Romantic Recognition in Gwethalyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven

Romantic Recognition in Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven 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 Montreal. 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 Canada´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 stereotypes” (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 identified 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.

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