Wilfred Watson fonds
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA
UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
A Descriptive Inventory of the Wilfred Watson Fonds
Accession Number: 91-117 & 95-131
Lynn McPherson
Spring, 2002
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA
UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Wilfred Watson Fonds
This guide was prepared with financial assistance from the Archives Society of Alberta, Access to Holdings grant. The University Archives gratefully acknowledges the assistance of this grant. Without it, these important records could not have been made accessible to researchers and the public.
Spring, 2002
Wilfred Watson Fonds
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Descriptive Inventory of the Wilfred Watson Fonds
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
SCOPE AND CONTENT NOTE
1. Journals and Notebooks
1.1 1945-1960
1.2 Cockcrow and the Gulls Notebooks
1.3 1961-1965
1.4 1966-1970
1.5 1971-1975
1.6 1976-1980
1.7 1981-1985
1.8 1986-1990's
1.9 Appointment Calendars/Daily Diaries
2. Literary Drafts/Writings
2.1Poetry: Notebooks/Manuscripts
2.2Plays
2.3Short Stories/Novel
2.4Essays
2.5Books
2.6Miscellaneous Manuscript Papers/Notes
2.7Publications
3. Sketches/Artwork
4. Correspondence
4.1Wilfred Watson to Sheila Watson
4.2Sheila Watson to Wilfred Watson
4.3Wilfred Watson's Parents
4.4Correspondence - Others
4.5Correspondence-Miscellaneous
5. Student Records
6. Reference Material/Material from Other Sources
7. Personal Papers
7.1Financial and Miscellaneous
7.2Promotional Items - Wilfred Watson's Works
8. Audio-Visual Records
8.1Sound Recordings
8.2Photographs
Index
Wilfred Watson Fonds
PREFACE
The University of Alberta Archives was established in 1968 at the recommendation of the President’s Standing Committee on Archives and Documents. Its primary mandate is to acquire, maintain, and preserve the records of the University, in any medium, which contain continuing administrative, legal, and historical value. The Archives constitutes the official “memory” of the University and represents the accumulated experience of our educational community. In addition to these official records, the University Archives also contain the private papers of the University staff whose subjects of research and teaching encompass the world.
Wilfred Watson Fonds
INTRODUCTION
The Wilfred Watson fonds consist of the personal records of Wilfred Watson, a noted poet, playwright, and faculty member of the Department of English at the University of Alberta. Included with the records are Watson's rich and creatively detailed notebooks and journals, numerous drafts of his poetry, plays, stories, essays and novels, as well as detailed correspondence files, reference files, and photographs and sound recordings.
SOURCE: Wilfred Watson's records were received at the University of Alberta in three separate accessions over a period of eight years. The first set of papers came from materials left with Professor Diane Bessai in 1980 when Watson moved from Edmonton to Nanaimo; the second donation was made directly to the Archives from
Wilfred Watson; and the third donation of papers were sent from Shirley Neuman after Professor Watson's death in 1998. Shirley Neuman, Wilfred Watson's literary executor, oversaw the original listing, description, and transfer of the Watson records to the University of Alberta Archives.
ARRANGEMENT NOTE: The Wilfred Watson records were transferred as three separate deposits to the University of Alberta Archives. Each transfer of records was accompanied by a detailed file list and description provided by Shirley Neuman, Diane Bessai and others contracted to complete the listing. The individuals who worked on the listing were all very familiar with Dr. Watson's work, and were able to fill in information gaps with names, titles, and approximate dates. In this current finding-aid, the three accessions were pulled together physically and intellectually, but with the original listings and descriptions retained. The result is that the Watson fonds is described with two accession numbers, and arranged in eight series; many of these series reflecting the original order imposed by Dr. Watson and his literary executor on his records.
The records are in excellent physical shape and provide a very complete picture of the creative processes involved in one individual's writing and teaching career.
RELATED ACCESSIONS: Researchers may wish to consult Studio Theatre (University of Alberta) records for further information about the Watson plays that were produced and performed at Studio Theatre. As well, records from the Faculty of Arts, Department of English might be consulted for the years Professor Watson was a faculty member (1951-1976). Issues of White Pelican, the literary magazine Wilfred Watson helped establish, are located in the Archives (84-13), along with copies of some of his books (See 69-56, 76-5)
ACCESS: The terms under which the records were deposited require those who wish to consult the records receive permission from Shirley Neuman, Dr. Watson's literary executor for his estate. These restrictions apply until the year 2010.
EXTENT: 10.60 m of textual records and other material.
