Unbuttoned by Christopher Dummitt

Author:Christopher Dummitt
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

10.2 Hugh MacLennan

The novel makes clear that the great quest in contemporary Canada was to look unflinchingly within the self. “We’re like the man who tore down all the walls of his house in November and then had to face the winter naked,” another character says. “Now I suppose we’ve got to make up the rules as we go along and one gets so tired doing that. It would have been so much simpler and safer to have kept the old rules.” And what had replaced the old moral language, the old certainties? It was psychology. “Was neurosis the new word for sin?” MacLennan has a character say. That is exactly what it was. As the book ends, the narrator comes to the conclusion: “Here, I found at last, is the nature of the final human struggle. Within, not without.” 14

MacLennan’s friend and fellow writer F.R. Scott agreed. Scott, whose poem “WLMK” so exemplified the desire for change at the end of the 1950s, also strove to create a less shameful, more open Canada in his other job, as law professor and lawyer. Scott acted as legal counsel in the court case that best illuminated the ways in which older standards of decorum were being cast aside at the end of the 1950s – the censorship trial over Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The case resulted from the attempt to censor an unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence’s famous novel. The British and American trials are better known but in fact the Canadian case went to the courts first. Moreover, the British defence attorney was an old Oxford friend of Scott’s and he looked to the Canadian trial for guidance on how to proceed.

Lawrence’s novel about an affair between an English woman and her gamekeeper offended sensibilities in myriad ways – in its portrayal of adultery, in its frank use of language including “fuck” and “cunt,” and in its blunt eroticism, especially the scene where the lovers braid each other’s pubic hair. The case was made for someone like Scott, with his unique background as a poet and lawyer. He brought in expert literary witnesses, including the novelists Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan, to speak to the literary merit of the novel. Scott had to make the case that the sexual passages of the novel were only parts of it and he tried to push the court to consider the effect of the book not on a young person (as had previously been the test in censorship cases) but on the community at large. Both the lower court in Quebec and the Quebec Court of Appeal found against the publisher. Scott had expected this given the conservative judicial culture in Quebec. But he had taken on the case only on the assurance that the publisher would see it through to the Supreme Court of Canada.

By the time the case reached this stage, the famous British trial had already reached its conclusion, vindicating the publisher. The British trial became a sensation and the crown

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