In Winter I Get Up at Night by Jane Urquhart

Reviewed by Michael Greenstein

Between Walls of Hotels and Hospitals

Almost mid-way through Jane Urquhart’s painterly, poetic novel In Winter I Get Up at Night, Doctor Angel recites some lines from his fellow physician, William Carlos Williams: “hospital where / nothing / will grow / lie cinders.” His young patient Emer McConnell listens to these lines, but her mind drifts to other settings in Saskatchewan where she has almost been destroyed by a prairie storm, the “big wind” that shatters her body. Doctor Angel continues to quote from Williams’s Imagist poem, “Between Walls”: “in which shine / the broken.” What is missing from his recital are the opening and ending lines of this minimalist poem – “the back wings / of the” and “pieces of a green / bottle.” In Doctor Angel’s rendering of the original poem, the lines are fragmented to reflect Emer’s broken body and her fragmented narration between past and present, as well as Urquhart’s technique of shining light on shards and cinders in narrow interiors against vast prairie panoramas. Indeed, another benevolent character, Mister Porter Abel, instructs Emer on how to focus on distances when he accompanies her on the train between Ontario and Saskatchewan, a journey that reverberates between walls in her hospital room.

The title of the novel, which derives from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, appears in one form in its opening sentence: “Late last night I woke when the prairie moon slid into the upper mullion of my window, then reached inside and touched my face.” In her house of fiction, Emer personifies this moonglow in a nocturnal atmosphere or dreamscape that persists through the rest of the novel. In painterly prose, moonlight and sunlight touch up interiors of house and portraits in a dynamic between still and active life. She stands shivering by the sill, “looking at the blue-tinted snow” from a dream she can’t recall. A music teacher, Emer narrates and hibernates in her dream sequences across provinces; her blurred memory across the prairie is filled with tears of sorrow and fury.

She walks through one of her mother’s houses – “the imaginary one she built inside her mind and furnished with whatever images she could seize from the narrow corridor of life allotted to her.” Emer navigates between parochial corridors and a wider world, as she replicates her mother’s life of teaching and love affair. Where her mother has an affair with Master Walter Scott Stillwell (a school inspector), she carries on with Harp, a renowned discoverer of medical cures (loosely based on Frederick Banting). Stillwell’s name contrasts with Emer’s (Irish for swift or quick-witted) in the novel’s broader interplay between stasis and migration. Harp’s body and ghost stalk her dreams of her damaged childhood spent in a hospital after the body-shattering tornado. That trauma informs her narration through hospital, hotels, trains, and schoolhouses.

In her mind Emer tries to keep her mother’s house in order, but to restore order in the face of so many hardships becomes an almost impossible task – hence all the weeping in an effort at solving complex puzzles of infidelity. On “some nights a moon and stars navigate the winter sky above the roof,” even as the reader navigates narration between past and present under various roofs. Emer shifts from her nocturnal meandering to daytime questions about teaching music in different schools. She packs a tin whistle, tuning fork, and triangle for sounds; and paintbrushes for the visual arts that depict galleries of the great capitals of the world. She carries all of these articles of instruction in one hand and her stick or cane in the other. She rides to school in a blue Ford that Harp has given her, although she is reluctant to accept his gift “because of the light that such a gift shone on what could only be described as my weakness of character.” Psychological frailty accompanies her physical disability, for Harp is the crutch on which she leans.

Emer is an ambidextrous juggler of music and trauma – “I was born twice, you see” – the second birth coming from the “big wind,” but possibly from other sources and rebirths, along with her younger twin siblings and other forms of twinning in the novel. Equally important, “you see” is a rare instance of direct address to the reader who sees her narrative painted in a range of colours. In the darkness of her early morning drive to school she remembers Friedrich, one of her childhood companions in the hospital who sings Brahms’s “In stiller Nacht,” a melody that haunts In Winter I Get Up at Night. Her landscape encompasses the train’s “cone-shaped beam of light” and the illuminated monastery windows where her brother Danny lives. (This cone shape is ominous in the caps her mother sews for the Ku Klux Klan in Saskatchewan.) Thus, the blaze of light on the book’s cover illuminates a tree – the Edenic apple tree that Emer’s mother transplants from Ontario to Saskatchewan where dollar bills grow on it after her transgression with the demonic Master.

