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MK: Before committing yourself to a writing career, you
studied nursing, but dropped out nine months before graduation.
Why did you leave?
EH: I was very impractical. I was to nursing what James
Thurber was to the army. It was a total disaster. Well, I
wasn't a total disaster. I was good at the academic stuff.
I did well on my exams and so on, but I was always the last
one to finish up and people always laughed at the way I starched
my cap, because it was always sort of flopping around.
MK: Writing was what you wanted to do all along, though?
EH: I started writing a lot of poetry when I was around
eleven. I tried to write like the poets whose work I found
hilarious: Ogden Nash, Robert Service.
MK: Were books and writing part of your upbringing?
EH: Yes, they were. My mother used to make little books
out of yarn and blue cardboard, and then my brother and sister
and I would make up our own stories. So we had the heady experience
of making our own little books. Vanity publishing! But I think
it was a very good idea, really, to give children the physical
experience of producing this object, a book. And we were also
surrounded by books to read. My parents had a hard time making
ends meet in the early years, but whenever they had a bit
of extra money they bought books. My parents were potters
and people who came to visit the pottery would also give us
books, as Christmas presents, and so we would get things like
The Moon & Sixpence and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
But we were given better books too: Out of Africa,
The Wind in the Willows. We had some Russian novels;
we had Gogol's Dead Souls.
MK: So this is what you were reading as a child?
EH: I was reading some of it. I was picking out books
here and there. What did I read? I read Isak Dinesen. When
I was twelve I was reading Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales.
And Sherlock Holmes. At fourteen it was A Tale of Two Cities
and A Town like Alice.
MK: Who do you read and admire now?
EH: Oddly enough, the two novels that have affected
me most powerfully in adulthood were both written by men:
Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, and Saul Bellow's
Seize the Day. Malamud died while I was teaching at
Concordia and two or three months after his death, I invited
Clarke Blaise to come to speak to my students, and what I
remember best about his visit is that he arrived at the workshop
wearing a few articles of clothing that had been given to
him by Malamud's widow. And all through his talk all I could
think was "I'm sitting beside Bernard Malamud's necktie!"
And then there are so many other writers whose work has been
incredibly important to me: Plath, Woolf, Nabokov, Colette.
Lots and lots of short story writers. Mary Lavin's "In
the Middle of the Fields"; Thomas Mann's "Disorder
& Early Sorrow". Among the Canadian story writers
I've recently been reading and admiring are Nadine Mclnnis
and Elizabeth Hay.
The New Yorker was another gift that was given to us every
year at Christmas, and so I would read it. Or pretend to read
it. I loved running out to the mailbox for it, so I could
be the one to bring it home. I grew up with a great hunger
to be in it, and when I was in my twenties and thirties I
kept sending things down to New York even though I kept getting
rejection letters year in and year out. For many years I was
sending stories only to The New Yorker and if they rejected
something, then I no longer liked it either. The editors there
had become internalized parent figures. I remember talking
about this with another writer, and he was astounded. He said,
"You can't just send to them. They aren't even all that
great a lot of the time." But I didn't listen to him,
I was too obsessed. So that when I finally did sell something
to The New Yorker ["Heart Trouble"], I can't even
convey the euphoria I felt. It lasted for weeks. I even carried
the acceptance letter around with me everywhere I went and
then sort of assaulted people with it. And they were of course
mystified. I could see them thinkmg: "What's the big
deal? It's only a magazine.... But then I didn't sell to The
New Yorker again for another twelve years. And it wasn't a
story this time, but a poem: "The Death of the Nurse".
MK: Although you really haven't spent much time in
New Brunswick since you left at the age of twenty-one, and
you've never been back to the Kingston Peninsula, your childhood
and youth there and in Saint John come up in your work all
the time. The Kingston Peninsula comes up in a sort of really
lyrical way -even though there are all kinds of other memories
associated with it, too. What is it about that time and the
place that continues to interest you?
EH: It was such an idyllic place when I was a child.
