On Hugh MacLennan’s Watch

Mostly, though, The Watch is an elegy for Canada, for the Canada that might have been. Through his memories, George takes his readers back to the 1930s, back to a generation searching for something, anything, to replace the shattered faiths of their fathers. Marxism. Communism. Socialism. Fascism. Social Credit. The ccf, the lsr, the cpc, dreams mouldering under forgotten acronyms. “Was there ever a time,” asks George, “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?”

Jerome is the novel’s big, bold hero of the hungry 1930s: the man of ideals and action, as good with a bayonet as with his surgeon’s scalpel. With his shirt off, he looks like a boxer. George is its hero of the 1950s: a nice little man in a meaningless job who dreams of a warm apartment after a cold walk, a drink before dinner, a good night’s sleep. He doesn’t take his shirt off, but if he did he’d look like a professor. Let’s finish the allegory: Catherine is the Canada they both love, her damaged heart a metaphor for a generation that never felt safe, a generation that came of age in the Depression, remembers two World Wars, and lives under the Bomb.

The plot and the times side with George. George gets all he wants and more, Catherine and the daughter Jerome left behind. Jerome gets his surgeon’s hands smashed by the Nazis. By the 1950s, the ideals of the ’30s were just a memory, broken in war and forgotten in Canada’s postwar affluence. MacLennan lost what faith he had in commun-ism after a disillusioning trip to Russia in 1937, a trip George makes for the cbc the same summer and with the same result: “See Russia,” he hears a fellow traveller say while in Leningrad, “and let your theories die.”

Hugh MacLennan was a very earnest writer, very cbc. And like the cbc, he was best at documentary. Better than any book I know, The Watch That Ends the Night captures its generation’s loss of faith in both religion and politics, and the resulting quandary of having to find meaning in units no larger than the family. “Prosperous under the bomb,” says George, “we all seemed to have become atomized. Wherever I looked I saw people trying to live private lives for themselves and their families . . . The gods, false or true, had vanished. The bell which only a few years ago had tolled for all, now tolled for each family in its prosperous solitude.” That, not the youth or corrupt politicians, is the source of voter apathy in Canada: the generation of Canadians who gave up on citizenship, who abandoned the polis for the oikos and its summer cottage.

The Watch is the fictional counterpart to economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, a bestseller the same year; both depict a society that has lived through the Depression and the Second World War and come out materially comfortable and politically secure, but existentially bankrupt, with nothing bigger to believe in than the shiny new cars in the driveways of its shiny new homes. MacLennan saw all that Galbraith saw, understood it — and ran straight into the arms of God. Atheist or agnostic for most of their adult lives, his three main characters all find meaning at last through the old trick of renaming mortal chaos as divine mystery. Politics, affluence, even family — the trouble with these substitute faiths, says George, is that none of them abides. Like all MacLennan’s novels, The Watch isn’t really about explaining man’s ways; it’s about explaining God’s ways. For that explanation, you can skip the book for the title, from Psalm 90: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” Politics do not matter, because God is watching.

That Christian consolation must have struck a chord with many Canadians that summer of 1959, though perhaps more with the parents of the 1950s than the children of the 1960s. The Watch is ostensibly about the emergence of a modern Canada and a modern Canadian, but it is actually and defiantly anti-modern. It opens in a modern city, Montreal, with the sounds of George’s young students. It ends in the country, in a cottage, with the young nowhere to be seen, with even daughter Sally conveniently away, with just the parents, classical music, nature, and God.

For these and other reasons, MacLennan is today dismissed as a historical relic, a conservative left behind by the revolution waiting on the other side of that summer. That’s mostly wrong, a mistake of a history too tinted by Woodstock footage. In 1967, the summer of love, the name that came first to the minds of Canadians when asked to name a famous Canadian novelist for the centennial was still Hugh MacLennan.

For his part, MacLennan believed The Watch was a revolutionary novel — revo-lutionary because conservative. Despite his early attempts to follow in the footsteps of Joyce and other modernist writers, by the 1950s he was railing in essay after essay against the entrenched cynicism, ugliness, and decadence of “Eliot and Co.” (“The whole damn lot are homo-sexuals,” he grumbled in a letter to Toronto critic William Arthur Deacon.) To MacLennan, the modern novel had dead-ended in despair. His novel went back to faith, back to morality — “Back to Tolstoy,” as he titled one version of his argument. After The Watch came out, he told an interviewer that “While The Watch doesn’t avoid many of the basic tragedies of the human condition, still it doesn’t ‘look back in anger.’ I felt a revolution of this sort was necessary if the novel as a genre was to live.”

Entertain this thought: in Canada, the revolution took. Laurence, Davies, Munro, Atwood, Ondaatje, Shields: each affirms life over despair, several with God’s help. In 1959, MacLennan told an audience at the University of Saskatchewan that for the novel to recover the readers it was losing to non-fiction and TV, it would have to aim neither at the highbrow nor the mass reader, but at the middle — readers who wanted affirmation from art, not nihilism. “More often than not,” he said, “the profession of the serious reader today, when the reader applies for a passport, is classified as housewife.” That is the market for fiction in this country, the only market that matters: serious, life-affirming novels, mostly for women. MacLennan not only saw that market earlier and clearer than anyone; he helped create it.

In The Watch, the salve for suffering is art: classical music and Catherine’s paintings for the characters, the novel for the reader. “Go to the musicians,” says George. In Bach, in Beethoven, he says, you can hear conflicts resolved: the light and the darkness, love and hate, life and death. You can hear God. Whether because of MacLennan’s example or not, many later Canadian writers have dropped the cause and found enough in the effect, using art not as a window on but a replacement for God. From The Watch, it’s a short step to another Canadian bestseller, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi: belief in fiction as a substitute for belief in God.