Watch that Ends the Night Page 3

  Point of no return – God, how I wish Marquand14 had never used that title! I discovered I was bound to her [ Dorothy] irretrievably by my own love for her. Also, point of no return as regards the outer world. I found my own intensity of experience had isolated me from everyone but Marian. Even from Dorothy. For her experience, intense though it was, was different than mine. But Marian and I both know that we must be aloof from one another for Dorothy’s sake and Frank’s sake. I know that even should Dorothy die, Marian and I could never live together on account of Frank. I knew that and accepted that. [p. 1]

  At what point the relationship began and how seriously MacLennan and Scott were involved is uncertain, but by June 1950 Marian was separated from Frank and living in an apartment on Peel Street in Montreal.15

  In his essay “The Future of the Novel as a Literary Form” MacLennan states that the measure of a novel’s success is “in its capacity to entertain and in its characters.”16 He observes that if the novelist fails to create “interesting, vital and important characters, not all the style and grace in the world will prevent the public from rejecting it.”17 The strength of The Watch is in MacLennan’s capacity to create persuasive characters with whom the reader can engage. As in the fictional love triangle of Jerome, George, and Catherine, MacLennan was torn between his love for Dorothy and his doomed attraction to Marian. That he could draw upon his intense life experience to endow his characters with a profundity of feeling while masking the origin of that experience is a testament to his skill as a novelist.

  In the final section of the novel, MacLennan leads the reader back to the fictional present. While Jerome believes that Catherine, like Penelope, has been chastely waiting for him, MacLennan chose to prevent him from achieving the emotional and sexual fulfillment that had sustained him during his absence. Instead, MacLennan provides a bittersweet romance for Catherine and George who, childhood sweethearts, had married, believing that Jerome had died during his long absence. Although Jerome is physically scarred by his ordeals, his mind and spirit are intact. He decides that, for the sake of Catherine’s well-being, he must leave Montreal. Before he leaves, in his final heroic act, he performs life-saving surgery on Catherine. Although he could not mend her “broken heart,” he can give her several years that she might not have had. He disappears from Montreal, leaving George to take on the limiting role of nurse and care-giver.

  Facsimile of the first page of Hugh MacLennan’s notebook. Hugh MacLennan papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Division, McGill University Libraries.

  As it appeared in MacLennan’s life and experience, so it is in the novel. Catherine, like Dorothy, emerges as the primary focus. In the mode of a double fugue, George narrates Catherine’s slow and imperiled recovery, interweaving tonal and stylistic shifts from objective reporting to elegy. He invokes his belief in God to explain the human condition and, through the intercession of faith, receives the final grace of acceptance and an understanding of life, love, and loss. In The Watch, awareness of Catherine’s eventual loss brings the novel to its subdued conclusion. For MacLennan, Dorothy’s unexpected physical decline and premature death enabled him to examine his fate and that of his generation and turn the tragic events of his life into fiction. It is this blending of the remembered past and his skills as a novelist that, above all, ensures that The Watch That Ends the Night will continue to endure.

  DAVID MCKNIGHT

  Rare Books and Manuscript Library

  University of Pennsylvania

  NOTES

  1 After graduating from Oxford in 1932, MacLennan returned home to Canada in June. After failing to find employment as a school master, he entered Princeton University in October, where he pursued a Ph.D in Classics. He completed his dissertation in 1935 and it was published as Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1935). Oxyrhynchus, a city in Upper Egypt, rose to prominence under Hellenistic and roman rulers. Archaeological investigation there has uncovered many papyrus texts, the majority of which date from 240 bc to 700 ad.

  2 See Elspeth Cameron, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life, 87.

  3 Dorothy Duncan (1903–1957), an American by birth who married MacLennan in 1936, was herself an accomplished writer and artist. She was an important influence on MacLennan’s writing, encouraging him to use Canadian subject matter in his novels. She is best known for Bluenose: A Portrait of Nova Scotia (1942), her fond tribute to her husband’s family and native province.

  4 Bitter over the failure of The Precipice, MacLennan blamed his American publisher, Charles Duell of Duell, Sloan and Pierce, for failing to provide promotional support for the novel. As a result, MacLennan severed relations with Duell.

  5 There is no evidence of another notebook.

  6 In an essay entitled “The Story of a Novel,” MacLennan estimated that he had written one million words before the final draft of the novel was completed.

  7 MacLennan refers to his “lost generation” and their beliefs, trials, and sufferings in an essay “Couth and Uncouth” published in the Montrealer in 1955. (Cited in Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 287).

  8 The Padlock Law (officially known as the Act to Protect the Province Against Communistic Propaganda) was enacted in 1937 by the Union Nationale Party of Maurice Duplessis. Its purpose was to prevent the dissemination of Communist propaganda. It was later used to prosecute members of the Jehovah Witness sect. Scott was revered as a hero throughout Quebec for overturning the law until 1970, when he expressed his support for the adoption of the War Measures Act. Although his support was principled, Quebec nationalists and English-Canadian liberals saw it as a rejection of the concept of civil liberties. For more on this unfortunate event see Djwa, The Politics of the Imagination, 410–11.

  9 An excellent source for the study of Canadian volunteers in Spain is Mark Zuehlke’s The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War.

  10 See Larry Hannant’s Norman Bethune’s Writings and Art, 118 ff.

  11 For a full account of the Montreal rally see Djwa, The Politics of the Imagination, 170–5.

  12 See Trepanier, Marian Scott, 116 ff. and Hannant, Norman Bethune’s Writing and Art. 76 ff.

  13 Both MacLennan’s biographer Elspeth Cameron and Scott’s biographer Sandra Djwa confirm that MacLennan modeled Jerome Martell on Scott. Jerome and Catherine’s flat is based on the Scott’s flat on Aylmer Street, near the intersection with Lorne Crescent above Prince Arthur. The apartment was a block from the McGill campus. Scott makes a direct appearance in the novel as Professor John David.

  14 MacLennan is referring to John Phillips Marquand’s 1949 satirical novel Point of No Return, which portrays the fictional Harvard anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner.

  15 Esther Trépanier, Marian Scott: Pioneer of Modern Art, 194. The Scott’s marriage had a long and complex history. Frank was well-known for his notorious affairs and at the time of this separation was in a serious relationship with fellow poet and artist P.K. Page.

  16 MacLennan, Scotsman’s Return, 141.

  17 Ibid., 142.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The unpublished notebook is among the Hugh MacLennan Papers in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill University Library. The passages are reproduced courtesy of the Hugh MacLennan Estate.

  Allan, Ted and Sydney Gordon. The Scalpel, the Sword; The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952.

  Cameron, Elspeth. Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981.

  Chambers, Robert D. “Adam Blore’s Broken Phonograph,” in Tiernny, ed., Hugh MacLennan,, 135–42.

  Djwa, Sandra. The Politics of Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987.

  Hannant, Larry. Norman Bethune’s Writing and Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

  Lucas, Alec. Hugh MacLennan. Canadian Writers 8 – New Canadian Library. Toronto, McClleland and Stewart, 1970.

  MacLennan, Hugh. The Watch That Ends the Ni
ght. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959.

  – “The Story of a Novel,” Canadian Literature 3 (Winter 1960): 35–9.

  – Scotsman’s Return and Other Essays. London: Heinemann, 1961.

  – “The Future of the Novel as a Literary Form,” in Scotsman’s Return and Other Essays, 139–55.

  Tierney, Frank M, ed. Hugh MacLennan. Reappraisals Canadian Writers. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994.

  Trépanier, Esther. Marian Scott: Pioneer of Modern Art. Québec: Musée du Quebec, 2000.

  Woodcock, George. Hugh MacLennan. Studies in Canadian Literature. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1969.

  Zuehlke, Mark. The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1996.

  THE WATCH THAT ENDS THE NIGHT

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER I

  There are some stories into which the reader should be led gently, and I think this may be one of them.

  One evening at the beginning of a cold February, the first winter of the Korean War, I left my classroom in the university and made my way along the corridor to the stair. It was five o’clock and the best time of my days that winter was about to begin. I love Montreal on a fine winter night and I was looking forward to the walk home along Sherbrooke Street with the evening star in the gap at the corner of Guy, then to a drink before my fire, to dinner and after dinner to a quiet evening with my wife, a little more work and a good night’s sleep. That evening I was happy.

  Now I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is George Stewart and I come from what might be called an old Montreal family. But I also come from an impoverished family and even now I think of myself as a product not only of Montreal but also of the depression, scarred by it like so many of my friends. For this intricate, fostering city was a bad place in the depression.

  I have done various things for a living, but radio has been the only thing in which I have gained any reputation. For years before the Korean War I had been a political commentator over the radio and a writer of free lance articles on political topics for our magazines. In a huge country like the United States a man with a reputation such as I had here would have been prosperous. But Canada is a country with a small population, and the pay for my kind of work is proportionate. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians knew my name from coast to coast, but most of them were better off than I was. I had never known financial security. But at least I managed to get by and was not in debt.

  I have never felt safe. Who of my age could, unless he was stupid? Quite a few people thought me successful, but in my own eyes I was no more successful than the old Greek who pushed boulders up the hill knowing they would tumble down the moment they reached the top. Some people thought me calm, but inside I knew I was not. I have often heard myself described as a “mature” commentator, but I have never seemed mature to myself. The young seem more so because they know nothing of the 1930s. The young have the necessary self-confidence and ignorance to feel mature, and that is why I like them so much better than I like my own generation. Was there ever a crowd like ours? Was there ever a time when so many people tried, so pathetically, to feel responsible for all mankind? Was there ever a generation which yearned to belong, so unsuccessfully, to something larger than themselves?

  That winter I truly thought I had begun to relax for the first time since I was a boy. I thought I had come to terms with myself and with the peculiar fate which controlled me owing to my wife. I even thought I might have become self-confident. And I had loved this part-time job in the university, because it had brought me into touch with the young.

  These post-war students seemed to me a new breed on earth. They were so much freer in their souls than we had ever been, and so much easier in their emotions. Also, unless the world goes crazy again, they were luckier. For not one of them could remember the depression or what it had been like when Hitler was the most powerful man in the world. Not one of them was corroded by the knowledge that nobody wanted them. They all expected to get jobs and marry young and to raise families young, and now as I walked down the corridor I felt joy flood me as I heard the happy noise they made at the end of their day. A student asked me a question about my lecture; I gave him an answer and stopped at a window and looked out.

  Powder snow lay deep and white on the slope of Mount Royal and was flecked with the foot and tail marks of the squirrels who lived on the mountain. On this clear winter evening after sunset there was a green blink in the sky, and as I looked up through the boles of the bare trees I saw a flash of bright color and recognized a pheasant which also lived on the mountain and survived the winters on scraps thrown to him out of apartment windows by old ladies who loved him. This pale twilight bathing the city erased time: it called me back to the Montreal which once had been one of the true winter cities of the world, with iced toboggan slides on the mountain and snow-shoers in scarlet sashes and tuques and gray homespuns bright against the snow and shacks with rank coffee and acrid air where you warmed your half-frozen feet in front of Quebec heaters and felt young and clean and untroubled. It was gone now that we were learning to live like New Yorkers.

  The porter was at the foot of the stair and I saw from his expression that he wanted to speak to me. He was an Englishman, a former Grenadier, and he had a ramrod back, waxed gray moustaches and a voice husky and formidable.

  “A gentleman’ as been calling you, sir,” he said in that voice of his. “Most important ‘e said it was, sir, so I left you ‘is number in your box.”

  I went into the staff room, took the number out of my box and waited for an elderly professor to finish using the phone. The number was unfamiliar, but from its exchange I knew it was located downtown and this suggested that it might be more important than an unknown lady who wanted me to give a political talk at a suburban women’s club. So I sat and waited, looking out the window at the clean northern twilight feeling easy and relaxed.

  Must one remember or is it better to forget? Certainly that winter it had seemed easier to forget than ever before. Sleep had come easily, and sometimes the nights were like quiet oceans where I woke after five hours of profound sleep and lay happy in the dawn. We lived in the heart of Montreal but inside our apartment home it was always quiet and we never seemed conscious of the city. Nor is anything quite like the silence of a northern city at dawn on a winter morning. Occasionally there was a hiss or whisper and a brushing against the windows and I knew it was snow, but generally there was nothing but a throbbing stillness until the street cars began running up Côte des Neiges and I heard them as though they were winds blowing through old drains.

  Must one remember or can one forget? Those trams of Montreal were history to me, and when the day came when they would be replaced by buses I had the feeling that history itself would disappear with them. Whenever I sat on one of their straw-yellow seats, hearing the bilingual conductor chant “Mountain Street – de la Montagne,” I was apt to have a total recall and remember exactly how I had felt in those same cars when I sat reading the news from Mukden, Chapei, Addis Ababa, Guernica, Sudetenland, Eben Emael and Forges-les-Eaux. What a terrible lesson in geography my generation had learned! Those place-names of our lost passions and fears! No wonder there were moments when I felt like a survivor, for those names which could still send a shiver through me meant nothing to these students I taught three hours a week. Most of them had never heard of them.

  Can one forget through another human being? That winter I loved so many things, and one of them was the thought of Catherine in the dawn. She was always asleep then in her separate room, but I would lie and be conscious of her presence. I would watch one of her paintings grow visible on the wall and some of the joy she had when she painted it became mine and I was so happy because she had discovered this wonderful thing before it was too late, and I was proud, too.

  I had made Catherine the rock of my life. As a boy, at least for a time, I had been religious and believed that God cared for me personally. In the Thirties I had said to my
self: There is no God. Now I had Catherine and Catherine’s fate and that winter, feeling con?-dent of being equal to it, I said to myself: “What difference does it make if there is no God? Or, if God exists, why worry if He is indifferent to justice?”

  For on account of Catherine I could not believe that if there is a God He is just. Catherine had a rheumatic heart which had handicapped her from childhood and it was not on account of her sins, or of her parents’ sins, that the seeds of this obscure disease had singled her out among hundreds of thousands of others who went free. A rheumatic heart is fate palpable and unavoidable. It cannot be contended against, it cannot be side-stepped and until very recently it could not be cured. Twice within the last few years Catherine had nearly been killed by it, and for such time as remained to her she must live with the sword dangling over her head every minute of every day. So had she to live and so had I. And I was proud that winter because – so I believed – I could do so without begging for help from a Power which, if It existed, I could not respect because It had allowed this to happen to the woman I loved.

  Now as I sat looking out the window at the twilight darkling on the snow, thinking idly as I have described – how many thoughts you can have while waiting to get to a telephone! – inevitably I remembered the man I always remember when I think about the 1930s, the man who would always epitomize that time to me. He at least I had all but forgotten. He had been dead for a decade now and I had put him behind me, I thought, forever. I had put him behind me as a grown man puts behind him his predecessor, his father. He had not been my actual father but for a time in the Thirties, when I was spiritually and emotionally fatherless, I had virtually allowed him to become so.