WHEN THE ever-optimistic editors of Books in Canada first suggested it last spring, the possibility of my talking with Sheila Watson seemed as likely a project as pushing a peanut up the Matterhorn with my nose. To their credit as realists, however, they did add a cautionary note. "She's been refusing interviews for about 30 years," I was told. "But you can always try."
Sheila Watson's place in our literary history was assured with her first published novel, The Double Hook (1959), which was hailed by Stephen Scobie, writing in The Canadian Encyclopedia (1985), as having "made possible ... the development of contemporary writing in Canada." This year, however, Watson published an even earlier novel, Deep Hollow Creek (McClelland & Stewart), which she wrote in the 1930s and which stems, like The Double Hook, from her experiences as a schoolteacher in British Columbia's Cariboo country during the Depression. So it was an opportune time for an interview. All I needed was an appropriate introduction.
I tried calling the publicity department at McClelland & Stewart. "I've got bad news for you," said the person detailed to get back to me. "Sheila Watson does not do interviews. She is about 80 and at her age has a right to refuse." I tried asking for a mailing address anyway. Absolutely no dice. So, after stomping around awhile, I began to dig, and came up with one of those strange strings of coincidence that can link the unlikeliest people. Sheila Watson and 1, for example, though we're a generation apart, both went to convent schools in B. C. where we were taught by the same order of nuns. The late Dr. W. L. MacDonald of the University of British Columbia, who supervised Watson's M.A. thesis on Addison and Steele, was once my husband's landlord. And so on, though it was the nun connection - in the person of Sister Beverley Mitchell, who is a professor of English at the University of Alberta - that did the trick.
And so at last, one bright day in June, I met Sheila Watson and the poet-playwright Wilfred Watson, whom she married in 1941. They live in comfortable West Coast waterfront style, surrounded by found treasures from the beach and an impressive collection of 20th-century art.
John Grube, in his introduction to the New Canadian Library edition of The Double Hook (1969), describes Sheila Watson as "a small, bird-like creature who lives on coffee and cigarettes." I found her drinking tea, eschewing cigarettes, and small of frame but large of brain, with so much concern for the local birds that she and Wilfred have obscured their ocean view with "weed species," fast-growing trees that effectively prevent the once daily deaths against their picture windows. ("If we want to look at the sea, we can always go for a walk," said Watson, who hurt her foot in a fall some time ago and is still waiting for it to heal.) Her self-sacrificing sensitivity to the plight of the birds reminds me of her short story, "Antigone" in Five Stories (Coach House, 1984), and she confirms that yes, this is indeed the story that is "closest to the truth." In it, the young narrator and her two cousins, Antigone and Ismene, prepare to bury a dead bird in her father's "kingdom":
I should have loved Ismene but I didn't [confesses the narrator, whose portrait of Antigone is intrinsic to the story]. It was Antigone I loved. I should have loved Ismene because, although she walked the flat world with us, she managed somehow to see it round .... In her own head she made diagrams to live by ... She would simply live and leave destruction in the purgatorial ditches outside her own walled paradise. Antigone is different. She sees the world flat as I do and feels it tip beneath her feet. She has walked in the market and seen the living animals penned and the dead hanging stiff on their hooks. Yet she defies what she sees with a defiance which is almost denial. Like Atlas she tries to keep the vaulted sky from crushing the flat earth. Like Hermes she brings a message that there is life if one can escape to it in the brush and bulrushes in some dim Hades beyond the river.
Getting to know Watson even a little bit, talking with her and her husband in the conversational manner that she prefers to structured interviews, I learned enough to know that this passage from "Antigone" goes a long way toward summing up the essence of Sheila Watson and the choices she has made in her life and art.
SHE WAS BORN in New Westminster, B.C. on October 24, 1909. "I am three-quarters American. Grandfather Martin was from Mobile, Alabama. He moved to California. Later, he opened up the first canned fish factory on the Fraser River. My grandmother came to Victoria through the Panama Canal and up the West Coast. She kept house for the Indian agent there. Mother was born in 1882, the same year as Virginia Woolf. She went to boarding school from the age of five to 17, and then to San Francisco."
I ask, "Why did she go to San Francisco?"
