Issue 152 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

Sheila Watson was Canada's first modernist writer, famed for her elliptical novel The Double Hook. It is not an easy book to read. Sheila Watson was also my friend. She was an easy friend to have. She stole my manuscript from me and six weeks later, caused, as if by magic, a contract for its publication to come flying through Canada Post. So she was also my fairy godmother, as I liked to call her. We frequently made jokes about this. Knowing that she was dying, I asked her if she would leave me three wishes, three pieces of advice, or three warnings.

I can still see her careening fiercely toward me on her metal walker through the smoke-filled living room in her home in Piper's Lagoon, a long spit that juts out north of the Departure Bay ferry terminal in Nanaimo. Sitting on her old blue couch, I had to look up only slightly to meet that steely gaze. "Steely" - it's a clichéd word - inadequate, a sword that can be dulled by age. Sheila never appeared to age, not with those sharp eyes. Even when she complained that she could no longer read much, it was a lie. In the next breath, she would be telling me what I should be reading, whose manuscript had arrived at her door last week, how she was sorting her husband Wilfred's papers for the archives, why I needed to change the voice in the third paragraph of a story, or which politician should be shot. ("Now her tired eyes saw water issuing from under the burned threshold. Welling up and flowing down to fill the dry creek. Until dry lips drank," as she wrote in The Double Hook ). Her joie de vivre, her life spirit, like that of her character Mrs. Potter in The Double Hook, remained unquenched.

I don't remember how we started this, but I would always arrive at Piper's Lagoon with an old tin, the lid of which featured a ballerina surrounded by white birds with outstretched wings; the contents, something I'd baked with my daughter Kazz. We would ring the doorbell. After a long pause, Sheila would come to the door on her walker and greet us rather formally. Limping (but proud), Sheila would ask, "Tea?" and shuffle in her sweat pants and Birkenstocks toward the kitchen. On celebratory occasions, it was what she and Wilfred called "mittens" - tea mit alcohol, usually Irish whiskey. Near the end, she finally relented and let me make my own tea, if by some chance Wilfred was not around. Her coffee was thick, black, the way only a woman of her strength could stomach it. At this point, I would pull out the biscuit tin, and she would scowl, "What did you bring that for?" Reluctantly, Sheila would set the cookies on the kitchen table, or Wilfred would carry them back to the living room. After our visit was over, the tin would be thrust back at me, usually containing one of Sheila's partially-frozen banana-cranberry breads wrapped in waxed paper. She would have a wicked look on her face that might be described as an impish grin.

Next she would ask me, half hopefully, if I was still smoking. Smoking. Sheila loved it. Officially she had quit. When Wilfred had his back turned (looking up some reference in the National Biography Dictionary he kept in the kitchen), she would reach her arm out and steal a drag off my cigarette, only slightly put off by the garish red lipstick on the filter. She preferred filterless Players, if I could find them for her. But of course she had quit, she reminded me. Which is why she looked so pleased when I brought back Egyptian cigarettes from a trip (and she hid them under the bed in her room). She took long, heated drags, sucked it all in as if there were no tomorrow, as if she were not fading. She hated my red lipstick, which I've worn since I was old enough to steal it from my mother's drawer, and she had a fascinated horror for my silver earrings. Sheila was as austere as I am gaudy, but she never judged me. She did not relish physical contact, and guarded her privacy. No one hugged Sheila except my daughter Kassandra, less effusive than I am, who was permitted to, because Sheila claimed Kazz was extraordinary, a bit otherworldly. As she continues to be to me, a daughter more grounded and clairvoyant than I am. I think Sheila saw Kazz as my anchor, and told me repeatedly that I needed one. As she seemed to need cigarettes. Toward the end, Sheila stopped smoking, or so she said.

I met Sheila in person for the first time when I moved to Vancouver Island in 1989, when I began a job teaching at the college in Nanaimo, where, I was surprised to learn, the Watsons lived. I first encountered Sheila's writing in 1976, and in 1978 I took a correspondence course through Athabasca University, which Sheila had helped design (she wrote the section called "How to read Ulysses"). After settling in Nanaimo, I wrote her a little note and invited her to come and speak to my CanLit class one evening. It won't happen, said my colleagues; she hasn't made a public appearance in years, maybe as a concession to Wilfred, who was envious of the attention she had received for The Double Hook. Although Wilfred achieved notoriety as a performance playwright and experimental poet and was more prolific than his wife Sheila, he was never as popular. A week after I sent my letter, Sheila Watson phoned me and told me that yes, she would come to my class, but only if she could smoke in the room rather than out in the rain, and if there were food and drink provided. Ignoring regulations about smoking, we turned the class into a wine and cheese party, and Sheila delighted all of us. Mostly she talked about other young writers she admired, and read from their work. Elliptical, she would rarely talk about herself.

