"I am . . . increasingly suspicious of what we may call ‘the impersonal fallacy’—the objective, clinical, antiseptic estimate of a poem, judicial but not always judicious, made by suppressing all the nerve-ends of personal sensibility, by unfleshing our sympathies, and uprooting us from the soil of our own experience and affections," stated Malcolm Ross in 1984 in an overt challenge to Matthew Arnold’s injunction against the "personal fallacy," the potential to allow one’s critical judgment to be swayed by "personal affinities, likings and circumstances" (Ross, "Bliss" 11; Arnold, "Study" 159). The force of Ross’s rebuttal, articulated almost a decade after he had ceased full-time teaching and six years after he had formally retired as general editor of the New Canadian Library (NCL), provides some sense of the impact Arnold had on his scholarly life. Like many of his academic generation, Ross had been schooled in Arnoldian principles during the course of his post-secondary education. Arnold’s pronouncements about critical methodology, set out in detail in his two essays, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864) and "The Study of Poetry" (1880), were intellectual precepts that Ross, and other Canadian literary scholars contemporary to him, had to negotiate and qualify when they became advocates of the serious teaching and research of Canadian literature at the post-secondary level. For Ross, who in the early 1950s conceived the idea of a Canadian literary reprint series in paperback, an idea given form in 1958 when McClelland and Stewart (M&S) launched the NCL, advocacy of Canadian literary studies demanded not only a revision of critical outlook, but also a practical education in the realities of Canadian publishing.¹ In his position as general editor, Ross served as a liaison between the NCL’s publisher and the post-secondary classroom in which he wished series titles primarily to be utilized. He stood at the centre of the NCL title selection process, recruited and oversaw the individuals chosen to introduce or compile specific titles, and undertook some introductory and title-level editing himself. He approached all of these editorial activities with a critical sensibility imbued with an historical and cultural [Page 26] perspective, investing the study of Canada’s literature with cultural, as well as aesthetic, imperatives. In doing so, he embraced the very likings and circumstances that Arnold cautioned against, believing that these very things could serve as sources of critical insight.

In 1941, when he emerged from his post-secondary education as a specialist in seventeenth-century literature, Malcolm Ross would not have seemed an obvious candidate to become a leading advocate of Canadian literary studies. With the exception of some study of Maritime poets while a schoolboy in New Brunswick, his exposure to Canadian literature had been sporadic and extracurricular (Ross, Personal interview). Moreover, while pursuing his post-secondary education, from the University of New Brunswick (B.A., 1933) through University of Toronto (M.A., 1934) to Cornell University (Ph.D., 1941), Ross’s youthful—and favourable— readings of poets like Bliss Carman had been challenged on the one hand by the Arnoldian caution against "the personal fallacy" and on the other by modernist repudiations of the Romantic tradition (Ross, "Bliss" 11, 13). It was the setting of literature in historical and cultural context, a practice still highly regarded in Canadian universities in the 1930s, that provided the critical toehold from which Ross would later pursue the serious study of Canadian literature.

Ross first identified an historical and cultural approach to literature as valuable when, as an undergraduate, he read Herbert Grierson’s Cross-Currents in English Literature of the XVIIth Century (1929). Grierson’s work was "a study of the culture of the seventeenth century which related the writing to the political events of the time, the attitudes of the whole society, the changes going on in the world"; it made Ross become aware of "literature as an expression of the whole culture" (Personal interview). At Toronto, the critical worth of historical and cultural context was reinforced by professors such as A.S.P. Woodhouse of University College, a scholar whom Ross admired (Ross, "SCL" 248). Woodhouse was a well-known champion of the "history of ideas" approach to literature, which itself was an aspect of Arnoldian methodology that linked the context of prevailing ideas to the literary production of an age and deemed the "creation of a master-work of literature" to be dependent upon the concurrence of "the power of the man and the power of moment," the man not being [Page 27] enough without the moment.² Woodhouse was a force behind such important innovations as the annual "Letters in Canada" survey in the University of Toronto Quarterly, but did not encourage the inclusion of Canadian literature in the university curriculum (Pacey 69). Other aspects of Arnoldian thinking, such as defining the role of criticism as "the idea of a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world," as well as the critic’s warning against the "historical fallacy"—the risk of overrating a work’s aesthetic worth based upon its significance in the "course of development of a nation’s language, thought, and poetry"—no doubt discouraged such a move.³ Right up to the mid-twentieth century, Canadian literature was often described as immature by its advocates, while its detractors decried its very existence; in either case, hardly a stunning endorsement for the curricular use of Canadian-authored works. Throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Canadian academics who did feel a concern for Canadian literature tended to express it through extra-curricular activities, such as public lectures and book reviewing. W.J. Alexander, whose long and influential tenure in literary studies at University of Toronto ended in the mid-1920s just as Woodhouse’s was beginning, believed that a curriculum aimed at "improving the tastes of the students" would do much to promote a literate community capable of producing a significant body of Canadian literature (Fee 209). Woodhouse likely shared that view. The 1930s in general was a decade of significant debate over critical methodology, one in which the claims of the New Criticism, which eschewed a consideration of historical context and authorial intention, were being particularly felt. Ross synthesized the various critical perspectives to which he was exposed during his graduate school years. He came to place a high value on the aesthetic side of literature, but he never viewed literature as something that existed in isolation (Ross, Personal interview).

