The prismatic reality of Canada's Cold War novels

Several important novels were published in Canada in 1954. They include Mordecai Richler's first book, The Acrobats, Fred Bodsworth's The Last of the Curlews, Charles Bruce's The Channel Shore, Robertson Davies'; expertly crafted, Leaven of Malice, and what proved to be Ethel Wilson's masterwork, Swamp Angel. It was a bonanza year in fiction and these titles are still in print. Yet the Governor General's Award for 1954 went to a novel that has been forgotten, Igor Gouzenko's The Fall of a Titan. Why was this anti-Communist spy novel, written by a Soviet defector and translated into English, so highly regarded by the arbiters of Canadian culture in the 1950s? What does it say about Canadian literature and social values in the 1950s that this novel, which has earned only a brief mention in The Literary History of Canada, was so highly prized at that time? I see this curious aberration in literary judgement as symptomatic of something larger in Canadian society and use it to conduct an analysis of class and political ideology in selected Canadian fiction of the 1950s. As part of North America, Canada has followed the United States and made anti-Communism part of Canadian government policy. This political background and the events that ensued in the 1950s inevitably affected and decided the ideology of Canadian writers and are reflected in their works. The chief difference among the writers as they mirror the perceived social and political reality is that some became the speakers for the ruling class in art and literature while others, despite their desire to reflect the ideology and needs of those from the lower order -- the left-wing and the working class --, still could not escape the bonds of the prevailing ideology around them. The primary purpose of this essay, through analyzing works by Morley Callaghan, Ethel Wilson, Hugh MacLennan, and Mordecai Richler, is to study the range of literary responses to the Cold War politics of the 1950s and to measure the degree to which the dominant conservatism and concomitant fear of Communism shaped the literature of Canada in this period.