Audrey Thomas

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Audrey Thomas with Eleanor Wachtel (interview date 1985)

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SOURCE: An interview, in Room of One's Own, Vol. 10, Nos. 3 & 4, March, 1986, pp. 7-61.

[In the following interview, which was conducted in August, 1985, Thomas discusses her literary themes and interests and biographical influences on her writing.]

[Wachtel]: You describe your own childhood as unhappy.

[Thomas]: When I think about it now, that was not the right word; I was absolutely terrified, I spent my whole childhood in a state of terror.

Terrified? Why?

Because my parents . . . somebody had to be the adult. It was interesting, Robert [Bringhurst] and I got to talking .. . about our childhoods . . . and I mentioned that very early on I learned that there wasn't any adult in our family.

Did you recognize that even as a

Oh really young, and I was just terrified. They had these tantrums and they threw things, they smashed glasses, they threw knives. And what you did on Monday .. . on Monday you'd get kissed for it, on Tuesday you'd get slapped for it. And that's very disturbing for a young child. You can never figure out .. . I mean, all parents at times blow up over trivialities, I think that's something you do partly because you get tired. And so some little minor thing . . . you end up screaming and the poor little child who's only spilled milk doesn't understand that this is Friday and not Monday. On Monday that was a forgivable offence and on Friday it was not. But this was consistent. . . .

Consistently inconsistent.

Yes, and really scary stuff. I realize it is a way of driving somebody crazy. . . .

What did it mean to have a childhood of terror or to be the adult at the age of seven?

You shut your—eventually what you did is you kind of mentally walked away: these are people having tantrums, so I'll just let them have their tantrums. You just refuse to get involved, which would make the tantrums worse sometimes. My mother was always saying that she was going to leave and we would have to choose between her and my father. I would get to the point where I wouldn't even come downstairs.

To play that game?

Yes.

Do you think that has made you more emotionally detached, or given you a certain kind of strength?

I don't think I'm emotionally detached at all except in the sense that any artist is. No, I think I'm very emotionally attached. I think it's made me very nervous. It's taken me years, and yoga, and all kinds of stuff like having neat children, to get over that. I think I'm probably an overly-conscientious mother in some ways. I find it very hard to get angry at my children, but that's OK, they get angry at me and then I'm able to get angry. They're very straightforward about how they feel.

You've obviously created an atmosphere in which they can do that

But they've created an atmosphere in which I can get mad and I know it's not the end of the world, whereas with my mother it was. Also, in my era you just did not talk back to your parents, so the only out you had was to say "No, I'm not coming down the stairs." But you didn't say, "You people are assholes! Why don't you get some psychiatric help, you are crazy." Once I started working in the hospital I realized they were both crazy. But you didn't say to them: "Look, let's sit down and talk about the way you people are behaving, there's something terribly wrong with both of you." It was a worse stigma than being divorced to go and get psychiatric help. Plus we had insanity in our family, so you know, this would never be admitted.

Spending time alone, walking away, is that when you first thought about being a writer?

I was always writing, always, always.

Recording?

Yes, from the time I was about three. Observing, recording. I was a great reader; I learned to read when I was four. It probably saved me in some ways. My grandfather really encouraged me, although when I look back now he wasn't the hero I certainly thought he was at the time. He was a very cold man to his children, but a great grandfather (as often happens). Somehow he could relax with us in a way he never could with his own children. He constantly gave me stuff to read. I remember he taught me how to row a boat. Maybe that has something to do with my loving to cross the water or something. You get out on a boat and nobody can get at you. My father often went fishing, and he used to take me with him. He went fishing to get away from my mother, but he was just as bad as my mother. I now see they were feeding off one another in some very sick way. But he was a great fisherman, a wonderful fisherman. He would take me with him, and I saw the advantages of being out on a boat.

And reading. Do you remember who you were reading, what you were reading?

I remember asking to have a book given to me, because I was always being lent books by my grandfather, he had those little, small—and I had very bad eyes from the time I had measles when I was seven—he had those early twentieth-century editions of Treasure Island and all this stuff and the print was really terrible. But I would borrow them from him just the same and take them back. They all had little green covers, I remember, kind of bookshelf classics, I'm sure they had a name like that. After he died, I asked to have some of his books, but of course I wasn't in the States to choose. It's interesting, because two of the ones I got—and I didn't get very many—one of them was The Princess, Tennyson's The Princess. (I find it extraordinary that my grandfather would have had this book and wonder if it was my grandmother's. You know in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, it's the key book. It's an amazing book; I'll show it to you, a big book with illustrations. Quite a lovely, lovely book.) The other book was Paradise Lost with the Dürer illustrations. But he was a beautiful drawer and he probably had that book for that reason.

Do you remember any books from your childhood in particular?

Treasure Island! The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This is what you gave kids to read, right? Also, we read all the Nancy Drew books, and even the lady next door had inherited from her mother the Little Colonel books which no one has ever heard of; I ask everyone. These books must have come out in the 1880s or something. It was the usual girl fantasy thing where the mother's dead and the father's rich and she's the little colonel.

This was a Shirley Temple movie?

Of course, she's the little colonel, of course. There's a whole series, about fifteen books. I also read all the Bobbsey Twins. . . . The Bobbsey Twins Go To The Arctic . . . The Bobbsey Twins At Home . . . The Bobbsey Twins do this, the Bobbsey Twins do that. That was the standard birthday present that you gave to people but you read it the night before yourself, or I did.

When did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up?

When I was ten.

Was it a writer?