During the 1940s, experiences outside of literary studies came to bear upon Ross in important ways, and encourage him toward a professional commitment to Canadian literature. In 1941, while undergoing doubts about accepting a permanent position at Indiana University where he was teaching full-time and feeling increasingly concerned about the Second World War, in which Canada was already involved, Ross read Donald Creighton’s Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (1937). Creighton’s history provided him, for the first time, with a genuine "sense of being a Canadian." Ross appreciated the historian’s interpretation of Canada’s past as a unique culture that had arisen out of the clash and intermeshing of British, French, and American peoples (Personal interview). Thus spurred [Page 28] into returning to Canada, Ross applied unsuccessfully for military service then obtained a position with the National Film Board (NFB) during one of the most nationalistic periods of the agency’s history. His work in the NFB’s distribution branch required him to travel throughout the country, and brought him into contact with people from a diversity of backgrounds. "I forgot about this little Anglo-Saxon world that I’d come out of," he recalled. "I learned a lot about what the country was like and what I thought about it" (Personal interview).

When Ross returned to teaching, taking up a position at the University of Manitoba in 1945, he found the insights of his NFB years reinforced. Winnipeg was populated by individuals from a variety of backgrounds, and that ethnic diversity was reflected in the students Ross taught. In the 1950s, he began to give those insights form in such works as Our Sense of Identity (1954) and The Arts in Canada: a Stock-Taking at Mid-Century (1958), two volumes which he edited. In the introduction to the former, he placed historical weight on the "two nations" in the formation of Canadian identity, describing the dual English and French presence as having created a "dynamic and fruitful tension" (ix). He designated irony as the key to Canadian identity, stating it was "the Canadian mode" for it represented "the inescapable response to the presence and pressures of opposites in tension" (x). Describing Canadians as a people still caught up in the act of becoming, he argued that over time "this dual irony [shifted] to the multiple irony, from the expansive open thrust of French-English tension to the many-coloured but miraculously coherent, if restless, pattern of the authentically Canadian nationality" (xi).

Ross’s perception of Canadians as a people in the process of becoming extended to the art they produced. In the introduction to The Arts in Canada, which considered the period between 1945 and 1958, he emphasized that contributors had been directed to approach their topics in an "‘independent’ yet ‘positive’" manner. "The book," he explained, "was conceived in the spirit of enquiry but also in the faith that such a critical enquiry as this would show forth the ‘promising elements,’ the significant new patterns while, inevitably, exposing the false starts, the sterile gestures, the traces of pretentiousness and servility" (2). He added that while some of the critics "unhesitatingly [applied] ‘world standards’" to the work of certain artists under their purview, authors of other sections had had difficulty because they were examining fields only in their fledgling stages in Canada. Such critics were "concerned, therefore, not only with the appraisal of such achievement as they can locate (and in some cases that achievement is considerable) but also with the conditions (technical, [Page 29] social, economic, geographical) which affect and, to a degree, determine the progress of certain arts in this country" (2-3). He described these as "extra-aesthetic considerations upon the act of aesthetic judgment" (3). Further along in the introduction, Ross noted that a number of contributors pointed to international or cosmopolitan influences upon various fields of the Canadian arts. Canadian artists, in Ross’s view, were faced with negotiating between such influences, and those to which they were subject at home. "[A]ssimilation is just as necessary to our advance as discovery," he asserted. "Like other people everywhere we must advance over our own cobblestones. . . . The personal vision takes charge of the ‘international idiom,’" he added. "There is no reason at all why the spectrum should shrink to grey, why, in the end, our varied culture should turn flat and single. We are learning a new idiom. We shall come to talk it with our own accent, our several accents" (5).

Ross’s faith that Canadian artists would ultimately articulate their country’s cultural uniqueness and complexity, his belief that extra-aesthetic circumstances should bear on aesthetic judgment, and his perception of literature as an expression of the culture of a specific place and time provide an important intellectual framework in which to situate his general editorship of the New Canadian Library. Evidence of these ideas was manifest in the retrospective view he offered in 1995 of his initial vision for the series. "I’m not sure that I had any clear map ahead of me," he explained:

In the twenty years between the series’ official launch on January 17, 1958 and Ross’s retirement as general editor in February 1978, that probing produced just over 180 titles in the NCL’s Main and two subsidiary lines, the Original series and the Canadian Writers Series.⁴ Ross’s ambition to achieve historical and regional representation was certainly addressed, [Page 30] though not necessarily realized to the degree he might have wished. Of the 137 reprints in the Main series, a figure which excludes original NCL compilations and translations, 1 (.7%) title is from the eighteenth century and 16 (11.7%) are from the nineteenth century, while 37 (27%) first appeared between 1900 and 1939, 49 (35.8%) between 1940 and 1960, and 34 (24.8%) between 1961 and 1975. Regional representation is a more difficult statistic to establish, but the series includes at least one title set, in whole or in part, in every province and territory, with the exception of the Yukon.⁵ "As a teacher of Canadian literature, I have been concerned with the growth, the slow growth of a Canadian literary culture, and in all the regions in our time and space," Ross revealed in a letter to an M&S editor toward the close of his editorship. ". . . I think that at this stage of our self-awareness some such study of our culture, both high and low and middling, is valid and has been necessary. And I think NCL, in these terms, has made a serious contribution to the self-knowledge of Canadians, even if such self-knowledge has not always flattered our self-pride."⁶

