Editors in the United States have more than once suggested to me that Canada is bad literary material because few Americans are seriously interested in her. When they do think seriously of Canada, they picture an empty land with cold weather, extensive wheat fields and forests, and a population quiet enough to be taken for granted. Canada—that good, gray country! If Time Magazine has not already used this phrase, it must have been purely by oversight.

Nor have many Canadians been helpful in making their country seem real. From the travel publicists who depict it as quaint and romantic, through the businessmen who exchange jovial platitudes with their American counterparts at conventions, all the way up to the politicians who are so terrified of being misunderstood in Washington (and thereby getting a bad press both in the United States and at home), the spokesmen of this strange northern land nearly all seem motivated by a compulsion to disguise themselves, often without even knowing they do so.

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