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Frank Underhill: the Historian As Essayist Frank Underhill: The Historian as Essayist Kenneth C. Dewar EW PEOPLE TODAY under the age of fifty are like- The chief medium of his intellectual engagement was ly to have heard of Frank Underhill, unless they the essay, a form that in Underhill’s time had lost some of have studied Canadian history or politics. The the dynamism and authority it had achieved in its nine- same goes for the political party with which he was long teenth-century heyday. It experienced something of a Fassociated, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation revival in the late twentieth century and, after a long hia- (Farmer, Labour, Socialist), and its founding platform tus, has recently attracted the attention of literary critics. document, the Regina Manifesto, which he drafted in Books have appeared studying the essay, as have essays — 1933. Members of the New Democratic Party, which “essays on the essay,” to quote the title of one collection grew out of the CCF in its last days in 1961, might in this — while in 1997 Fitzroy Dearborn, the British publisher of case be among the exceptions. When I was a graduate dictionaries and encyclopedias of just about everything student at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s, under the sun, brought out an Encyclopedia of the Essay, a where Underhill had made his name as a thinker and his- title perhaps verging on the oxymoron. Everyone interest- torian, his reputation had already begun to fade in the ed in how writing works should be pleased by this. It was years since his departure in 1955. somewhat odd that a genre so widely used in so many dif- It didn’t help that, in the latter decades of his life (he ferent forums and over so long a period — the sixteenth- died in 1971 at the age of 81), he abandoned his socialist century French humanist Michel de Montaigne was its principles, or so it seemed, and embraced the Liberalism inventor — should have been so little studied during the of William Lyon MacKenzie King and Lester Pearson, era of the New Criticism in literary studies. and that he stood firmly on the side of the United States Underhill’s attraction to the essay was rooted in his during the Cold War. This was not a posture that won pre-World War I origins, which also shaped much of his much sympathy in the late sixties, especially among those thought. Born in 1889, he grew up in Stouffville, north of of my generation, and since then we have entered an Toronto, and attended University College in the entirely new era. Sic transit gloria mundi. University of Toronto from 1907 to 1911 and Balliol Nevertheless, Underhill was unquestionably the College, Oxford, from 1911 to 1914. He was in his first leading public intellectual of English-speaking Canada in academic post, at the University of Saskatchewan, as the the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the war began and left it a year later to enlist for service over- late 1920s and continuing almost to the time of his death, seas. He was then twenty-five years old, fundamental ele- he wrote hundreds of essays and reviews, primarily in ments of his habits and outlook having been formed in the Canadian Forum, of which he was editor briefly in the refined milieu of middle-class Edwardian Ontario the 1930s, but also in the New Statesman, the Nation, and and England. Much later, he reminisced, with character- Saturday Night, in the university quarterlies, in the daily istic gentle irony, that “he or she who was not born soon press, and in other journals of opinion — journals, in enough to grow up in that delectable quarter century other words, very like this one, but in the medium of before 1914 can never know what the sweetness of life is.” print. He reviewed books on the CBC and, in 1963, It is hard not to think that beneath the irony lay an delivered the Massey Lectures, later published as The experience of the twentieth century — of warfare, depres- Image of Confederation. sion, and social upheaval; of fascism, communism, and All this was in addition to the work he published in aca- the cult of the masses — as a kind of Fall. “Most history,” demic journals like the Canadian Historical Review, in essay the American critic George Steiner has written, “seems to collections, and as introductions and forewords to reprints, carry on its back vestiges of paradise,” and this would anthologies, and other books. A constant of his thought and seem to have been true for Underhill. writing — perhaps their single most consistent theme — was In that sweet Edwardian Indian summer, political dis- his contention that Canadian public life had been dimin- putation, social commentary, and even history itself were ished and constrained by the absence of an indigenous intel- the province of gentlemen scholars, sages, and moralists, lectual tradition. No one did more to remedy the deficien- and