The Double Hook

by Sheila Watson

  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.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  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.

  BY SHEILA WATSON

  ESSAYS

  Sheila Watson: A Collection [Open Letter,

  series 3, number 1] (Winter, 1974–75)

  FICTION

  The Double Hook (1959)

  Four Stories (1979)

  Five Stories (1984)

  Deep Hollow Creek (1992)