MUSICAL DELIVERANCE
Novel set in 1930s Montreal
“The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley once wrote. “They do things differently there.”
If that’s true, then Montreal in the 1930s might require a whole other designation. From the perspective of 2015, as depicted in Susan Doherty Hannaford’s striking debut novel, A Secret Music (Cormorant, 296 pages, $21.95), it looks like a whole other world.
It was a rigidly segmented city, for one thing, with the reins of power still very much in the hands of an anglo-Protestant elite. Irish Catholics were a second-class minority within the English-speaking community. As for the French, for many living west of The Main they were little more than a rumour. One character in A Secret Music, a blue-collar resident of St-Henri, says he was in the fourth grade before he even knew there were French speakers in the city.
This is the Montreal of teenage piano prodigy Lawrence Nolan, the central figure of A Secret Music. Lawrence’s father is a self-made man, having worked his way up from the slaughterhouse floor to a successful if still socially vulnerable position as an Irish Catholic businessman in a Protestant-dominated place; his mother, once an aspiring concert violinist, is debilitated by what would now probably be termed an extreme case of postpartum depression, but was then mentioned only in hushed terms as “flattened anxiety” and kept hidden as much as possible. The other Nolan children are the rebellious Patricia and the sickly John, a near-holy figure who for many might call to mind the title character of John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany. Between a convalescent mother and a father distant both emotionally and literally, the Nolan children are frequently left to fend for themselves as Lawrence seeks escape through his musical gifts.
For Montreal-born Doherty Hannaford, long associated with the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto as a board member, A Secret Music was a way to write about two of her abiding interests — music and mental illness — and to incorporate aspects of her own local family history.
“When I began to research the great European composers,” she said of her prep work for the novel, “I was fascinated to learn that most suffered from various aspects of lifelong mental disorders — depression, mania, OCD, even schizophrenia,” she said. “Schumann was delusional and paranoid. Beethoven was bipolar. Schubert had severe mood swings, violent anger, dark despair. Chopin had paralyzing depression.”
The period of A Secret Music’s setting, brought to life by a sharp eye for physical and sensory detail and meticulous historical accuracy, was a time when depression and mental illness were sources of shame, to be hidden from view at all costs; as for treatment, things were still at the medieval stage. “There were no options,” Doherty Hannaford said. “You went to an asylum (in the case of the novel, that means the Douglas Institute in Verdun), where the popular thing was ice baths. It was the same as the idea behind shock therapy — they would submerge you in 34-degree water in an attempt to shock your brain out of its malaise.”
For Lawrence, caught between his obligations in a troubled household where his mother lives through his accomplishments and his drive to make a mark in the broader world — he is offered a chance to study at the prestigious Curtis Institute — the pressure to keep up appearances calls for a degree of maturity that’s unfair to demand of one so young. The strain shows, and the novel’s narrative drive lies in the question of whether, in the end, he will crack. Novels about music and musicians have traditionally faced a fundamental and often insuperable challenge — how, after all, do you write about something that by its very definition demands to be heard? Doherty vaults the problem by having music play a part as much symbolic as literal. For Lawrence, the piano is more than a means of self-expression — it’s his tool of identity, his way of escape, and his bridge to the world around him. For his mother, music is the one piece of common ground she shares with her oldest son, and for much of the time it’s her only access route back from depression. In a world
with precious few safety nets, how a young pianist comes to grips with Chopin is about more than a possible scholarship — without exaggerating much, it’s a matter of life or death.
Schumann was delusional and paranoid. Beethoven was bipolar. Schubert had severe mood swings, violent anger, dark despair.