Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  To fully understand the tragic power of The Watch, it is useful to trace the origins of the novel and follow MacLennan as he confronted a series of personal crises that left him in despair, heavily in debt, and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His emotional, financial, and professional state during this period is revealed in a notebook that survives among his personal papers in the Rare Books and Manuscript Division of McGill University Library. (Fortunately, when he rediscovered the notebook by chance in October 1962, he chose to preserve it rather than destroy it.) The unpublished notebook documents MacLennan’s personal and professional life from January 1951 to November 1953. What emerges in its typed pages and anxiously hand-written and sometimes scrawled entries is the story of how MacLennan overcame adversity through his renewed faith in God and art. This process forms the foundation for his transformation of the drama of his personal life into the basis of the novel.

  As the notebook opens, MacLennan is in anguish. Struggling to survive solely from his earnings as a writer, he is broke. He is wracked with self-doubt: despite his professional success and his two Governor General Awards for fiction, he believes that his stature as a writer is in question. He is deeply anxious about the impending possibility of yet another world war. Most importantly, his wife and soul mate for sixteen years, the American-born author and painter Dorothy Duncan, is seriously ill, suffering from an incurable heart condition.3 His hope for a long, loving, happy marriage has been shattered, replaced with loneliness, uncertainty, and fear of falling into debt.

  In a pre-Medicare Canada, MacLennan faced medical bills that were crippling him financially. His two recent novels had been financial failures4 and, while he was still earning an income from the sale of magazine articles, his meager income was insufficient to pay Dorothy’s medical bills. Acknowledging that he could not depend upon his writing alone to earn a living, MacLennan accepted that he would have to find part-time employment. He flirted briefly with the idea of hosting a daily radio program on a local Montreal radio station, but the offer fell through.

  A more attractive option was teaching at McGill University. Teaching at the college level was more appealing to MacLennan than serving as a school master, which he despised. Eventually he was offered a part-time position at McGill, which not only provided a stable, if modest, income but led to a thirty-year relationship with McGill that transformed the writer into a much admired lecturer.

  Middle-aged at the time, MacLennan was keenly aware of the process of aging. His reading of Budd Schulberg’s recent fictional portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald had aroused memories of MacLennan’s days at Princeton, which provoked more intense recollections of the period when he was in his mid-twenties and a writer engagé. In the present, he found hope in the post-war students he taught at McGill. Yet, like his generation, the optimistic students of the 1950s lived in the shadow of a possible world war, with the Western nations confronting the specter of spreading Communism and the United States entering into war against North Korea and her Communist allies.

  The notebook provides ample details about material that is woven into the structure of The Watch. MacLennan acknowledges that he intends to continue in the autobiographical mode. Having drawn on personal experience in his earlier novels, he had openly experimented with the autobiographical form in Each Man’s Son, something he acknowledged had therapeutic value. The idea for The Watch had been conceived within months of the previous novel’s publication. On 27 February 1951, MacLennan noted that the new novel would be a sequel to Each Man’s Son. At this stage he was considering casting the orphan Alan Ainslie in the role of an artist as a means of further self-examination of his own growth and development as a writer. Alan’s love interest was to be a character named Catherine. In a brief outline of the new novel, MacLennan emphasized: “The question ‘Who am I’ must be reiterated again and again” (p. 37). Eight months later, on 23 October, MacLennan transposed the “I” into “We,” writing “I’m beginning to think that the theme ought to be the final defeat of my own generation” (p. 79). At this point, MacLennan set aside the concept of a sequel to Each Man’s Son, although Alan Ainslie would resurface a decade later as the lead character in The Return of the Sphinx (1967).