Ross conceived the idea of a Canadian literary reprint series in paperback in the early 1950s, shortly after taking up a position at Queen’s University. On the surface, the environment for such an undertaking was not auspicious. The market for Canadian literature in Canada was small, and its appeal internationally was limited (Gray 60-62). John Gray, President of Macmillan of Canada, whom Ross first approached with his idea, firmly turned down the proposal, convinced that no stable market for the series could be ensured and that paperbacks were a passing fad (Staines 14). Gray’s conviction about the lack of a stable market largely rested on the scant attention granted Canadian literature in secondary and post-secondary classrooms at that time. Jack McClelland, whom Ross next approached in December 1952, expressed similar misgivings, but eventually allowed himself to be convinced by Ross’s assertion that the availability of the books would create the market for them.⁷

The lengthy delay between Ross’s proposal of the series and M&S’s launch of it were indicative of the caution with which McClelland approached the venture. Ross, McClelland, and S.J. Totton, M&S’s educational traveller, discussed potential markets and drafted a short, working list of titles in 1953 and 1954, but it was not until January 1955 that the publisher made a firm commitment. Even then McClelland’s misgivings remained evident. "After a good deal of further discussion here and after a long struggle with costs," he wrote, "we are finally able to turn on the green light and say that we are prepared to go ahead with the project as planned, sink or swim" (qtd. in Solecki 14). Over the next few years, the launch of the series was delayed several times as McClelland struggled with concerns over academic calendars, market research among booksellers, and printing delays. In January 1958, the first four titles, Frederick Philip Grove’s Over Prairie Trails, Morley Callaghan’s Such Is My Beloved, Stephen Leacock’s Literary Lapses, and Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House, finally appeared. McClelland produced each in a print run of 5000, and estimated that if every copy of the four books sold, the firm would clear a total of $400.⁹ With their appearance, M&S became an early Canadian player in the mid-twentieth-century paperback revolution and the first to undertake a quality paperback series.¹⁰

Ross stood at the centre of the title selection process, mediating between the series’s publisher and the academic community which represented the NCL’s most important market. As general editor, he was expected to read every book or book proposal placed on the working list of potential titles then recommend the work for further discussion or reject it outright. He adopted a consultative editorial method, and for that reason the list of potential titles included suggestions from academics, teachers, and other educational authorities, as well as M&S personnel, booksellers, book reviewers, writers, surviving spouses and children of authors, tourism personnel, and members of the general public. Academics were by far the most substantial contributors to this list, and Ross not only passively received their suggestions but also actively sought out their advice. While the NCL was in its planning stages, Ross had served as editor of the Queen’s Quarterly from 1953 to 1956; the experience had revealed to him the importance of building a network to support a publishing endeavour. During his early years as NCL general editor, he had an added incentive to reach out to colleagues because his own knowledge of Canadian literature was still relatively sparse.¹² Ross queried, for example, critics such as Robert McDougall and Ross Beharriell about the merits of compiling new collections versus reprinting existing titles by Thomas Chandler Haliburton and Ralph Connor respectively.¹³ Carl Klinck, in turn, became an important advisor on early Canadian literary works, while of his own initiative he recommended to Ross titles such as Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague and Rosanna Leprohon’s Antoinette de Mirecourt.

Ross favoured titles for a variety of reasons, including aesthetic merit, revelation of Canadian scenes, events, themes, or sensibilities, or historical significance in the development of a Canadian literary tradition. In his introduction to Grove’s Over Prairie Trails, the general editor rejected "narrowly technical scruples" about authorial nationality, arguing that "Grove’s was no passport Canadianism." "He was not just a writer who happened to be writing in Canada," Ross explained. "He was a Canadian writer, wholly absorbed by the Canadian scene and by the pioneer drama of a diverse yet single people, wholly convinced that this scene, this people, could yield to the artist’s vision themes and values at once unique and universal" (v). An idea of the boundaries Ross drew around the series emerges out of his rejection of Ann Charney’s Dobryd, a title proposed to him by an M&S editor in the mid-1970s. Ross felt "this account of a Czeck concentration camp" was not "a Canadian book in the NCL sense." Dobryd "is a good book," he noted, [Page 34]

In the process of negotiating title selection with McClelland, Ross always had to respect the financial constraints under which M&S, a commercial publishing house, produced the series. Never the beneficiary of a direct government grant, the NCL was launched before the university expansion of the 1960s, and at a time when only about 25% of Anglo-Canadian universities offered a dedicated, undergraduate course in Canadian literature (Friskney 661). In order to support the whole endeavour, it was imperative that some titles have appeal in the general trade, as well as college and high school markets. To that end, Ross acceded to McClelland’s wish that Stephen Leacock titles appear regularly; a Leacock work was duly issued in 11 of the 16 groups of NCL titles published between 1958 and 1971. Concerns about the production costs of longer titles, which first began to be articulated by M&S personnel in the early 1960s, in turn led to Ross’s agreement to abridge eight titles, including Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush and John Richardson’s Wacousta, rather than exclude them from the series entirely.

