When I started publishing fiction in the 1960's it was in a novel atmosphere of candour and sexual explicitness to which I could freely witness as a gay artist.  Well, I won't go on with interpretations of the word "integrity" - I notice that the O.E.D. provided a whole slew of them - but the one that I want to use as my launchpad comes in fact not from the dictionary but from a rather long-winded speech by Polonius inHamlet  when he gives that very prolix advice to his son Laertes: "This above all, to thine own self be true."  This, then, was my writerly self to which I applied that counsel. But at that time I really had little idea of just how hard it was to be consistently true to self when the insidious pressure to relax and succumb to an external imposition and write what is euphemistically called "non-controversially" was exercised constantly by the nicest people, by organizers of the nicest theatres, editors of the nicest magazines, the nicest representatives of the Canada Council. For ours, you see, is a country jam full of the nicest people, who ardently share one characteristic: namely, a disinclination to publicly attest their private distaste of racial and sexual minorities, or any other segment of society which get a formal pat on the back from all professional small "l" liberals and their camp followers.  Not that for a moment am I referring to anything here smacking of gay oppression. I am merely speaking as a writer about my own specific writing and what devious pressures have existed ever since I published Ashes for Easter, to critical praise, in 1972, through Love  andThe Waiting Game, Once More Into The Garden,  toThe Connecticut Countess  of last year.  The assault against the integrity of my writing is as seamless as it is constant. It is the endless insistence to subscribe to the current orthodoxy of Canadian North American style, to restrict myself to a demotic - that is, impoverished -vocabulary, and to stick to a subject matter which is deemed pertinent - read "fashionable" - for the kind of writer I am perceived to be, by them. This latter pressure is particularly important. No one, but no one, is asking me to write in the idiom of a Harlequin romance, or that of an author of whodunits.  But as a serious fiction writer I have come to understand that there are topics and themes which, to put it mildly, do not ingratiate one with the editors of magazines or the editors and readers employed by publishing houses.  My species of writer - that is, the sexually disturbed and wordy enough to be pigeonholed as a poet (although I've never published a book of poems in my life) - is supposed, for example, to eschew humour; also, oddly enough when you consider the suffocating degree of it carried throughout the media, a prohibition on an explicit reference to politics. So here we have perverse sex, humour, and politics as potential obstacles to publication.  Yet if I were to fail to witness to these things I would be thoroughly treasonous to my literary art. 

   Let me go into a little more detail if I may.  It is not that there is some kind of general proscription about sex as a topic. To the contrary, you sometimes get the impression from reading Canadian short stories that there is nothing else being written about.  Nor is there an innate hostility to homosexual reference in contemporary Canada.  And what I have to say here applies specifically to Canada and not to the United States, where, as an author, my experience is quite different.  Far from an obstacle, I think that it in fact might well be argued that a gay constituent to literary content can often be construed nowadays as an advantage. Certainly, more and more straight writers seem to be introducing gay characters, even if only minor ones, and let's not forget that such best-selling novels asThe Frontrunner  and the novelConsenting Adult,  on which the Vancouver-shot TV-movie about a gay son and his uncomprehending parents was based, were both written by straight - that is, heterosexual - women.  No, the problem I have as an author, and where the pressures to change my tune are perhaps subtle, but nevertheless unrelenting, is in my inability to see gayness as a problem and only as a constituent of life for my perennial protagonist Davey Bryant, and which, thus, may not have a per se implication in whatever I happen to be writing about him - not all that much more significant perhaps, in terms of text, than the problems of tall people and extremely short ones.  Following from that, I feel justifiably free to write of good gays, mean gays, cowardly and courageous gays, for I am as itchy about finding myself in the pocket of the gay propagandist as in the hands of perverted puritans or those Jesus  monsters who would have all fictional gays end up suicides.

   But the integrity prodding is given further exercise when it comes to my deployment of humour.  I hope I am a serious gay novelist, but I am certainly one who is never more thrilled and content than when a reader informs me that he or she has laughed out loud at an incident I've recorded. The Ying and Yang of existence, in terms of sadness and pleasure, are cemented by only one commodity: tears.  It is a special benison for an author to learn that he has moved someone to tears, whether the genesis be humorous or melancholy. Unfortunately the infrastructures of our literary establishment do not always permit the comic to operate as freely as it might, for the arbitrary crisscrossing of subject matter, from murky sex to drollery, is too often perceived as impeding packaging.  Such untidiness of content, in the Canadian situation impairs that vast army of cataloguers who organize and promote what is grotesquely designated "the entertainment industry." These folk I see myself in conflict with when I wish to  practice surgery with my literary scalpel rather than entertain with my pen. As for the industry aspect, which I experienced when Doubleday published a novel of mine, that's something I intend to steer away from for the rest of my writing days.