DATE RANGE: 1946-1998
Includes ca. 10.60 m of textual records, 7 sound recordings, 4 video cassettes, .20 m of art work, and 356 photographic items
Wilfred Watson Fonds
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Wilfred Watson was born in Rochester, England in 1911, the oldest child of Frederick Walter Watson and the former Louisa Claydon. He immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of fifteen, settling in Duncan, British Columbia. After one year of highschool, he found a job with a Vancouver Island sawmill. Watson attended the University of British Columbia from 1940 to 1943, earning a B.A. in English literature. During the Second World War, he served in the Canadian navy; after the war he continued his education at the University of Toronto, receiving an M.A. in 1946 and a Ph.D. in 1951. In 1949, Wilfred Watson was employed as a special lecturer in English at the University of British Columbia and from 1951 to 1953 he became professor in the Department of English at the University of Alberta, teaching at the Calgary campus. In 1954, he transferred to the Edmonton campus, remaining there as Professor of English until his retirement in 1977.
Wilfred Watson married Sheila Martin Doherty in 1941, who as Sheila Watson published The Double Hook in 1959. The Watson's both taught at the University of Alberta and participated in an intellectual circle that included the painter Norman Yates, and actor-directors Gordon Peacock and Thomas Peacocke among others (see Stefan Haag, M.A. thesis). Watson co-founded the Jazz Club "Yardbird Suite" in Edmonton in the early 1960's, and joined the editorial group of White Pelican(a quarterly review of the arts) in 1972. Wilfred Watson retired from the University of Alberta in 1977 and moved in 1980 to Nanaimo, B.C. with his wife Sheila. He passed away very shortly after his wife Sheila in Nanaimo in 1998, at the age of 87.
Wilfred Watson's writing career was prolific and continuously evolving and developing. T.S.Eliot accepted his first volume of poetry, Friday's Child, for Faber and Faber, publishing it in 1955, and Watson received the 1955 Governor General's Award for it. He lived in Paris, 1955-1956, as the recipient of a Canadian Government Overseas Fellowship. Here he was introduced to the theatre of the absurd, and in the following years explored this interest with his own writing and directing activities. In the early 1960s, Watson made contact with Marshall McLuhan and developed a growing interest in McLuhan's theories, culminating with their collaboration on the study, From Cliché to Archetype. Watson started work on his first major play, Cockcrow and the Gulls, in the mid-1950s, and it was first performed at the University of Alberta's Studio Theatre in March 1962. Studio Theatre, where Thomas Peacocke and Gordon Peacock were both associated, was an important venue for the production of Watson plays. During the 1960s Watson had his most prolific period of playwriting; Trial of Corporal Adam was produced in 1963; Wail for two Pedestals in 1964; and Let's murder clytemnestra according to the principles of marshall mcluhan in 1969. A play for Canada's centennial, O holy ghost, dip your finger in the blood of Canada, and write, I love you was produced in 1967. (For a complete listing of Watson's works, please refer to the Watson biography file at the University of Alberta Archives) During the 1970s, Watson concentrated on writing poetry, and his second volume of poetry, The Sorrowful Canadians and Other Poems was published in 1972. This volume of poetry experimented with using different typefaces and repetitions, and Watson later introduced Number-grid Verse in a volume titled I Begin With Counting. Number-grid verse involved a configuration that combines numerals and words juxtaposed on the page; this form allowed Watson to score poetry for oral performance by several voices. A second volume of number-grid verse, Mass on Cowback, was published in 1982. The 1980s also saw Watson return to writing for the stage; The Woman Taken in Adultery, a short play, was performed at the Edmonton Fringe Festival in 1987 and a major play trilogy, Gramsci x 3 was produced by Studio Theatre in 1986. The number-grid verse concept was applied to these later plays as well. Wilfred Watson also wrote some short stories, essays, and a novel, although a lot of what he wrote was never published. In her article on Wilfred Watson for the Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography, Diane Bessai writes:
Wilfred Watson, playwright, poet, teacher, and
literary theorist, has steadily conducted a one-man
revolution in Canadian letters from the 1950s to
the present. (pp 382)
Wilfred Watson Fonds
SCOPE AND CONTENT NOTE
The Wilfred Watson fonds span a period of over fifty years, and provide a wonderful record of the creative processes of a noted Canadian poet, playwright, teacher and literary theorist. Wilfred Watson was a writer brimming with ideas and his papers provide evidence of his creative endeavors; his numerous notebooks are filled with drafts of plays and poems, ideas for further development, excerpts from his own reading and study, sketches, and jottings about his daily activities. In addition to his notebooks, there are files of his writing drafts (encompassing the many genre he wrote in), very complete correspondence files, drawing files and sketchbooks, and supplemental material including sound recordings and photographs.