Aided tremendously by university expansion and the substantial increase in courses in Canadian literature during the 1960s, the NCL became a stable publishing venture by the end of its first decade. Unfortunately, Ross’s need to function within financial constraints actually became more acute over the next ten years, for in 1968 M&S as a firm entered a period of financial crisis. This general financial situation was exacerbated by the greater royalty demands and increased manufacturing and storage costs experienced by the series. The emergence between the mid-1960s and early 1970s of other Canadian publishers’ quality paperback series, such as Macmillan’s Laurentian Library (est. 1967), also made Ross more reliant on the M&S backlist as it became increasingly difficult to acquire reprint rights from outside the firm. In addition, Ross found his ambition of the early 1970s to enlarge the presence of titles from the nineteenth- [Page 36] and early-twentieth centuries, a response to the more specialized courses in Canadian literature that were beginning to emerge, tempered by the publisher’s concern for a quicker turnaround on first NCL printings, a circumstance which aided the firm in recovering initial investment costs.²⁰ After the introduction of M&S paperback promotions in the mid-1970s, the firm also became increasingly preoccupied with issuing more titles in the series with broad trade appeal. Consequently, during the last few years of his general editorship, the content of the annual issues of NCL titles became more of a trade off between Ross’s editorial preferences and M&S’s business concerns than ever had been the case in the past.

Even so, the bulk of Ross and McClelland’s twenty-five year working relationship was marked more by amiability than dissent, with Ross acknowledging the commercial considerations which were of obvious concern to McClelland as publisher, while McClelland, in turn, recognized Ross’s ambition to produce a series in which some volumes, while significant for literary or historical reasons, would be less than financially successful for his company. McClelland favoured, for example, the E.K. Brown collection, Responses and Evaluations, explaining to a colleague that while the work would likely be unprofitable, Brown had been an important Canadian literary critic and a collection of his work would be an appropriate and prestigious addition to the series.²¹ Prior to the tensions of the mid-to-late 1970s, the only title to bring them into serious dispute was Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. After provisionally agreeing in 1968 to an NCL edition of the work, Ross reversed his decision, for on close reading he found he neither liked the book, nor could he appreciate it on grounds of literary merit. "The book is an artistic failure because there is no control or transcendence of the material," Ross wrote McClelland. "Cohen is overwhelmed by the stuff in the book. For this reason the effect is that of obscenity for obscenity’s sake."²² McClelland questioned Ross’s decision, citing the praise of other critics, his concern for Cohen’s feelings, M&S’s obligations to the author, and even borrowing from Ross to argue the book’s inclusion on historical grounds–all to no avail. Ross remained adamant in his decision, McClelland unhappily acknowledged his right of veto as general editor, and Beautiful Losers did not appear in the NCL during his general editorship.²³ While McClelland felt particularly thwarted over the exclusion of this particular title, for Ross compromise was an abiding factor throughout his general editorship. His basic editorial wish to achieve a balance "between old and new as well as in tone and type— and region" was tempered on many occasions by the vicissitudes of publishing.²⁴ Nonetheless, by the time of his retirement in 1978, he had made [Page 37] substantial progress in "get[ting] together a library, and hold[ing] together as a library, books which would otherwise have disappeared or got beyond the reach of students" (Ross, "Interview" 61).

The assignment and editing of introductions formed a central component of Ross’s activities as general editor. While selection of titles tended to be negotiated settlements between him and the publisher, in the case of introductions Ross functioned relatively autonomously, believing that as general editor he should be the one primarily responsible for interacting with introducers and undertaking the editing of their work. On the odd occasion when he felt that an in-house editor was encroaching in this area, Ross was quick to clarify what he considered to be the parameters of their respective roles. "I think all correspondence with the ‘introducer’ should be conducted by the General Editor," he explained in 1961 to an M&S editor. "On questions of style and phrasing in the introduction itself, I urge that all suggestions come to me in the first instance," he added:

In making this statement, Ross confirmed his practice of the previous several years. Such remained the working policy for the series over the next decade and, in 1972, the situation was formalized in an "Editorial Procedures" memorandum.²⁶

Most of the introducers were drawn from the academic community; notable exceptions included media persons connected with books, such as Thomas Saunders, Robert Fulford, and Robert Weaver, and writers such as Robertson Davies and Margaret Laurence. In his pursuit of appropriate introducers, the general editor kept an attentive eye out as he attended conferences, read journals, participated in thesis boards, and networked with colleagues. He endeavoured to match books with individuals. As much as possible, he tried to obtain a wide geographic and institutional representation in his choice of introducers, an initiative undertaken "[t]o further our hopes of getting books adopted for Canadian courses" at post-secondary institutions throughout the country.²⁸ However, if an individual had contacted the general editor with a title suggestion that eventually came to be included in the series, Ross was inclined to turn to that person first when it came time to assign an introducer. Generally, he functioned on a first-come, first-serve basis with respect to titles for which there had been multiple proposals.