And so romantically rural: no doctor, no paved roads, no electricity,
no running water. My brother and sister and I grew up drinking
raw milk and running around barefoot, but then there was also
a darker story: the exposure to the glaze-mixing inside the
house. So that was the great paradox of our childhood: in
a world of amazing natural beauty, our mother standing at
the dining-room table and pouring what looked like poison
milk into enamel basins, then dipping her unprotected hands
into the filled basins as she tipped bowls and jugs into the
glaze batter. With ecological hindsight, we now know that
this was an extremely dangerous thing to do, but in those
innocent days nothing was thought of it. But when we were
away from the toxic atmosphere of the house, we moved in a
world almost as pristine as wilderness.
The person who best understood that the magic of that place
would draw tourists to the pottery was our mother. She was
the one who willed us to become a sort of Trapp Family Singers,
pottery division. There are photographs of us all walking
hand in hand. It's like The Sound of Music. We're all smiling
to beat the band. And this performance just covered so much
tension and money worry and all these difficult family things
going on. But there was always this other "finer"
family we could be, when we had to. Which I think is what
made me a writer, really-or one of the things-the dichotomy
between the public and the private family. Probably the main
thing.
MK: Your first book was published under the name Beth
Harvor.
EH: That's right, and I was always called Beth as a
child, although Flisabeth is my real name. But I'd actually
been wanting (for a long time) to dump the Beth, partly bc.cause
it always made me think of the saintly Beth in Little Women.
For a while I also considered dumping the Harvor and just
taking some other name-not my maiden name, which I don't care
for either, because it's too much like Eichmann. But it's
so strange: to have a name that sounded like Eichmann for
my last name, especially when one of my middle names is Arendt.
MK: Deichmann in ]erusalem.
EH: [laughs] Exactly! It's so bizarre to have those
two names in my name. The avenging intellectual angel and
the banal Nazi devil. But as far as the Elisabeth goes, I'm
glad I went back to it, although the change does get some
people upset.
MK: It's like the problem people have with The Artist
Formerly Known As Prince.
EH: [laughs] Here's a little story that might be relevant:
my brother and sister and I used to be taken into Saint John
at the end of the summer holidays, to Mr. and Mrs. Wiezel's
shoe store, to buy new shoes for school. And it so happened
(as they say in fairy-tales) that this Mr. and Mrs. Wiezel
had a son named Larry who, when he grew up, changed his name
from Larry Wiezel to Lawrence Earl. This was around the time
that he became a writer of adventure novels set in exotic
places. And I thought then-and still think now-well, why not?
If a frog can turn into a prince, why can't a weasel turn
into an earl?
MK: I wanted to ask you about biography and fiction
and the intersection between the two, because there's repetition
of certain elements in your work, both in the fiction and
in the poetry. There's a young girl who goes to live with
a doctor and his wife - as you did in Saint John-in my favourite
story from Let Me Be the One, "Through
the Fields of Tall Grasses", and also a girl who lives
with a doctor and his wife in "The Dark Clouds between
the Ribs", one of the poems that appears in your most
recent poetry book, The Long Cold Green Evenings of
Spring. A "monster" baby appears in a poem
called "In the Hospital Garden" (in Fortress
of Chairs) and in a story called "Monster Baby"
in Our Lady of All the Distances. Do you revisit
material because you're interested in re-examining the content
or because it frees you to focus on form?
EH: I think both. I think of them not as repetitions
but as obsessions [laughs]. And I'm often fascinated by seeing
how you can use similar incidents quite differently in two
different forms.
MK: It's almost like you're improvising on the same
theme or motif, but getting very different things.
EH: Yeah, I like that. And I do feel that. And I never
exactly repeat something I've clone before. If I do a variation
on a theme, I do it because it interests me. And I feel that
you should do what interests you-that you shouldn't feel,
"Oh, can you do that?" You can do anything you want.
And painters will do variations on a theme, musicians will
do variations on a theme.
MK: Yeah, and nobody says, "Oh, another nude,"
or "Another landscape."
EH: [laughs] No, they don't. And the writers I tend
to like best are the obsessed ones.