Nearly a decade later, I visited her in the hospital with another writer, Keith Harrison, who came to pay his respects. He'd brought Sheila a copy of his last novel, not realizing that the inside dedication was already inscribed to his own mother. He opened his eyes wide in panic at me (tiny Sheila, looking like a shriveled Mother Teresa, propped against white bed linens and covered in books, distracted and in mid-story); I didn't know what to say to him, so I shrugged. He gave her the book anyway, with two dedications. (I forgot to ask her about this at our next visit, but I suspect she would have enjoyed opening that double-hooked book. She was very keen on its title, Eyemouth, and she praised it.) Our hospital conversation rambled in all directions. Sometimes I was afraid she was losing the thread as she went off on different tangents, but she always circled around and around and then dropped back - like Hopkins' windhover, she claimed to always return to the original point ("My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!"). Not so much a bird of prey as one with a precise eye, and a capacity for swooping down toward the targeted goal of her thought.

Sheila told me once or twice about how she was born a monster. She recalled walking up the hill with her nurse and her little brother Kelly, who was in the perambulator, and a man and a woman strolling by describing the infant boy as beautiful, "but what a disagreeable-looking little girl." (Sheila snorted as she told me this, but her face was still that of the little girl climbing the hill.) How did she spend the first eleven years of her life in a wing of the Essondale Mental Hospital (where her father was Superintendent) without becoming a monster? When her father died, what else could she do but sit with a cousin up in a maple tree in Tsawassen and write a story about a man dying in a swamp with a snake around his neck? ("What would Freud make of that?" she jested.) Sheila's university studies were a "room of one's own" left to her by her father, but disapproved of by her mother. Yes, she did get to university, come hell or high water, even if it was 1928 and good Catholic girls just didn't do such things unless they are monsters. In the 1990s, Sheila still sat among the trees just above Piper's Lagoon, looking out over the water, Wilfred's monstrous carvings and masks, made from driftwood he'd found on the beach, staring back at her from the deck. And somehow, I do see the connections between these events, these objects, with Beatrix Potter and The Rubaiyat (her favourite childhood books), and with Wyndham Lewis (her doctoral thesis).

I have heard and read of Sheila described physically as a frail bird. Frail? Impossible! If she was a bird, she was like the sparrow whose voice I heard when I was a little girl. My aunt took me to the theatre in Paris, where a petite woman came out on stage, stood on a raised platform and belted out, "Non. Rien de rien. Je ne regrette rien."

So here is a picture of her at Piper's Lagoon, holding my own monster, a howling son born in 1994 who has not slept since. I know now that he has the same artistic temperament that Sheila once described to me as both a blessing and a curse, although at the time of enduring his colic, I considered him everything but a blessing. Sheila told me to take things in stride, give up trying to write for a couple of years. (A couple of years!) When I look back on this photo now, she looks surprised but not shocked by the screaming bundle in her lap. Wilfred wrote an Horatian ode to commemorate his birth; Sheila just wondered why I would keep wanting more children. She analyzed the dream I had when I gave birth to my son in which I had visualized myself as a pterodactyl taking off in flight. Sheila telephoned me out of the blue and announced, "I get it now. Ptero and dactyl - it's the pen;" the significance had escaped me prior to her observation. Sheila's interpretation of my dream was that only by the pen would I be able to take flight. At such times she could be like a little child in her excitement. At other times, she seemed merely resigned. "I'm as old as Chairman Mao, and rumour has it he's still kicking," she would croon if I asked her how she was.

Like most declared atheists, Sheila's tastes were catholic. When she founded and developed the magazine White Pelican in Alberta, she was determined to give voice to those new writers whose words she admired. Create, don't mimic, she told me. And how she admired and supported those renegade creators: Dorothy Livesay, Norman Yates, Douglas Barbour, Stephen Scobie, Miriam Mandel, bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt, Jack McClelland, and countless others - even Wilfred Watson ("Ah, Wilfred," she'd sigh; "he has a playfulness about him"). Sheila once remarked flatly to me that language is never innocent. And I believe she felt most drawn to those who flaunted convention as willingly as she did.

