When I was teaching a university course in Canadian fiction between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, I always included a novel by Ethel Wilson (usually Swamp Angel). This seemed an obvious and natural academic procedure. I saw-and still see-Wilson as the equivalent in Canadian literature to E. M. Forster within the English tradition: a writer who combined a deeply personal and humane vision with an individual fictional technique that avoided the flamboyantly experimental at one extreme and the unimaginatively conventional at the other. Clearly, however, this view was not widely shared. Almost every year, at least one student would come up after class and ask, with a combination of puzzlement and near-anger: "Why hasn't anyone told me about Ethel Wilson before?"
David Stouck's biography both explains and exemplifies this situation. He calls his book "a critical biography" because it tells not only the story of her life but also the story of the books that she wrote, and succeeds in throwing light on both. He is especially skillful at identifying and highlighting what he calls "autobiographical details saved up and transmuted into fiction." Indeed, the biographical aspects of the book are beyond praise. This is all the more gratifying because an earlier biography, Mary McAlpine's The Other Side of Silence (1988), was patchy, anecdotal, and often inaccurate, revealing, as Stouck notes, "little evidence of archival research." By contrast, he has saturated himself in the considerable Wilson holdings at the University of British Columbia Library and elsewhere. His book is comprehensive, authoritative, well-written. And yet, when he comes to critical assessment, he displays much of the uncertainty that, as he shows so well, had dogged Wilson throughout her writing life.
Wilson was a complex figure, whose literary principles and instincts often ran counter to received attitudes in the Canada of her time. She disapproved of literary nationalism ("what Canadians have to aim at is not to write something Canadian ... but to write well"); expressed grave doubts about the validity of "symbolism," Freudian or otherwise, in literary study; deplored the spread of creative-writing courses at universities (thus rousing the ire of Earle Birney); believed that marriage was more important than writing (thus alienating literary-minded feminists); and sacrificed possibly considerable profits by refusing to allow her first novel to be mangled by Hollywood. Above all, her emphasis on style rather than plot led to her neglect by high-school teachers using Margaret Atwood's Survival as a classroom aid (the main reason, doubtless, why my students had not been introduced to her).
Canadian critics have always found it difficult to come to terms with Wilson's individual and independent approach to her art. William Arthur Deacon carried literary nationalism to an extreme by recommending readers of The Innocent Traveller to skip the opening chapters set in England. Significantly, Wilson never received a Governor General's award, The Innocent Traveller, The Equations of Love, and Swamp Angel all being passed over for, respectively, Philip Child's Mr Ames Against Time, David Walker's The Pillar, and Igor Gouzenko's The Fall of a Titan. (Claude Bissell, one of the judges, honorably wrote a letter to the Globe and Mail publicly dissociating himself from the committee-decision on the last of these.) Readers' reports from Macmillans, though occasionally helpful, were more often obtuse; one solemnly dismissed Nell Severance in Swamp Angel as "boring' and irrelevant." Even John Gray, her trusted mentor at the publishers, frequently gave poor advice, complaining of her editorial "digressions" and objecting to the magical final scene in the same novel when Maggie throws Nell's bejewelled revolver into Three Loon Lake as an unsatisfactory ending.
Criticism in the British Isles, with one glaring exception, proved more understanding. One English publisher's reader cut through finicky arguments about genre by writing of The Innocent Traveller: "This is not a novel, nor biography, nor autobiography, though something, probably, of each. That does not matter at all ... it is witty, delicious." Precisely! Her work was praised by such notable writer-critics as Elizabeth Bowen, Elspeth Huxley, and San O'Faolin, and it is hardly surprising that "she began to feel increasingly that her real audience was in England where an appreciation of language and style was so much stronger than in North America." (The glaring exception was a tone-deaf illiterate who considered her prose "a pastiche of William Faulker!") By contrast, Wilson complained with justice that Canadian reviews "were mainly plot summaries." Her own literary discussions invariably focused on the quality of the writing. Characteristically, on reading Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, she immediately responded to "the powerful use of language."
Throughout this biography, Stock properly lays stress on Wilson's own emphasis on language and style. Her secondary-school education (in England) was, she says, "based largely on the use and study of words," and in addressing young students she spoke of "the importance of the sentence as the essential building block for every kind of writing." Stouck even goes so far as to claim that, when she considered editorial recommendations, "the life and death of a character was often of less importance to Wilson than the placement of a comma or the changing of a word." She consistently criticized verbal pretension, giving strict instructions that her death notice should read "that she died, not passed away.'""
All this is admirable. Yet, when Stouck discusses the novels and short stories, he pays comparatively little attention to language. His commentary on Swamp Angel, for example, has much to say about structure and thought and the vexed question of "symbol," but makes no reference to the linguistic usages that distinguish the speech of her characters or the contrast between these and her own lucid, precise, and uncluttered prose. He is anxious to include references to all critical approaches to her work, but seems to regard at least most of them as having equal validity. Moreover, he is far too fond of trying to make Wilson acceptable to "post-modernism," and is clearly worried that she might be regarded as politically incorrect. All this detracts from the more crucial matter of identifying Wilson's unique literary qualities. None the less, where hard facts and relevant historical background are concerned, his book is likely to prove definitive.
Contemporary readers are in a better position to appreciate Ethel Wilson's writings than they were a generation ago. For this, two people are primarily responsible: first, David Staines, current editor of the New Canadian Library, who succeeded in getting all her books into print and keeping them there; and second, David Stouck, for making her more fugitive writing available (in Ethel Wilson: Stories, Essays, Letters, published in1987), and for producing this scholarly yet highly readable biography. But is she, even now, accepted as one of the indisputably significant Canadian writers? Frankly, I doubt it. One can only hope that the publication of this book will stimulate increased interest.