MK: Because then you know that it's genuine, it isn't
just intellectual.
EH: Yes, exactly.
MK: You've said that you don't really fully believe
writers who say they don't write from life and people they
know.
EH: Yes, I do find it really hard to believe them.
And I feel it's a sad project anyway, to write only about
invented people, invented events. Perhaps the true originality
lies in claiming what's yours. And then elaborating on it
to protect the innocent. Which I suppose is another way of
saying "to protect the not-so-innocent", i.e., the
writer, from the rage of the innocent.
I don't want to hurt people unnecessarily. But of course the
people you know best you might have to hurt up to a point.
And I think it is one of the things that might keep you humble
as a writer: that you can't really say to yourself, "I'm
an utterly good person." And I think it's healthy not
to be able to say that. To say that I may have caused harm,
I may have caused pain and yet, I believe in what I'm doing.
MK: The entry on you in the recently published Oxford
Companion to Canadian Literature describes your work as being
about women: "Women in marriage and out of marriage,
as mothers, as student nurses" and praises your "detached
but not uncompassionate eye for human nature and its foibles
and credulities." Somehow, I doubt that you yourself
would discuss your work in these terms. Do you get tired of
being classed as a "woman writer" and as a classic
realist?
EH: Well, I'm not all that wild about being called
a "woman writer", and I've also never thought of
myself as a classic realist. What I always aim for is the
surreal within the real. Also for a certain off-the-cuff-ness,
a certain breeziness, but with pathos, even tragedy in it.
I want to trust my imagined best reader.
As for the woman-writer part of your question, there's a piece
by Mary McCarthy in which she's scathing about the phrase
"women writers". She says that calling women who
write "women writers" suggests that they are the
kind of women who write scenes with a lot of drapery in them.
MK: And you agree?
EH: I do. But I also feel that it's usually women reviewers
who will say that your book is a book for women or that it's
about women.
MK: But there may be other things going on.
EH: Yes. I mean, I have so many men in my stories.
But I think I must have been tarred with this particular brush
because I write about physiological processes.
MK: Also, I think maybe what people mean when they
say that you write about women, is that your work is more
concerned with personal relationships....
EH: That's true.
MK: But there are male writers who write about relationships.
EH: Look at Updike. Or look at Richard Ford. It's also
very possible that writers like Jane Urquhart and Carol Shields,
who have both recently written novels with male protagonists
in them, are writing in resistance, against this. As many
women, I feel, now want to d0. But I'm not sure this helps.
I mean, it might help them; it might help them to feel, "Oh,
I can do a man." But I have no desire to write from the
point of view of a man, and I don't think I would do it well.
MK: Why is that? Because the male characters in your
stories-even though the centre of consciousness is definitely
female - are very real.
ER: I'd rather do it that way~o them from the outside
but make them real-than do them from the inside and risk creating
a sort of feminized male construct that isn't real.
MK: You're known mostly as a short story writer and
you've won raves from critics for your work in the short story
form. When and why did you start writing poetry? What can
you do in a poem that you i't do in a story?
EH:
A poem is a narrative of a much closer moment. Much more
distilled, and of course very much swifter. A poem's metaphors
also work like codes and the codes force the reader to do
a lot of the work. And what you have to work for, you tend
to love. So that although the audience for poetry is small,
it's a passionate audience.
But to go back to the when and why: I started to write poetry
not long after I was offered a poetry prose workshop at York
University. To keep up with my students, I was reading poetry
much more intensively than I'd ever read it before. I was
discovering that although there were very few really successful
complete student poems, there were amazing parts of poems.
And as I worked with these poems I could see them getting
much better, and so I began to write poetry too. I was very
lonely in Toronto, because except for my oldest son, I hardly
knew anyone there. So it was partly the loneliness also.
MK:
There's been a change in the style of your try, at least from
Fortress of Chairs to the new book. In the poems in Fortress
of Chairs there's a kind of incredible balance between chaos
and control- especially the shifts in the first poem, "Afterbirth".