After the destructive big wind on the prairie or northern Great Plains, Danny finds the small apple tree that remains standing. As he unpeels part of an adhering Canadian dollar bill, he recognizes the facial features of King George – a reminder of British colonial enterprise across the country. The big wind is a force of weather or nature that changes Emer’s life by crippling her childhood. Harp tells her that she resembles a broken windmill when she gets excited. An offshoot of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” Emer’s lover blows hot and cold in clasping casements of hotels. “He once told me about Harpocrates, the Hellenistic god of silence and secrecy.” The god’s gesture is a finger lightly pressed against his lips, a gesture that epitomizes Harp’s relationship to Emer. Harpocrates was also known as the Hellenist god of hope. His pseudonym is also an allusion to Harpo Marx, the comedy overshadowed by silence and music in a minor key. Harp’s ghost is Hellenistic, Coleridgean, and Canadian.

Urquhart exposes the Canadian class system in the family’s train journey from Ontario to Saskatchewan, but also in the educational system where Emer’s mother obtains a third-class certificate for teaching in rural schoolhouses. Foreigners in rags belong in the “free colonist car” near the rear of the train, while Emer’s family rides in the “better” car. The train’s velocity contains its own big wind: “It was as if everything we had ever known was being blown away from us by a noisy industrial wind.” She meets the porter Abel who treats her kindly, first in the train and later in hospital, in contrast to the Conductor who is harsh and pictured in a menacing blue. Abel’s uniform displays four brass buttons polished so that “they caught the beam of the night light” and appear to Emer as gold. Accordingly, he nicknames her Buttons and instructs her to look far in the distance instead of being overwhelmed by the immediate foreground speeding by. Throughout the journey her mother weeps and whispers to herself, “You are a disgrace” – her reaction to her affair with the Master school inspector.

Her mother’s school, Forest School, is so named because of a stand of trees surrounding it, but also because it has romantic associations in the midst of harsh realities. “Beyond the wonder of teaching, there was a further dimension to the schoolroom for my mother: a memory of approval-seeking and obedience. Romance.” In the pedagogical hierarchy this memory applies to her pupils, but also to her relationship with the Master who demands obedience from students and teachers alike. Just as daughter retains her ghost of Harp, so mother harbours her own spectral presence and absence. “The way the imagination links a daily activity in an undistinguished room with communion, even if that communion is with the ghost of a former relationship.” What is suppressed in school for mother and daughter comes out in the reading of letters at a later stage of discovery.

Their sexuality is repressed in the larger historical perspective of the 1920s when so many of the characters have been marked by the First World War. “I carry the music of an old abandoned world to these new world children, in the same way my mother introduced them – through reading – to the castles and cathedrals that so often figured in the stories of their schoolbooks.” In her novel the old world figures in the music, poetry, and paintings of castle hotels, schools, trains, and hospitals of the new world. “The Great War would show such architectural wonders to a handful of her students before death or disfigurement shut their sight down altogether.” Grief in Ontario and Saskatchewan whelms the novel, as much as snow and night light – not unlike the atmosphere in Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight or Anne Michaels’s fiction. Emer’s ghost or memory of Harp or her mother, or the echo of their minds adds to the amber mood and atmosphere of winter night.

What makes Harp interesting is not just his discovery of insulin, but also his taking up painting. While Emer teaches Leonard da Vinci, Ingres, and Goya to her prairie pupils, Harp visits the Prado in Madrid to study “Goya’s etching of malicious winged humans filling a blackened sky.” Goya’s Gothicism comments on the mood within the novel, the “wing of flying” contrasting with Emer’s disability. Harp’s postcards from the Prado, moreover, overlap with Stillwell’s letters preserved by Emer’s mother who caresses his “tapestry of words” woven by Urquhart in careful patterns of shadow and light, bat’s wings and cogged wheels of trains across the horizon.

