by Adam Gopnik
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Homer’s Cutting a Figure (1871) shows a woman on skates with a come-hither glance over her shoulder — an image central to the advance of the idea of women as knowing creatures in control of their own allure.
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By our own time, the underground city of Montreal, spurred by its brutal winter and godfathered by the planner Vincent Ponte, has become a vast, alternative urban universe.
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FOUR
RECREATIONAL WINTER
The Season at Speed
I keep in my wallet a five-dollar bill, a Canadian five-dollar bill, all blue on blue. It shows boys playing improvised hockey, skating on a frozen pond someplace in Ontario or Quebec or the Maritimes, an idealized Canadian lake, without adult supervision. It’s one of my three wallet-talismans. (The others are two French fifty-franc notes from the years of my children’s births.)
Like all nostalgic images of national spirit, the picture works best in the absence of evidence and experience. I’ve never been to that pond and the odds are overwhelming that you haven’t either. But the belief in that pre-lapsarian pond is a crucial part of the mystique of hockey. Part of the mystique of hockey is to see it as something that grew up “naturally,” beginning as a country game and coming to the city only to be first regimented and then commercialized until it eventually migrated to the United States, where — what else? — it got prostituted. It’s a familiar story: country girl goes to city places, begins in wonder and ends as a whore. It’s a tale told of a thousand things from folk tales to jazz and blues, and so no surprise that it is also told about the winter sport.
Our subject now is recreational winter, winter as a season of speed and play. Some by now familiar ideas, familiar people, familiar thoughts, even familiar patterns of explanation may appear. But my subject is also, more narrowly, ice-skating plain and simple, and you’d be right to see past the high-minded connections and allusions to a cruder motive. I see that picture and I ask a question: Is there a story about skating, about hockey, deeper than the myth, a truth beneath the tangle of stories that lie at the foundation of our fascination with it? Well, let’s begin the search with a waltz — a skater’s waltz, not the familiar one by Strauss, which is a bit oom-pah-pah, but a much later one by John Lewis for the Modern Jazz Quartet. It’s a beautiful thing called “Skating in Central Park,” taking as its subject just that activity. It surprises us, perhaps, by its languor and piquant charm, by its poignant slowness. We might even stop to think that this is one of the few titles to have created two wonderful works of art, a century apart: Winslow Homer’s engraving from the 1860s and this jazz waltz. What do they have in common and how are they different; what do they, and ice-skating, so beautifully mean?
When I was working up these essays, knowing they would necessarily be stuffed tight with names and allusions, I made a little note for myself on each one, stating its central thematic premise, so that even if I went a bit off-centre I would never go too far off-theme. The first note, about Romantic winter, reminded me that the subject is the growth of resonances that winter began to evoke in the nineteenth century, how something went from being seen as bleak and bitter to sweet and sublime. The second one, on radical winter, was about how words get woven around Arctic expeditions. The third thematic note, about recuperative winter, was that its subject is the secularization of Christmas and how that act of secularization invented a new idea of the sacred. For this fourth chapter, my thematic note to myself read in full: Chance to talk at length about ice hockey. So while I shall look sideways at sledding and sleighing and skiing, I shall concentrate most on the history and meanings of ice-skating — in part because it’s the most varied and social of all the winter sports, in part because it points us towards the holy spot (or sport) and to the larger mystery of sports and national culture, and why watching people skate with sticks is for some of us as satisfactory an experience of theatre as any we know.
One of the things that struck the Romantics when they discovered winter was that while on the one hand it impeded comfort, it strangely accelerated movement. On skis and skates, on sleds and sleighs — and later, of course, on snowmobiles — you could actually move more quickly in winter in the cold countries than you could in the other seasons (a truth that would turn out to have momentous effects on history, when ski-mounted Russian soldiers, reposted to the Moscow front from Siberia, counterattacked the German invaders and their tanks in December 1941). It was a truth of pleasure too, one that Pushkin, for instance, celebrates with his poetry of sleighing — an imagery that moves on to Gogol’s famous portrait near the end of Dead Souls, of Russia itself as a troika, racing through the snowy wastes while the rest of Europe watches:
And what Russian is there who doesn’t love fast driving? How should his soul that yearns to go off into a whirl, to go off on a fling, to say on occasion, “Devil take it all!” How should his soul fail to love it? Is it not a thing to be loved, when one can sense in it something exaltedly wondrous? Some unseen power has caught you up on its wing and you are flying yourself, and all things are flying; some merchants are flying towards you, perched on the front seats of their covered carts. The forest flies on both sides of the road with its dark rows of firs and pines, echoing with the ring of axes and the cawing of crows. The whole road is flying, no one knows where into the unseen distance . . . The troika tears along, inspired by God! Where art thou soaring away to, Russia? Give me the answer! But Russia gives none. With a wondrous ring does the jingle bell trill; the air rent to shreds thunders and turns to the wind. All things on earth fly past, eyeing the troika and all the other peoples and nations stand aside giving it the right of way.
