrecognition: we learn later in the novel of Marc’s “appalling vulnerability” caused by his struggle to resist “the general conspiracy among the great majority of the people he met to drive him back into himself … to tell him what he was, and finally, to force him to abide by the definition” (79). Marc is, evidently, not always successful in refuting such misrecognition. He frequently internalizes his own undesirability, which becomes one of a number of barriers to his and Erica’s romantic union and his inclusion in the commonly understood sense of Canadian national identity. The identity crisis Marc struggles with throughout the novel is rep- resented symbolically in the Drake drawing-room when he sees the van Gogh print of The Arlésienne hanging on the wall. Marc’s comment to Madeleine that the painting “ ‘must be one of those German prints, it’s so clear,’ ” however, might reflect more about Charles Drake, presumably the owner of the print and the proprietor and patriarch of the home (7). Marc’s comment points to the many contradictions that characterize Charles: he is a man convinced that his son is overseas “making the world safe” by fighting Nazism (41), yet his powerful belief in the “freedom of enterprise” suggests he may not be below stimulating the enemy’s economy (34). After

130 | Rackham all, as Erica explains, there is a “duality” to her father’s nature, where he can have “two opposing opinions on economic, political, and even moral questions and yet be equally sincere in both” (32). Although Charles has the freedom to contradict himself in a number of ways, is allowed to have “two opposing aspects of his nature” (31), Marc is trapped into being one thing only: Jewish. Given the limitations imposed upon Marc’s identity, his reaction to the painting is very telling. He is immediately taken by the print, and throughout the first chapter his eyes often return to scan the lady in van Gogh’s portrait. That lady is Marie Ginoux, the owner of the Café de la Gare whom van Gogh and Paul Gaugin both met during their sojourn in Arles in 1888 (Hulsker 712). After Gaugin persuaded Mme Ginoux to sit for a portrait, both he and van Gogh painted sketches of their model, who was wearing the “traditional local costume” of Arles (Hulsker 712). What is interesting about the painting, for the sake of this study, is the number of paintings that van Gogh did of The Arlésienne. In fact, the number of Arlésiennes is so conspicuous that Carl Nordenfalk refers to it as van Gogh’s “often repeated painting” (138). Van Gogh completed at least six oil paintings of Mme Ginoux: two portraits were painted in Arles, and another four portraits were painted later from a sketch by Gaugin.4 One might assume that of the six versions of van Gogh’s Arlésienne the one depicted in the novel is one of the two portraits painted in Arles in which Mme Ginoux is featured with “a parasol and gloves on the table instead of one open and one closed book evident in the much reproduced version” (“L’Arlésienne”). It was this parasol and gloves version of van Gogh’s painting that was exhibited at the Art Association of Montreal in 1942 (“L’Arlésienne”), two years prior to the publication of Earth and High Heaven and contemporaneous with the novel’s plot. Given that The Arlésienne in the Drake home is a print, however, it is likely the “much reproduced version” that hangs on their wall (see figure 1). A close read- ing of Graham’s discussion of the painting, and Marc’s initial reaction to The Arlésienne, may suggest that the Drakes’ print is likely one of the more “bookish” versions of van Gogh’s painting (see figure 1): “From the

4 John Hulsker has noted that only four of Van Gogh’s paintings of Mme Ginoux painted from Gaugin’s sketch “are still in existence” (714). Therefore, Van Gogh may have painted other versions in the series. Despite the traditional costume Mme Ginoux wears in each of the portraits, which establish her identity as an arlésienne, the diversity of her representation in the six versions of the painting is impressive. The variety and multiplicity of identities that the many versions of The Arlésienne enacts is something that Marc unknowingly searches for himself in the novel yet is consistently denied by Charles Drake, among others.