Oh yeah, although (I don't know if you should put this in, it is quite funny). . . . About seven or eight years ago I was standing on the dock at Sturdies Bay, waiting for the ferry, and it was a beautiful evening. You could see Mt. Baker, just like this wonderful licked ice cream cone in the distance, and for some obscure reason, I don't know if it was the pink and the white .. . and I suddenly thought, you know you're never going to be a ballerina. So obviously at the back of my mind it was the moment when I knew I was never, ever going to be a ballerina. I really knew it at that moment, something about Mt. Baker and the pink and the white and the perfection I guess. I took ballet when I was really small and I was terrible at it of course.

What did your parents want you to be, did they have expectations?

Married. They wanted me to have naturally curly hair, which in fact I have but it wasn't curly enough I guess, or maybe it's gotten curlier. Things happen to your hair when you have children and it may be much curlier than it was. Married. And married to someone in one of the professions. If I was going to be a writer, she—I remember a writer by the name of Alfred Payson Terhune, and he wrote dog stories—she would have liked me to . . .

Why would you want to be a writer?

I didn't want to be a writer, I was a writer. This is what I did, this is what I did well, although I also played the violin, a "little-known fact" about my life. For seven years I took the violin and played in the school orchestra and was very bad, but enjoyed it. . . .I also painted; it was my grandfather who gave me a set of oils.

And so, why write?

Well, I wasn't any good at those things.

And you were good at writing?

Yeah.

Were you writing stories?

Poems.

Did you show them to people?

Oh, I won prizes for them. Terrible, awful stuff, the kind of stuff that little girls in elementary schools in the '40s would win prizes for; I wrote one about the unknown soldier. It was so horrible. I remember writing that one because I wrote it so cold-bloodedly. It wasn't really a contest at school but anyone who wrote a really deeply moving poem for what we called Armistice Day was going to get to recite it. I think this is typical of me too, I was so carried away with the idea: I wrote this poem, and it's told from the point of view of the unknown soldier who's dead, and his mother actually comes to his grave and he has no way to tell her that he's her son. It's just a bunch of crap. . . .

Were you known as the poet [when you later studied at boarding school]?

Oh no. That was all secret.

You withdrew from the prize-world?

That stuff was just crap. There was an English teacher at that school, who was let go. I think it was very sad that he was. He gave me a reading list and about two weeks later I had read it all. And he said "Oh my God, what are we going to do with you?" So he gave me War and Peace to read, The Brothers Karamazov, he gave me all this stuff and he got me writing. . . .

When you were [at Smith College], by that time you were getting into academic subjects, you 're still thinking you're a writer?

Oh yeah, I'm still writing but feeling more and more shy about it because people don't—I remember the English teacher I had at Mary Burnham. I got very discouraged, she didn't like what I was writing, thought I was a smartass. I probably was, but she didn't encourage me to write at all. In fact, it was the French teacher who encouraged me. Because she knew I really liked words and I had a lot of fun in French class with all the idiomatic expressions. She really encouraged me to write, but the English teacher didn't like what I was doing at all, didn't like anything that I wrote and really made my life quite miserable. But meanwhile, I had discovered boys of course, so it compensated for a lot. I wrote a lot of letters. . . .

What happened to the novel [that you started the summer after you graduated from Smith]?

It must be somewhere, I got some chapters of it done. It was set in St. Andrews and was called Tomorrow We'll Be Sober, which is a line from a drinking song. Come landlord fill the flowing bowl . . . [she sings] Nice title. I could come up with good titles even then. It was about the British students after the war, because when I went there in 1955, it wasn't that long after the war and there was that sense of giddiness that some of them had, that—'My God, the war is really over,' and rationing was over. There wasn't any money but there was a tremendous sense of optimism that they'd come through and Britain hadn't been invaded. It was a great time, actually, to be in Britain. So this is what that novel was about, but it wasn't terribly good. I remember I kept reading The Atlantic Monthly. I wanted to publish in The Atlantic. I don't know why.

Because that was your heritage? In some way?

I guess, and then I did. My first story was published in The Atlantic. I've done just about everything I've set out to do. It is curious, you know. I wanted, the first time I was ever in print—real print, big print—I wanted it to be in The Atlantic and it was.

Have you set other goals?

I wanted to get married, I wanted to have children, I wanted to travel, I wanted to become a great reader, because I wasn't really; I read a lot, but I wasn't a great reader. I am a great reader.

Did you want to become a great writer?

I was a writer. That was sort of like saying, do I want to have blue eyes?

But a great writer? You wanted to be published in The Atlantic, but beyond that, did you think, I want to publish the great American novel?

I never thought I would make any money from my writing, which is just as well because I never have really. I never thought about great or not great. Partly, I think that has something to do with—you see, at Smith, I didn't study any women writers at Smith. So maybe women didn't think in—or this woman didn't think in terms of great. The American novel course that I did at Smith was Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But didn't you identify with them?

Oh no. Identify? Oh no, I was very curious about John Dos Passos.

But those were the authors you were exposed to; didn't you identify?

I don't identify with men.

Even if they're the only role models as great authors around?

No. Faulkner a little bit, because I liked the way he was so outrageous, he didn't care what he did. And he was so meticulous about it. I really liked that. I think I learned a lot from reading Faulkner. Then I discovered Virginia Woolf, of course.

When was that?

I was 17. I read To the Lighthouse in our freshman English course and then I wanted to read everything of hers.

So going back to your goals, was that it?

Wasn't that enough? No, I wanted to build a house. . . . No, there are a couple of things: I wanted to become fluent in five or six different languages and I haven't done that, but maybe I'll do it yet. I love language, but I tend to dabble in it. . . .

Do you think of yourself as a funny writer?

I just think I'm a funny person and occasionally it comes out in my writing. No, not a particularly funny writer, although I sometimes think of things I don't write down, usually when I'm walking. Something that I think would make very funny little stories, but I don't usually write them down, I just have a nice quiet chuckle to myself. Nobody ever seems to think I'm funny, that sort of bothers me but I don't know how I would talk about that.

