The Double Hook (13 page)

The two versions of a scene involving the Widow Wagner and her son, Heinrich, illustrate at least some of the differences between penultimate draft and final copy. In this scene (Three, 6) the Widow tells her son to find his sister, Lenchen, who has gone in search of her lover, James Potter, and to bring her home: “Then together we will think what to do,” she says. In the draft version, the scene is remembered by Heinrich; and the memory – framed by the Widow’s final cry (“Come back. Come back whatever you find”) and the repetition of this cry in the sound of his horse’s feet – is of a confession which his mother made to him.

In its final form the framework of memory and the Widow’s confession both disappear as the scene is compressed and internalized.

The nature and circumstances of a past “sin” are now of less importance than its consequences. The Widow’s experience of guilt issues now in urgent compassion for her pregnant daughter: “Heinrich,” she said. “Go. Go.”

It is as a result of such decisions that
The Double Hook
became what now it is. The Widow’s new urgency follows hard upon the disappearance of the old guarantees that every condition must have a cause and that the past will always make room for regret even when the present has room only for fear. Whatever Watson’s intentions were (whatever the effects upon her of publishers’ reports or of Salter’s sense of the manuscript’s Learesque nakedness) in her final, extensive revision of
The Double Hook
she moved against such guarantees as are provided by
possibility
and
causality
and
memory
in order more fully to realize that spareness and immediacy that come to characters when they have no alternative but to
be
in their time and place – when they are characters who have no history apart from the experience of their readers. With Watson’s own description of the final condition of these characters as “figures in a ground, from which they could not be separated,” we are reminded of Angel, “Tough and rooted as thistle” (Five, 12), and of Felix Prosper’s final glimpse of old Mrs. Potter, now no longer fishing, “Just standing like a tree with its roots reaching out to water” (Five, 3). We are reminded of the futility of her son James’s attempt “To get away. To bolt noisily and violently out of the present. To leave the valley. To attach himself to another life which moved at a different rhythm” (Four, 1). But we are reminded also of Marshall McLuhan’s perception that as T.S. Eliot revised
The Waste Land
under the influence of Ezra Pound, he discovered that “the public outside the poem” was the poem’s “real
ground
.”

Sheila Watson has observed that although she cannot remember when she started to write
The Double Hook
, she “first thought about it … right in the middle of Bloor Street.” The time was the late 1940s. At the war’s end, Watson had come with her husband to study and to teach in Toronto. They had come from British Columbia, where Watson had been born and where she had lived and taught. And one day she stood at the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road and she looked up at the facade of the Anglican Church of the Redeemer which then, as now, stands at the northeast corner of that intersection, and she “first thought about it.”

She thought, according to her own account, about a problem and a place. Whether or not it was possible for a writer in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century to write about a particular place without remaining merely regional – this was the problem. “… [H]ow do you? how are you international if you’re not international? if you’re very provincial, very local, and very much a part of your own milieu …” The place that for her had given rise to this problem was located in the Cariboo country of central British Columbia: Dog Creek, where for two years, from 1934 to 1936, she had taught nine grades in a one-room school. It was a place which she found as beautiful as A.Y. Jackson and Bruno Bobak had when they went there to paint; as beautiful, though more devious and hostile and violent than they had represented it. She found it, in her words, “a country of opposites – heat and cold; flat rolling plateaus and sheared-off hills; streams, rivers, pot-holes and alkali waste; large ranches and small holdings; native Indians and ex-patriated Europeans; and great stretches where no one lives at all.” And she found there isolation. “Here, for perhaps the first time in my life, I was alone for hours of the day and night and often for days in succession. I was alone physically, I mean, except for the dog at hand and the horse in the stable. Yet round me and in myself, too, I became actively conscious of another kind of loneliness …”

This other kind of loneliness had less to do with geographical remoteness or spatial separation than with the separation of mind from mind. “I wrote about the Cariboo,” Watson observed, at the time of her correspondence with Salter, “because image and idea came to me together.” The remoteness of the place and the isolation of its inhabitants provided her with images for figuring forth and clarifying the
predicaments that these conditions imposed. At the same time, the lore of the Shuswap Indians who lived in the country where she taught, gave her, in Coyote, an incarnation of those paradoxes that she had already found in the landscape and in human society there.

Sheila Watson has summed up the attitude to which she was responding when she first thought about
The Double Hook:
“It had to be about what I would call something else.” Whatever this something
else
was, it was most assuredly
there
rather than
here
, and
then
rather than
now
. Coyote is her most striking challenge to this attitude. His nature and exploits are described in tales of the Shuswap and other tribes collected by the American folklorist James A. Teit early in this century (see
Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition
, Vol. II, and
Folk-Tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes
). He was a creature of the district where Watson taught and about which she wrote: his place in her book is
here
and his time is
now
. He answers to a people’s need to account for their world: he is their tyrant and their “thing,” his roles as trickster and demi-god and buffoon embodying the motley nature of existence itself. He is as wily as Ulysses, as elusive as Proteus, as malicious as Satan, as ingenious as Prometheus (for Coyote, too, is a stealer of fire). He is the father of the Shuswap, wiser than Raven, master of the elements. Like Jehovah, he brings down the proud. “A man full up on beer saying in that beer how big he is,” Angel observes. “Not knowing that Coyote’ll get him just walking round the side of the house to make water” (Two, 6). Also like Jehovah – and like the Fates and household and tribal gods of other times and other places – he is an arbiter of consequences.