After The Double Hook in 1959, she stopped writing. Why? Why did Margaret Laurence stop writing after The Diviners? Christina Stead after The Man Who Loved Children? What silenced Tillie Olsen? Why did Sheila Watson, the same writer who gave us a contemporary version of the defiant Antigone in one of her stories, quit there? What happens to those who stand up to The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost? I am going to be speculative here, suggesting that Sheila had three reasons to cease writing when she sensed that her back was up against a wall.

1. Sheila got a gun. She had a will. She had a voice that was rapid-fire, and she had nameless and fleshless characters that resonated through nearly half a century of Canadian literature. She recounted stories of living in the Cariboo in the thirties to me. Some of her experiences are described in her last published novel (My copy is inscribed by her as "Deep Hollow Creek, perhaps!"). She told me she had refused to publish it before 1992 because she didn't want to offend anyone who might still be living. Ironically, most of the locals in the Cariboo had already been offended by the mere arrival of Sheila Watson in their midst during the Depression, and they wondered why this young woman would want to do nothing but read most of the day. "Because I do," she replied to them. (Sheila used to tell me she considered herself privileged as a child because she didn't have that many chores to do, leaving her time to read at leisure.) Thinking her strange, no one in the district brought her any of the meat they killed. She got hungry. So Sheila picked up a gun and taught herself how to shoot, brought down her own game. Having to do many of these tasks for herself left her less time to write. "This business of living takes up far too much time," she would complain to me frequently.

2. Sheila became a matriarch. Her public image overshadowed and robbed her of her private world, and Sheila was forced to make a "choice" - which is to say, a sacrifice. We already know too much about the Matriarch of Manawaka and other kinds of sacrifices. Sheila had Wilfred, Friday's Child. She told me she sent that first manuscript of Wilfred's off to T.S. Eliot himself, at Faber and Faber, "all on my own and without Wilfred's permission." Wilfred disliked being upstaged, and he always had to speak first when I arrived for a visit. When Sheila died, and I knew that I should go over and pay my condolences to Wilfred, I delayed. And then it was too late. He died only days after she did. I regret that I did not speak to him before that. I did, at Sheila's urging, try to make a video about Wilfred's grid poetry and his connections with Marshall McLuhan, but it was unsuccessful, largely because Wilfred decided half way through the project that for him to appear on the camera violated his intellectual principles.

   There are at least two other matriarchs remaining in Nanaimo. Thora Howell, former owner of The Bookstore on Bastion, is just as generous as Sheila was in her support of every writer who is passing through town. She was a close friend. Thora says that Sheila told her she had stopped writing because she felt she had had her time, and wanted to pass on her wealth of knowledge. It's too bad we can't all still listen to Sheila's anecdotes about her meetings with other minds. Thora did.

   Carol Matthews, another matriarch, told me about the time she went to drop off a letter to Sheila from Angela Bowering (who wrote a critical work on Sheila's writing that Sheila deeply admired). In the letter, written when Angela was very ill and awaiting surgery, Angela requested that Sheila pray for her. "I would pray too," said Carol, "but I am a heathen." "But I am a lapsed Catholic," protested Sheila. (And Wilfred piped up with, "Well, I am only an Anglican, but a very high Anglican.") So everyone prayed, and Sheila had a mass said for Angela in Toronto. Angela died not long after Sheila did.

3. Sheila was grabbed by her Achilles' heel. Sheila's physical decline began when she was standing on a stool and realigning a work of art that hung on the wall in her living room, just beside the kitchen. (It used to terrify me, all the works by the Group of Seven and Norman Yates and other contemporaries which hung in the Watson home, particularly downstairs. What if someone robbed these two old people?) She fell and hurt her ankle, and the bone never healed. In terms of her health, it was downhill from there.

Only the good die young and victorious. Sheila and I agreed that this was a legacy of the Greeks. I think of ox-eyed Hera begging that cloud-gatherer Zeus to honour swift-footed Achilles and destroy the Acaeans' ships. I think of Hephaestus' labour in forging a beautiful shield for Achilles. And of the judgment concerning Achilles' armour after his death. Of Achilles' mother Thetis, leaving her husband for good, and trying to make her son immortal by dipping him in the waters of the Styx, all parts of him made invulnerable by her baptism. Only the heel by which she held him, the undipped part, remained vulnerable, and it was there he received his fatal arrow wound.