I thought your books were getting funnier, but then I went back and looked at some of the early stories in Ten Green Bottles, stories like "Albatross", there was some really funny stuff, but I think it got lost in some of the more serious books, such as Blown Figures, Mrs. Blood.

People are rather surprised to find out that I'm funny, when I do a reading and I have dinner with the hosts ahead of time. I think Intertidal Life has a lot of funny stuff in it, but nobody seems to think so. Bob Amussen said an interesting thing the other night, he said it's important that it begins with that discussion of Harlequin romances because what the book is is a turned around Harlequin romance, inverted. It begins in a sense when all the happiness is over in the relationship between Peter and Alice.

Do you think of yourself as a realist then, a chronicler of social comedy?

I think I've always felt a great identification with Restoration comedy because of the language, the use of quick language. Yes, I'm very much for writing having a social comment to it.

As an observer of social comedy, is it barbed? There's going to be a sort of wryness . . .

I suppose, certainly a story like "Ted's Wife", or "In the Bleak Midwinter" [from Real Mothers], the trio in Greece. [In the latter story, one of two women in a ménageà-trois rebels against the self-centred male focus of the triangle. She takes up with a worker in the Greek hotel where they are staying, undermining her lover's pretensions. Then she silences his impotent anger with a devastating reassurance.]

Ending with, I told him you were my brother?

The worst insult. I suppose, actually, in life, I rarely say anything like that. At the time, I might think it, but I don't say it, something holds me back from being quite that mean. I once was introduced to someone here at the dock and I remember she was being very snotty and she said, "Oh yes, yes, I know who you are. Mind you, I haven't read all your work." And I said, "I haven't written it yet." That's, I think, the best one-liner I've ever gotten off. Sometimes I like to create characters who are nastier than I am because then they can say things that I wouldn't say. For example, that woman in "Ted's Wife" is a really nasty piece of work.

Are nasty people more interesting?

No, sometimes they're just nasty and to be avoided. I know one or two people who scare me with their nastiness.

That wouldn't be something you'd want to write about?

I don't think so, I think I'd be a bit scared, it's as though it almost borders on evil. It's very destructive. Ted's wife is that kind of person; she isn't Ted's wife, of course, she only wishes she were. She wants to destroy; there's gossip and then there's plain meanness. When I first came to this island, the gossip worried me. Then I realized it was the newspaper. Besides, it's always so funny by the time it gets to the north end, it's so different from what really happened. You've cut your finger at the south end, by the time it gets to the north end your hand's been amputated. I like that sort of elaboration as it comes up the island, it gathers a kind of mythic momentum. So you get these true stories that aren't, that are more story than true and I find that really interesting.

Are there types of characters that you particularly like to write about or want to write about?

Well, I do like writing about children. I don't think that they are given a fair deal in literature generally. I think Dickens understood children, really understood them. I think Great Expectations is a perfectly marvelous book. I love Pip when he's small, and being brought up "by hand." I've always identified with Pip, also because of his words, his love of words, and the way he misunderstands things too. But generally children don't get a good break in literature. I think partly that has to do with the fact that until fairly recently, most women who were writing didn't have children, so they didn't know a hell of a lot about them, actually living day-to-day with children. Mrs. Ramsay [in Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse], the strongest part of the book is she and the little boy, sitting together and cutting out pictures from the Army and Navy Store's catalogue and everything is actually related to Mr. Ramsay .. . the refrigerator, everything, is symbolic of the way the father is. Everything the little boy wants to cut out is either cold or sharp or somehow related to the father. That's a beautiful scene, because children will do that, will show you, often non-verbally, how they feel. But, later on, when she gazes down the table, there isn't a lot to do with children, she's knitting for the lighthouse, the keeper's child. That's more an act of charity than anything else. You get things like Jane Eyre, the whole strange Gothic horror and romanticism of the orphanage, things like that.

One question that's come up a lot in the last ten or twenty years is the difficulty of being a mother and a writer . . . you shrug.

Oh no, it's difficult. But if you thought about it, it would be more difficult. I never thought, for one minute, that I couldn't do both. When young women come to me and ask "Can I do both?" I say if you have to ask you better not do it. It sounds a mean thing to say, but I mean it, if you're that unsure then you better not do it.

Which 'it' do you mean, write or have children?

Whichever. Don't do it. Don't do both if you're really worried about it. Because the one thing you have to have is an enormous amount of energy. And a very strong belief in yourself because it's all very well for "Mom to have a job" as long as she's bringing in money, but ideally, Mother should have a job she doesn't like.

That's right, keep her priorities straight.

She should be out working for the family, everybody understands that. And she comes home from working at the Bay and she's been selling hosiery all day long and she hates it and she never wants to see another pair of pantyhose and everybody understands and sympathizes and likes it that she's gotten a raise. But to say, "Look, I want to shut myself off for three or four hours a day and do something which is not going to bring in any money but which I love doing," it's not what mothers are supposed to do. My children have been very, very supportive.

Are there any advantages at all in being a woman and a writer?

Yes, I think there are some advantages. One of the advantages is that, traditionally, women have never been told they had to make it in the outside world. I find most of the male writers I know very competitive with one another, looking to see who's got another book out, who's won this, who's doing this, who's doing that. I think that women writers do have that advantage that the interior, within the house, is where they've been powerful, so if they write at home, I don't think they have to make as many excuses for that to the world outside. To their family maybe, but to the world outside, no. So it takes them twenty years to publish their first story . . . do you see what I mean? They'll keep on working at it in a way that would cause a man to give up. He needs that outside recognition. Almost all the men I know, no matter how wonderful they are, need it. They have to have it, because they've been trained that they're nothing unless they're recognized by their peers or the outside world. Women always have been "wife of the above."