By most accounts Ross allowed those assigned introductions a relatively free hand in conceptualizing their essays. Beyond a limit on length, many of the introducers surveyed recalled little overt instruction from Ross on the matter of how to approach their assignments.²⁹ NCL correspondence does reveal direction on occasion, however. "Our introductions are meant to be interpretive and critical with emphasis on theme[,] structure, pattern of symbol, tone etc. with plot detail used only for necessary illustration," Ross explained in one letter.³⁰ He offered more specific suggestions to Vida Bruce, requesting that she place Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard within its literary tradition, and discuss its historical significance as well as its contemporary relevance.³¹ Philip Child and Ian Ross Robertson, who introduced, respectively, Raymond Knister’s White Narcissus and Andrew Macphail’s The Master’s Wife, were asked to include brief biographical sections in their introductions, for the general editor believed these two authors were not well known to contemporary audiences.³² Ross also penned an occasional letter of persuasion when his candidate seemed reluctant to take on a proposed introduction. Such was the case with [Page 39] Carlyle King, who, while pleased to be asked to introduce an NCL title, was dismayed by Ross’s choice of Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese. In response, Ross acknowledged that Ostenso’s novel had "certain limitations," but felt it "worth bringing back into print. Our aim is gradually to make available a workable variety of Canadian titles," he explained. "This one has a considerable claim," he added, because it "was the forerunner of a whole family of western Canadian novels and it is still . . . quite readable."³³ Once he received an introduction, Ross picked up his editorial pen and set to work. "I often had to get people to rewrite them," he recalled. "If they didn’t seem to me to get at the nub of the book, or open it up for the student to see what it was about," he explained, "I’d get them to change it" (Personal interview).

Perhaps based on an early experience with his own introduction to Such Is My Beloved, which he allowed Morley Callaghan to read in typescript, Ross felt that introductions should not be previewed by authors whose books were to appear in an NCL edition. Ross had reluctantly revised his introduction to Callaghan’s book after the author indicated he found the opening section somewhat negative, and the main section too weighted in its discussion of religious symbolism. In responding to Callaghan, Ross had noted his revisions while defending his original draft. "Most readers who pick this up in a store won’t look at the damned introduction!" Ross exclaimed half-way through his letter:

Ross had advocated Such Is My Beloved as one of the first four NCL titles because he believed that in general Callaghan had received less recognition than he deserved in Canada, while this particular book had been inappropriately condemned as indecent at the time of its original publication in 1934 (Ross, Personal interview). His letter to Callaghan makes it clear that through his NCL introduction Ross wished not only to inform students, but persuade fellow critics about the meaning of the work and the worth of its author.

Ross’s interaction with Callaghan over the introduction to Such Is My Beloved represented an anomaly during the first ten to fifteen years of the series’s existence. However, some time in the early 1970s, perhaps due to an in-house editorial change at M&S, the firm’s own authors began to receive copies of introductions prior to NCL publication, a circumstance that horrified Ross when he learned of it. Ross felt that this was a practice that could potentially inhibit the critical freedom of those commissioned to write the introductions. "I pick people who are favourably disposed to the particular book and writer but have always guaranteed freedom from that point on," Ross wrote the publisher in January 1973. "I fear that if news got around that our introductions were ‘vetted’ by the authors," he added, "our credibility would dwindle."³⁵ McClelland did not view the situation in so grave a light, but acknowledged Ross’s concern. Noting he may have been inadvertently responsible for the change in practice, the publisher indicated he had no firm view to offer at that time. Nonetheless, McClelland felt that some benefit could be derived from authors previewing introductions, specifically that errors of fact could be caught and corrected prior to publication. While he conceded that the practice could risk the critical freedom of introducers, he felt that threat could be neutralized by making it clear to authors that changes other than to errors of fact would be left to the discretion of the introducer and general editor.³⁶

The publisher ultimately acceded to Ross’s position, but revised his own point of view in the summer of 1974 when he learned from a close friend of Gabrielle Roy that the author was upset with Mary Jane Edwards’s introduction to The Hidden Mountain, a title which had been issued in NCL earlier in the year. McClelland immediately read the introduction, then wrote Roy that it would be amended or dropped prior to the book’s next printing.³⁷ To Ross, McClelland stated that he had never intervened in the past, believing that the introductions were strictly the general editor’s business. He acknowledged that Ross had always sought out introducers "favourably disposed toward a book." In the case of Edwards’s [Page 41] introduction, however, McClelland wished to see a change. "I suggest this is not because Gabrielle is an old and dear friend," he wrote,