"She came out," says Watson simply. "My grandfather's sister, Elweena, did the unspeakable thing - she married a Yankee. He was in the American Navy, at the naval base in San Francisco, and Mother went down and came out. Well, you know, this is the end of the 19th century. She'd been in the convent all her life; they just put her there when she was five and she stayed there till she was 17 or so. In Victoria. So she was brought up almost completely by the Sisters of St. Ann."
"San Francisco would have been a shock after that," I say.
"It was ridiculous. The whole life out here was ridiculous. I don't think people in the East ever understood British Columbia. It's not that it's like a frontier; it's a moving the other way."
Watson's father, Dr. Charles Edward Doherty, was the second superintendent of the provincial mental hospital in New Westminster. "It must have affected you, living in the mental hospital as a child," I say. She looks up at me with sudden candour: "That's what you thought the world was."
Watson was the second of four children born to Charles and Elweena Doherty: "I had a sister 10 years younger and two brothers, one 18 months older and one three years younger. This last brother died on his 30th birthday of cancer; the other one drank himself to death. It wasn't an easy life for the boys and even for me; they were so constrained." A tinted photograph showing a portion of the mental hospital - and the well-kept grounds where Antigone holds her funeral for the dead bird - appears on the front cover of Five Stories. Next door was the federal penitentiary.
"My father was an interesting man," Watson tells me. "He didn't believe the insane could be cured, not certain types. He went to Sir Robert McBride and got Coquitlam developed as a farm for the patients. We were brought up completely by servants - a nursemaid, a Chinese cook. The nurse really taught me what sin was; she was a Scots Presbyterian. We were kept out of the way. We weren't allowed to touch anything, almost, because it was public property." As "Antigone" ends, the narrator's father finds Antigone burying the bird in his garden:
This ground is public property, he say,. No single person has any right to an inch of it.
I've taken six inches, Antigone says. Will you dig the bird up again?
Some of his subjects my father restrained since they were moved to throw themselves from high places or to tear one another to bits from jealousy or rage. Others who disturbed the public peace he taught to walk in the airing courts or to work in the kitchen or in the garden.
If men live at all, my father said, it is because discipline saves their life for them.
From Antigone he simply turned away.
WATSON'S FATHER died when she was 10. She started writing at about the same age, and recalls visiting some of her mother's cousins at Tsawassen, B.C. ("spelled Chawassen, then"): "They had the only house there then, built long in the ranch style. They ran their own water system. My cousin Janet and I sat up in this big maple tree and wrote. What child doesn't, if you're brought up with books, I suppose." When I ask if she can remember what she wrote then, she says immediately, "This was a horror story I was writing. I hate to think what a psychologist could have done with that." "We were read to all the time," she adds. "I read Hopkins early. Austen, Carlyle - you read indiscriminately. just after my father died, there were publications like Spengler's Decline of the West. I never read Anne of Green Gables or anything like that. First of the books forbidden were the Horatio Alger books. The boys used to smuggle in Alger books." Watson attended convent schools in New Westminster and completed the first two years of her university training at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Vancouver. ("It was useful at the convent; the nuns really cared so little for literature that you had to discover it for yourself.") She graduated from U.B.C. in 1931 with an honours degree in English, qualified as a teacher in 1932, and received her M.A. in 1933. An important influence in her life at this time was Professor Hunter Lewis, who taught Middle English and drama but was also keenly interested in contemporary literature. His students read the works of contemporary authors - Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Lawrence ("I didn't believe in D.H. Lawrence"), Hemingway, Faulkner - as they appeared. (Almost half a century later, Diane Bessai and David Jackel, two of Watson's former colleagues at the University of Alberta, edited Figures in a Ground: Canadian Essays on Modern literature Collected in Honor of Sheila Watson [Western Producer Prairie Books, 19781. In their preface to this volume, the editors note that they were guided in their organization "by Sheila Watson's own belief that studies of Canadian literature must find their proper and unself-conscious context in a larger concern - the study of modem literature in English.") Another influence was the Depression. ("I get it in the neck all the time because my father was a wealthy man. You're on both sides of the thing; you're always afraid of disease sympathy. Are you going to save the world with a row of vegetables?") "About 1933," she saw "riots in Vancouver when police whipped people off the street." The shock she felt then is recreated in Deep Hollow Creek when Stella, Watson's protagonist-narrator who has come to a remote community in the Cariboo to teach school, recalls a memory "seared on the retina":
... a man on a horse raising a whip, letting the great bull tongue of it lick and fleer and sear the flesh of an old greybeard in the street -the mayor in all his pomp of tweed and hair lotion and shaving lotion and devotion standing on the cenotaph reading the riot act - men rifling the counters men hurling bricks through windows .... tear bombs and jeer bombs.