The second chapter begins with more lighting effects – the warm light of her father’s lantern shining on their brand-new Saskatchewan farmhouse before moving on to the barn. “And if your window faces the barn, as mine did, you could see the gold seams of light appear between the perpendicular boards once he had entered the building.” This turn to the second-person pronoun invites the reader into the domestic drama and atmosphere in preparation for her memory of a poem read to her by Master Stillwell in Ontario. These provincial flashbacks interact with the flashlight function of the lantern to yield the title from Stevenson: “In winter I get up at night / and dress by yellow candle-light.” A stern romantic, Walter Scott Stillwell chokes in reaction to such phrases as “a bunch of lace at his throat,” while Emer’s father weeps when reading Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Stillwell’s Gothic romances include “shipwrecks and drownings and daemon lovers of the empire!” Like her instructor, Emer teaches “the equally frightening old folk songs” of empire and gothic romance. Whereas empire instructs and imposes its will, post-colonial writing interrogates and reinterprets history, with or without irony. Stevenson’s presence may be felt not just in his poetry, but in Urquhart’s Jekyll and Hyde dual characters of Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter, and Mister Abel Porter and the cold blue Conductor.

If from the beginning Emer is in charge of keeping her mother’s house in order, she fails to recite for the Master “the correct stanzaic order” of a Robert Burns poem which she misattributes to Robert Louis Stevenson. Burns, Scott, and Stevenson intrude in Saskatchewan’s schoolhouse which tries to absorb “My Heart’s in the Highlands.” When Emer tries to recite the poem, she sees a shadow on the window at the top part of the back door, which may be her mother. Shadow and memory arise throughout the novel. “Since then, I have come to believe it was a woman he saw, or perhaps only the memory of a woman, dim and transitory, with the light behind her. The shadow had the same shape as my mother.” This silhouette flits by in counterpoint to lines of poetry memorized and recited: “A-chasing the wild deer and following the roe.” While this chase reflects on the affair between Stillwell and her mother, the word “following” encompasses her whole world, for she follows in her mother’s footsteps. Meanwhile, Stillwell paces the schoolroom to the rhythm of the poem and disorients the narrating daughter.

Emer’s trauma after the big wind corresponds to the novel’s fragmented structure and shunting between past and present. “The image I retain from those hours in my childhood when I was carried to the train are fractured, split apart by pain.” Half dead, she experiences the train “as if it were alive.” To describe the abrupt halt of the train by her father and brother summoning it with their shirts waving in the air, she turns to the reader as witness: “You would expect that the surrounding air had stilled to a quiet hush.” Her narration is further stilled and hushed by a parenthesis – the still in Stillwell and hush of Harp: “(A panel painting from the Sienese School, Harp commented later.)” And that Sienese School contrasts with prairie schools in the novel where Emer learns and teaches.

Emer colonizes her prose as she moves from the classroom where the children sing “God Save the King” to her relationship with heroic Harp who is stubborn enough “for a Napoleon or a Roman emperor on a coin.” She wants “to clear his wilderness and plant his fields and colonize him. As he had colonized me.” Colonial love resides in order and power. Like the hotels and trains leading to them, the hospital with its doctors, nursing nuns, and hierarchies infringes on the colonial realm. The wall near Emer’s hospital bed has a crack like lightning, or rivers, streams, and tributaries. On the wall a map of mainlines, branches, and spurs of the railways of Saskatchewan remind her of where she has been and where she will go. This wall replicates the blackboard at school where the Master instils the hierarchical politics of Crown, Governor General, Senate, House of Commons in his innocent charges. That lesson is interfused with the experience of the railways “with their colonist cars fully occupied.” White settlers displace buffalo on the northern Great Plains.