   The politics taboo is a particularly hard one for me to suffer as I am a child of the 1930’s, and, while seeing what havoc poetical doctrine can play on literary creativity, I nevertheless feel an attenuation when politics are overwhelmingly banned from our fictional pages.  It wouldn’t be difficult to compile a dismal list of writer victims of Marxist pedagogy, and I’m saddened when I see current women authors succumbing to the forced wiles of feminist propaganda, thus putting a rightful cause in the wrong context.  But where are the Orwells and the Sinclair Lewises? We might feel that the naturalism of a Theodore Dreiser now smells musty, but the political fervor of Steinbeck’sGrapes of Wrath  remains the persistent magnetism of that epic of exploited migrant workers in the hungry thirties. In fact the political needs of my own fiction are neither a matter of organized parties nor specific doctrines, but the psychological motives behind the political gesture. This is what I strove for specifically in the childhood stories in my most recent book, Fury.  It’s also what I’ve sought in a story called "Vancouver Summer Pudding," which will appear this Fall in an anthology called The Vancouver Fiction Book,  where I was able to explore the motivational complexities behind one of Vancouver’s famous civic marches for peace. 

   Under the category of that political constituent, but really rather a variant of it, I would also include the subjects of religion and regionality: 

   I don’t often use my background as a theology student, as I did both inNo More Into The Garden  and inThe Connecticut Countess  - with the Davey chronicles for a start - nor do I much use my commitment to Anglo-Catholicism, although I shall be doing so in a couple of works that I have in mind. But I relish the freedom to do so whenever I wish, even though I am gently made aware invariably that this is editorially frowned upon as an improper associate of gay sex and a comic perspective. My literary instinct is to occasionally use a religious context for the backdrop to a story, rather than explicitly refer to the elements of dogma, as, say, Francois Mauriac, George Bernanos, or Graham Greene have done. But I will freely utilize Christian or other religious symbolism when it suits my creative purpose, even though I am well aware that there is a price to pay for that in terms of critical acceptance. 

   With regionality - and I think what I have to say here is very interesting in terms of Dennis's comments - we come to a matter that is not only central to my artistic devices but to something which in Canada is scrutinized and evaluated very much in political terms. There is no realm as a writer where it is easier for me to betray my integrity as an author working in the Canadian federation, where the philosophy of centralism is paramount and my kind of regionalism wholly at a discount.  The path I pursue is that which was familiar to Jean Giono in France, Thomas Hardy in England, and today, on the opposite side of the continent, the young David Adams Richards with his world of the Miramichi River in northern New Brunswick.  There are many Canadian writers - Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro spring at once to mind - who have utilized such places as the prairies and rural Ontario for their fiction.  But I do not perceive with them an intensity of regionalism which raises it to a crucial aesthetic, not in the sense that David Adams Richards or myself seek to create our own versions of a Wessex, Lelonde, or Yoknapatawha County of William Faulkner  This approach is crucial to me, even when I use west coast precisions and Vancouver topographies as places from which I can ricochet back in time or use as a sounding board in different literary ways.  But such intense adherence to a cultural verticalism in one's work is perceived as offensive and perverse by centralist taste-makers, and there is thus a perpetual pressure to loosen one from these positions of creative fragmentation and to return to the fold as a true Canadian patriot, where you can mention towns, rivers, and mountain ranges so long as you don't get too excessive over it.

   What does this all add up to, and just where is integrity actually threatened?  Well, when you amalgamate all these strands and discover that after considerable success your third book of fiction, in my case the novel, No More Into The Garden,  is not reviewed inMaclean's,  that after a cover appearance and presentation of a Davey Bryant story in 1978 I have never again appeared inSaturday Night  or ever been reviewed in its pages, that Books in Canada ignored my last two books, and ditto theGlobe & Mail  - one can only conclude upon observing the fact that all these periodicals and journals issue from the town of Toronto that my work is either sliding steadily into such a degree of mediocrity or artistic worthlessness that it shouldn’t be noticed, or that, as I maintain, there is a palpable price tag of being ignored when the writing incorporates wrongful ingredients and offends the orthodoxies of the centralist establishment. The only trouble I have in the "fall of artistic standards" interpretation is that the facts steadfastly proclaim otherwise: the percentage of positive critical response to my books has never been less than eighty-five percent and in the case of the last two, both of which appeared in 1984, I received nothing but extravagant response from New York, Florida, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, in the U.S., to Ottawa and here in Vancouver, where I have not only fared better than ever but where both the major newspapers here suggested that my last work was the best to date. 