Only hate and fear, she thought, the hand on the counter reaching for the pain-killer -- the pyrethium -- the hobble -- the halter -- the chin-strap -- the check-rein.
Also significant in Watson's life and thought was the depth of human suffering she witnessed, first as a child growing up inside a mental hospital, then at the hospital for crippled children in Cobble Hill, B.C., where she worked as a volunteer for two summers while attending university. "There was nothing for the children to do," she says. "You did what you could for them. There was a boy there from the Chilcotin; he was paralyzed from the waist down. Every so often he'd be taken off the ward to die. I'd wonder, What's going to happen to that boy? Maybe a hospital for the incurable. You know, in Deep Hollow Creek, when the father drives the cattle out? [In the novel, when a farmer's son is hurt in an accident, the father is forced to sell his cattle, but he's unable to get a fair price.] And he shoots himself. That's the first thing I heard there, on the phone! You don't improve anything. It was a commonplace event." In 1934, Watson embarked on her own teaching career. She taught many children of all ages and in many places across British Columbia, but it was the two years she spent at Dog Creek, on the Fraser River in the Cariboo country between Ashcroft and Williams Lake, that were to crystallize her view of the human condition. "It's awfully close to the bone, that kind of country," she says now. "It gave you an opportunity to question them." Then she asks me if I remember the way Stella "plays with the creed" at the end of her first term in Deep Hollow Creek:
She knew when she was going [away for Christmas] that she would come back. For, she thought, when spring has come I hope to see the resurrection of the dead .... She had supposed [like Ismene] that she could measure out life with a school compass .... [but] ... the mind has failed .... I believe [like Antigone] in the body, the creator of other bodies, and in the body's body conceived by the body, born of the body, and suffering under the body - the body crucified, the body dead, the body buried - the body rising in the grass and blossoming in the hedgerow. No ghost. No church. No communion except the communion of the body to protect the body against the body.
"Do you still embrace the Catholic faith?" I ask her. And she replies, "Like Pascal, groaning." With her gift for irony, Watson would be the first to appreciate the fact that by rejecting Deep Hollow Creek some 50 years ago, Macmillan of Canada actually did her a favour. The manuscript was returned with the comment that it was an inferior version of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm. "People have a right to read in their own way," says Watson of that long-ago decision. "He had to interpret it somehow. The Duncan Hines Stamp of Approval on Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Sheila Watson - that's worse than putting the royal stamp on tea. There's something belittling to the reader in that." By rejecting that first manuscript, however, Macmillan spurred Watson to develop a less traditional approach the second time around. "I thought I had to do something to get the narrator out of it," she explains, "so I killed the schoolteacher." The result was The Double Hook (1959), a dark story from "the flat world" that is nevertheless shot through with her characteristic irony. At a rare public reading from The Double Hook in 1973, Watson explained how she decided on a symbolic treatment of the Cariboo experience:
I'd been away for a long time before 1 realized that if I had something I wanted to say, it was going to be said in these images. And there was something 1 wanted to say: about how people are driven, how if they have no art, how if they have no tradition, how if they have no ritual, they are driven in one of two ways, either towards violence or towards insensibility - if they have no mediating rituals that manifest themselves in what 1 suppose we call art forms. And so it was with this that the novel began.
Today, she says, "I'm not a prolific writer. That's the way my life went. The short story is about the only place you can get published. But you only want to write when you have something to say." Sheila Watson may have written relatively little, but she's written it uncommonly well. In 1965 she completed her doctoral thesis on the British writer-painter Wyndham Lewis, at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Marshall McLuhan, and continued to write scholarly and critical essays during her years with the department of English at the University of Alberta, from which she retired as a full professor in 1975. "If men live at all," says the narrator's father in "Antigone, "it is because discipline saves their lives for them." But defiant Antigone has her point to make, too. Meeting Sheila and Wilfred Watson, enjoying the hospitality of their secluded retirement home, I hear Antigone's message come through loud and clear: "There is life if one can escape to it in the brush and bulrushes in some dim Hades beyond the river."