How did you keep the faith, how did you keep faith in yourself as a writer?

This is something I'm going to think about this year. It just never occurred to me not to be, and I never was in any hurry. This is something I do tell young women writers. "If you do want to have a husband, family and a writing career, don't be in a hurry." I knew which came first, when. When my children were very, very small there was hardly any time to write. It didn't matter, I'd write when I could, and I never felt any particular conflict. Also, I never wrote when they were around. I think Claire [the youngest] is the only one when I've done that, and only since her teens, only from the time she was about fourteen. My working day is really the school day. That's another thing, you get very disciplined. I imagine till the end of my days my working day will be the school day, it won't change now. At about 2:30 I'll start thinking, "Oh, I'd better pack it in," even though I could work all night if I wanted to. You had your chance, if you didn't do it between those hours when the kids were at school, that was it for that day. . . .

Where do you place the source of your fascination with language, and word roots?

I think partly because I grew up in this strange, rather insane household. My parents didn't know how to manage money. The wallpaper would be falling off the walls in strips—you have to imagine this—and this is a middleclass household, presumably. And in fact, on my mother's side of the family, they've been the lumber barons of Broom County, as I just found out last year when I went back. I used to think she was very snobby, but when I realized what this family had been, what the Corbett family had been in the history of New York state, I sort of understood where that comes from. So here was this family who were saying one thing, "We are the same as these well-to-do families," but I knew all this was lies, and so I began to listen very carefully to what people said. I noticed that teachers told lies, and that teachers had pets, and that pets were usually someone who didn't disagree. Or was pretty, or . . .

So you mistrusted language . . . or you wanted it to give you meaning . . .

I thought . . . people don't say what they mean. And I guess that's why Alice in Wonderland has always been my favourite book. People didn't say what they meant, and they didn't mean what they said either.

So language is at the root of this?

Well, language was my enemy for a long time, so, what do you do with your enemy? You wrestle it to the ground. I just thought, I must find out about language. English is an extraordinarily difficult language. I was taught this thing: when two vowels go walking the first one does the talking, which I use in Latakia as my metaphor for Michael and the relationship. But to me, English didn't make much sense, and I would hear words . . . you know, that piece that was in Room, "Untouchables," where she hears about assault and battery. She hears a word where she doesn't know the meaning, "molester" only she thinks it's "mole taster." I've made that one up, but in fact, "assault and battery" was the real one because I thought it was "a salted battery" and I couldn't understand why someone would be arrested for putting salt in a battery. I knew a little bit from my grandfather about acids and bases and salts, but I didn't dare ask anyone because I thought it was a terrible crime. I knew also that you didn't ask; you had to find out for yourself, so dictionaries became a big thing. You could go to dictionaries but you couldn't ask adults, either they wouldn't tell you or they'd give you a slap. . . .

[You] were writing your own stuff even when you were doing academic work?

But being very quiet about it you see, because meanwhile there was the Tish group [at the University of British Columbia, where Thomas was studying]. They were all men: George Bowering, Frank Davey, Lionel Kearns, these were the people who were in my classes. And meanwhile, UBC had started a degree in creative writing, but I just couldn't see being academically judged as a writer.

So that's why you reverted to Anglo Saxon for your doctorate? You did it on Beowulf?

Yes and of course, they didn't accept it, although I'd passed my Ph.D. exams very well. . . .

So when did you first admit to being a writer, was it not until The Atlantic?

Still won't admit it, I'll never admit it. If you want to get an inferiority complex or if you wanted to get one, you went to graduate school in the early sixties, late fifties. As a mother, as a wife and mother, I was simply not taken seriously. It used to make me so mad I'd get dizzy, I'd just get insane with anger at the way I was treated. I'll tell you an amazing thing. I was coming along the corridor one day—and I had published Ten Green Bottles so this is '67 now—and I met a professor I quite liked from whom I'd taken a course in romantic poetry. And I said, "Oh, I've just published a book." And he said, "Is it a children's book?" I said, "You wouldn't ask a man that." And I thought, right, I can't stand this place, that's it, that has really done it! I was fuming. They patted me on the head all along; they used to take me out for coffee to the faculty club and tell me the stories of their lives and then say, "Oh, I don't know why I'm telling you this." And I'd say, "I know why." One of them said I had sort of Burne Jones hair. I'd get all this crap, literary allusion, a literary pass, Burne Jones hair, well I don't.

When did you take writing seriously for yourself?

I've always taken it seriously, but then after the story came out in The Atlantic, several people read it, and then, of course I was contracted to do a book. At the same time, I had decided to finish my Ph.D. I went up to see the chairman: this was the beginning of the end, I think. He called me in and said he heard I was publishing a book. And I said, "Yes, a book of stories." And he said, "It's been our experience that when people have two strings to their bow, they tend to twang one louder than the other." I just looked at him and I said, "What if you have none?" That was a good line; it was not appreciated. In other words, he was saying, how dare you write a non-academic book while you're still a graduate student? I kept on, because I wanted to write the dissertation, and I learned an enormous amount, I feel as if I got my Ph.D. I studied Middle English as well, which is so interesting, there are so many dialects and it's so beautiful. So I don't feel that I lost out. I probably wouldn't have liked it in the academic world, I know I wouldn't have. Sure, it would be nice to have the dough and everything but I did the Ph.D., I did everything. I did all the language courses, I passed everything as far as I'm concerned, and I wrote my dissertation.

You 've said the impulse behind writing "If One Green Bottle . . . " was to organize pain, that there was a sense of

I suppose so, I mean, that's how people live their lives actually; I've realized it's not just artists who do that.

But the impulse behind that first story?

That was certainly so. I'm not crazy about that story. The impulse is really to organize—period. I think that's true of everybody. And. the great thing about being a writer is that you can reorganize. That's fun, that's play too. I mean, I take writing very seriously but I think it's a very playful act.

