Love and Salt Water by Ethel Wilson

First published: 1956

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: 1930-1950

Locale: British Columbia, at sea, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Principal Characters:

• Ellen (Gypsy) Cuppy , a young woman who grows to maturity in the course of the novel
• Nora, her older sister
• Frank Cuppy, their father, who works in the oil business
• Morgan Peake, Nora’s husband, who is a Member of Parliament
• Johnny, Nora’s and Morgan’s small son
• George Gordon, a Montreal businessman, who is a suitor to Ellen

The Novel

Ellen ldquo;Gypsy” Cuppy is devastated by the death of her loving mother, on whom she has greatly depended. Her older sister, Nora, is married, and her father is mostly away from home, traveling in connection with an oil business. To console Ellen, her father takes her on a long freighter voyage, down the West Coast, through the Panama Canal, and to London.

The voyage is momentous, first, because the sea, usually so calm and charming in Vancouver, becomes a raging monster in a storm; a boy member of the crew is swept overboard and lost, and several members of the crew and a few passengers are injured. Second, Ellen’s father meets a sympathetic woman on the ship whom he later marries. This further isolates Ellen. She, of necessity, becomes independent and somewhat selfish. At the outbreak of World War II, she joins the Canadian navy as a Wren.

Ethel Wilson passes rapidly over the war period. The novel takes up again with Ellen back in Vancouver, where she takes an office job and begins to date and then becomes engaged to Huw Peake, the stepbrother of Nora’s husband, Morgan, who has been a prisoner of war for three years. She soon realizes that Huw can be bad-tempered and morose. After a particularly unpleasant car trip into the interior of British Columbia in pouring rain, she breaks off the engagement, to the dismay of her family. To get away from them, she takes a job in Saskatoon as secretary to an elderly, rich, and miserly financier. There, she meets George Gordon, who comes to the city on business and with whom she later falls in love.

After the financier’s death, Ellen moves back again to Vancouver: Her nickname, Gypsy, is quite appropriate. Ellen and George plan a vacation together in British Columbia, but at the last minute George finds that he cannot leave Montreal, as his boss is sick. In place of that vacation, Ellen agrees to take her young nephew, Johnny, to the Gulf Islands while her sister takes a trip with her husband on Vancouver Island. This chain of circumstances results in a boating accident which is almost fatal for both Ellen and little Johnny. Ellen thoughtlessly rowed out in a dinghy with Johnny into Active Pass in search of seals, forgetting the danger that can result from a combination of a tide rip and a ferry wake. They are rescued at the last minute. Johnny fully recovers, but Ellen is deeply scarred on the face from being hit by the dinghy as it sinks.

She writes to George to explain the accident and to release him from any commitment to her. He insists on his devotion, so she asks him to make the trip to Vancouver to see her before she goes into plastic surgery. She meets him at the train station; he kisses the “seamed and puckered skin,” and “this was the beginning of their happy chequered life together.”

The Characters

A common feature of Wilson’s novels is the strong, self-reliant heroine. Ellen is privileged and sheltered as a child, coming from a prosperous family, educated at a private school, and living in a house near Stanley Park and the sea in Vancouver. She is ill-prepared for the tragedy of her mother’s death and tends to withdraw into herself and patronize other people, particularly her conventional sister Nora and Nora’s stuffy husband, the Member of Parliament. As further difficulties beset her—the remarriage of her father, the breakup of her love affair with Huw Peake, and the loss of her job through the death of the old financier—she changes and matures, but it is not until the almost fatal accident with her nephew that she becomes fully aware of her tendency toward disdain and superiority. She took little Johnny out in the dinghy as part of a process designed to toughen him, for she believed that Nora was bringing him up a sissy. “With all her ways of the superior onlooker,” Wilson writes, “she had nearly drowned him, that’s all. She had better mind her own business. Everyone had better mind their own business. A gap had closed.” She can now be reconciled with her family and freely give her love to George.

Ellen’s father, Frank, was not particularly helpful in her development, since he was away during much of her childhood and finds it difficult to communicate when he is with her. His marriage to the woman whom he meets on the ship after the death of Ellen’s mother puts a further distance between father and daughter.

Nora, having married a much older man, sinks rapidly into domesticity and doting motherhood, particularly since her first child is stillborn and her second is born with Down’s syndrome. Little Johnny is perfection in her eyes, which makes his near-fatal accident all the more distressing. Yet Nora comes through in the end, as she never upbraids her sister for her foolhardiness in taking the dinghy into the pass. Nora’s husband, Morgan, also emerges as a sterling figure, supportive to Ellen after the accident and, it is revealed, attentive to his mongoloid child, who is being looked after by a couple in the suburbs of Vancouver. At the end of the book, Ellen asks him to go with her to meet George at the train station.

George plays a relatively small role, since he is in transit much of the time, like many of the characters in the novel. He is divorced and has tended to lead an isolated, bookish life until he meets Ellen, who draws him out. Another character with a small but important part in the book is Aunt Maury Peake. It is she who “blesses everything she touches” and who comforts Ellen after her mother’s death. She owns the cottage on the Gulf Island near Active Pass, and it is she who brings little Johnny back from death through artificial respiration after the accident.

Critical Context

Love and Salt Water was Ethel Wilson’s last novel. It lacks the unity of her best work, but it is distinguished, as all of her novels are, by her poetic style, her pervading irony, and her sense of the integrity and perversity of the human character. The novel skillfully conveys the essentials of life on the Canadian West Coast, “on the periphery,” as she calls it. She is an old-fashioned novelist in the way that she feels free to comment on aspects of character, vagaries of weather, peculiarities of settings, and so on, ex cathedra, although she normally restricts the focus of her fiction to one point of view. On the other hand, she is interested in new technologies and communications methods and is acutely aware of the constantly changing patterns in modern North American life. Even when she is dealing with near-tragic events, such as the accident with the dinghy, she does not become solemn or portentous but keeps the balance that her unerring comic sense demands.

Desmond Pacey has well summed up the basic pattern underlying her fiction: “There is a cosmic rhythm, and true life consists in surrendering oneself to that rhythm. If man seeks to preserve his personal identity, to protect himself within the shell of his own ego, he brings upon himself loneliness, fear, and ultimate horror.” This rhythm is found both in the natural world and in human life. True wisdom, in Wilson’s view, lies in learning to bring together in harmony one’s nature with that of others and with the natural world itself.

Bibliography

McMullen, Lorraine, ed. The Ethel Wilson Symposium, 1982.

Pacey, Desmond. Ethel Wilson, 1967.