An image that is, to be sure, rather at odds with the stasis and corruption of the world that the novel details, filled with drunken landowners with absurd rosters of deceased slaves waiting to be sold for a tax advantage. (But then, surely, that play of stasis and sudden hysterical excitement is part of the national Russian style and national temperament.) The reality of troika riding in Russia in that period is probably better caught by the composer Hector Berlioz’s account of an overnight sleigh ride during his concert tour in Russia in 1847:
The common assumption made in our temperate climes that Russian sledges, drawn by swift horses, skim smoothly over the snow as though crossing a frozen lake, has given us a rather agreeable idea of sledging as a method of travel. The truth is very different . . . Imagine a metal box, hermetically sealed yet subtly penetrable by the fine snow, which seeps in, powdering your face white. Imagine yourself shaken about in it, violently and almost without pause, rather as shot is shaken in a bottle to clean it. Imagine the resultant sharp contact with the casing of the sled. Imagine, on top of all that, a general sensation of malaise plus a powerful desire to vomit, which can fairly be called snow-sickness, from its strong resemblance to the state known to travelers by sea.
The same discovery takes place in Canada. Anna Brownell Jameson, if you recall, was the amazingly well-educated Anglo-Irish proto-feminist who came to Toronto in 1836 and in the course of a very unhappy marriage stayed for a momentous few years. Anna was also struck by the paradox that in December the social life of Upper Canada, as she knew it, instead of being confined and narrowed, village to village, suddenly opened up; the ice and snow allowed people to move rapidly from town to town, from place to place.
That winter could be complex and deep was news, but that it could be fun was news as well. You’ll recall that one of the most important engines of the discovery of winter in the nineteenth century was the sense among the northern Romantics, in England and Germany and Russia alike, that they could identify the season with an escape from French rationalism. Winter was the pet season of the counter-Enlightenment. They saw winter as the opposite of spring, the place of instinct, the place of purity; the winter evening is a place of emotion and memory while spring and summer are se
asons of reason and hope. And so the first Romantics didn’t at first see sport, they didn’t see movement, and they particularly didn’t see ice-skating as social activity. They saw it as a soulful one, an escape into solitude: a kind of meditational aid, a way of escaping the social lies for the truth of Man Alone in Nature.
Now, ice-skating has been part of European culture for a remarkably brief time. Once again there’s a kind of false spring of winter lore in the late seventeenth century that anticipates a more lasting one in our own time. Recall that at the beginning of that century the world, certainly the European world and probably the entire planet, becomes much, much colder for a brief time. Throughout Europe, rivers and ponds and canals all freeze up. There’s a great frost in England in 1689, for instance, in which the entire Thames freezes for the winter. And by one of those strange coincidences in history, that’s exactly the moment of the Glorious Revolution and the entrance of the Dutch as the English royal family.
One of the things the Dutch bring with them are their skates. Samuel Pepys writes in his diary for 1662: “to my Lord Sandwich’s, to Mr. Moore . . . and then over the Parke (where I first in my life, it being a great frost, did see people sliding with their skeates, which is very pretty art).” And John Evelyn, that same year, notes “the strange and wonderful dexterity of the sliders on the new canal in St. James’s Park . . . after the manner of the Hollanders, with what swiftness they pass, how suddenly they stop in full career upon the ice.”
But ice-skating, like so many other aspects of winter, took hold of the European imagination only around the end of the eighteenth century. William Wordsworth’s skill as an ice-skater was legendary among his friends — he was the Toller Cranston of the Lake District — and he offers a long passage on ice-skating in 1799, in his great Prelude, so far as I know the first extended description, much less poetic evocation, of a winter sport in all of English literature. It’s wonderful Wordsworthian poetry, and it describes his ice-skating in the evenings as a boy.
. . . All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures — the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the far distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion . . .
Wordsworth sums up the skaters’ dilemma. On the one hand, he recognizes, in a way that might delight the current generation of evolutionary psychologists, that the thrill of skating is partly an atavistic, tribal thrill, recalling primitive pleasures: “games / Confederate, imitative of the chase / And woodland pleasures, — the resounding horn, / The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.” The boys on the ice in Wordsworth’s poem aren’t, I think, consciously pretending to hunt; it’s just that the act of ice-skating echoes all those other “games Confederate” in which people come together to lose themselves in a common purpose. It’s the group action, the loss of self in the thrill of common action, that stirs him; but in the end, skating in winter allows him to escape the group — he finally finds a form of personal movement all by himself, spinning in the starlight. Ice-skating is for Wordsworth both a way to make yourself a captive of the wind and a way to escape from the world. “Behind me did they stretch in solemn chain, / Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched / Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.”