But I think you've become lighter.

Oh, I don't know, I think I was pretty light. I think I probably went through a very withdrawn and perhaps sad time after my marriage broke up, but I couldn't stay very withdrawn and sad with three young kids. I'm not sure I've become lighter, I think it's probably on a U-curve of some kind. I feel very light these days.

In terms of formal problems or experimentation and content, do you have a sense of what your primary purpose is in your writing? [Audrey shakes her head no.] Is there a sense of grappling with formal questions?

I don't know, I'm so wary of all that. I don't want to think about things in those terms. You have a particular thing that you want to say and so you play around with it. Reading John Dos Passos really did teach me a lot about chopping things up. His trilogy, USA, had far more influence on me than I'd realized. I've been back to look at it and he uses newspaper clippings, which is quite amazing considering when it was written. And then Lowry also, repetition, and I like film and music. I think I got a lot of my idea of repetition from music, from playing, even playing badly. Or plainsong, for instance, which we sang a lot of in school. But I never think, oh, here is a formal problem. I just think, now how am I going to arrange this stuff? Bob Sherrin said that having watched me work, he thinks I work like a film editor. Because I quite literally cut things up and paste them into place.

You did say, a couple of years ago, when Real Mothers came out, that you felt more relaxed and could give the writing more of its own head while you still held the reins.

I'm getting better at my craft, I suppose, that's what that is. It's becoming more sure that you can do, more or less, what you set out to do. I have to work for myself, I can't work to please someone else.

But for yourself, it's just what you do, there's not a sense of purpose?

I do think writing has a moral purpose but you can't add it like vanilla. It's there in who you are and what kind of statements you're trying to make to the world. I'm amazed at this slight antagonism I feel about the fact that I write about mothers with children, it bothers me, it deeply bothers me. I've read Germaine Greer's latest book [Sex and Destiny], and although there are many points where I don't like it, what she says about Westerners and children has a lot of truth. We don't like them, we want to put them away somewhere. We don't want to deal with them, we start them in daycare at a very early age and let others deal with them. They disrupt our lives. They certainly do: they're messy, they're noisy, but I really like them. I mean, I think they have enriched my life so much. And brought back all kinds of memories and stuff; they're very useful in that way also. I guess it's not as important a feminist issue as equal pay for equal work, it's not very fashionable to write about children.

It's certainly fashionable to be having them.

Well, that's different.

Do you think of yourself as a feminist writer?

Yes. Absolutely. What I'm saying is women have a voice and they ought to be heard. I'm also saying, you can write your book any damn way you want to as long as it works and don't let men tell you that it has to have the larger scene. I'm so fed up with hearing that. You know, you've got to write War and Peace, you've got to write this great diorama of history, The Naked and the Dead. You've got to set it in the context of the great social upheavals of your time. Well, yes or maybe not. I think that women get very scared by that because they think this is not very good writing because it doesn't.

It's dismissed as domestic.

Women's writing, yes. I think most creative writing teachers in the colleges and workshops are men. So this is what young women writers are up against who attend creative writing courses, they're up against men saying, oh, this is OK, this is quite sweet but it's not real literature. And I'd like to demonstrate through my literature that you can do whatever you like. If you want to have seventeen points of view, have them, if you want to chop your thing in the middle, do it. Virginia Woolf was doing that sort of thing all the time, she didn't care. If you want to make a letter form, fine, that's an old way, that's the way the novel started.

Just to get back to what I refer to as formal, but it doesn't have to be described that way, you do have multiple narrative threads in some of your stories which allow for a multi-faceted view of a particular situation, stories like "Crossing the Rubicon", the illustration [in Saturday Night] of the braid was not inappropriate, and the ending, "She doesn't look back. In my story, that is. She doesn't look back in my story. "

Well now, if you were a post modernist, of course, you'd deconstruct the self in that story.

But for you, is it a way of examining situations in a different way or of taking control of it?

I think so, or also just seeing where it will go but keeping very close watch on where it goes, calling it back. To me, writing a short story is like taking a puppy for a walk: you've got to keep track of it or it'll run into the traffic but it'll stop, just when you don't want to stop. It'll stop and it takes forever, it gets tangled up and so on, but you have to be in control, not the puppy. And I like that; I love just seeing where a story will go. Peggy Atwood told me, your stories always take a turn, just when you think they're not going to.

Another metaphor might be a honeycomb, because you can see into all the different rooms at the same time . . .

A Queen Bee, sitting there.

Do you think the character rather than the plot carries the burden of meaning in your books?

Oh, I think that's so. What is plot? I still believe in a good story. You can enthrall people with a good story. But yes, character is what carries it.

Do you start with a character, an incident, a phrase, a setting?

Sometimes a phrase, sometimes a setting like that mummy museum in Mexico, when I went there and saw that place [which inspired the story "The More Little Mummy in the World"]. Of course, sometimes I'm just handed things. I mean, there's this case of child mummies and one has this sign underneath and I'm not quite sure what it means because I don't speak Spanish. The guard says, it means "the more little mummy in the world." All of a sudden you think, oh my goodness yes, what a title. And you just write it in your notebook and you put it aside for two or three years. And later you're writing a story and you get out your notebook and here's all this stuff that you've written down, including this phrase "the wind in the pine trees rattles the tins like bones." These are all the tins that the flowers are in, which is what I'd thought when I was in the graveyard before I went into the mummy museum and that becomes one of the refrains of the story. And then the fact that outside this mummy museum they were selling all these strange souvenirs, including toffee mummies. The Mexican attitude to death is very different from ours, they do have this sort of joking relationship with death. And suddenly you've got a story. You say, if I did that and if I move that over there, and somebody told me this years ago about their boyfriend coming to get them from the hospital, and bringing the kids and suddenly you start making a story out of it. Sometimes it's a phrase, it depends what interests me at the time, or what strikes my fancies. I've got notebooks at home with all sorts of little phrases in them that I haven't had time to explore yet, and I may or may not.

