WINDOWS ON WINTER

Adam Gopnik is a true romantic. His 50th anniversary Massey Lectures, Winter: Five Windows On The Season, magnificently exhibits this quality. The title of each window begins with the letter R – Romantic Winter, Radical Winter, Recuperative Winter, Recreational Winter, Remembering Winter. The series was broadcast The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s  Radio One and published simultaneously by House of Anansi Press in November 2011. It made for good listening; and at $22.95 it’s a good buy.

The repetition in chapter titles sounds almost too cute, though alliteration is  characteristic of English romantic poetry. Each chapter is filled with ample content drawn from Gopnik’s vast knowledge of literature, music, art, religious traditions, sport and personal experience of Canadian winters he knew in his and my home town of Montreal, Canada. Twenty-two pages of the bibliography and three pages of permissions at the end of the book show how much research went into the preparation of these lectures.

The romantic attitude to winter came as one of the benefits of the Industrial Age in Britain and Northern Europe. Prior to that winter was to be endured for people not wealthy enough flee to a warmer climate. Central heating developed during Britain’s Industrial Age made greater enjoyment of the season possible. It became easier to go inside and look at winter from the windows of a more comfortable home. I remember doing that in my boyhood home near Montreal where winters were sometimes quite severe.

Vivaldi’s Winter from his opus Four Seasons and Samuel Johnson’s poem, “The Winter’s Walk,” voiced a bitterly negative view in the mid-eighteenth century. Just two decades later in 1785, William Cowper’s, “The Winter Evening,” presented a totally inverted view. Quickly followed by William Wordsworth, Hans Christian Anderson, composer Franz Schubert, poet Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, and artist Caspar David Frederic brought the romantic attitude to full flower.  After the defeat of Napoleon, not by Russian armies but the Russian winter, Pytor Vyazemsky and Alexander Pushkin had their opportunity to join the chorus that made winter “invigorating – even joyful – and always sexy.”

Reality set in when Gopnik turned to Radical Winter in his second lecture. The still elusive search for the northwest passage and the race for the north and the south poles told the truth about the extent of human endurance. Franklin’s bitter defeat by the ice and the many futile searches for his stricken expedition made for great adventure and great suffering. “They went in search of absolute winter – and got it, good and hard.”

A not always hidden imperialism clouded their vision perhaps more than the perpetual winter they discovered. In his return from apparently reaching the north pole, Robert Peary stole the right to claim success from fellow American Frederick Cook who got may have got there first. Instead of acting like a hero, Peary “did everything that made him look like a schmuck…. In one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism in the not-very-auspicious record, Peary, in 1894, carted away the three (scared) meteorites (of the Greenland Inuit) – and sold them to the Museum of Natural History in New York for forty thousand dollars.” One of the meteorites weighed one hundred tons. The Inuit had used the meteorites for centuries as their sole source of technology to eke out a survival existence by skinning walrus and whales for food, clothing and transport.

Gopnik’s third lecture/chapter on Recuperative Winter bears the sub-title of The Season in Spirit. Here he traces the origin, development and ultimate return to the roots of the annual festival of the winter solstice. Known by various names throughout history, it is best recognized in Western Christianity as Christmas. It did not start there, but was taken over from the Roman, Celtic, Norse and Jewish cultures. Many of the non-religious features of our modern celebrations come from non-Christian sources. Today our religious celebrations are hidden by commercial interest in the season that began, Gopnik claims, with Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol and Thomas Nast’s Santa Claus and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.

Gopnik begins this chapter quoting Christina Rossetti’s famous carol of the Victorian era, In the bleak midewinter, frosty wind made moan.” In the end he finds our modern Christmas anything but recuperative. “One thing we can say for certain: the symbolism of the modern, ambivalent, anxiety-ridden, double-faced Christmas is winter symbolism. We need warmth in order to enter the cold and at Christmas we need the cold in order to assert the warmth, need the imagery of the bleak midwinter in order to invoke the star above the stable.” It’s a persuasive thesis and antithesis. So far, we have not yet found an adequate synthesis.

Sport dominates the fourth window on winter, but what Gopnik sees most is his beloved game of hockey. He feels that the most Canadian of movie or television documentaries could be made of the unique way three amateur teams in Montreal at the turn of the 20^th century created the game he loves so well. Though the game had been invented elsewhere, they were the first to play by defined rules – drawn from rugby, no less, later augmented by rules from other sports.

Competition and even conflict existed between the three dominant cultures of Montreal at the time. These were the elite English minority centred on McGill University at the foot of Mount Royal, the French in their majority status throughout the eastern part of the city, and the poor Irish Catholics from the Point St. Charles area near the St. Lawrence Rivver. Hockey gave the three a creative outlet that made the success of the new sport possible. Though hockey is not the only or the oldest winter sport, Gopnik believes that the present, professional and American-dominated National Hockey League, detracts greatly from the beauty of his favourite sport.

Winter is having a hard time getting here to southern Ontario this year. Overnight on December 30-31 we lost scarce snow cover on the ground for the third time. That’s not at all like the winters that I and Adam Gopnik remember in Montreal in our youth. In his final chapter, Gopnik writes about Remembering Winter because it is changing. We remember it in two ways: “We use it as a blank slate … where everything is scrubbed away.” And we remember it after it is over. “We set our winter clocks by the storms we’ve known.”

Those are happy memories for both Adam and me.