The Watch That Ends the Night by Hugh MacLennan

First published: 1959

Type of work: Social morality

Time of work: From about 1910 to 1951

Locale: Montreal, the Laurentians, northeastern New Brunswick, Spain, Leningrad, Germany, and China

Principal Characters:

• George Stewart, the narrator, a political commentator for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and part-time university lecturer
• Jerome Martell, a surgeon and social activist
• Catherine Martell, the wife of both George and Jerome
• Sally Martell, the daughter of Jerome and Catherine
• Nora Blackwell, a nurse and “puritanical nymphomaniac”
• Arthur Lazenby, a social activist who becomes a senior civil servant
• Giles and Josephine Martell, a clergyman and his wife, who rear Jerome
• Jack Christopher, Catherine’s doctor
• Hastings Stewart, the father of George Stewart
• Dr. Rodgers, the head of medical staff at Beamis Memorial Hospital

The Novel

When George Stewart, a political analyst for CBC radio, returns a call to a seedy Montreal hotel in the winter of 1950, he hears the voice of Jerome Martell, a gifted doctor and left-wing political activist who disappeared while serving with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. Jerome was married to Catherine, who, assuming him dead, is now George’s wife. The reappearance of Jerome jogs George’s memory and triggers a series of flashbacks which explore his own past and the intense personalities of Jerome and Catherine Martell and the political milieu of Montreal during the 1930’s.

George’s role as the analytical radio commentator qualifies him as the natural narrator of the tale. The reader learns about his childhood with his father, an inept inventor who prefers playing with children to working for a living. The reader follows his teenage infatuation with Catherine, who was already afflicted by a rheumatic heart, and witnesses his inability to break free of his family to follow her to McGill University.

Much of the novel takes place during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. George, unable to find suitable work after taking a degree in history, resorts to teaching at a private school. His weekend jaunts into Montreal bring him into association with a group of Socialists, some of whom are active members of the Communist Party. Among this group, he encounters the brilliant young surgeon Jerome Martell, now married to George’s old sweetheart, Catherine.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Montreal’s left-wing sympathizers rally to the call for men and women to fight Fascism by joining the Loyalist forces. Such determination is strongly rejected by the Catholic Church, and riots between the Left and Right are not uncommon. The novel documents this social history through the role of Jerome, who forsakes a brilliant medical career, his wife Catherine, and his daughter Sally in order to join the Spanish Loyalists. In Spain, he becomes a prisoner of the Nazis and, after his release, continues his quest as a participant in the Chinese Communist revolution, much in the pattern of the celebrated Canadian Socialist Norman Bethune.

While the novel explores the nature of Montreal’s left-wing radicalism of the 1930’s, it also operates on a more immediate and personal level through its examination of both Jerome’s and George’s relationships with Catherine. Hugh MacLennan focuses upon Catherine’s struggle to live a full life despite her defective heart. Her resulting life force, while sustaining her, sucks vitality from her men, who must learn her secret of living their own deaths.

The novel concludes with a return to the present as Jerome makes his way to Catherine’s side just before she suffers her worst embolism. His final gift to her takes the form of medical healing, and he moves off to a career on a new frontier leaving Catherine and George to deal with Catherine’s inevitable death.

The Characters

While George Stewart provides the narrative and the point of view in this novel, Jerome Martell is by far the novel’s strongest character. The illegitimate son of a cook in a New Brunswick lumber camp who is murdered by one of the men, Jerome is forced at the age of ten to flee for his life in a small canoe. The image of Jerome floating down the river in the darkness of night away from his primitive origins and toward his ultimate confrontation with truth is central to the meaning of the novel. His first stop of consequence is with the Martells, who name him and bring him up within a Christian tradition as their foster child.

He becomes a soldier during World War I, and his experiences overseas—the killing of eleven men with a bayonet, spending the night in a foxhole with the body of one of his victims, and his exposure to venereal disease—destroy his Christian faith. “He had come back from the war an agnostic, so full of guilt and so shocked by his experiences that he had been unable to live any longer with his foster parents.” He leaves Atlantic Canada for Quebec, working his way through McGill Medical School.