The cracks on the green wall are “also married to the map of my ligaments, tendons, and cartilage and the map of my circulatory system…. I could visualize the bifurcating branching paths of my own lungs” which sing in minor keys and bifurcate in Romantic and Victorian poetry, and the paintings of other Masters. In Saskatchewan’s schools, the children sing “Rule, Britannia” and pledge allegiance to an island thousands of miles away. Her roommate Friedrich sings Schubert’s “Erlkönig” (a different king) and gathers around him the Company – a troupe of actors and performers who provide carnivalesque relief form the sadness of the children’s lives in the ward. After Friedrich finishes speaking, “the sunlight in the room got brighter, and everything … winked and gleamed, as if all the objects in the room wanted to bring something to our attention.” This Dickensian décor includes “strange and forbidden narratives” that commingle with the image of the Conductor whistling in a minor key, as hospital and train oscillate in her mind: “the whole ward would rock and sway, as if it were one incidental car of a long, long train.” Withs Sisters Philomena, Hildegard, and Editha the hospital migrates along with the locomotive in Urquhart’s postcolonial journey.

Urquhart paints images of light across the vast canvas of Canada, or she may focus on a narrower range of poetic vision. In the hospital Porter Abel offers Emer a gift from one of the hotels he’s not allowed to enter because of his colour. One gift is for his daughter Miranda in Nova Scotia, the other for Emer; one is a velvet horse, the other a seashell. She examines the sea urchin from Nova Scotia where Miranda represents not just “a dickens of a time” for her mother, but also a Shakespearean romance from The Tempest. “I studied the small balloon-like shell; it was like a miniature paper lantern.” Friedrich’s singing about broken hearts adds to the atmosphere of Brahms and Schumann. Urquhart closes the chapter by transferring Abel’s shell to Emer: “And while he sang, ferns make of frost unfurled on the wall I was once again facing, with my soft side pressing into the mattress and the hard carapace of the cast covering my other side like a shell.” Her song softens f sounds before hard c’s take over.

Urquhart’s painterly prose filters light between characters and settings, so that any external scene mingles with Emer’s consciousness and memory. On her way to school she follows a rail line, and because of “atmospheric clarity” she is able to see the milk train on the branch line. Her train of thought: “I can’t even glimpse a plume of smoke from a locomotive’s stack without thinking about Harp.” She takes a spur line for her rendezvous with him in various hotels across the land: “Each time I walked into the lobby of a castle hotel, I thought of my mother. The interiors of these empire-building, developer-fuelled palaces were essentially all the same.” Like the railways, these imperial hotels spread and are subject to romanticizing notions of palace and castle, as well as postcolonial critiques – like mother country, like daughter. She notices the watery shadows across the carpets of her hotel room and two elms outside the window, which touch overhead – nature imitating character. Their encounters at her house are equally furtive, as he walks through the “vernacular space” of her house, compared to the hotels’ imperial space.

Emer accompanies Harp to the official opening of the Saskatchewan School for the Deaf, an occasion which combines postcolonialism with Michel Foucault’s heterotopia or other places of contestation: “here it was, an institution, so like all the other institutions put up in the name of some monarch or another: schools for the blind, schools for the deaf, residential schools in which dwelt stolen and grief-stricken Indigenous children, jails, madhouses, colleges, poorhouses, workhouses, palace hotels.” These heterotopias echo the pomp of the mother country but silence deaf children. Not only does Emer discover her mother’s affair with the Master, but she also learns about her connection to the Ku Klux Klan – “The Invisible Empire” and Imperial Headquarters. Emer feels shame for this hidden history. Similarly, we learn about the history of the Doukhobors in Saskatchewan – their constant need to move on, and their destruction of schools that attempt to rob them of their language and way of life. With grace and beauty, Urquhart exposes and awakens personal and national history in her winter’s tale.

---

About the Author

Jane Urquhart, one of Canada’s best loved writers, was born in the north, ( in Little Longlac, Ontario), and grew up in Northumberland County and Toronto. She is the author of seven internationally acclaimed novels.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.

He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Aug. 27 2024

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 320 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771051999

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771051999