The Double Hook (12 page)

William stood up.

He’s been to town, the boy said. Perhaps he took Lenchen with him.

As Ara turned the team into the gate, she raised her head. The Widow sat upright on the lambswool quilts, her hands on the edge of the box. Above the chatter of a chipmunk which balanced on a bush near the cabin window, they heard a thin wailing.

Dear God, said the Widow, it’s a feeble cry. Quick. Quick, she called and clambered down from the box as Ara pulled the horses to a stop before the door.

We don’t want any trouble, Angel said as she jumped down from the seat.

The Widow’s hand was on the knob.

If there’s trouble, Mrs. Prosper, she said, it won’t be of my making. Dear God, she said, the latch needs oil.

When James pulled his horse up at the foot of the slope he could see the gate, the stable, the path which led down from the stable-yard to the creek. Where the house had been there was nothing but blank smouldering space. On the fringe of the space he saw the figures of William and the boy beckoning to him.

In the emptiness of the fenced plot the bodies of the man and the boy seemed to occupy space which, too, should have been empty. The lank body of William and the thin body of the boy roped him to the present. He shut his eyes. In his mind now he could see only the seared and smouldering earth, the bare hot cinder of a still unpeopled world. He felt as he stood with his eyes closed on the destruction of what his heart had wished destroyed that by some generous gesture he had been turned once more into the first pasture of things.

I will build the new house further down the creek, he thought. All on one floor.

The men had come towards him. William’s hand was on his sleeve.

We were waiting for you, William said. It was nobody’s fault. I’ve seen it happen time and again. It’s the women left, the meals that will never be ate, it’s the heat and the frost and the empty spaces.

Tell him straight out, the boy said, that Greta burned the house and no one knows where Lenchen is. Make him speak.

Lenchen, James said. He looked at the burnt ground.

I left her here, he said.

And Greta, the boy said. It was her face we saw behind the honey-suckle. Where have you been that you left the two of them alone at such a time, and come back two nights and a day later dressed up in a new shirt.

James dug his toe into the edge of the ash, but he said nothing.

What made Greta set fire to things? William asked.

James looked up at him.

God knows, he said, we both had reason to wish the place gone and everything in it.

James turned to the boy. What could he say of the light that had made him want to drink fire into his darkness. Of the child got between the leafless trees when the frost was stiff in the branches. Of beating up Kip and running off because Kip had been playing round with the glory of the world.

I ran away, he said, but I circled and ended here the way a man does when he’s lost.

I’ve a notion, William said, that a person only escapes in circles no matter how far the rope spins.

There was Greta as well as James, the boy said.

James turned away leading his horse as he went.

We best go down the creek, William said, and then we can think what to do. Ara’ll make you welcome, he said to James, as long as you care to stop.

I wouldn’t speak for Ma, the boy said.

He turned to James.

Tell me, he said, what would a girl do?

By Felix Prosper’s stove the Widow sat with James’s child across her knee.

Felix didn’t do bad for a man, Angel said. Especially for a man who never raised a hand to help one of his own mares in foal. I doubt whether he ever knew the difference between what just happened and what other people did.

Hush, the Widow said. It’s no time for remembering. Remembering churns grief to anger.

She laid her hand on the baby’s back.

Dear God, she said, what a straight back he has.

He’ll need it, Angel said, to carry round what the world will load on his shoulders.

Felix stood at the edge of his own brown pool. Kip sat on the bank beside him.

When a house is full of women, Kip said, and one of them Angel, it’s best for a man to take his rest among the willows.

When a house is full of women and children, Felix said, a man has to get something for their mouths.

I’ve seen a bird, Kip said, wear itself thin doing just that. A bird with a whole nestful of beaks open and asking.

Felix played his line.

I keep thinking about James, Kip said. I kept at him like a dog till he beat around the way a porcupine beats with his tail.

Felix moved down the creek a little.

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.

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:

W
hen 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.