So I’m about halfway through this novel, and my impression is that it’s the Canadian Gatsby.
It’s set in Montreal and it jumps back and forth between the 30’s and the 50’s, and follows the life of journalist/part-time professor George Stewart. Things get complicated quickly for poor George. The story begins (spoiler alert) when George gets a phone call from Jerome Martell, a man he hasn’t heard from in over a decade and who was presumed dead in the war since 1939. This is awkward because George’s beloved wife Catherine was married to Martell before he disappeared.
I am a little over half-way through the novel right now, and some of the most interesting issues the novel raises so far are : (1) discussions of Communism in pre-war intellectual circles; (2) the idea that there are men like Martell who are “made” for times of conflict and war, perhaps due to childhood traumas that have all sorts of influences on him as a doctor, a father, and a husband; (3) the depiction of the Anglophone community in Montreal; (4) the idea of vocations or “callings” especially during war time; and (5) bad parents and bad teachers.
Especially vivid is the scene in which Stewart is hired as a schoolmaster at Waterloo. The British headmaster mails him a job offer in the mistaken belief that Stewart is also a Brit. He tells him he’s the first “native” ever hired at the school, by which he means a Canadian of British stock. (Side note: It’s really interesting to see how Canada’s native populations are placed under such erasure). So much of the school’s operations reek of imperialist failure, and it’s interesting to see how, in this novel teeming with bad parents, Britain is cast as Canada’s bad parent.
Bad parents – a list: 1. Catherine’s mother who did everything right to care for her sick daughter, but never loved her, and resented her for stealing her youth. 2. George’s father for being a foolish, puerile man-child who allowed his family to be bullied by the wicked aunt and loses the family fortune because he’s afraid of her. 3. George’s mother for same. 4. Oh hell, she belongs on this list: the wicked aunt. 5. Jerome Martell’s father for abandoning him. 6. Jerome Martell’s mother (debatable though). 7. Jerome Martell for cheating on his wife and abandoning her and their child (I THINK. I’m not done the book and don’t have the full picture of what happened there yet, but all signs point to that.) And probably also Jerome’s mistress Norah (8) but again, need to finish the book. 9. Sally’s boyfriend Allan’s parents. Are we sensing a theme yet?
On a personal note, reading about Montreal during that time is strange. It’s sort of like the feeling you get when you see photos of your parents before you were born. The novel opens on the corner of Sherbrooke and Guy, which is pretty much my exact geographic location as I write this. The main characters, like me, grew up in the West Island of Montreal, and the descriptions of the scents and sights are heady and familiar. My favourite thing about this novel so far is the overarching sense of nostalgia that pervades every character’s life, and yet I’m not sure if everyone who reads this book feels this way, or if it’s heightened for Montrealers.
This novel was one of the first Canadian books to be taught in universities (Gary Geddes mentions this in his introduction to 15 Canadian Poets X 3) and to be given the kind of authority that the academy can endow. It won the Governor General’s Award, which also contributed to its prestige.
I will update this when I finish the novel, and in the meantime I leave you with a fun fact: the song “Courage (For Hugh MacLennan)” by the Tragically Hip is based on the book.
[UPDATE]
So, I finished the book much, much later than I had planned. Life (and the first year of school) got in the way. That said, this book was a really interesting place to start reading again in order to prepare for the comprehensive exams. I say this because the political atmosphere of the moment is fraught with tension – just yesterday I saw a Facebook post that said “If you ever wondered what you would do in 1930’s Germany, now’s your chance”… chilling, no? But it raises an important question – what is one’s duty in times of impending crisis? Not even in full-on crisis, but as we stand by mutely watching the world roll towards disaster? And I’ve come to think that that very question is the central thesis of The Watch That Ends the Night. I took a reading hiatus at an odd moment in the narrative, but it seems that the main question is one of duty, or as the Tragically Hip interpret it, one of courage.
Indulge the tangent, but it cannot be overstated what an important part of the Canadian cultural landscape the Tragically Hip are. I remember the first time I really heard them, they were on the radio on my elementary school bus, and I was a small child bundled all the way up to my ears because we were in the throes of a hellish cold snap … I digress, but the point is that they are so distinctive a band that most Canadians have a clear recollection relating to the Hip in some way or the other, and I think that it’s at least partly because their lyrics have a way of cutting right to the heart of a thing, and connecting truthfully with all kinds of people. I cannot express this anywhere near as well as my dear friend Dave Kaufman does in this beautiful tribute he wrote upon the lead singer Gord Downie’s announcement that he’s been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer: http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/music/the-tragically-hip-gord-downie but I think it expresses what makes this a quintessentially Canadian band (their best-of album is humourously titled “Yer Favourites”), and might help lend a sense of why “Courage” is so very à propos with regard to The Watch That Ends the Night. Listening to “Courage”, having recently finished the novel, there are two sets of lyrics that really stand out:
Courage, my word
It didn’t come, it doesn’t matter
Courage, your word
It didn’t come, it doesn’t matter
Courage, my word
It didn’t come, it doesn’t matter
Courage, it couldn’t come at a worse time
and
There’s no simple explanation
For anything important any of us do
And, yeah, the human tragedy
Consists in the necessity of living with
The consequences under pressure
Under pressure
That last stanza is a reference to George’s musings in Part VI, Chapter IV:
“But I was not like [Jerome Martell] and I could not know what his pressures were. I had not seen my mother murdered … But that night as I drove back to Montreal I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them. Morality? Duty? It was easy to talk of these things once, but surely it is no accident that in our time the best of men hesitate inwardly before they utter these words? As Jerome said, “What is my duty?”” (274-275).