Romantic Recognition | 131 Arlésienne his eyes moved along the line of bookcases reaching halfway up the wall, across the door, past more bookcases and around the corner to a modern oil painting of a Quebec village in winter, all sunlight and Marc’s colour and with a radiance which made him think of his own Algoma hills in Ontario” (7–8). Marc’s eyes move directly from the painting to the connection to bookcases in the home, which implies a connection between the painting and books. This suggestion is in fact doubled as Marc’s eyes move across the landscape the door to more bookcases, eventually landing on another painting. Nor- denfalk explains that in one version of The Arlésienne, “the books on the painting is table in front of the lady have been provided with distinctly legible titles: Charles Dickens, Contes de Noël, and Beecher-Stowe, La case de 1’Oncle symbolic of his Tom” (138). These titles are significant for Marc: Dickens’sA Christmas Carol features a miserly old man who is not a Jew, breaking the Shylock connection to stereotype that Charles Drake imposes on Marc; Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also a story about racial prejudice, focusing on slavery in Canada’s distinct the United States. At the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, many of the slaves find freedom when they cross the border into Canada. When Marc’s eyes national identity at last fall on the Quebec landscape, there is a latent hope expressed on his behalf that such freedom might be available to him in this province. and distances Marc’s interest in this “modern oil painting” of Quebec, moreover, reinforces his Canadian nationality. Although the painting is never identi- him from his fied, it is almost certainly a Group of Seven painting, and it is most likely a work by A. Y. Jackson. Members of the Group of Seven traveled by train European to the Algoma region following World War I to paint the landscape of what Marc calls “his own Algoma hills” (Harper 280). From 1921 to 1949, Jewish identity. however, Group of Seven member A. Y. Jackson went on his own during the Ides of March to paint the snow-covered landscape of “the small vil- lages dotting the shores of the St Lawrence below Quebec City” (Larsen 112). The Drake’s Quebec village painting is probably one of the many Jackson painted during his trips to the St Lawrence shoreline. Although these Quebec paintings were generally painted when Jackson was on his own, they are still identified as Group of Seven paintings as they were featured in Group of Seven exhibitions. John O’Brian and Peter White have suggested that “[t]he model of nationhood constructed by Thomson and the Group of Seven positions Canada between the Old World ‘other’ of Europe and the New World ‘other’ of the United States, while insisting on the distinctiveness from both” (4). Marc’s connection to the landscape painting is symbolic of his connection to Canada’s distinct national identity and distances him from his European Jewish identity. At the same time, his acknowledgement of the affinity between the Quebec landscape and

132 | Rackham that of Ontario’s Algoma region draws on landscape’s typical function as “a powerful political unifier” (O’Brien and White 4); the comment calls attention to one of the narrative functions of Earth and High Heaven, a war novel aimed at unifying Canadians and rallying citizens of Quebec, in particular, behind the war effort.

Figure 1: Vincent van Gogh’s The Arlésienne, 1890. Oil on Canvas, 65 x 54 cm. Museu de Arte, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Photograph credit: Bridgeman- Giraudon / Art Resource, New York.

The courtship between Marc and Erica, that which defines Earth and High Heaven as a romance novel according to Regis (22), becomes the means of recuperating a national identity that is tolerant and inclu- sive of Jews. This reworking of the national identity is possible mainly because Erica and Marc’s courtship is characterized by its discursive- ness. As Eva-Marie Kröller notes in a recent review of the novel, “[t]he romance between Erica and Marc is fitted around these conversations, and it sometimes seems as if love-making were got over hastily so that they may return as fast as possible to their real preoccupation, talking” (2). To add to Kröller’s comments, Marc and Erica’s dialogue also tends to be extremely self-reflexive of its romanticism. Often Marc and Erica’s romantic self-consciousness serves as a means for them to renegotiate the national identity and for the reader to recog-