  Using his notebook as a way to analyze the past and measure his present circumstances, MacLennan shaped a novel of ideas that delved into the intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual depths of his generation during the 1930s. Marked by the Depression, many members of his generation, like MacLennan, had expressed sympathy for or embraced Socialism or, at serious personal risk, joined the Communist Party. All of this was played out against the rising threat of German Fascism and the widely reported atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, a cause which rallied support in numerous countries, including Canada. MacLennan also reflects upon Ernest Hemingway’s influence, both as a man and writer. He acknowledges Hemingway’s influence on his own writing style in his abandoning of literary experimentation for a more direct and economical style.

  The last entry in the notebook is 9 November 1953.5 MacLennan was preoccupied with many responsibilities and Dorothy’s deteriorating health as well as teaching and free-lance commitments forced him to set the manuscript aside. He resumed work on the novel in 1956, writing quickly and completing the manuscript in 1957. When he finished it he was convinced that he had written his best novel to date.

  To reinforce his sense of the purpose of the novel – exploring the fate of his generation – he had adopted the working title “Requiem.” MacLennan sent the manuscript to his close friend and Canadian publisher John Gray, president of Macmillan of Canada. While receptive to the novel, Gray had some reservations about it and sent the manuscript to an external reader, a recent University of Toronto Ph.D. graduate. The reader’s report was harsh and dismissive. MacLennan was devastated.

  Reluctantly, MacLennan set to work to address the reader’s concerns; he took another two years to edit the manuscript. The novel into which he had transferred so much of his personal anguish, and which he was depending on to relieve his financial problems, was now held hostage to the criticism of an anonymous academic. (Throughout his career MacLennan viewed academic critics with suspicion and disdain.) In the midst of the numerous rewrites requested by the publisher, Dorothy died. Her loss added greater poignancy to the basic story line in the novel. Once the rewrites were finished, he sent the manuscript to his US publisher, Charles Scribner, who liked it, suggesting only that the title be changed to The Watch That Ends the Night. The book was launched in the United States in April 1959 and the Canadian edition appeared six months later.6

  As in his earlier novels, MacLennan builds upon a triad of time, memory, and place to narrate the story of his principal characters, George Stewart, Catherine Carey, and Jerome Martell, whom he uses to present the broader story of his “lost” generation.7 George, Catherine, and Jerome play symbolic roles representing reason (George), spirit (Catherine), and action (Jerome). However MacLennan goes to some length to develop his principal characters beyond a restricted symbolic role. Each is flawed. George’s ambitions are checked by his insecurity and low self-esteem. Catherine, though beautiful, suffers from a physical handicap – a weak heart that prevents her from leading a “normal” life – marriage and children. Though a gifted surgeon, Jerome is indifferent, dogmatic, and self-righteous. MacLennan challenges each of his characters to respond to the novel’s overriding theme of love – both human and divine.

  Using the plot device of the misidentified hero, which he had employed in Barometer Rising when Neil McCrae, the novel’s hero, disguises himself on his return to Halifax with the goal of clearing his name as a war deserter, in The Watch Jerome Martell, captured by the Nazis in France and reported killed, returns to Montreal twelve years later to discover that his wife, Catherine, whom he had abandoned to join the Medical Corps in Spain, is now married to George.

  Jerome is the most compelling character in the book, emerging from obscurity to rise to the pinnacle of the E
nglish-Montreal medical scene. His unexpected return affects not only George and Catherine but also many of the minor characters who are part of MacLennan’s portrayal of the lively political and bohemian circles of Montreal in the mid 30s. A member of a loose coterie of intellectuals and artists, MacLennan drew upon his knowledge of the Montreal cultural scene to create a series of representative types, such as Adam Blore, the cynical artist, Arthur Lazenby, the committed communist, and the hapless Harry Blackwell, married to Norah, the beautiful, doting hanger-on who falls in love with Jerome and accompanies him to Spain. Through the characters of George, Catherine and Jerome, MacLennan also creates a caustic portrait of Montreal’s English elite, its institutions, attitudes, and prejudices. As novels depicting Canadian intellectual life are rare, this portrait is one of the compelling aspects of The Watch.