In responding, Ross endeavoured to respect the concerns of all parties. He indicated that the existing introduction would be dropped and that he himself would write a new one. At the same time, he noted that in overseeing NCL introductions he asked critics to "avoid the blurb," and defended Edwards’s citation of earlier criticism in her essay, though he conceded she perhaps could have dealt with it more positively. "I have always assured my ‘introducers’ that they are free to raise critical questions and to avoid hagiography!" he explained, adding that it was a "liberty" he had attempted to keep "under control by selecting people I know to be sympathetic to the writer concerned," an approach he had followed with Edwards. Noting he would be more vigilant in future, he concluded: "It would not do to emasculate the essays. But I shall insist that critical points whenever made are made in such a way that the author is not offended. We have, on the whole, managed to do this. . . ."³⁸ McClelland’s reply acknowledged both the ground yielded by Ross and the general editor’s academic concern for the critical freedom of his introducers; he agreed that the introductions had to have critical weight and that their track record, on the whole, had been good.³⁹ In its entirety, this exchange is interesting for what it reveals about the publisher’s and general editor’s respective understandings of the function of NCL introductions, and the accountability each felt to authors and introducers respectively. After the situation with Roy was resolved, the publisher proceeded with greater caution with respect to the introductions, directing the in-house editor to be on the look out for anything that might cause serious distress to an author.⁴⁰ The firm also reverted to the practice of showing authors copies of the introductions prior to publication.

Ross’s preference for giving his introducers conceptual freedom extended to the small portion of them who also engaged in title-level editorial work. These individuals compiled the collections of short stories, essays, and poetry originated for the series, or undertook abridgements. As general editor, Ross assigned a manuscript length and deadline, but tended not to intervene much further in the process unless his counsel was sought. In recruiting Stan Dragland to do a collection of Duncan Campbell Scott’s [Page 42] short stories, he advised only that Dragland "draw on the best stories" from existing collections of the author’s work, "aiming at both variety and balance." "But let’s see what you suggest for such a book," he then added, closing with a request for a plan or alternative plans for the volume.⁴¹ He had a more extensive exchange with Miriam Waddington, who contacted him several times while she was compiling John Sutherland’s Essays, Controversies, and Poems. In response to an early query about how many poems to include, Ross suggested that more emphasis be placed "on the criticism and ‘the controversial matter’ than on the poems." In a subsequent letter, he supported decisions she had made over inclusions and exclusions and, after reading her final letter outlining the structure she had adopted and listing her selections, he wrote back to affirm her approach and choices.⁴²

In addition to his editorial and introductory work on Poets of the Confederation, Ross wrote introductions for five other NCL titles during his general editorship: Grove’s Over Prairie Trails (1958), Callaghan’s Such Is My Beloved (1958), Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1960), Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk (1971), and Roy’s The Hidden Mountain (1974).⁴⁶ Read collectively, they provide insight into his general critical preoccupations, as well as his beliefs about Canadian authors and their works, and the links he drew between them and a Canadian national culture. Perhaps as a fundamental means of ‘opening up’ a work for the student reader, he always clarified the genre of the book he was introducing. Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, he explained, is not a novel, but a series of sketches, each one "a blessed compound, like nothing else that ever was or ever shall be, of caricature, anecdote, and essay" (x). Ross’s directive to consider issues of theme, structure, pattern of symbol, and tone was one he clearly followed himself. A consideration of religious symbolism took centre stage in his introductions to Such Is My Beloved and The Hidden Mountain, while he highlighted the careful structure and the "fine poetic craft" of Grove’s "selection and deployment of the facts" in the rendering of Over Prairie Trails (ix). Irony was a critical touchstone for him, one he detected at play in a variety of ways in several of these titles.

The Callaghan and Roy introductions lack any reference to larger Canadian literary and cultural concerns, but Ross considered these issues to varying degrees in his other essays. His introduction to Sunshine Sketches, for example, commanded a central place for Leacock’s work in the Canadian psyche when it asserted that the book "somehow got lodged in the marrow of generations of Canadians yet unborn" (ix). In his essay about Over Prairie Trails, the claims of the Canadian landscape–or, more specifically, the Prairie landscape–upon both the author’s and the nation’s imagination were evident when Ross stressed, "Grove is able to possess this northern world because he is first willing to be possessed by it"(vi). For Ross, Grove’s reformulation of that possession in literary terms holds the potential to communicate something "at once unique and universal" to Canadians and non-Canadians alike (v). With respect to The Incomparable Atuk and Poets of the Confederation, one finds Ross addressing the issue of cultural space, rather than physical place. The Incomparable Atuk, he explained, "questions the very Question" of the "Canadian Question" (vi). This book, which "at first glance . . . seems to be very much about the American take-over, about the Canadian branch-plant culture," is actually a satirical account of cultural self-betrayal, Ross revealed, one perpetrated [Page 44] by individuals professing to be working in the best interests of indigenous Canadian culture (vi, vii). Significantly, Ross described the book as "a dark parable of the human condition in a McLuhanatic world," placing it firmly within the globalization debate when he queried: "[I]s it not obvious that in Atuk Richler is presenting the Canadian dilemma as symptom-in-little of a universal dilemma?" (viii, xi).