You said Africa's been 'done' for you; is Africa a phase?

No, no it's not a phase, but it's just that I'm tired of people asking me about Africa, I guess, and my African books. I hope to go back, I intend to go back.

It seemed that when you got rid of Isobel at the end of Blown Figures, you got rid of Africa to a large degree.

Maybe.

Or at least when you came back to it, when you used it again, it was the way you'd use Mexico or Greece, it didn't have the same power.

That's probably true, but I'm fascinated by West Africa and I hope to go back. It's so sad, Africa's such a sad place now. There's something obscene about going back as a tourist. I don't know how I would go back, in what way I would be comfortable going back. I might have to get a job and live there for a year or so, because I can't see just going to look at what's happening in Africa because it's so bad.

Obviously travel is important to you personally and it's used as backdrop for your characters.

Sometimes, although I never travel to get a story and often I take trips that don't turn into stories.

Of what importance is setting?

I'm not sure what importance setting has but I think that if you set someone down in a setting that is not their normal one, you find out all kinds of things about them, things that can remain hidden at home, and that interests me. If you set them down in Greece and they don't speak Greek, or they don't like Retsina or they find Greek men difficult to deal with or they don't like the heat, or there's a couple travelling together, one likes the heat and one doesn't. Setting sometimes becomes a metaphor. Take a story like "Hills Like White Elephants." What Hemingway does is turn setting into a pulsing metaphor for the conversation that's going on between the man and the woman. Maybe that's the sort of thing I'm interested in doing with setting. The mummy museum thing could have been nothing, it could have just been an interesting thing that I happened to do until I thought of this other story that had been told to me, and then it all began to fit into place. But often I have things that don't fit into place. I do think it's important for me to travel alone. That was one of the things I realized when we were all in Japan is that I don't have a great deal to say about Japan. I mean I absorbed a lot and I really loved being there, but as a writer I guess we were all having so much fun that the time I normally would have spent going back and thinking about what I had just seen and writing it down, I just didn't do this time. That was fine, it's not what I went there to do. I went there to proselytize Canadian literature and I think we did that all right.

Is it that the earlier novels are more of a conscious search for the self and then later, especially in the stories, you're looking more at relationships?

First of all, I can't think in those terms. A search for self is like looking for the northwest passage, where all those guys were sent out from England and Spain and so on. In their terms it didn't exist, it wasn't where they thought it was, so what did they get out of all that to-ing and fro-ing and travelling up Vancouver Island looking for some way to get across? What they got was doing it. But that's it, what they got out of it was the search. There really was a northwest passage, it's just that they didn't know where to look.

So would you say the earlier books were a search?

No, I would never put it in those terms, but I would say that the process of writing those earlier books may have brought me closer to myself, which may not have been where I thought I was.

But do you have a sense of moving on from that . . .

I never have any of those senses. I would like to do something more for the world than write letters for Amnesty International. Something more direct, but I don't know what yet or whether that's just some romantic pipe dream, you know, that sounds good when you say it. But do I really want to go and work with Mother Teresa? This has actually been a fantasy of mine for years, because I know I could deal with dying people or really ill people; I know that about myself, that is something that does not frighten me. But there might be something I could do about the living, not the dying. Not that the dying shouldn't die with dignity, but there's a part of me that would like to do something for the living and maybe the very young. I don't know what, I have no skills. Just writing about it isn't enough. That's why I say I don't know how I could go back to Africa unless I went in a capacity where I was doing something more than writing about it.

OK. But I want to talk a little about the more recent work that has been looking at relationships, Real Mothers, Latakia, Intertidal Life.

I'm interested in relationships, I'm all for them, but also, more and more, and I don't think it's just a question of being older, it's a question of recognizing in myself that I like to be alone.

The women in your books like to be alone, but they also like to connect.

Oh sure, and I really like having friends and I will miss my friends next year. But also, it's going to be interesting being in a city where I don't know anyone.

It's interesting, because you have close friends, but you don't write about friendship, do you? You write about male-female relationships, you write about mothers and children but . . .

It's interesting that you say that, because there are a few stories I haven't finished, that I haven't got right yet, that are in fact about friendship.

Because the only story I could think of, off hand, that seemed to be about friendship was "Déjeuner sur l'herbe." Looking at the more conventional relationships in the sense of male-female ones, Real Mothers especially, but also Latakia and Intertidal Life seem to be about, to some extent, people who struggle to relate, to become close and fail.

But fail, really, in part because of the pressures that are put on them. But at least they try. Have you read Look Homeward Angeli The beginning has this wonderful quotation, and it says, "Great Gerta knew that man was like a drunken beggar on horseback." And the important point was not that he was drunk and reeling, but that he was going somewhere. I think that's beautiful. That's what I mean, at least the people in these stories are trying. I've seen a lot of people who simply refuse to get into relationships any more.

Are you hopeful of male-female relations?

Sure. I think living with another person, you have to learn to be more accommodating, and there's a way in which I think I can't do that. The only kind of relationship I can imagine is with someone as obsessed as I am.

You have this question [in Real Mothers], "where are all the strong men now that there are all these strong women?" Are there strong men?

Yes, there are strong men. I think that in the last year I've met two or three really interesting and strong men, but they're all not too sure they want to be in close relationships with women again.

Are there particular aspects of relationships that you want to explore or think about?