Sheila did not die young, but I think she died too soon.

***

So who cares about the death of Mrs. Potter? I do. Lots of people do. The last present I brought for Sheila's birthday the week before Halloween was a pair of brightly-coloured pillowslips, wrapped in my daughter's carefully-sketched map of the western hemisphere. Wilfred said she was too unwell to receive anyone when we arrived at the door. Knowing her spartan tastes, I am certain that those lurid pillowcases are tucked away somewhere and that she didn't use them. I like to think of her lying in that small monastic bedroom, surrounded by her books and her desk and her typewriter. It suited her well.

***

And Sheila did leave me with three pieces of advice. The first one was: Get your doctorate. "But I have a job already," I groaned, "and I have lost interest in my thesis. Why do I have to go back and defend it?" "Because you do," she said. When I returned to Nanaimo from my defense back east, she and Wilfred had me to tea again, only this time it was "mittens." "Mi a little something special," she explained, pouring Scotch into my cup.

The second piece of advice was: Get your driver's license. Don't be as dependent as I am in getting where you want to go. I had had a near-fatal car accident when I was sixteen and wrapped a sportscar around a telephone post. So it took me more than a bit of effort to take driving lessons again. When I got my license, I drove to Piper's Lagoon to tell Sheila and Wilfred. And now I still drive there often to walk the spit with my children. Several years ago, when we were driving home after a visit with the Watsons, my daughter told me not to be so sad. She knew Sheila was going to die long before I did, before I wanted to accept it. "It's just like when people go from grade one to grade two, Mommy. You think it's going to be totally different when you get there, but all your old friends are just the same." Only months before her death, I visited Sheila with a woman named Bea Corbett, who came from Kingston and wanted to meet Sheila. But Sheila was unwell when we arrived, and after a short conversation, she said, "It's time to go." Bea and I stared at each other, uncertain whether she meant just for us to leave or something eerier. The light was already fading in Sheila's eyes.

The third piece of advice that Sheila taught me was: Don't be ashamed of being intense, of being passionate, of getting dirty. We loved language, all levels of diction. We shared a love of the cadence of the Latin mass and agreed we would never get its incantations and rhythms out of our blood, so why try to sound any different? ("Even so, it was hard in my day to get a job in the university if you were Catholic," she said.) We mourned the passing of Latin from the mass after Vatican II. There were names invented for food, and we tried to outdo each other in these contests. She laughed when I arrived one day, uninvited, dripping wet after a spontaneous swim in the lagoon in late afternoon; she gave me a sweatshirt and sweatpants in exchange for my wet clothes. I ended up staying for dinner, and we ate what she and Wilfred called "poets' caviar"; it was made of cooked eggplant and bore an unfortunate resemblance to the mush I had fed my baby earlier in the day. (I had a more disgusting term for it.) But it was delicious. We decided our favourite food was "cuisine de la paysanne." And that there had to be a connection between The Cantos and early cantors; Wilfred volunteered to research it. Dinner with them was sometimes silly, always fun.

There was more that Sheila gave me, beyond her three pieces of advice. Sheila also taught me that writing is an act of redemption. I never discussed this actual word with her. But I understand now what she meant when she said that you can re-envision and restore events in your life. We were talking at the time about The Wasteland. I don't think she would have liked the religious implications of the word "redemption," but she would have believed in the necessity of getting things right through the creative act of writing about them. Certainly I view the words she left behind as redemptive.

Sheila told me to keep on writing; this was beyond the three pieces of advice I had requested. Perhaps it seems self-evident. But in her case it may have been the hardest thing for her to do.

***

I miss my friend Sheila, but I shall heed her advice.

This is my day. I am pretty sure no one is home yet. That is, until I hear my daughter's voice: "Mom, are you smoking down there again?" I am dying for my kids to leave the nest, so I can pick up my pen again. I've got a pot of Gunpowder Green brewing beside me, and one biscuit tin with an angel dancing on its lid, full of scraps of paper and cookie crumbs. I am looking at white paper, white clouds, white pelicans. Ideas are shooting off in my head. And I am waiting.