Ross’s "Confederation Poets" were not attributed with defending an extant culture, but credited with nurturing a nascent one. In this essay, Ross reiterated and developed some of the ideas about Canadian culture he first set down in Our Sense of Identity and The Arts in Canada, while alluding to Arnold in his critical treatment of the four poets and their historical context. His belief that Canada’s cultural pattern arises out of the circumstance of "opposites in tension" was revisited, with the source of those stresses extended to include federal-regional relations as well as French-English and American-British tensions (ix). Confederation, he further explained, transfigured "[t]he separate (and rudimentary) colonial cultures of British North America" into "a new (if tentative and precarious) structure," one in which "all the original elements remained alive and operative" (x). The political act of Confederation was not a source of inspiration in and of itself, but rather charged the air with cultural potential (viii). If not quite "the power of the man and the power of the moment" enjoined by Arnold, the four poets under discussion nonetheless felt and acted upon that potential within the limits of their abilities. The key challenge for these poets, in Ross’s view, was negotiating among the multiple tensions to which they were subject, and incarnating the ideas (another allusion to Arnold) they derived from elsewhere into something uniquely, and creatively, their own. "The philosophical poems of Roberts and Carman stand as warnings to us," he stated. "It is well to reach beyond the parish for the idea. But the idea must be made flesh–flesh of our flesh. For if parochialism has been our curse so has its opposite. The task for us has always been to find the centre." One senses a fellow feeling in the Ross of 1960 for his "Confederation Poets," for he, like them, was negotiating among the multiple tensions of his native culture, and the critical ideas largely received from outside. In the nascent milieu of Canadian literary studies, he too was working to find his centre. [Page 45]

Arnold, Matthew. "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." Representative Essays of Matthew Arnold. Ed. E.K. Brown. Toronto: Macmillan, 1936. 32-63.

——. "The Study of Poetry." Representative Essays of Matthew Arnold. Ed. E.K. Brown. Toronto: Macmillan, 1936. 156-185.

B[aker], Ross. "New Canadian Library." June 24, 1975. File: "New Canadian Library - General 1976." Box 69. Series Cc. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

Bentley, D.M.R. Letter to author. April 16, 1997.

de Bruyn, Jan. Letter to author. May 24, 1997.

Dragland, Stan. Letter to author. May 1, 1997.

Fee, Margery. "English-Canadian Literary Criticism, 1890-1950: Defining and Establishing a National Literature." Diss. U of Toronto, 1981.

Fraser, Keath. Letter to author. April 21, 1997.

Friskney, Janet B. "On a Mission for Culture: the New Canadian Library and Its Milieu, 1953- 1978." Diss. Carleton U, 1999.

Gray, James. Letter to author. April 22, 1997.

Gray, John Morgan. "Book Publishing." Writing in Canada: Proceedings of the Canadian Writers’ Conference Held at Queen’s University July 1955. Ed. George Whalley. Toronto: Macmillan, 1956. 53-65. [Page 49]

Groening, Laura. "Malcolm Ross and the New Canadian Library: Making It Real or Making a Difference?" Studies in Canadian Literature. 25:1 (2000) : 95-110.

Keith, W.J. Letter to author. May 1, 1997.

King, Carlyle. Letter to Malcolm Ross. February 22, 1960. Box 5. Carlyle King Papers. U of Saskatchewan Archives.

Lecker, Robert. "The New Canadian Library: a Classic Deal." Making It Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature. 154-172.

Mandel, Eli. "Introduction." Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970. New Canadian Library O7. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972. x-xvi.

McClelland, Jack. Letter to Anna Porter. October 28, 1975. File 9. Box 93. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Steve Rankin. n.d. File 7. Box 2. Series Ca. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Malcolm Ross. August 25, 1958. NCL file#3. Box 47. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Malcolm Ross. August 27, 1968. File 7. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Malcolm Ross. September 9, 1968. File 7. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Malcolm Ross. October 4, 1968. NCL file#5. Box 47. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Malcolm Ross. January 5, 1973. File 12. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Malcolm Ross. September 3, 1974. File 18. Box 68. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Gabrielle Roy. August 8, 1974. File 21. Box 54. Series A. M&S Papers.   McMaster U Archives.

Marshall, Joyce. Letter to author. April 20, 1997.

McKillop, A.B. Matters of Mind: the University in Ontario 1791-1951. Ontario Historical Studies Series. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994.

Murray, Heather. Working in English. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996.

"New Canadian Library Meeting." October 6, 1961. NCL file#5. Box 47. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

Pacey, Desmond. "The Study of Canadian Literature." Journal of Canadian Fiction. 2:2 (Spring 1973) : 67-72.

Parks, M.G. Letter to author. April 30, 1997.

Porter, Anna. Memo to Ross et al. June 15, 1972. File 11. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

Readers’ reports and memos from 1962 related to A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. NCL file#2. Box 47. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

Roper, Gordon. Personal interview. April 28, 1997.

Ross, Malcolm. "Bliss Carman and the Poetry of Mystery: a Defense of the Personal Fallacy." The Bicentennial Lectures in New Brunswick Literature: Winthrop Packard Bell Lectures 1984-1985, Fall Series. (Sackville, NB: Centre for Canadian Studies, Mount Alison U, 1985). 9-31. [Page 50]

——. "Editor’s Preface." Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. By Stephen Leacock. New Canadian Library 15. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1960. ix-xi.

——. "An Interview with Malcolm Ross." By Judith Breen and Lynn Atkinson. Journal of Canadian Fiction. 3.3 (1974): 60-64.

——. "Introduction." The Arts in Canada: a Stock-Taking at Mid-Century. Toronto: Macmillan, 1958. 2-6.

——. "Introduction." The Hidden Mountain. By Gabrielle Roy. New Canadian Library 109. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. [vii-xiii]. (The 1975 printing is the one containing the Ross introduction.)