Romantic Recognition | 133 nize Marc as a Jewish-Canadian, not simply as either a Jew or a Canadian. On their first excursion to the Laurentians, and after their implicit love- making is through, Marc and Erica wake to hear a whippoorwill calling outside their window. Marc jokes that, “ ‘Romeo and Juliet had a nightin- gale but all we get is a whippoorwill’ ” (199). In a comment that appears to show self-consciousness of the novel’s discourse of misrecognition, Erica corrects Marc by noting that it was not a nightingale but a lark that sang for Romeo and Juliet (199). Relating their own situation to one of the most popular romances ever written, Marc and Erica invoke a literary identity to which they can either conform—ending in tragic death for both of them—or rework. When Erica recites the lines from Shakespeare’s play, she stops abruptly by saying “ ‘I don’t think I particularly care for that bit after all,’ ” realizing that they must define their own ending, as this old, inherited one is not desirable. In an effort to rework their own identities as literary archetypes, the couple must first establish Marc’s subjectivity as a Jewish-Canadian and not simply a Jew. Charles Taylor suggests that identity is always defined “in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us” (102). In this romance novel, Marc and Erica substitute intercourse for discourse as they endeavour to recognize Marc’s status as a Canadian citizen. In the first love scene in the Laurentians, Erica demands the particularity of Marc’s personal history instead of the general history of the Jewish race. She has him tell her about his childhood, his home in Ontario, and his family, in order to fill in the “gaps” of his invis- ible subjectivity (200). When Erica asks him to describe the one time that he felt absolutely happy, when he managed to be “in complete harmony” with the rest of the world, Marc sums up his experience by quoting the Canadian poet Wilfrid Campbell’s poem “Indian Summer” (207). Marc’s ability to cite the poem reinforces his identity as Canadian, as he draws his literary heritage not from the English bard but from a Confederation poet. It is significant that Erica does not recognize the poem: it implies that Marc is more connected to the national literary heritage than Erica, even though her Gentile status suggests she is more Canadian than Marc. Marc’s Canadianness, however, is not consistent throughout the novel. His ability to recognize himself as both Jewish and Canadian often fal- ters. Consistent with Taylor’s argument that identity formation occurs in dialogue with our significant others, Marc’s ability to see himself as Canadian is particularly challenged when he ceases to work through his personal identity discursively with Erica. The lack of dialogue between the couple is most evident in the second scene in the Laurentians, before Marc

134 | Rackham leaves for Manchester, Ontario. The scene is characterized by its silence, and, although Erica and Marc do eventually talk with one another, their discourse is fragmented and marked by ellipses throughout the chapter. In this persistent silence, Marc has abandoned any possibility of recognizing himself as Jewish-Canadian. When he mentions their hypothetical prog- eny, Marc exclaims, “ ‘[m]ost Gentiles regard half-Jews as Jews—look at the refugees!—particularly if the father’s Jewish, regardless of whether or not they’ve been brought up as Christians or not’ ” (273). If his half-Jewish children will be thought of as Jewish then there is no hope for Marc at this point to see himself as anything other than a Jew. Marc, however, is mistaken in his belief that his children will be “half-Jews,” since, according to Jewish law, Jewish identity is inherited through the mother. His error reinforces the fact that, once again, he has been internalizing his own misrecognition and his own undesirability. In the genre of the romantic novel, this second scene in the Lauren- tians is the point of ritual death, which, according to Regis, “is the point in the romantic narrative when the union between hero and heroine seems impossible, when the barrier seems insurmountable” (35). In Earth and High Heaven, the barrier is set firmly in place by Marc’s silence and his refusal to “believe” in the possibility that he and Erica can be together (283). “ ‘I can’t …’ ” says Marc (283), an utterance followed by the news that Erica’s brother, Anthony, has gone missing. Anthony’s disappearance is the symbolic death in the romance novel (283). His “death” is significant because it separates Marc from Erica: she must return home to lament her loss, and Marc must also return home to accept his Jewish identity. At the same time, Anthony’s “death” enables the reunion of Marc and Erica: Anthony’s status as missing is symbolic of Marc’s inability to find his other identity, initiating the recognition scene that follows. In the romantic novel, the recognition scene is the scene in which the protagonist is recog- nized for her or his true identity, eliminating the barrier and permitting the betrothal to go forward (Regis 36). Regis explains that in the recognition scene, “any number of things can be ‘recognized,’ ” adding that “[f]ar more common in contemporary romance novels is an interior barrier, in which case the recognition scene consists of the heroine understanding her own psyche better” (36–37). In Earth and High Heaven, however, Marc is at the centre of the recognition scene. Having left the Laurentians decidedly as a “Jew,” Marc goes home for the Day of Atonement hoping to come to terms with his Jewish identity. Yet he makes the mistake of trying to work out his identity alone, not in dialogue with his love interest, when he attends the services of Yom