one of their chief instruments of discourse was the cy. If writers from Hilda Neatby and George Grant to Mark essay, whose diffusion had been made possible by the Kingwell and Naomi Klein have since found a wide audi- rise and proliferation of periodical journals and maga- ence it is at least partly because Underhill paved the way. zines. Underhill read widely, not to say voraciously, in the U NDERHILL R EVIEW FALL 2007 5 literature and commentary of the day. As a high school a dictum that he came frequently to quote and that he later student, he was much taken with Leslie Stephen, now claimed to have first heard as an undergraduate from better known as the father of Virginia Woolf than as one Maurice Hutton, one of his classics professors. Even then, of the pre-eminent essayists and ‘men-of-letters’ of late he told his readers, he had felt a thrill of appreciation. Victorian England. At university, his studies — honours He proceeded to argue that the Globe (and its editor, classics, English and history at Toronto, ‘Greats’ and George Brown) had been the voice, not primarily of anti- modern history at Oxford — provided him as fine a lib- Catholic bigotry, as was then widely believed, but of eral arts education as he might have received anywhere Upper Canadian agrarian democracy. Editorials criticized in the English-speaking world, but it was an education as big business, in the form of the Grand Trunk Railway, a generalist and quite unlike the specialized professional extolled the virtues of the yeoman farmer standing training in historical research that was then taking over at foursquare on the soil, called for the opening of the North Princeton and Harvard, and was established at Berlin West to settlement, and saw better than most the national and the Sorbonne. It was also an education that stimulat- potential of Confederation. All of this had relevance for ed his interest in political ideas and cultivated his prose the present. “We of the modern West,” he concluded (he style. Douglas Francis, Underhill’s biographer, tells us was then still at Saskatchewan, though about to move to that one of his Oxford tutors admired his weekly papers Toronto), “have a natural affinity” with George Brown’s for their “witty prose and epigrammatic remarks.” Upper Canada: “It is our spiritual home.” Wit and a well-turned phrase were to become the Leaving aside whatever might be made of this pur- hallmarks of an Underhill essay. They were especially evi- ported regional affinity for our own present, what strikes dent in the short pieces he wrote for Canadian Forum in a the modern reader of this academic paper is its discur- column entitled “O Canada,” which ran from 1929 to sive qualities: its personal voice, its relative informality, its 1932. “All these European troubles,” he wrote in July manner of directly addressing the reader. These are 1929, referring particularly to Canadian involvement in among the distinguishing qualities of the essay mode, the League of Nations and what it implied for the nation’s though the line between personal and impersonal is not foreign commitments, ”until we have more investments easily drawn, nor is it obvious in just what an essay’s there, are not worth the bones of a Toronto grenadier.” informality consists or where relative informality shades This was typical Underhill: provocative, a bit flip, and into relative formality. killing two birds with one stone. There was nothing ideal- Most people would agree that the articles that istic, he was saying, about Canada’s membership in the appear in academic journals today are not essays, gener- League, since Canadian politicians would never act unless ally speaking, even though they are similar in length and there were domestic political advantages to be had, and some of them have essayistic qualities. Two of their most foreign relations, in any case, were driven by business common features make them something else, perhaps interests. Undercutting the idea of any involvement at all cognate forms of the essay: one is their elaborate schol- was the sentence’s buried lead, “the bones of a Toronto arly apparatus and the other is their scientific or quasi-sci- grenadier,” evoking the lives of young men wasted in the entific detachment. The two are closely related, of last European war only a dozen years earlier. course, since scientific (or science-like) credibility rests The column then deftly segued into another favorite above all on the quality of an author’s study and subject, the baffling (to him) resistance of Canadians to research, and footnotes (or endnotes) enable the reader acknowledging their close kinship with Americans: “On to check the author’s sources, at least in theory, and to the subject of Americanism the ordinary Canadian judge whether he or she has used them honestly and behaves like a fundamentalist discussing modernism.” drawn legitimate conclusions.
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