   If what I have jut been saying sounds like a self-pitying moan over a lack of proper Torontonian recognition, then I’m sorry. I shall simply have to live with that detraction. I believe I am a stranger to whining and that my career has demonstrated it. One thing that is certain is that I have not and never will deviate one iota from the literary pallet I elect to use and the canvas I am concerned to paint - that is, I intent to remain an anarchic bloody-minded regionalist, using my gayness when I consider it apt and relevant, evoking humour, politics, and religious substance when I feel called to do just that. I have no intention of forsaking Canada jut because our country is currently in the grip of countless smelly little orthodoxies, to use Orwell’s phrase. [laughter] Thus literary integrity allows of no alternatives for this particular writer. If I’d ever wanted to deny the prickle of self-respect which all that involves then I would long ago have stolen away to terrains of corruption - filmwriting in Los Angeles, CBC writing in Toronto... take your pick [laughter] - where dollar bills could at least temporarily have assuaged the sting of shame. But, with the buttress of a patron, in terms of my partner in life (the phrase used by the recipient of on Oscar at this week’s Academy Awards) to pick up the slack from evaporating sources of local revenue, I have been able to stay true to that writerly self and to my literary complexion. 

   All of which leads me from the relevance of integrity in the literary process, as it has impinged upon me, to the predicament that such an affirmation of integrity makes upon the person. For if those salient features of my writing which I have laid out had an economic consequence which would have been crippling had I not been privately subsidized, it remains true that even a west coast writer, even a gay one, even a new Canadian one, has managed to forge a reputation of sorts and is thus willy-nilly in a position to exercise a certain degree of power.  I wish to spend the remainder of my time examining some of the implications of that and drawing your attention to the function of integrity in the context of one man of letters, a role which is hardly accorded much honour in Canada but which offers, relatively at least, comparable temptations those involved in politics, the military, or any other high profile discharge of power.

   Livelihood.  I think the primary threat to my integrity of person as a published writer, as for many others, has an awful lot to do with brute dollars and cents.  That translates into the kinds of thing one is tempted to do in order to pay for the support of the creative habit. What to do by way of a living was, and is, a potential anguish, even though, as I have already suggested, the force of that has mercifully dissipated over the years, for me, by virtue of private circumstance.  For many, the campus, particularly the university campus, has been seen as a solution, but my own experience of teaching, fitful and brief though it has been, long ago convinced me that I was temperamentally incapable of holding back and that consequently the literary creativity would suffer if it had to be subject to the claims of pedagogic creativity.  My personal alternatives were somewhat limited as I was not capable of arduous physical labour - read "lazy" - and emerged from four years of university with a measure of theological learning but no vocation whatever wherein to make use of it.  The only other exploitable factor at my disposal was the gift of writing, so that was the route I took.  But a pamphlet on bee-keeping represents writing just as much as a penning of the Criminal Code of Canada, so what kind of writing becomes the key concern.  Before 1’d published any fiction - although at that time I was writing novels in quick succession - I worked for a San Francisco newspaper, where my task was largely involved with rewriting Hollywood press kits to make them look genuine and literate. That writing bothered me enormously and I was not sorry when circumstances took me far away from the activity, to be a publisher's reader and book reviewer for a public radio station and the New York Times Sunday Book Supplement.

   When I came to Vancouver in the 1960's a roughly comparable problem soon presented itself when I became a newspaper reviewer of music, theatre, and the visual arts.  Over and over again I encountered editorial resistance to both the style I employed and the vocabulary I used, as they were regarded as over the heads of what was and is still idiotically referred to as "your average reader.” To be honest, this was not a problem I experienced - at least, as much - writing for the CBC radio or television. Then, there was much less certainty over just what was the CBC audience, and in any case for the past decade there has been a steady decline in work opportunities as regional commentary has been progressively usurped by Toronto-devised and executed programs.  It's hard to conceive now, but there was a time when I reported on New York theatre - when I was living there - exclusively for a B.C. audience for the CBC, and that a counterpart did exactly the same thing from London.  On the other hand, with the Vancouver Sun I would be regularly requested by editor Swangard to omit such terms as “impasto” when reviewing certain paintings or to make my play reviews more accessible to those he chose to describe as "the man in the street."  [laughter]  In vain did I inform Swangard or his deputy that I wasn't writing art reviews as part of an art appreciation course and that the man in the street wasn't usually the man or woman in the theatre or in the art gallery, private or public.  It was of course the battle with populism I had become engaged in, and although I eventually quit that particular arena I still today get qualms of guilt for not battling strenuously enough.

   There are other areas where I know I am not the only Canadian author to feel particularly pressured, and again, we are in the area where integrity is in conflict with media sources.  As you may know, in both the United States and the United Kingdom - or perhaps I should say in London and New York - it is the common practice for authors to review their peers. But given the vast population of Britain and the States there always remains the possibility of anonymity and of the writers not personally knowing one another.  However in Canada, with our miniscule Anglophone population, which is hardly bigger than greater London or greater New York, a very different situation obtains. Given the socializing influence of such organizations asThe Writers Union of Canada  or, nearer to home,The Federation of British Columbia Writers,  to which so many of us writers belong, we not only know other authors, we’ve dined with them, fought with them, marched with them, and, for all I know, slept with them.  So when a Canadian novelist is asked to review a fellow Canadian's fiction, objectivity - never a facile goal - is especially hard to achieve.  But what then is the alternative, in terms of reviewing in newspapers, magazines, or over the CBC?  Should such activity be left in the hands of academe, which has its own knives to grind?  Or should it be left to some totally inept in-house journalist, often a failed novelist or such, and thus embittered or jealous? Or, failing all else, to some Grub Street hack who volunteers for reviewing and is primarily concerned to demonstrate that he or she is capable of hatchet work and can serve such a cause as women's or men's liberation, the goal of nuclear disarmament - all, doubtless, eminently worthwhile - as well as anyone else, even if such goals are altogether irrelevant to the job of literary evaluation.  It is not my place here to answer for any contingent of potential critics from whose ranks may well be summoned someone to summarize and judge what could be the lifework of a professional literary artist - like asking a bike mechanic to do an overhaul on a Boeing 707.  But I can perhaps say something as a gay who refuses to be reduced to an instrument of propaganda where fiction is concerned.  If I may indulge in the bad taste of quoting myself, let me state here what I wrote in answer to a questionnaire from an American anthology in which I appeared a couple of years ago and where my words were incorporated into the Introduction, as follows:

"On the question of the designation "gay writer," the feelings of most of the contributors were reflected by David Watmough: “I like being called a gay writer as much, and as little, as I enjoy being referred to as a Canadian writer.  I accept the qualification and can even see its usefulness.  But I soon fret if it is employed as a restriction to the catholicity I fervently seek.”

   As well as reviewing it happens from time to tine that I am asked to evaluate the project of a Canada Council candidate, or some like task. (And here, parenthetically, I find that integrity demands a certain self-rationing over the sheer amount of things it is proper to take on.  And that includes access to newspapers with letters to the editor, where excess appearance leads rapidly to verbal inflation and loss of credibility.)  I won't support a Canada Council application unless I can do so with informed enthusiasm.  That may sound obvious, but I can assure you that it isn’t. I have sometimes been horrified when I have seen so-called letters of support which have either been lukewarm or even detracting and decidedly hurtful to someone's chances.  Small matters, maybe, in isolation, but they are all basic constituents of my public self as a writer, and if one allows corruption to take over in one aspect of life, it will not be very long before the rest begins to putrefy.

   There is, finally, the matter of public commitment to causes that confront the published writer in his or her community. And that community in Canada can stretch thousands of miles, from here to Ottawa on occasion. My own feeling is that this is an area where it is very much the onus of the author to be true to himself or herself.  Too often there is an insistence that to remain silent when protest is possible - in a democracy such as ours, at least - is treasonous to the writing species, that the banners of accuracy and truth must be raised whenever and wherever they seem prone to be swamped and drowned by media hype. And there is patently truth to such contention, but, and this is my point, only truth for some. For others - and I count myself among them - there is a tendency to go the whole hog the other way, in fact to over speak.  God knows, as a Canadian writer whose activities have covered plays as well as fiction, TV and radio as well as newspaper and magazine journalism, I find my wallet over-stuffed with various membership cards.

   Each year I tell myself I shall desist from this activity and that and retire more extensively to the privacy of my typewriter and my primary vocation.  But still, all too often I find myself in the ranks of those who find it hard to be properly quiet over issues, such as censorship, or the distortion of language to serve political purposes.  I tell myself that the reason for so much sounding-off is the dearth of venues in this country for the reasoned essay on unmodish topics or unpopular stances over intellectually fashionable ones.  Indeed, my rationalization for all I have stated here is the unsubstantiated hope that I will find a home for it subsequently in essay form.  But I am still left with the niggle that my kind of writer is more true to himself on his chair than on his feet.  So, in order to serve my Polonian maxim, I'll now shut-up.

   Thank you for bearing with me.

"Since 1984 David Watmough has published the following works of fiction.Vibrations in Time  (stories, 1986); The Year of Fears  (stories, 1988); Thy Mother's Glass  (novel, 1992); The Time of the Kingfishers  (novel, 1994); Hunting With Diana  (stories, 1996); The Moor is Dark Beneath the Moon  (novel, 2002); and this fall of 2004, Vancouver Voices.
He also declares that there is not a sentiment or opinion he expressed in his 1984 statement that he wouldn't say today - except that the situations he cited then are now an even greater challenge as the cultural fragmentation has increased and the standards deteriorated. The call to personal integrity is even more clarion." - David Watmough