The Double Hook

by Sheila Watson

James’s got more than a porcupine has to answer for, he said. How’re you going to pick up a living now?

  There’s no telling at all, Kip said. There’s no way of telling what will walk into a man’s hand.

  21

  Ara was sitting at the foot of Felix’s bed. The girl lay quite still, her yellow hair matted with sweat. From the next room came the sound of the Widow’s voice and the sound of Angel’s hand upon the stove.

  Suddenly the girl sat up.

  The door’s opening, she said. I see James in his plaid shirt. He’s lifting the baby in his two hands.

  Ara stood up. The girl wasn’t speaking to her any longer; she was speaking to James.

  His name is Felix, she said.

  Ara didn’t want to look at James. She went to the window and leaned out across the bush where the sparrow chattered. Above her the sky stretched like a tent pegged to the broken rock. And from a cleft of the rock she heard the voice of Coyote crying down through the boulders:

  I have set his feet on soft ground;

  I have set his feet on the sloping shoulders

  of the world.

  AFTERWORD

  BY F.T. FLAHIFF

  When and where does a book begin?

  On its first page, of course, with each reader and each new reading; with its recovery – or its discovery: here and everywhere, now and always.

  With its publication, a book has another kind of beginning. In the case of Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, this beginning occurred in Toronto, on Saturday, 16 May 1959 – a day as it happened, of record-breaking cold (a high of only 45° Fahrenheit) and snow. A headline on Page 7 of that morning’s Globe and Mail asked: IS THE LIBERAL PARTY BEING WIPED OUT COMPLETELY IN WESTERN CANADA?; and Page 1 reminded its readers that another chronic problem remained unresolved: a divided Germany – legacy of the Second World War. On Page 16 there was an advertisement for The Double Hook: “A novel of beauty, artistry and power which is a Canadian literary discovery (Paper: $1.75).” This same page contained – under the headline LEFT HOOK, RIGHT HOOK, KO! – a review of The Double Hook. While welcoming McClelland and Stewart’s enterprise in publishing a new work simultaneously in cloth and paper, the review dismissed as “obscure,” “eccentric,” and “difficult” this particular choice for such an experiment. “… It is permeated by an odd atmosphere of unreality; it has the quality, in fact, of a distorted not especially vivid dream,” this tale of a mother (Mrs. Potter) who “dies in a manner about which there is apparently some confusion,” struck down by “an uneducated, middle-aged philanderer” (her son, James) and “his embittered wife” (in actuality her daughter, Greta; James is unmarried). “Certainly,” this remarkable review of The Double Hook concluded, “it cannot be described as entertainment in any sense of the word.”

  Some years before its publication, The Double Hook had already found a more sympathetic and more perceptive audience than this. In the wake of rejections by publishers in Canada and England (the latter complaining of too many characters and too much motion and dust; the former, of the absence of “a shattering inner force” or “any profound message”), Sheila Watson sent a copy of the manuscript of The Double Hook to Frederick M. Salter, a distinguished professor and authority on medieval and Shakespearean drama, who, since 1939, had taught the “writing” course at the University of Alberta. The time was the autumn of 1954, and Sheila Watson had just moved to Edmonton from Calgary where, in the previous year, she had completed The Double Hook. Salter’s reaction was as precise and detailed as it was generous and enthusiastic. In a letter dated 12 December 1954, he proposed to Mrs. Watson the mounting of a “campaign” on behalf of the publication of her work – although not without first bringing to her attention what he termed “a few trivial matters” (whether, for example, James Potter would be familiar with a “stud book,” whether Lilly could have “unbuttoned” his pocket when she stole his wallet, or whether it was advisable to use such words as “bugger” and “bullshit”). Salter also suggested that the sections of the work (there were six in this earlier version) might be given names (The Death of the Old Lady / Lenchen vs. Greta vs. James / A Flowered Garment / Nowhere to Go / A Waiting World / An End – and A Beginning); and he even proposed that the ending as it then stood was indeed “of a hint or suggestion of some kind that you have been dealing with things eternal and not transitory.”

  Sheila Watson has recalled Professor Salter’s more general advice to her: “The way you write a novel, the way you put a novel together, is the way you put together a pigpen – you do it with craft and skill, and in an orderly fashion.” Such advice seemed hardly necessary for one who had written, in Salter’s judgment, a work “perfect” in its detail: “I have gone to the trouble of mapping the countryside,” he wrote to Watson, “and your references to it never slip.” Still, he recognized that most readers (including editors and reviewers) “gallop” rather than read, and that such a pace could only “court bewilderment and frustration” for readers confronted by so spare and so dense a work as The Double Hook. With this in mind, he proposed that editor and reader alike be given what he termed “a necessary leg-up” in the form of a Foreword: “Without some explanation, I think it has no chance of being published.” Because he feared that Watson would “get off into the cloudy abstract and unintelligible symbolic” if she were to attempt such a Foreword (“What amazes me,” he had confessed to her, “is that you should do such a perfect work and not be able to explain it”), Salter wrote it himself. The first paperback edition of The Double Hook contains, in the prefatory “Note from the Publisher,” a long quotation from this Foreword: a testament to Salter’s faith in Sheila Watson’s novel, and a reminder of his place in its history.