  Montreal plays a prominent role in The Watch, allowing MacLennan to explore economic, social, and topographical features that accentuate and elaborate character, theme, and mood. Although he includes impressionistic descriptions of Montreal’s unemployed underclass trudging hungrily along Ste Catherine Street, much of the action takes place east of the McGill campus, at Beamis Memorial Hospital (based on The Montreal General Hospital), and at Waterloo School, set on the western edge of Montreal and modeled on Lower Canada College (LCC).

  MacLennan’s ten years at lcc were not his happiest period. He is ruthless in his fictional portrait of Waterloo, which is represented as a hapless institution run by outcasts from the English public school system. Its mission is to instill the waning values of the British Empire in the minds of English Montreal’s snooty, privileged sons. Like MacLennan, George Stewart is condemned to teach at Waterloo, but, after his first year in the school, he escapes to Montreal on the weekends where he meets Adam Blore, a sculptor and former Waterloo school master who was expelled and is now a salesman at Eaton’s Department Store. Through Blore, Stewart is introduced to a bohemian enclave of artists, political activists, and McGill professors. To a great extent this mirrors MacLennan’s own experience.

  Arriving in Montreal in 1935, MacLennan had been introduced to poet and constitutional lawyer Frank Scott (1899–1985), his wife, artist Marian Dale Scott (1906–1993), and a wider circle of academics, poets, and artists. The MacLennan’s and Scotts became life-long friends – their lives interweaving in the artistic and literary circles of Montreal during the thirties and forties, as colleagues at McGill University beginning in the 1950s when they met regularly at the Faculty Club, and on the more casual cocktail circuit in North Hatley, when they retreated to their nearby summer homes.

  In 1935 Scott was the leading leftist intellectual figure in English Montreal. Teaching constitutional law at McGill, he was at the centre of radical politics in Montreal and his reputation was growing across Canada. He was a member of the League for Social Reconstruction, a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and a signatory to the Regina Manifesto. He gained national attention in the 1950s when he took on Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis and triumphantly overturned Duplessis’s infamous Padlock Law which was enacted into law in 1937.8

  Scott was also a poet and founding member of the McGill Movement, which advocated modern verse and published their experiments first in the McGill Fortnightly Review and later in the Canadian Mercury. Though both little magazines were short-lived, there was a growing body of evidence suggesting that Canadian intellectuals were responding to international political events in a systematic way. The Canadian Forum represented a national perspective and more radical arts and politics magazines appeared in the mid 1930s, among them the New Frontier (1936). MacLennan, like others of his generation, was briefly captivated by Stalin’s Soviet experiment but a visit to Russia at the end of 1937 left him disenchanted with what he had observed, a view reflected in an episode in the final part of The Watch.

  While political ideologies were hotly debated, the rise of Fascism and the battle over Spain dominated political discourse from 1936 to 1938. Over a thousand Canadians volunteered to serve in Spain, forming the McKenzie-Papineau Brigade. Although successive Western governments, including Canada, signed non-intervention treaties that prohibited volunteers from joining in the Republican war against Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Fascist Army, Canadians of conscience continued to attempt to enter Spain at great personal risk to join in the “gallant cause.”9 Dr. Norman Bethune (1890–1939) is perhaps the most famous Canadian volunteer. As part of the medical brigade he saved hundreds of lives on the front lines through the introduction of a portable blood transfusion delivery system. He subjected himself to great personal risk to deliver blood to the battle front and emerged as a hero, but he was not without critics, in part because of his strident personality.10

  The civil war in Spain serves as the galvanizing event in The Watch. The characters are drawn into the center of a debate that focuses on Jerome’s decision to abandon his career, family, and friends to serve in the medical corps in Spain. This causes a rift in his marriage and he grows increasingly alienated from Catherine because of her indifference to the “cause.” He falls in love with Norah Blackwell, a nurse and political comrade, while, at the same time, George’s love for Catherine is reawakened. George, who is drawn to Jerome as a father figure and because of his heroic character, is also repelled because his political zealousness and his infatuation with Norah have a destabilizing effect on Catherine’s health.

