The Problem of Commitment and the Publishing History of Irene Baird's Waste Heritage

"Sidown, Brother, Sidown!": The Problem of Commitment and the Publishing History of Irene Baird's Waste Heritage Jody Masont Like much Depression-era writing in Canada, Irene Baird's 1939 novel Waste Heritageis out of print and, perhaps as a consequence, has not garnered much recent critical or scholarly attention. Fortunately, University of Ottawa Press is publishing a new edition of the novel in zoo7 (edited and with an introduction by Colin Hill), which will certainly bring the attention of a new generation of scholars to bear on the issue of women's authorship during the interwar years in Canada.I Existing criticism of the novel is largely influenced by leftist nationalist Robin Mathews, who argued that Baird's novel should be heralded as a classic of proletarian literature in Canada-a novel that sympathetically represents the inevitability of class revolution.2 Yet archival evidence regarding the publishing history of the novel has allowed me to reconsider its political commitments in a more nuanced way. Although Baird has no authors' papers and although the original manuscript for Waste Heritazge is no longer extant, her correspondence with her Canadian and American publishers, as well as her articles on the writing of Waste Her-itage, are integral to the process of interpreting the novel's conflicted cultural and political meanmngs. t Jody Mason is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her research on Irene Baird's Waste Heritage is part of a larger project on the politics of mobility in Canada. Mason has also published in CanadianLiterature, Stu~dies in CanadianLiterature, and University of Toronto Quarterly. I I would like to thank Colin Hill for his generous assistance with my research on Irene Baird. 2 See Robin Mathews, "Canada's Hidden Working Class Literature," Canadian Dimension, (November / December 1997): 37 and "Waste Heritage: The Effect of Class on Literary Structure," Studies in CanadianLiterature 6.I (198I): 65-8I. For similar appraisals of the novel, see Anthony Hopkins, "Thematic Structure and Vision in Waste Heritage," Studies in CanadianLiterature II (Spring 1986): 77-85; and Roger Leslie Hyman, "Wasted Heritage Waste Heritage: The Critical Disregard of an Important Novel," fournal of CanadianStudies I7.4 (1982-83): 74-87- 144 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 45/2 Baird's social realist novel certainly does decry the situation of those men who were cut adrift by the Depression and largely ignored by the federal government, but the narrative reinforces the social hierarchies and relations of power that the thousands of transient unemployed threatened to undo in the mass demonstrations and strikes they engaged in throughout the I930s. As her communication with Macmillan Canada and Random House in New York demonstrates, Baird's work was constrained by numerous factors, including her class and gender, the demands of her publishers, and state censorship that resulted from the 1939 invocation of the War Measures Act, all of which led her to feel deeply ambivalent about writing a "strike novel." Like other writers with leftist sympathies in Depression-era Canada, such as Dorothy Livesay and Oscar Ryan, Baird articulates the importance of federal intervention in the crisis of mobility that had beset the nation, but her hesitancy regarding the politics of her project indicates that interwar leftist literary culture in Canada (and the literature that has been incorporated into its marginal canon by, for example, leftist nationalists) was by no means aligned by a homogenous conception of class struggle. `Waste He·ritage as Protest Novel Waste Heritage represents an explosive event, the troubling effects of which remained fresh in the minds of Canadians in 1939, when the novel was first published (it was re-published in 1974). The Vancouver Sit-Down Strike of I938 involved more than one thousand transients who were protesting the fact that provincial and federal governments had been unable to formulate a permanent strategy for dealing with the unemployment that had ravaged the country for the better part of a decade.3 Baird's fictional narrative responds to this labour crisis with a depiction of a typical unemployed transient, allegorically named Matt Striker, who comes to Vancouver by train to join the strike 3 The strikers inhabited the symbolically significant sites of the Vancouver post office and art gallery for a month before the RCMP forcibly evicted them; the men then proceeded to Victoria to make their voices heard in the provincial capital. James Struthers, No Faultof Their Own: Unernployrnentand the Canadian Welfare State, 9Ip4-z94I (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 192-93- There has been some misidentification of the context for Baird's novel in criticism of Waste Heritage. Caren Irr, for example, identifies the strike as the earlier On- to-Ottawa trek. Caren Irr, The Suburb ofD~issent: Culltural Politics in the United States and CanadaDuring the I-93os (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 145 "Sidown, Brother, Sidown!" just after the evictions. There, he befriends a fellow striker named Eddy, falls for a young department store clerk named Hazel, struggles with his sense of loyalty to the cause, and finds himself back where he started when the government settlement sends him out onto the road without hope of work or relief. Faced with so few options, Matt has a violent altercation with a police officer, kills the officer, and is arrested; Eddy, grieved by his role in Matt's arrest, stumbles onto the train tracks and is killed by an oncoming train. Waste Heritage shares the ideological project of many of the stories and poems that appeared in Canadian leftist periodicals in the I930s, such as the Communist-affiliated Ma'sses or the social democratic CanadianFor·ur: through the figure of Matt Striker, the novel argues for the existence of a national labour force that deserves the attention of federal coffers. The possibility that Canada had a national labour force and, consequently, that the federal government was responsible for it, was an issue that had only begun to emerge in Canada in the I930s. Under the Conservative government of P)rime Minister Robert Bennett (93~o-35), municipalities and provinces administered federal relief, but when the temporary Relief Act expired in 1933,this meant that most programs denied relief to non- residents.4 Transient men were the greatest victims of this restriction.~ The visible presence of these men in cities across Canada provided evidence for those who argued that unemployment was a national responsibility, and who decried the reluctance of the Conservative and subsequent Liberal governments to assume this responsibility.b Yet the increasingly loud voices of democratic socialists such as 4 Bryan Palmer, Working Clazss Experience (Toronto: McClelland 6c Stewart, 1992), 206-07. SStruthers, No Fault, yI. 6 Dennis Guest argues that the "prevailing residual approach to social security" in Canada (an ad hoc system that responded with "charity" to "deserving" beneficiaries in times of emergency), as well as the need for constitutional amendment prevented the Bennett and King governments from acting on Unemployment Insurance during the 1930s. Bennett's government did capitulate with a "New Deal" in 193r-the Employment and Social Insurance Act. However, opposition leader Mackenzie King claimed that a constitutional amendment would be required if the federal government chose to administer a UI program. The Privy Council agreed, and the "New Deal" was shelved. King's Liberals won a majority in Parliament in the I935 election, but chose to leave the delicate issue of constitutional amendment untouched until the late 1930s. Dennis Guest, The Emergence of Social Seculrity in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985), 86-91. 146 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 45/2 J.S. Woodsworth of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), as well as the conclusions of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations (1937-I940), urged the issue of federal jurisdiction over a national program of Unemployment Insurance.7 Insofar as Waste Heritage is sympathetic to this issue, it shares the commitments of both the social democratic and Communist movements in Depression-era Canada.8 In both political and literary cultures, which were admittedly intertwined in this decade, the transient unemployed became the symbolic battleground of the contested issue of jurisdiction over unemployment and relief. In a description of Waste Heritage that Baird wrote for IVacmillan's sales catalogue, she called the novel a "protest against the stupidity, irony and menace of a policy that allows the country's richest asset to drift from coast to coast, homeless, unskilled, undisciplined and unwanted, its one hope of steady employment the next great European war."g Baird hoped that this "protest" would create political change in Ottawa, as she noted in a letter to publisher Hugh Eayrs in 1939: "There seems to be no doubt that this subject will be the ace election issue. I hope that this may redound to the benefit of all of us."Io The novel makes its argument with regard to federal responsibility clear. The reader, for example, is meant to credit the one newspaper account of the sit-down strike that the strikers deem accurate and which calls the issue of unemployment 7 The CCF-affiliated social democratic League for Social Reconstruction (LSR) published Social Planningfor Canada in 1935; the book calls for a system of insurance to replace unemployment relief. Similarly, Leonard Marsh, a McGill eco no mist, member o f the LS R, and autho r o f the government-commiss ioned Report on Social Security for Canada in I943, advocated a federally-run and funded system of unemployment insurance as a means of regulating both geographical labour mobility and the capriciousness of market forces.

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