Romantic Recognition | 135 Kippur. Hoping to find out “what he, Marc Reiser, actually meant” (287), he finds out instead that he does not belong to this Jewish community either, because he is not as “exclusively Jewish” as he thought (312). Marc This romance comes to this realization only when he discusses his identity and his love for Erica with his brother, David. Although David has been described by novel, after all, Michael Greenstein as a “deus ex machina” (9), his place in the narrative is important; he stands in for Erica as what Taylor calls “the significant other” offers hybridity with whom Marc can rework his identity, and he helps him overcome the barrier (102). That barrier, it turns out, was about “ninety-eight percent” as a solution. Marc’s own fault, according to David (313). Marc had been recognizing only his Jewish heritage, internalizing Charles Drake’s misrecognition of him only as Other. Once the barrier has fallen, Marc’s new identity is articulated for the first time when he receives a phone call from the tele- graph office addressing him as “Captain M. L. Reiser,” a Jewish-Canadian soldier (321). Marc, recognizing his other identity, stares at his initials carved into the wall of the Reiser home, and he is ready to depart and fight alongside fellow Canadians in the war. First, however, he must reunite with the heroine, Erica. This romance novel, after all, offers hybridity as a solution, the betrothal scene promising the Jewish-Canadian children Marc and Erica had talked of in the Laurentians. David’s suggestion that Marc is responsible for the barrier to his and Erica’s romantic union in the novel, a suggestion left unchallenged by the narrator, is troubling and problematical as it blames the Jew and disregards the social, historical, and material circumstances of immigrants and Jews in Canada during the Second World War. When Graham published the novel in 1944, as Abella and Troper have remarked, Canada’s “door” was still closed to Jewish immigrants (285). Canadian Jews did not simply encounter anti-Semitism from a handful of intolerant civilians: it was festering in Canadian politics and public policy. Donna F. Ryan remarks that “Canada’s immigration policy during the 1930s included strict quotas on Jews, Asians, and blacks explicitly designated as the least desirable aliens” (135). In the 1940s, “[n]ot only did the director of immigration from 1936–43, Frederick Charles Blair, voice anti-Semitism, but Prime Minis- ter Mackenzie King expressed fears about admitting Jews … in Canada” (Ryan 135). According to Irving Abella and Franklin Bialystok, King told his cabinet that accepting Jewish refugees “could undermine Canadian unity, alienate many Canadians, strengthen the forces of Quebec separatism, and bring about bloodshed in the streets” (756).

136 | Rackham These comments came from the same Prime Minister who launched a campaign for tolerance and unity during the war. As Wendy Brown explains, however, “tolerance talk” is not always what it appears to be: as a moral-political practice of governmentality, tolerance has significant cultural, social, and political effects that exceed its surface operations of reducing conflict or of pro- tecting the weak or the minoritized and that exceed its formal goals and self-representation … Tolerance can function as a substitute for or as a supplement to formal liberal equality; it can also overtly block the pursuit of substantive equality and freedom. (9) Despite its impression of harmony and unity, tolerance, according to Brown, “is an internally unharmonious term” (25). Underlying its “pacific demeanor” are “discomfort, judgment and aversion” (24). Given King’s inconsistent statements regarding Jewish immigration, his message of tolerance for the Canadian public was probably not a message of accep- tance. Instead, King pitched tolerance primarily to repress aversion to other cultures for the sake of national unity during the war. Is Graham’s message of tolerance in Earth and High Heaven, then, much different than Prime Minister King’s? The novel’s unsettling sugges- tion that Marc is partly to blame for the social intolerances he experiences in the novel, including the intolerance of his and Erica’s union on the part of Charles Drake, certainly does not flatter one of the few Jewish charac- ters in the novel. Although Earth and High Heaven examines intercultural relations in Montreal through its romantic plot, it is perhaps first and foremost a Canadian war novel, as its setting in September of 1942—just a month following the Dieppe Raid—and the narrator’s emphasis on this temporal setting in the novel’s opening sentence would suggest. Through the novel’s romantic narrative and the modern trope of undesirable desire, the romance staged at the domestic level explores the very public issues of citizenship and national identity that were vital at the time of the novel’s publication. By attacking anti-Semitism on the home front, Graham’s novel garners support for the war effort, uniting Canadians to fight anti-Semi- tism on a global scale. For readers of the novel in the twenty-first century, where the fight against anti-Semitism continues globally, Graham’s solu- tion seems inadequate and even idealistic: the stuff of fairytale romances. Nevertheless, the novel questions whether or not the Canadian national identity is as tolerant as it prides itself on being.

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