——. "Introduction." The Incomparable Atuk. By Mordecai Richler. New Canadian Library 79. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971. vi-xi.

——. "Introduction." Our Sense of Identity. Ed. Malcolm Ross. Toronto: Ryerson, 1954.

——. "Introduction." Over Prairie Trails. By Frederick Philip Grove. New Canadian Library 1. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1957. v-x.

——. "Introduction." Poets of the Confederation. Ed. Malcolm Ross. New Canadian Library 01. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1960. xii-xii.

——. "Introduction." Such Is My Beloved. By Morley Callaghan. New Canadian Library 2. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1957. v-xiii.

——. Letter to Ross Baker. July 12, 1973. File 13. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Vida Bruce. January 14, 1976. File 2. Box 4. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Morley Callaghan. January 7, [1956]. File "Ross, Malcolm. n.d., 1951-1953." Vol. 4. Morley Callaghan Papers. National Archives of Canada.

——. Letter to Stan Dragland. November 29, 1971. File 10. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Hugh Kane. March 8, 1957. NCL file#3. Box 47. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Carlyle King. February 24, 1960. Box 5. Carlyle King Papers. U of Saskatchewan Archives.

——. Letter to Carl Klinck. January 13, 1960. File 36. Box 16. Carl Klinck Papers. U of Western Ontario Archives.

——. Letter to Jack McClelland. December 9, 1952. File 2. Box 27. 1988 accession.      Jack McClelland Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Jack McClelland. June 9, 1958. NCL file#3. Box 47. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Jack McClelland. June 26, 1958. NCL file#3. Box 47. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Jack McClelland. September 2, 1968. NCL file#5. Box 47. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Jack McClelland. January 3, 1973. File 12. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Jack McClelland. January 26, 1973. File 12. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Jack McClelland. February 6, 1973. File 12. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives. [Page 51]

——. Letter to Jack McClelland. August 31, 1974. File 18. Box 68. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Lorraine McMullen. July 24, 1973. File 13. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Anna Porter. May 16, 1976. File "New Canadian Library 1978." Box 69. Series CC. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Anna Porter. March 17, 1977. File 6. Box 10. Malcolm Ross Papers. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

——. Letter to Anna Porter. November 6, 1972. File 11. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Anna Porter. January 28, 1975. File 1. Box 4. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

——. Letter to Claire Pratt. November 12, 1959. NCL file#2. Box 47. Series A. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Jack Rackliffe. March 17, 1961. File 12. Box 12. Series Ca. M&S Papers. McMaster U Archives.

——. Letter to Miriam Waddington. July 10, 1970. File "Waddington re: Sutherland          c 1972." Vol. 11. Miriam Waddington Papers. National Archives of Canada.

——. Letter to Miriam Waddington. July 8, [1971]. File "Waddington re: Sutherland         c 1972." Vol. 11. Miriam Waddington Papers. National Archives of Canada.

——. Letter to Miriam Waddington. August 4, [1971]. File "Waddington re: Sutherland    c 1972." Vol. 11. Miriam Waddington Papers. National Archives of Canada.

——. Personal interview. 17 August 1995.

——. "SCL Interviews: Malcolm Ross." By Kathryn Chittick. Studies in Canadian Literature. 9.2 (1984): 241-266.

Scheider, R.M.K. Letter to author. May 14, 1997.

Shrive, Norman. Letter to author. June 24, 1997.

Solecki. Sam. Ed. Imagining Canadian Literature: the Selected Letters of Jack McClelland. Toronto: Key Porter, 1998.

Spadoni, Carl and Judy Donnelly. A Bibliography of McClelland and Stewart Imprints 1909-1985: a Publisher’s Legacy. Toronto: ECW Press, 1994.

Staines, David. "Introduction." The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions. By Malcolm Ross. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. 7-19.

Stedmond, John. Letter to author. [April 1997].

Stratford, Philip. Letter to author. April 20, 1997.

Turton, Conway, M&S. Letter to Morley Callaghan. December 19, 1955. File "McClelland & Stewart. 1950-1982." Vol. 4. Morley Callaghan Papers. National Archives of Canada.

Waddington, Miriam. Letter to Malcolm Ross. June 25, 1970. File "Waddington re: Sutherland c 1972." Vol. 11. Miriam Waddington Papers. National Archives of Canada.

——. Letter to Malcolm Ross. July 23, 1971. File "Waddington re: Sutherland c 1972." Vol. 11. Miriam Waddington Papers. National Archives of Canada.

Watterston, Elizabeth. Letter to author. May 9, 1997.

Wilson, Milton. Letter to author. July 21, 1997.

Woodcock, George. "De Mille and the Utopian Vision." Journal of Canadian Fiction. 2.3 (summer 1973): 174-79. [Page 52]

——. Letter to Malcolm Ross. August 13, 1962. File 1. Box 3. Malcolm Ross Papers. U of Calgary Archives.

Woodhouse, A.S.P. The Poet and His Faith: Religion and Poetry in England from Spenser to Eliot and Auden. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1965.

Young, Alan. Letter to author. June 16, 1997. [Page 53]