  It is very tempting to cast Professor Salter in the role of il miglior fabbro, “the better craftsman,” who, like Ezra Pound with The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot, played a crucial part in the final shaping of The Double Hook. When, after consulting and corresponding with him, Sheila Watson undertook to revise her manuscript, she certainly gave full value to his “few trivial matters” (the reader now will search in vain for a “stud book” or a “buttoned” pocket), and was attentive to his suggestion that the ending required further work if it were to avoid that kind of particularity that can be mistaken for patness. (In the version Salter had read, the novel ended with the words of Lenchen: “I see James in his plaid shirt. He’s lifting up the baby in his own two hands.”) But where Salter had suggested an elaborate coda complete with Coyote, the double hook, fear and glory, and a Latin tag from the Mass, Watson chose simply to reorder the last lines of her manuscript and add one detail: “His name is Felix.” Her other revisions, however, were more extensive and, indeed, less tied to Salter’s responses to her work. Some of these – made in the light of his comments, although not always by their light – are worth noting. They will serve to remind us that the form in which The Double Hook has come to us is really very different from the form in which Salter, for one, first read it (and for which, incidentally, he wrote his Foreword). More to the point, though, these revisions represent the last in a series of decisions by means of which Sheila Watson wrote The Double Hook.

  She chose, for example, to reverse the order of what we now have as Sections 4 and 5 (they were not numbered in the earlier draft) of Part Two. She chose to rework some passages that were closer to the quirks and cadences of Joyce than to her own voice: Angel no longer “dropped her children to the tune of Over the Waves” but “walked across the yard like a mink trailing her young behind her” (One, 4); “Sainted in the no-struggle of it” became “Simply redeemed” (One, 14); “Terrier rampant in the field azure of Prosper’s glance” disappeared altogether. Details also disappeared: the name of a cow, the type of chair Ara and William have in their parlour, the pieces played by Felix on his fiddle, the bloodlines of characters, even family histories. And a five-part structure replaced what had originally been in six parts. This last decision did not involve any rearrangement or deletion
of material, simply the removal of a “partition” at the end of what is now Section 7 of Part Five.

  If Salter did not venture to perform the type of “Caesarean Operation” on The Double Hook that Pound performed on The Waste Land (and the obstetrical analogy is Pound’s), in certain of his comments on its earlier form he did at least anticipate the shape that would result from its final revision. Watson’s achievement had put him in mind of Lear’s reflections on “unaccommodated man”: she “dis-accommodates man,” he wrote in his Foreword, “and studies him.” She had done this by withholding from her characters those resources or “garments” that, in Salter’s words, “shelter us from the dark and the void of the universe.” What these characters are left with in this earlier draft is, however, luxurious in comparison with their final condition. For what had not been withheld initially is, in this last revision, withdrawn. Gone now are the scraps of personal and family history and the details of national and racial origin by means of which characters sought to locate and to understand themselves and others. Gone are “the words of the town,” and the doctor who might have been called by William to certify his mother’s death, and the law that Kip might have brought on James if he had known “how to go about it.” Gone is the possibility that Greta might merely have hidden the kerosene-soaked wild garden of a house-coat, put on a dress, and greeted those who beat at her door. Gone, too, is James’s thought when he looked down into the river (“How easy”); and gone are such contexts as are suggested by “the spaceless fields of being,” and the “abyss,” and “nature.” (“When you have no son,” Ara had observed to the Widow Wagner in this earlier draft, “there is nothing but one man between you and nature.”) Gone are origins and options and even causes.

  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.

  Heinrich, she said, flesh calls for flesh, but we don’t always choose. In my country, she said, custom held one so and gave one so. Once in the summer when my father was out on the river with his nets – but when Wagner knew as he must he closed his mouth and shut his eyes and we came leaving the shame behind. The child died, she said. Of such things Wagner would not let me speak. Of such things I thought no longer. Why should I speak so to you? I have done wrong. I have seen the wrong. You do not judge. It is God who judges, she said, and covered her eyes with her hand. I have cried against God, she said. I have set wrong on wrong. Heinrich, she said, I have seen the judgement. Eyes looking from the creek bottom. God’s eyes looking out from the body of an old woman. The knowledge. The silence. The shame.

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

  Flesh calls for flesh, she thought. She had paid enough.

  Had come with Wagner. Her lips closed. Her eyes shut.

  Had come into the wilderness. She had done wrong.

  She had seen the wrong. It was God who would judge.

  She covered her eyes with her hand.

  She had cried out against God. She had set wrong on wrong. She had been judged. Eyes looking from the creek bottom. From the body of another old woman. Knowledge. Silence. Shame.

  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 summe
d 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.