Swamp Angel (23 page)

Wilson’s travelling protagonists leave the seeming unity and comfort of family to discover disappointing and
frightening chaos, and set about creating an uncloistered order. Remember the Ancient Mariner, that returned traveller: with thoughtless murderous skill he brings down the albatross; when he blesses the watersnakes
unaware
, the stinking bird falls from his neck and the narrative wind arises. You will remember that Maggie
forgets
her own existence just before she despatches the little trout and feels the darkness “cut through her mind.” Now recall that verb in this “authorial intrusion”:

The last five words epitomize Ethel Wilson’s noted “tone,” and serve to attract the reader who wants to feel, paradoxically, closer to the seemingly detached writer. Wilson knew that she was producing that paradox, and she employed it as well in the telling she had to do about her subjects: “all fly-fishermen are bound closely together by the strong desire to be apart, solitary upon the lake, the stream.”

Paradox, or at least contradiction, for certain metaphor, is signalled in the novel’s title. Observing that range from primordial slime to divine flight, one might expect a story of triumphant emergence, but I do not think that the angel emerges. I think that no matter how compassionately Maggie acts, even in the Christian terms that the book clearly suggests, the pipefish still swims in her mind. A swamp angel is not necessarily a gun. The dictionary that Wilson alerts us to on her first page tells us that the swamp angel can be an eremite in the bog, or another name for the hermit thrush, that feathery song.

Birds are important to Wilson’s fictions. They fly in formations, break their necks against windows, carry messages quicker than the symbols Mrs. Severance complains of. Fifty brown birds fly in this book’s first sentence, and Mrs. Vardoe (or the narrator) asks what they are. Perhaps they are swamp angels; certainly they are “birds returning in migration,” probably ironic precursors of this still earth-held Vardoe woman. They are recalled in the fish that return to the water above the ooze into which the gun settles in the penultimate paragraph. “Things are falling into place,” one reads a page earlier.

Maggie Lloyd’s place is somewhere between the birds and the fish. She will never fly further than her flight from Vardoe, and she will never live all the time among the seals and porpoises or in Three Loon Lake, no matter what her avatars say. The fish do not reside in a swamp and the birds are not angels. Take that delimiting a step further: birds such as eagles eat fish and take them flying; people such as Maggie Lloyd make flies out of feathers and feed trout to their death.

Look at those birds and fish again. For Maggie the birds are seen and the fish are imagined. For Ethel Wilson they are all imagined, and so what are they for the reader?

Ethel Wilson the writer wanted two things that are
opposite and necessary to one another. She genuinely loved the physicality of British Columbia, and used her great sentences to make it brightly visible. If the rivers and lakes are to become allegorical landscape, that will be permitted, but they will live before the imagining eye first. There is also a dark universe, however, that turns and looms outside the range of the human eye. As dogs and other animals sense oncoming earthquakes, Wilson’s protagonist and reader, easing into the previsual world of nature, enter the dream of Eddie Vardoe, whose face becomes the face of a child and then a sharp-toothed mink screaming in the forest.

“Going fishing?” everyone asks Maggie. “Yes, I am,” she replies pleasantly. Like any novelist, a fisherwoman can tie a practised fly, search the best rainbow shoal, and still be in the dark as to what she may with her single hook, hook.

But in fishing she offers a faith in order, in a not-quite-predictable order. About her earlier books, especially
Hetty Dorval
, Wilson was sometimes upbraided for her use of coincidences, especially coincidental meetings, in her plots. In
Swamp Angel
, an often recurvate text, she responds to that criticism through the words of the never-shy Mrs. Severance, who tells Albert Cousins that she believes in two things: coincidence and faith. That sounds a little like the paradoxical reality that Maggie the questor comes to learn. Is a coincidence an island of random order in a sea of chaos, or is coincidence chaotic itself? To the realist non-Jungian critic it is a cheat or a failure of vision. To a person to any degree religious it can look like evidence of supernal regard for the mortal world.

In any case critics have always held
Swamp Angel
to be superior to its predecessors in terms of authorial control. This is so partly because, despite her probable opinion on the matter, Wilson cut back on coincidence. This novel’s plot is
articulated by illnesses, accidents and injuries. Plot is developed and characters are constructed by these reminders of human frailty and fallibility. They start with the battlefield death of Tom Lloyd, and include, among others, the fall of Nell Severance in the street, Haldar Gunnarsen’s car wreck, and the sudden storm that brings an end to Mr. Cunningham’s strength. Each event has a part in bringing Maggie to her place in the boat on the lake, on the way to the lodge where the smoke is rising from the chimneys. Of the accidents and the tangles of emotion that have got her there, Maggie has told herself simply “life is like that – if it’s not one thing it’s another.” Wilson gave her that common language to keep her normal, to show us that all her compassion and personal strength are simply human possibility, not the attributes of a literary hero. The epigraph for
Mrs. Golightly
quotes Edwin Muir on the world we have to inhabit: “a difficult country, and our home.”

Most of Wilson’s stories are about the problem of home, and most of these are about a girl or woman looking for the meaning of the term. For Maggie, the house in which she had lived with Eddie Vardoe was “home” as only a geographical designation. It had been a fake haven for the younger woman who had become widow, orphan and childless all at once. So, like a fish, she goes upstream to something she seems in the darkness to recognize. In the short
Chapter 5
, Maggie Vardoe is reborn as Maggie Lloyd, and in her snug cabin finds her first comfort as this new child. The word “home” comes from a root meaning to lie down. In Vardoe’s bed she lay in anguish every night. Here

The next day she rides through the town of Hope.

But the lodge on Three Loon Lake is surrounded by dark forest, and as the people who live there know, unpleasant things can happen any time. The reader should be on guard as well. If you were ever in a mind to swallow the fish story about the author’s self-image, the country cat far from the nearest pigeons, look again at the end to the scene of the fawn and the kitten:

Swamp Angel
is a short novel and a highly complex one. On re-reading it we are rewarded with the assurance that we will never be able to tell anyone what it is all about. Wilson’s feigned simplicity is the most complicated trick of all. For a careful reader the text is as difficult as this world our home.

BY ETHEL WILSON

FICTION
Hetty Dorval (1947)
The Innocent Traveller (1949)
The Equations of Love (1952)
Swamp Angel (1954)
Love and Salt Water (1956)
Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories (1961)

SELECTED WRITINGS
Ethel Wilson: Stories, Essays, and Letters
[ed. David Stouck] (1987)