ROSS, (James) Sinclair

Nationality: Canadian. Born: Shellbrook, Saskatchewan, 22 January 1908. Education: Graduated from high school, 1924. Military Service: Served in the Canadian Army, 1942-46. Career: Staff member, Union Bank (now Royal Bank) of Canada, in Abbey, 1924-27, Lancer, 1928, and Arcala, 1929-32, all Saskatchewan, and in Winnipeg, 1933-42, and Montreal, 1946-68; lived in Athens, 1968-71, Barcelona, 1971-73, Málaga, Spain, 1973-80, Montreal, 1980-81, and Vancouver from 1981.

Publications

Short Stories

The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories. 1968.

The Race and Other Stories, edited by Lorraine McMullen. 1982.

Novels

As for Me and My House. 1941.

The Well. 1958.

Whir of Gold. 1970.

Sawbones Memorial. 1974.

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Bibliography:

by David Latham, in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors 3 edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David, 1981.

Critical Studies:

Ross and Ernest Buckler by Robert D. Chambers, 1975; Ross by Lorraine McMullen, 1979; Ross: A Reader's Guide by Ken Mitchell, 1981.

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Fiction has long been considered the strongest of all genres in the writing of the three prairie provinces of Canada, though a strong current of poetry writing has also appeared in the area. Both fiction and verse tend to concentrate on the brief but dramatic evolution of what we think of as an agrarian prairie society that, with the big immigrant settlements in the 1890s and 1900s, superseded the earlier nomadic and hunting culture—the bison culture—of the Plains Indians and the Métis. With the bison extinct and the hunters humbled after the defeat of the Riel-Dumont rebellion of 1885, the drama shifted to the farmer—often a transplanted northern or eastern European peasant—fighting to conquer the inhospitable land with plow and harrow. Many of the earlier prairie novels—those of Frederick Philip Grove (Greve) and Maria Ostenso, for example—were primarily concerned with this struggle, but by the early years of the twentieth century a new western Canada had emerged, characterized by the broad fields of its wheat monoculture and by the villages and small towns clustered around the cubistic towers of its railway grain elevators.

This was the world into which Sinclair Ross was born and in which he grew up as a small-town bank clerk. His first writing, emanating from his experience with farmers and tradespeople trying to survive in the Depression, took the form of the short story. His talent was evident from the start. In 1934 his first published story, "No Other Way," won third prize in an English competition judged by Somerset Maugham and Rebecca West. It later appeared in Nash's Magazine, an English popular monthly, and through the rest of the 1930s Ross occasionally published stories, sometimes in popular magazines but most often in Queen's Quarterly, published by Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, whose editors early recognized his importance. Stories like "Cornet at Night," "The Lamp at Noon," and "One's a Heifer" documented with sharp insight the way of life or survival of farming families in the troubled years of the 1930s when the apparent assurance of a precariously established agricultural order gave way under the impact of the Depression. What Ross was constantly illustrating in his stories was the hardness of homesteaders' lives even without the special and crushing burdens of dust bowl drought and unstable world grain markets that were controlled by faraway merchants and financiers. His men usually see no alternative to the dreadful physical struggle against the land, the climate, and international economic conditions. The women at least have more time to be lonely and to dream of something different and better, and Ross's great theme of inner solitude is established through a tough, unsentimental vision and in a taut, undecorated prose.

Ross's first novel, As for Me and My House, did not create a sensation when it appeared in 1941, partly because it moved outside wartime preoccupations. It was a novel written with beautiful spareness, but perhaps its lack of a broad appeal was also due to the fact that what it told was too near to the recent past of Depression experience. Further, the community of Horizon, which Ross imagined, was too reminiscent of the places so many of its potential readers were hoping sometime to escape. Only as the Horizons of reality began to pass into history did the novel gain a popular readership, but it quickly won its place as a classic of Canadian fiction. Ross, as Margaret Laurence among other remembered so warmly, became an example for younger novelists, though none of his later longer works equaled As for Me and My House.

Ross continued to write stories and occasionally publish them, though illness later reduced his energy and his production as he retreated to a largely reclusive life, first in Spain and then in Vancouver. But, curiously, he never seemed strongly moved to publish a collection, even when publishers began once again to show interest in the short story during the 1960s. It was Laurence, his fellow writer and admirer, who persuaded Ross to put together a collection and then persuaded Jack McClelland to publish the result—The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories—in his New Canadian Library in 1968. When Ross's second collection appeared as The Race and Other Stories in 1982, it was again through the initiative of a fellow writer, the critic Lorraine MacMullen, who edited the stories and arranged for their publication through the press of the University of Ottawa.

This kind of hesitation reflects a quietness and a modesty that seem to run through Ross's personal manner to his writing. His prose evades the devices of eloquence. It is simple and penetrating, the perfect vehicle for his lucid perceptions of human beings, their lacks and their struggles to overcome them, often in some way through art, where he can be marvelously at one with his characters.

—George Woodcock

See the essay on "The Lamp at Noon."