The song’s lyrics feature “my word” and “your word” and these give us a useful lens through which we can look at this novel about promises and duty, and one that often seems to ask the question “what does it mean to be a man?” which, heartbreakingly, neither Martell nor George seem to answer clearly or completely. Part of what MacLennan captures so well is the painful open-endedness of the existential crises that touch these two men, the city of Montreal, and the nations of Europe in the period immediately before and during WWII. Martell is figured as being possessed of an ultra-masculine nature, one that impels him to go to war, feel responsible for Norah Blackwell (despite, as Catherine says, the fact that he probably regretted the affair immediately after the first time, but maintained it afterwards out of a dutiful sense of responsibility towards her, and indeed declares these feelings, and that “I wish to God I had never laid eyes on her!” (271)), and to stand along the Spanish in the war on fascism. George, on the other hand, is painted more as the soft-handed bookish type. If Martell is an alpha male, then George is a bit of a beta. George works as a schoolteacher at a fussy boys’ boarding school, and then switches into political radio later on – a job that Martell arranges for him, as they are friends, despite the fact that George is clearly in love with Jerome’s wife. And although George has no desire to go to Spain to fight in that war, he does have a sense of duty and obligation to try to enlist when Canada enters WWII, but is turned down on two counts.
On the other hand, though, Martell’s heroism is conflicted because he abandons duties he has already undertaken in favour of high-minded political idealism. He neglects his responsibilities of a married man who is a father and a husband to a perilously ill wife. And George, despite his less fiery nature, is Martell’s better in terms of constancy and loyalty to Catherine; he always loved her, and he always will. Towards the end of the novel MacLennan seems to draw parallels between the war going on in Europe, and the war that Catherine’s sick heart is waging on her body. However, it’s a war that George is excluded from; it is her own private battle that he can’t help with, no matter how much he wishes to. In this way, the warriors in this novel are actually Jerome Martell and Catherine, and George is shunted, perhaps emasculated, to the side, at times. Again:
“Courage, my word, it didn’t come, it doesn’t matter / Courage; it couldn’t come at a worse time.”
So what does it mean to give your word? Martell gives and then breaks his, by breaking his marriage through his affair and through leaving for Spain, but he does it in order to fulfill a higher duty. In a conversation with George, he says the following:
“A man must belong to something larger than himself. He must surrender to it. God was so convenient for that purpose when people could believe in Him. He was so safe and remote… Now there is nothing but people. In Russia our generation is deliberately sacrificing itself for the future of their children. That’s why the Russians are alive. That’s why they’re happy. They’re not trying to live on dead myths.”
Leaving aside how happy a place 1930’s Russian may have really been, Martell’s courage to go to war is highlighted here, although it fails him in subtler ways when he leaves his family. Conversely, George is a faithful husband, but seems not even to sense a higher duty other than to care for Catherine. The larger thing Martell belongs to is his political belief, whereas for George, it’s loving Catherine. Can they be fairly compared on the point of courage, then? Martell frequently says to George that “Do you know how lucky you are, not to have been born with my temperament!” or that George is lucky not to be like him, which carries a note of self-indulgent “I can’t help it, it’s my nature” to it, but there’s more to it than that because there is also the sense of performing masculinity to the best of his ability, and of wrangling this terrible “inner beast” and “force of nature” within himself, in a way that George never has to. While they’re married, Kate also has to contend with Jerome’s powerful nature, but almost paradoxically it is her weak heart that lends her the strength to buffer her against it in their marriage, which is actually very loving, despite the affair.
The novel takes a theological turn in the last sixty-odd pages. Everyone discovers or rediscovers their religion. George experiences the following revelation: “And God said: let there be light: and there was light. Here, I found at last, is the nature of the final human struggle. Within, not without. Without there is nothing to be done. But within. Nobody has ever described such a struggle truly in words. Nobody can. But others have described it and I can tell you who they are. Go to the musicians. In the work of a few musicians you can hear every aspect of this conflict between light and dark within the soul,” (343).
Meanwhile, Jerome, returned to Montreal and taking George’s old place as the third party in Catherine’s second marriage, advises George that he must let Catherine live her own death, which she undertakes, and it allows her to experience the beginning stages of dying with luminous dignity and grace.
While initially I had thought that the novel’s opening was much like Gatsby, because it was describing scenes of shimmering opulence and featured a tortured romance or two, now I think that, due to the novel’s philosophical bent towards the end, it outgrows that comparison. The novel is very beautiful, and it tries to grapple with something much greater than what Fitzgerald ever intended – how a person might find the courage to move towards and through their own death, not as a terrifying absence of life but as a transcendent, and transformative, experience. How well MacLennan succeeds at this is, I think, largely dependent on individual readers’ experiences and opinions on the subject, but in any case, it remains an impressively ambitious literary undertaking in an already powerful novel.
This is my favourite passage:
“It is a curious city, Montreal, and in this story I keep returning to the fact that it is. Strangers never understand its inner nature, and immigrant families, even from other parts of Canada, can live here two generations without coming to know it in their bones. I am absolutely certain that Montreal is the subtlest and most intricate city in North America. With her history she could not have been otherwise and survived, for here the French, the Scotch, and the English, over two centuries, have been divided on issues which ruin nations and civilizations, yet have contrived to live in outward harmony. This is no accident. They understand certain rules in their bones.” (255)
The Comprehensive Reader 