The records arrived at the University of Alberta Archives in three separate deposits (the last deposit of records made after Wilfred Watson's death), with excellent listings and descriptions attached. The archivist brought the records in each of the three deposits together physically and intellectually, while retaining many of the original groupings adhered to in the first listings. The notebooks, for example, were kept chronologically by Wilfred Watson, so the notebooks from all three deposits have been pulled together and arranged in their original date order. Likewise, the correspondence in each deposit was arranged alphabetically by correspondent and in the comprehensive finding aid, all of the correspondence is together and arranged in alphabetical order. The series designations include the following eight series, and were arrived at by considering the contents of the records:
Series one: Journals and Notebooks, further arranged by date and with a separate sub-series of Cockcrow and The Gull notebooks, and appointment calendars or daily diaries
Series two: Literary Drafts/Writings, with sub-series including poetry; plays; short stories/novel; essays; books; miscellaneous manuscripts; and publication related
Series three: Sketches/Artwork, including files of loose drawings and paintings, and sketchpads
Series four: Correspondence files, arranged in sub-series involving the correspondence between Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson; Wilfred's parents; other correspondents (alphabetically arranged); and miscellaneous correspondence
Series five: Student Records (Watson)
Series six: Reference Material (used by Wilfred Watson for his own research and teaching purposes)
Series seven: Personal papers, including financial records, and personal publicity records
Series eight: Audio-Visual records, further divided into sound recordings and photographs
The notebooks are of particular research value as they provide so much information about Wilfred Watson's creative thought processes, as well as information about his teaching plans, readings, Department of English activities, and even a daily weather observation from his study window. The notebooks also held loose sheets of paper, and these have been removed for conservation purposes and placed in a separate file following the notebook they were retrieved from. The series of literary drafts and writing files is also very significant; often several different versions of a particular poem or even an entire play are present in the files. The writing files take on added significance since they provide evidence of, as Wilfred Watson was once described, "a prolific poet who publishes little." As Diane Bessai noted, Watson's plays, while given lively reviews in the daily press at the times of their first performances, "have not been widely produced since". His writing, particularly his later writing, was often considered controversial and experimetnal, and was not readily published or produced, so it is important that his work is preserved in his own archive. The correspondence files, particularly the letters between Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson, provide another fascinating glimpse into these writers' minds. The Watsons, due to work and schooling circumstances, lived apart off and on over the years and their letters became their main link. Their letters, written regularly to one another, usually go beyond the ordinary to explore mutual ideas about writing, writers, literature, and projects they are working on in their own studies.
A detailed series and file list follows, with further information provided about each of the eight series in the Wilfred Watson fonds. A subject/name index is included at the end of the inventory to assist in locating specific files.
Series 1
Journals and Notebooks
- Wilfred Watson, Journals and Notebooks. --1945-1998.--3.8 m of textual records.
Archival Description: [the following description(s), both the Archival and the Scope and Content, are largely taken from an original listing and description provided by Shirley Neuman]
Series one is a large series, containing the many notebooksand journals that Wilfred Watson kept during his writing career. The earliest notebooks were usually 5 x 8 hardbound books, between 64 and 128 pages. By the early 1950s Watson was using 8 x 11 books, with the exception of a few books from Paris which were a smaller, paperbound format. All the books tend to be 64 to 80 sheets (128-160 pages). Each is filled, sometimes, particularly while working on Cockcrow, he keeps several at once. Beginning in 1980, Watson began buying 11 x 14 books of construction paper, usually 48 sheets for his notebook (the multicolored effect of several of them on a shelf was the effect sought for in the design of Mass on cowback). He also began keeping simultaneous notebooks in the white spaces and over the illustrations of calendars. All of the notebooks are filled with drawings, line, crayon, pastel, and watercolor, as well as with written text. There are approximately 345 notebooks, journals, and calendars and they make a complete record of Watson's work from 1945 to 1982, and a somewhat more fragmentary record for the last sixteen years.
Scope and Content: Wilfred Watson's earliest notebooks are manuscript notebooks. Increasingly over the years, the notebooks combined reflections on reading and conversations with others, ideas of poems, plays, and short stories, and manuscript drafts. Certain themes recur in the notebooks, among them ongoing meditations about Shakespeare's plays and, especially from 1965 on, a continuing engagement with the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Nearly all Watson's plays, poems, and short stories are first draftedin the notebooks, sometimes with many variations. For some work, such as Cockcrow and the Gulls, the notebooks provide a complete history of the genesis and development of the script. The notebooks also include hundreds of ideas for poems, scenario for plays etc., some developed, some not, as well as a great many unpublished poems and plays. They provide an indispensable research tool for scholars wishing to trace the thought and the process of composition of Watson's Oeuvre. "The notebooks and journals provide a record of the conception, writing and revisions of all Watson's major works and of a great deal of important unpublished work, as well as a major and creative response to the intellectual and political changes of the period from 1950 to 1980".
The series title is based on the contents of the records.
A file listing follows.
Accession 2001-58
Series 1.
Journals and Notebooks
1. Journals and Notebooks
1.1 1945-1960
Box # / File # / Description / DateAcc. #91-117
The terms 'Notebook' and 'Journal' are used somewhat interchangably, although in the earlier volumes, notebooks tended to be filled more with writing drafts, ideas, and sketches, while the journals had more of the daily diary-type entry.
1 / 1 / Notebook. Handwritten entries with drafts of poems, notes on readings and essays and journal entries. / Jan. 1945-May 15, 1950