David Watmough's eight books of fiction, including his new novel The Year of Fears (Mosaic $17.95 $8.95), have all been written in Vancouver and published in Canada. "I think Canadian, feel Canadian, and find it quite impossible to regard myself otherwise," says Watmough, who emigrated in 1949.

Yet Cornwall-raised David Watmough continues to find himself referred to by reviewers as a 'transplanted Englishman'. Ironically, in a place called British Columbia, where BritLit was once the preferred cultural norm, a British accent can now be detrimental to a writer's reputation.

"Part of me--the robust, creative side of me--welcomes the prickly thorns and the persistent reminder that I will always remain an outsider from the Canadian Literary Establishment," says Watmough.

"The other side of me--the less intransigent, softer side--has admittedly been tempted in the past to return to the United States where my sales are higher, my reviews more positive, and where my birthplace hardly rates a mention."

Significantly, Watmough' s new novel is about tolerance and intolerance. The Year of Fears has a San Francisco Bay area setting in the year 1953 when the McCarthy Hearings were in full swing. It's a story of immigrant adaptation against a backdrop of witchhunting, bigotry and smear-campaigns.

"Even if I know that in the eyes of many of my compatriots I can never be as Canadian as the native-born--unlike the American immigrant's experience--I can find imaginative sustenance from that sense of ultimate exclusion to feed my fiction and to remind my homosexual character, Davey Bryant, that belonging is a luxury denied a very great many throughout this dislocated century of ours."

Prior to the 1960's, being born in Britain was clearly advantageous for a writer. Would we have been so impressed by Roderick Haig-Brown or Malcolm Lowry in the 1940' sand 1950's had they hailed from Spuzzum? But the winds of cultural chauvinism have shifted and Watmough, whose semi-autobiographical character Davey Bryant has carried him through eight books, is now writing against the wind.

"When a native Canadian woman reviewer, writing from the cultural heartland of Toronto, refers to me as a 'transplanted Englishman', it is comparable to taking a cold shower: useful in alerting all one's senses of survival but not something to be desired too frequently."

"If I have a lot of Jewish friends as well as the expected gay ones, perhaps the reason is not too hard to find."

One of of Watmough's closest literary friends is the dean of Canadian literary critics, the 'transplanted' George Woodcock. Although born in Winnipeg, Woodcock was raised in England (and was named in honour of the English novelist George Meredith). The second volume of Woodcock's autobiography, Beyond the Blue Mountains (Fitzhenry & Whiteside $29.95), recalls Woodcock's remarkable early years in B.C. when he homesteaded in Sooke, was enamoured of Doukhobor idealism, met Earle Birney and commenced editing Canadian Literature at UBC.

[BCBW Spring 1989]