March 12, 2018 7 min to read

The Watch that Ends the Night

the great step forward in Canadian writing

“An important “

For many Canadians, Hugh Maclennan is the name that appears in parentheses after the title “Courage”, a song from the Canadian Rock Band The Tragically Hip. Maclennan was an early, even the first, Canadian novelist. Today, however, his books are out-of-print. I dug up my copies at MacLeod’s Books, a used bookstore on Hastings Street in Vancouver.

While some of the themes of the Canadian Identity may not resonate today as they did then, this novel explores the themes of courage and meaning in a time when people were trying to understand what world they lived in, what it meant to be a human and a Canadian in this new dangerous time.

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

This book explores the meaning of life in a new era where traditional moralities have been placed side-by-side with modern ones; the example provided by Jesus seems to stand next to the reality of a world where the nuclear bomb threatens all existence.

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

Perhaps most interesting was the duality of the two central male characters, George and Jerome, two men whose behaviour under pressure varies, but whose humanity show that there is no single way to be a man (or a mensch). Jerome seems almost a force of nature: athletic, decisive, powerful, and righteous. George is timid yet thoughtful and reflective. He is a counter-balance to the aesthetic of Jerome. The younger version of me would have been enamoured with Jerome and frustrated with George; mature me understands that there are times when I’ve acted like Jerome and times when I’ve acted like George. Sometimes the moments we act like him, the outcomes aren’t always what we’d hoped for, and when we act like George sometimes the outcomes are better than we could have hoped for. The book makes it clear that Jerome’s life is not some ideal to move towards; it creates an interesting binary of how we move forward in life: sometimes brashly, sometimes thoughtfully.

The book also makes it clear that Jerome’s story is by no means a result of some ethos he has. Jerome is thrown into the pressure cooker from a young age. He’s not some Ayn-Randi-ian archetype who is the complete intellectual master of his destiny. Jerome became Jerome in the crucible of the pre-war Canadian identity as a land of resources being exploited. He escaped the dangers of that environment not by sheer will to become a great man, but by the sheer necessity to survive. He was forged, not self-made. And in the novel, there are moments where his sense of duty seems misplaced (leaving his wife and child to go serve in the Spanish Civil War during which he disappears and is presumed dead).

It’s also worth mentioning that Jerome was partially inspired by the Canadian thoracic surgeon and advocate for socialised medicine, Norman Bethune. I say ‘partially’ because Bethune’s background is notably different from that of Jerome.

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

The edition of the book I picked up is a 1960 first printing, and it looks like it’s had a few owners. Someone who read this book marked up the section of the book that Gord Downie riffed on in the song “Courage (for Hugh Maclennan):

There is no simple explanation for anything imporant any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

I can’t tell if this was done before or after the song was written, almost as much time has passed between the publication of the book as has passed since the song came out!

New Canada. New World. New Morality.

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

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