Jerome is described as “dumb, but . . . dangerous. He’s an idealist, and he has five times more energy than any normal man.... Everything he does is compulsive.... He explodes.” Jerome’s vitality, his “life force,” refuses “to be bounded, circumscribed or even judged” by normal social convention. People who do live conventional lives and come into his orbit are emotionally damaged or destroyed from the encounter. Nora Blackwell, the operating-room nurse who gives up her husband and follows Jerome to Europe, commits suicide. His foster parents are devastated when he rejects them along with his Christianity. On the other hand, his explosive energy is matched by the intuitive touch of a truly gifted healer. As a doctor, he brings miracles; as a man, he spreads emotional chaos.

When Jerome meets Catherine, he finds for the first time a personality endowed with as much undisciplined life force as he possesses. Catherine draws upon his energy to find the courage to test her rheumatic heart when she conceives Jerome’s daughter, Sally. It is Jerome who provides the healing touch which gives her several more years of life after her second embolism. While Jerome’s vitality can be life-giving, it is also emotionally destructive, and the marriage between Catherine and Jerome is doomed.

Jerome’s loss of Christian faith creates a vacuum which he attempts to fill first through his marriage to Catherine and then with Socialist ideology. His guilt from his actions during World War I is eased by the belief that the capitalist system was primarily responsible for the carnage. His commitment to the battle against Fascism, however, leads to the discovery that political ideology is no substitute for true spiritual awareness. Ultimately, he has a reconversion to Christianity while in a German prison.

Catherine, a woman who has lived with her own death from childhood, has been described as a “spiritual vampire.” Her confrontation with death gives her a driving energy to live which consumes the men in her life. Even Jerome is forced to flee from her, admitting that he married her “for safety against life.” Catherine, on the other hand, has learned to “live her own death.” She has the power to retreat inward, building a shell around herself. The shell is death, and Catherine regains her will to live by negating life. She thinks of herself “as annihilated,” thus destroying the fear of death. The character of Catherine owes much to MacLennan’s first wife, who suffered through five embolisms before dying.

George Stewart is described as “middle class to the bone.” He also refers to himself at one point in the novel as “everyman.” George encounters both Catherine and Jerome and is able to absorb from each enough vitality to fill his own spiritual vacuum. Like Jerome, George has lost his faith in religion, in himself, and in the integrity of human society. In Catherine, he finds his rock, his defense against his own disbelief. In order to live with her, it is necessary for him to come to grips with her inevitable death, and it is Jerome who provides the key to this problem. If Catherine must negate her death in order to live, George must be able to accept his loss of Catherine in order to live with her.

The novel also features a number of memorable secondary characters. George’s father, Hastings Stewart, the inept inventor, is a fine study in eccentricity, while the surgical nurse, Nora Blackwell, described as a “puritan nymphomaniac,” is a minor but complex character. Dr. Rodgers and Jack Christopher represent the old Montreal medical establishment and act as foils to Jerome’s radical views on medical service.

Critical Context

The Watch That Ends the Night, Hugh MacLennan’s fifth novel, established him as a novelist of international stature. The novel received the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and assisted in winning for him the Alberta Medal and the Critics’ Circle Award. It had solid sales in Canada, the United States—more than nineteen weeks on The New York Times list—and in Great Britain. Translations were sold in German, Swedish, and Estonian. By 1975, the novel had sold more than 700,000 copies.

Most critics agree that this novel fuses a number of themes which appear in earlier books into a coherent pattern. In earlier novels, such as Barometer Rising (1941) and Two Solitudes (1945), a variety of characters are required to play such roles as the father figure, the wandering hero, the gifted healer, and the wise counselor, often with two-dimensional results. In The Watch That Ends the Night, Jerome Martell is a composite of these roles, indicating that MacLennan had undergone a major shift in his theory of fiction. This novel, he said, “would not depend on character-in-action, but on spirit-in-action. The conflict here, the essential one, was between the human spirit of Everyman and Everyman’s human condition.” George Stewart became the “Everyman” figure, whose encounter with Jerome and Catherine leads him to resolve his own spiritual anguish.

While MacLennan’s shift in approach was far from radical for the times, it did allow him to achieve a much more integrated vision of the human condition than had been present in his earlier novels.

Bibliography

Buitenhuis, Peter. Hugh MacLennan, 1969.

Cameron, Elspeth. Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life, 1981.

Cockburn, Robert H. The Novels of Hugh MacLennan, 1969.

Goetsch, Paul, ed. Hugh MacLennan, 1973.

Woodcock, George. Hugh MacLennan, 1969.