It's just dazzling, they're so quick. And actually your publisher
quoted a reviewer on the back of The Long Cold Green Evenings
of Spring who said that your is "akin to synapses firing
in the brain; there are no concrete bridges, just jolts of
energy linking cliff to cliff, idea to idea." That to
me is the first book.
EH:
What I remember best about writing "Afterbirth"
is that I decided to enter it in The Mahat Long Poem contest
when there were only days left to go to the deadline, and
so I stayed up all night for two nights running to finish
it. And the day in between those two nights was a teaching
day so I was in a sort of crazed fugue state. Which is perhaps
why it ended up being such a weirdly elating poem to write.
But that comment about the jolts of energy was actually made
about a book of stories,
Let Me the One. Still, linking cliff to cliff and idea to
idea without using concrete bridges is something that it occurs
to me I always aim to do whether I'm writing fiction or poetry.
MK: But in The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring your
style is more linear. Do you think that's true?
EH:
I don't know, it's hard for me to look at anything I do really
objectively.
MK:The
new work seems to me, not more reserved, but maybe more elegant,
controlled. There's just a different kind of energy.
EH:
The fascinating thing about all this is that it isn't
all new work. Soine of the poems in the new book are even
older than the poems in Fortress of Chairs.
MK: So it's just the way it all works togethet; maybe.
Because there is a more sombre mood to it.
EH: In both books there are poems that more or less
do what I hoped they would do. But you're right about the
more sombre air. I wanted that. I wanted to put the poem "They've
Found a Shadow" at the front of the book because I wanted
it to cast a dark light (or bands of light and dark) over
the whole book. I wanted it to be like one of those fitful
days in late spring or summer when the clouds come and go.
And there are more love poems in the new book. More love and
loss poems. And more poems about friendship, illness, infatuation,
pottery-making. And there are also poems about teaching and
adolescence.
MK: And loneliness.
EH: Yes. But also about the positive side of loneliness
because even when I was a child I had a huge tolerance (and
need) for solitude. I used to hide. Hide and read. She's at
that stage, the narrator of some of these poems. And I think
the younger poems are also about loneliness or a kind of solitude,
the kind where the children feel very alone. Or the girl does,
I think.
MK: It's interesting that you talk about the narrator
in the third person: "her" "she feels".
EH: It is, isn't it? I'm trying to finish a novel now
(The Lowest Place on Earth) and it's written in the first
person and a lot of the events are things that really happened
to me, but when I make notes about it, I always write: she
this, she that...
MK: An editor at The New Yorker once told you that
you were a novelist, not a short story writer. Most of your
readers and most of your critics obviously would disagree.
All three of your story collections have been extremely well
received. Yet you did turn to poetry and now you're working
on a novel. Do you have a sense yourself that despite your
successes with the short story and also with poetry that you
haven't found your form? That maybe it's the novel that's
your true form?
EH: This novel is so big-over four hundred pages, and
I've been working on some version of it ever since 1980-that
I'm not able to stand far enough back from it to get an overview.
I should confess, though, that in spite of feeling totally
worn out from it, I'm already thinking of resuscitating another
one. But that one will be incredibly short.
MK: If you had to tell someone what the longer novel
is about in a line, what would you say?
EH: It's about how a young woman becomes the person
she was meant to be. She becomes a writer.
MK: So it's a Kunstlerroman.
EH: Yeah. And is influenced in some ways by another
Kunstlcrroman: Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. And by
Plath's Journals too, even more so, even though I didn't read
them until I'd written most of the book. So there are a lot
of notebook entries and diary entries. A lot about things
coming back in the mail and then mailed off again, all of
that. But I hasten to add that there are also scenes of passion
and sexual betrayal and infatuation in it.
MK: This isn't the first novel that you've finished.
EH: No, I've finished a number, but they either were
put away or they branched off and had their own little novelettes
[laughs].
MK: But this one is a keeper.
EH: I'm hoping.
Maria Kubacki is associate editor of The New Brunswick Reader,
the weekend magazine of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal.
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