Well, friendship is one and also old age. You see, my mother is really very elderly now, and she is an incredible woman now. She's come into her own at the age of 89. So what went wrong, what went right and why is she suddenly so much more perceptive about herself, about her daughters? She gave me a lot of the kids' pictures and things, because she said—I thought, what a wonderful hippie she would have made—she was more or less saying, "Live in the now." She's had William's pictures up [William is Thomas's grandchild] and recent pictures of me and the girls and she says, "I don't want these things from five years back, I want what's going on now." She had me when she was forty, so she never thought she'd live to see a great-grandchild, and of course, this is amazing. I think it's given her five more years, it's like a retread.

But also, the women that you write about want it all; well, why not?

What about the men that I write about, don't they want it all?

They already have it all.

Not often. Everybody wants it all. Everybody wants everything. Well, I have had it all, I have been very lucky that way. . . . Having more than one child, having three children has been really neat. You have these three separate individuals to look at.

You also have this dynamic in the relationships you portray where one person wants to level and the other person doesn't. Usually it's the woman who wants to level.

Yes. And I think it usually is the woman. I think men have to learn to start speaking, it's so hard for them. Even these days, they're taught not to open their mouths. Men can't understand what women find to talk about. They're amazed by it, that you and I could sit for two hours and gab about just about anything, we wouldn't think about it, we'd just talk, no agenda, nothing. Partly because society always pushes men to be out there doing something, they would see that as a waste of time. I think women have enormous advantages over men in a lot of ways, not financially, but in other ways. We are so strong, and so willing to tell someone else how we feel and men find that so difficult.

I want to get back to writing.

You should see the notes I've got on building this house. It's like a book, a novel, a book of days, a book of hours. It should be illustrated in the corners.

I remember you said once that you had a good ear for dialogue because you had bad eyesight.

Yes, like James Joyce, I absolutely believe that. If you can't, without really invading somebody else's space, see what the expression is on their face, you listen very carefully to how the voice goes up and down and what they're really saying. Why do they slur the end of the sentence? You listen very, very carefully and I think I have a natural gift for it too. I have an almost perfect ear when it comes to dialogue. And that's a great gift. I almost wonder if one should be a prose writer without it.

I mean, I really believe in public transport for writers. Whenever I do a workshop I always say, "Get on the bus and eavesdrop" because if you're in a car, either you've got a tape on, or you're talking to a person you already know.

There is a sense in which you have a very artless surface that's very complicated underneath. You really disarm the reader in some ways, you seem to be just talking across the table . . .

And it's very carefully controlled, every word, and that's something I think I learned from Henry James. Maybe also from studying Anglo Saxon poetry which is a highly formalized poetry where you're often using repetition, you're using stock half lines, that are used in all Anglo Saxon poetry. There's this sense of repetition, control, artlessness, although Henry James would hate to be called artless, he'd probably throw up on my green shirt if I called him artless. But he has a sense of artlessness, particularly in his short stories, in Daisy Miller, but it's also very controlled. But, maybe that's me too as a human being: I seem to be very sweet and sort of dishevelled and so on, but actually it's all very controlled. My daughters would probably agree with that: she knows what we're doing, she knows what she's doing, every minute of the day, it just doesn't look like it.

It seems to me the control's always been there but the surface has become more artless with time.

Bob Amussen says he's been reading the earlier stories, he says it's all there, everything you've subsequently written about is there in the first stories. But some of them are so precious, too literary. I like quoting, I like referential literature that goes back and forward, but there's a kind of preciousness about some of those early stories. Although I think "Salon des Refusés" is one of the best stories I've ever written. Where you simply don't know, you're just plunged into this world and . . . "what is she talking about, what?" but if you go to a mental hospital and work there—I wanted that sense and I think I really captured it. And the callousness of the people.

Are there other ways in which you think the writing has changed?

I hope it's gotten better. In some ways it probably doesn't mean as much to me as it used to. I know that I can do it and I know that I can do it well. I don't want to go on the lecture circuit telling young women how to write, because first of all you can't and that's not what I want to do.

So you care less about it?

I still care about it, it's a craft. I'm getting so interested in radio (I should have been born in the twenties) and sound. Maybe, again, as my eyesight gets worse, as it has done, I'm more and more interested in how things sound.

Is Mrs. Blood still your favourite book?

Only in the sense that when I went to write Mrs. Blood, I didn't have to think "Oh I should be writing like this, or I should have this, or I should have that." It was a kind of wonderful innocence about writing, I just wrote what I wanted to write and I was sitting over here and it was the first free time I had had. At this point Claire is not quite two, Vickie's about to be seven and Sarah's nine. I had this grant, it was my first Canada Council grant, and I had the year. And you know, the thing was done at the end of November. I didn't have the sense to be frightened by anything that I did; I didn't know enough. Now, there's a kind of knowing, the more you know about your craft. . . . but then I was throwing away, burning stuff, absolutely uninhibited. Also, you see, I had been thinking about that book for five years. Maybe it was all written, it was all in my head and all written; it's possible.

You describe islands and Africa as appealing to your romantic impulse; do you still think of yourself as romantic?

Sure, but, always suspicious. We went off to Africa as romantics, also thinking that we were do-gooders. But we wanted to go to Africa, we thought we were getting too middle-class. We had a house, children, he had a good job and . . . it was scary. You've got to challenge yourself, you've got to get out of that. . . .

Does it bother you that most, not all, but most of the audience for your books, are women?

No, I think that's great. It bothers me when Katherine Govier describes me [in Quill & Quire] as "an American living in Canada." Next week it will be twenty-six years, right, and I'm still hurt by someone who says "an American living in Canada." Why don't they say a Canadian born in the States? . . .

You have had cases where a story has turned into a novel has turned into a story.

Oh, sure. "Elevation" is the name of the radio play, and Act 1 in it really is the short story. I guess it started in a funny way with Patrick White's The Vivisector. The Vivisector is actually the artist, but it begins—well, it doesn't actually begin—when these Australian children are taken to London and they see an awful exhibit in a window, which is by an anti-vivisectionist society. And this image haunts the guy who eventually becomes the world famous painter—which is Patrick White, the world famous writer. He realizes that that's what artists are, too, vivisectors, only in a funny way their victims are still walking around. And in my play, "Elevation," that's going to be one of the points. It's really a dialogue in some way between the scientists and the artists, and the artist is saying, yeah, all right, I'm a vivisector but I don't chop up animals. My people get off relatively lightly, they can still walk around or they can come and shoot me if they want.

Your saying your victims are still walking around leads me to a question which is unavoidable in discussing your work, which is the autobiographical component.

Hoppy [Elisabeth Hopkins] gave me a little notebook when I went abroad a few years ago, and it's got the Queen on the cover and inside (it's a little tiny red notebook) it says "To Audrey from all your loyal subjects." So I figure when I'm eighty I'll write a book called Loyal Subjects. I've never lost a friend yet, maybe because there's no malice attached. If I want to be really malicious and write a story like "Ted's Wife" it's not based on anyone. I want to talk about that kind of destructive human personality, who just sees everything as fair game. It's funny living on this island [Galiano Island, near Vancouver] because everyone's come up and said "I know it's so-and-so, I know it's so-and-so," and it's not, it's just a conglomerate of that kind of destructive woman.

You 've said that everybody writes autobiography, but some people disguise it better.

Yes, I think everybody writes autobiography. I think everybody writes one story, has one thing that really interests them, and I suppose what really interests me is the relationship between men and women and how we lie to one another. I think one of the hardest things for women right now, because we've gotten so strong (and we really are strong) is that we're very intolerant of the weakness of men.

So why do we lie to one another?

We're so afraid, it's like walking naked. I think it must happen really early, you know. We're afraid somebody's going to laugh. . . .

[You] once said you wrote about people who had to confront their sexuality and I was thinking about how difficult it is to write about sex; what do you do?

I think you can't write about the sexual act as—the very fact that it's an act. But it can be done, I think "Harry and Violet" is a very successful story in that the two people get carried away and forget about the little kid. But it is a hard thing to do because it's such an intimate thing and it's different for everybody, and to read about it is a bit of voyeurism. I think that you have to. James sort of glosses it over or anybody up until 1950 glosses it over. But you have to do it. Did you hear that the Harlequins now have this prize for the most sexy description? But, you take Molly Bloom's soliloquy which is both good sexual writing and very titillating in some ways, if you really sit there and read it and read it out loud or listen to a record of it, it is amazing.

What fascinates you so much about Harlequins?

Their badness, I guess, and the fact that two million—or is it billion?—women read them. You know, when I won the magazine award for "Real Mothers" (I guess, here's a moment of truth for you, not a moment of real happiness, but a moment of truth) and I'm sitting with the publisher of Chatelaine and he says, "Congratulations, and do you know you've reached one million households?" My books will never reach one million households, and that's what I went up and said. I mean, I'm lucky if I sell five thousand copies of my work.

Well, that fascinates me, there are all those women, and what are they reading? They're reading Harlequins. They not only read Harlequins, they read Westerns, they read mysteries, anything light; and some of them read sixty books a month. I'm fascinated with the readers more than with the books themselves. I must have read over two hundred Harlequins and I think I'm at the end. But I don't know, sometimes I think it would be nice to write one and get the $6,000 advance, but at the same time, I think they're very dangerous.

Because they're so dishonest?

Yes, and they're also saying the happy ending involves money. It doesn't matter which series it is—the Harlequin Romance or the Harlequin Super Romance, or Harlequin Intrigue—always the hero has money, and he's always handsome, and he's always older than the heroine. I don't get anything out of them other than, to me they're kind of a peanut reading, you know, I wait to see when she turns her ankle, and I laugh, and I suppose I feel superior. I usually read them at 11 at night, it takes me an hour to read a Harlequin romance, and I don't have a TV, I suppose it's the equivalent of watching some crap on TV.

Women always say the one thing they really like about them is they know they're going to have a happy ending. I sort of believe there is a kind of happy ending to things, but you make your own happy ending, and it may or may not involve a man or a woman or a child or an airplane or a boat or whatever. I think you can make a happy ending to your life. I mean, you have this one life and you have to decide at some point how you're going to live it. It's got nothing to do with some stranger coming into your life.

I want to know how you make a happy ending.

How I make one? You die happy I guess, I don't know. At this minute I feel very happy so it's hard to say, but I don't think I'm ending.

Your books don't end happily.

No, they don't particularly. That doesn't make for interesting prose writing. Now, poetry can have a happy ending because it's a little tiny synapse. I've been re-reading Michael Ondaatje's stuff all summer. Secular Love is just beautiful, and of course it has a very happy ending. But, I think what you do is you come to terms with yourself first of all, and you decide that you like yourself and you're quite a reasonable human being for all your flaws, you're OK Jack, you know, and you make your own happy ending. It is interesting approaching fifty, particularly in my family where one side of the family is so longlived—my grandfather died at ninety-six, my mother is eighty-nine. The other side is not particularly long-lived; in terms of my father's family I would have fifteen years between now and the time that I died. And I think all right, let's just take it that you have fifteen years, now what would you like to do? Well, I'd like to spend a lot of time with my children, write a couple of more things, but not much more, only a couple, travel a wee bit more. I would like to go to Tibet, I'd like to go back to Japan, I'm longing to go back to Japan and rent a house for six months. I would like to die in bed, in a nice house, doesn't have to be this house, but you know, with a nice view, and feeling good about myself and the people I'm surrounded by. I would still like to fall in love again, but I'm not sure; it's really difficult.

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