And that idea is central to what winter sport gives us: a carved-out social space in which we find ourselves alone. On skates, we combine the pleasure of solitude with the virtue of energy. It’s a common experience as much as a poetic idea: we arrive on the ice in company and find on the ice our selves. I know of no experiences quite like skating or sledding, in which one starts by feeling all together and ends by feeling all alone. There is, after all, no alone so alone as the alone of the downhill skier or the luger or even than the ordinary pond skater. The long-distance runner may be lonely but he is not alone: someone over his shoulder all the time, and crowds watching from the walkways. It takes an impulse to make a summer sport: you run or throw or catch in a meadow made by God that’s just there. It takes work to make a winter one: you and your gang clear off the ice or ice up the track, build a ski lift or grab a blanket. (Even cross-country skiing, my own favourite, takes an elaborate preparation of winter woollens and careful waxing. Yet once you’ve prepared in common, you’re soon isolated, alone.) This doubleness makes ice-skating something like a sacrament in the recreational winter of the nineteenth century. Its lesson is the double lesson of so much Romantic art: we dream of a tribe and end in a spotlight, search for community and end in solitude.
So when the early Romantic painters took up ice-skating, they took it up in Wordsworth’s spirit, as a solitary meditational, ruminative act, focused above all on the single nighttime skater. And in the north — for Scots and Germans and even New Englanders — this led to a very peculiar and lovely and unintentionally comic genre of imagery: the painting or etching or engraving of a serious philosophical skater. You find that kind of imagery throughout Europe in the early Romantic period. In 1782 the American painter Gilbert Stuart portrayed the British MP Sir William Grant on skates, and we can actually see in the distance the (social) party the fine philosophical skater has fled in order to get in touch with his deeper nature.
You don’t know which is more delightful, the dignity or the absurdity. Stuart, it seems, had agreed during his time in London to do a portrait of Grant, who announced on arriving at Stuart’s studio that it was a better day for skating. He cajoled the young American out to the not-exactly-wilderness of St. James’s Park, where he dazzled the ladies and the painter with his skill — until the ice began to crack and the painter had to help him escape. Stuart used the occasion for the portrait, elaborating his memories and perhaps his sketches of the occasion, and in The Skater produced his first real hit.
Yet it’s not an image of winter energy, but more one of evening elegance, an image of what one art historian rightly called “Romantic melancholy.” Skating, for Stuart’s Grant, is a test of masculine dignity. The preacher or patriarch on skates shows his mettle exactly by testing his balance. Keep your dignity on skates and you can keep it anywhere.
In another wonderful portrait, painted around 1795, the Scottish artist Henry Raeburn, apparently influenced by Stuart’s great success, shows a man of the cloth who is actually out on skates on a Scottish lake in the middle of this cold period. And though it looks to us as if he is skating very normally, untheatrically, this kind of assured skating — executed on a single stiff left leg and a confident leftward lean, brought off with the gaze firmly fixed outwards and seemingly indifferent — was unusual, highly prized, something worth painting. And yet he remains a Scottish minister, stern and severe and self-possessed. Stuart’s Grant kept merely his dignity intact on skates; Raeburn’s Presbyterian preacher actually keeps his divinity.
The most touching and funny of
all these philosophical skating scenes involves what blossoms into a whole kind of subgenre of German Romantic art, showing the greatest poet of the period smugly demonstrating his mastery on winter ponds and river: Goethe on ice! There’s a wonderful one, actually called Goethe on Ice in Frankfurt, Germany, from the 1860s, though obviously showing a scene from an earlier decade, where in the midst of a crowd of skaters Goethe takes a bow to them all, as the great poet he was, and his countrymen raise their winter hats to his grace.
An even better one — it may be my favourite of all modern winter images — dates from even earlier, from the hand of the painter Raab — Johann Goethe Ice-skating in Frankfurt, Germany — where you see Goethe not only on skates and on the ice but surrounded by admiring women, agog with admiration for the perfection of this poet who skates away in smug certainty, demonstrating his superiority to the things of the world, especially sex. He’s lost, above it all, gliding in a Wordsworth-like reverie on ice — to the appropriate annoyance, one feels, of the women skaters watching, one of whom seems ready to throw a snowball at him.
So the first artistic use of ice-skating, and indeed winter sport, in the nineteenth century is not about social life. It’s about solitary life. It’s about the way in which skating can lead you into yourself, can lead you into a separate space — solitary and childlike in Wordsworth, rather smugly superior for Goethe, at least as Raab depicts him. You gain three inches and you glide and you’re above it all. You have to do it well in order to get the new emotion, but getting the new emotion allows you to forget that you’re doing it well. The subject of skating is balance, and achieving it on ice is a symbol of having achieved it in your soul. It’s about the rejection of fear and falling — and even of femininity — in a sublime moment of exhibitionist equilibrium. It’s the first image of the rock-concert kind. Poets and preachers throw their bodies to the wind, seemingly remote, and find their inner compass, while crowds of girls watch and wonder.