  MacLennan carefully paces events to build tension until the novel’s climax, when Jerome speaks at a political rally in support of the Spanish Loyalists. The rally is sabotaged by French-Canadian Fascist supporters and erupts into a riot. Attempting to escape the pandemonium, Jerome is arrested, and the story is front page news in the Montreal English dailies. Disgraced, he is summoned to the office of the chief surgeon of Beamis Memorial Hospital where, after an acrimonious meeting, he is dismissed, but not before he has expressed his continued commitment to his beliefs and his cause.

  MacLennan’s fictional rally is based largely on events that occurred on 23 October 1936 when Scott, chair of the Committee for Medical Aid to Spain, organized a rally for Spanish Republican delegates who were touring Canada to promote the cause of democracy in Spain. The delegates had been spuriously linked to the Communist Party, casting suspicion on their political beliefs and intentions. Quebec Catholics in particular reacted strongly to the arrival of the Spanish delegates. Attempts to suppress the rally were partially successful, forcing it to move from the Mount Royal Arena to the McGill Student Union. At the rally, Bethune shared the platform with delegates and expressed his dismay that city officials had attempted to censor the meeting. In reaction against the appearance of the Spanish Republicans, pro-Catholic demonstrations took place throughout the city.11

  Ironically, on the eve of the Spanish War, the period of the novel, Marian Scott had met Bethune and they had fallen in love.12 Scott, the socialist, never approved of Bethune, the communist, although they were uncomfortable allies in the greater cause of political justice. Soon after falling in love with Marian, Bethune converted to Communism. Less than a year later, he enlisted as a medical volunteer and on 24 October 1936, he departed for Spain. As it happens, MacLennan sets 24 October as the date in The Watch when, as part of the aftermath of the Montreal political riot, Jerome’s medical career ends in disgrace. Soon after he leaves for Spain, abandoning Catherine until his mysterious return fifteen years later.

  Of all of MacLennan’s fictional characters, Jerome Martell is arguably the most fully realized. MacLennan actually drew on several sources but many critics and readers have concluded that Jerome was based on Bethune. It is true that there are uncanny parallels and MacLennan actually alludes to Bethune’s decision to join in the Spanish cause in the novel. MacLennan, however, objected vehemently to the suggestion that the character of Martell was based on Bethune. To some extent Martell is an idealized portrait of MacLennan’s father, Dr. Sam, but much of his character is based on F.R. Scott.13 MacLennan
admitted as much in print and, in an early notebook entry of 18 November 1951, he also identifies Scott as the model:

  of all the people I know, the one most fruitful as a key character for the sort of book I could write is Frank Scott. Everything is there; the promise, the gaiety, the over-confidence [,] intellect, the socialism & the failure. The heart of it all, of course, has been his treatment of Marian. And even that pattern goes on into the final perfect symbolism. The moment he brings his life with her together again, off he goes to Burma. Should he perish there, the compulsion to write of it will be overwhelming. For this is the point – he & only he, was our leader our catalyst. His creativity was perhaps the finest kind: it went out toward people, bound them together, made them feel better than they were. When he fulfilled his finest [deeds?], the whole cultural group in Montreal did likewise. When he failed it flew apart. (p. 84)

  Although the entry summarizes the essence of The Watch – the importance of leadership, character, action, and morality – it also betrays MacLennan’s personal vulnerability, which becomes the essence of the novel in his creation of a generational myth of origin as outlined in the notebook entry quoted above. Beyond art and politics, MacLennan struggled to express his philosophy of love, both spiritual and human. MacLennan’s remark on Scott’s treatment of Marian betrays his own love for her – a fact he revealed in the first entry in his notebook, dated 14 January 1951: