It was fifty years ago today, or near enough. Sgt. Pepper has not yet taught the band to play; instead, from the top of the charts, smoke gets in your eyes. Frank Sinatra has high hopes, but Miles Davis is kind of blue. Roman chariots crash on the big screen, American stagecoaches on TV. Buddy Holly falls from the sky. Canada opens a seaway while Vietnam opens a trail. Khrushchev and Nixon debate communism versus capitalism in Moscow; a 36”-18”-33” woman named Barbie spreads her plastic legs in New York and settles the argument. In July, a nuclear reactor north of Malibu overheats, releasing radiation into the warm California air.
All that summer of 1959, a novel sits atop the Canadian bestseller lists that knows none of this but is about all of it. Published in February, Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night rises to number one on the Quill & Quire list in June and stays on top until September. (Below, a barely legal Lolita tussles with the newly legal Lady Chatterley’s Lover.) In New York, Scribner’s bookshop on Fifth Avenue gives the Canadian novel its window, stacks of copies among blow-ups of reviews from the Times and the Herald-Tribune and photos of its exotic settings — Montreal, Ottawa, a generic lumber camp. Hollywood knocks. The movie will never be made, but with $70,000 in film rights plus pocket change from book sales, the man from Cape Breton finally doesn’t have to care.
John Hugh MacLennan was born a century ago in the coal mining town of Glace Bay. His mother was a Glace Bay girl, Highland Scot, the kind who writes poems in her spare time. His father was a doctor, Highland Scot, the kind who studies the classics in his spare time and enforces the Sabbath and drives his daughter to a breakdown and his son to a Rhodes Scholarship — and when the telegram arrives tells the boy the walk needs shovelling.
MacLennan spent the 1930s quarrelling with his father’s Calvinist God. (Freud helped.) He studied classics at Oxford, struggling for Scottish pride to keep up with his British betters while dreaming of being Keats 2.0 and proving the first of his substitute gods right by sublimating rebellion and sex into tennis, rugger, cycling, and running — running every afternoon around Christ Church Meadow, running in circles. After graduation, he ground through a Princeton Ph.D., flirted with Marx, and wrote pastiches of Hemingway, Joyce, and Lawrence to which twenty-eight publishers mercifully said no thanks, been there, done that. Running in circles.
Plop went the sound of Hugh landing back in Canada, teaching at a Montreal boys’ school (Lower Canada College) instead of a university because it was still the Depression, and because his Oxford tie and Princeton pin notwithstanding, he was still a Canadian. He married a year later, Dorothy Duncan, a Chicago woman with a B.Sc. in botany and a ticking bomb in her chest, a heart damaged in childhood. Dorothy had her own authorial ambitions, publishing the lifestyle book You Can Live in an Apartment the year Hitler invaded Poland. Of more lasting importance, she persuaded her husband to set his third attempt at a novel at home, in Canada.
Barometer Rising, Hugh MacLennan’s first published novel, is the story of the Halifax explosion. This was home turf with a bang: when the Imo and the Mont-Blanc collided on the morning of December 6, 1917, killing 2,000 in the largest man-made explosion before the atomic bomb, its future author was in the bathroom of his home on South Park Street, just blocks from the harbour, washing his knees for school (it’s the era of short pants). His father tended the maimed and the blind; ten-year-old Hugh wandered the devastated streets. (MacLennan’s childhood home survived the explosion, only to be torn down in 1993 by the cbc.)
For Canada’s most nationalist novelist, nationalism was a career choice. As he wrote to a friend, MacLennan included the substantial glosses on Canadian geography and history in Barometer Rising because he had to explain Canada to his New York publisher and its American market, practically the only market for Canadian fiction up to his time. But with the novel’s success among Canadian reviewers and even some readers, MacLennan became convinced that Canadians were hungry for a spokesman. The job was far from his first choice — he wanted to be a writer for the world — but at least it was a job, and with the Depression leering its reminder in the rear-view mirror, MacLennan took it.
The nation confirmed his choice, asking and getting his opinion on all things Canadian for newspapers, magazines, radio, and later TV and the universities. Two Solitudes, his second novel, won the first of his five Governor General’s Awards and bought him and his wife a summer cottage in the Eastern Townships. Emboldened, he ventured a more “universal” (read “American”) story in his next, The Precipice, but after Canadian reviews accused him of selling out he ran home for the most Oedipal novel of this always Oedipal author, the father-slaying tragedy of a Cape Breton colliery doctor called Each Man’s Son.
Two Solitudes is MacLennan’s best-known novel, one of those rare books whose title alone shaped how this country speaks and thinks. The Watch That Ends the Night is his best novel. It’s told by cbc reporter and McGill professor George Stewart, based on MacLennan himself. The novel opens in early 1951 with George taking a phone call from a dead man: Jerome Martell, George’s wife Catherine’s first husband, reportedly killed twelve years earlier by the Nazis in France. Once the best surgeon in Montreal, Jerome left Catherine to volunteer in a surgical unit in the Spanish Civil War and has spent the years since in France, Poland, Russia, and China fighting fascism by whatever name. From here, the novel flashes back in George’s memory to the start of this love triangle amid the Depression.
The Watch That Ends the Night is an elegy. First, it’s an elegy for Dorothy, dying, like Catherine, of a rheumatic heart, dying through most of the eight years it took to write the book. Dorothy finally passed the day after Easter 1957. Eight months later, MacLennan finished the novel and dedicated it to his wife: “To you, wherever and whatever you may be, my thanks and this book.” Publicly, he made the usual novelist noises about Catherine being a fictional character, but when his publisher and close friend John Gray read the manuscript, he told MacLennan he could not see it as fiction, could not edit the lives of his friends.