Watson introduces Coyote with no apologies, and thus she deals with those who would counsel “something
else
.” Certainly, such analogies as he invites by virtue of his nature,
his power, and his influence, serve to connect him and those who live under his eye with other gods and other people. At the same time as he answers to such shared needs and fears, however, he remains the creature of a particular place. Here, he bears witness to what he embodies: the continuing presence of origins and their consequences. It is a presence which makes itself felt, not in the forms of the old guarantees (that Watson moved against in her final revisions of
The Double Hook
), but in the insistence of present participles, and in other vivid images of chronic realities. The “turning,” “reaching,” “grinding,” “walking,” “falling” of the novel’s opening page. The doom that Greta sits in when she sits in her mother’s chair. The “first pasture of things” that James Potter enters at the novel’s end. Coyote himself.

When Sheila Watson went to the Cariboo she went to teach. “I didn’t choose,” she has commented, “it chose me. It was the only place in 1934 that said, ‘Come, and teach our children.’ I had no idea where it was when I left by train in Vancouver, except somewhere
there
.” The world she left when she boarded that train had prepared her in ways that she could hardly have anticipated, both to receive and ultimately to transform her experience of this new place.

She had come from New Westminster to Dog Creek, as if from the northwest corner of the world’s end to an interior place of consequences. She had come at a time (indeed,
because
of that time) when the Coast, like the Prairies and the Exchanges of the East, had not yet shaken off the Great Depression. She had already taught in New Westminster for a while, at a boys’ elementary school run by the Roman Catholic Sisters of Saint Ann. She had been paid fifty dollars a month – when the Sunday collections at St. Peter’s Church
yielded as much – and until they did, a packet of cigarettes from the pastor, Father Murphy, tided her over. She had seen a child faint from hunger; and she had been drawn into a carefully contrived routine by her pupils, who took turns walking her home from school in anticipation of the food they knew her mother would press upon them. And she had also seen the rituals of their fathers: chalk marks on the gates or fences of any who had provided meals, and who might be expected to do so again.

Her own father, Dr. Charles Edward Doherty, had been superintendent of the Provincial Mental Hospital in New Westminster. Watson had lived with her family in quarters in this Hospital from the time of her birth, in 1909, until her father’s death in 1920. She drew images from this place and from the Royal City (as New Westminster is locally known) for a story entitled
Antigone
, which was first published in the same year as
The Double Hook
, 1959. New Westminster remains in this story palpably itself: “a world spread flat, tipped up into the sky so that men and women bend forward, walking as men walk when they board a ship at high tide.” The Hospital, on the other hand, becomes a “kingdom” presided over by the narrator’s father, where the narrator and his young cousins, Ismene and Antigone, take for granted the likes of “Atlas who held up the sky” and “Pan the gardener” and “Hermes who went on endless messages” – “men who thought they were gods or the instruments of gods or at the very least, god-afflicted and god-pursued.” They took for granted what such lunacy celebrates, that possibilities can be recovered, that things can be at the same time unique and chronic, that the origins and the extremities of human experience are always present.

The Double Hook
contains traces of another kind of celebration, one that is similarly rooted in Watson’s earliest
experiences and which, like the celebration of lunacy, is as mysterious as it is vivid. When he is confronted by Lenchen’s intrusion upon his house and his indifference, Felix Prosper thinks: “I’ve got no words to clear a woman off my bench” (Two, 1). Such words as he does have, both in this instance and later, when he goes to fetch Angel to nurse the blinded Kip (Three, 5), are a legacy of priests, vestiges of a time of “scratchy white surplice over … uncombed head” (Two, 14). “What the hell,” is Lenchen’s reply to his “
Pax vobiscum
” (Two, 1).

“Introibo. The beginning. The whole thing to live again. Words said over and over here by the stove. His father knowing them by heart. God’s servants. The priest’s servants. The cup lifting. The bread breaking.
Domine non sum dignus
. Words coming. The last words” (Two, 1).

Knowing. Lifting. Breaking. Coming. Chronic realities. Even “The beginning,” in this context, has the force of a present participle.

Like the country that beckoned its author in 1934, and that gave her its images,
The Double Hook
is a complex mixture: by turns beautiful, violent, and devious; certainly paradoxical; unquestionably indecorous. A parrot drinks beer in this book, and the sky has a skin, and a woman becomes the tangled garden that she wears, in a house that has jaws. Quotation marks no longer “fence off” a man’s or a woman’s words, as narrative moves uninhibited into the realm of drama and out again, snatching economy and vividness. The old guarantees have vanished; and yet there is still “The whole thing to live again.” Here the “Words said over and over” retain their old urgency, though they are spoken now with a new clarity.

Sheila Watson’s comments on
The Double Hook
have been drawn both from “What I’m Going to Do,”
Open Letter
3, 1 (Winter 1974–75), and from an account of the novel’s history that she wrote at the time of her correspondence with Frederick M. Salter. I am grateful to Sheila Watson for allowing me to quote from this last account, and also for allowing me to examine and to quote from two copies of the penultimate draft of
The Double Hook
, one of which had been corrected by Professor Salter and one by herself. I am also grateful to Mrs. Frederick M. Salter for allowing me to quote from letters that her husband wrote to Sheila Watson and from the Foreword he wrote for
The Double Hook
.