Flirt: The Interviews (7 page)

—All right.

—You have written so incisively and compassionately about father/son matters; one of your most-quoted lines is that the best thing a father can do for a son is die. What's the best thing a mother can do for her son?

—Mothers are much more, by and large, nurturers toward their children, and that was the case in my life. What I wanted my mother to do was survive, that's the thing she didn't do long enough. I wanted her to live on into both my adult life and her later life. And I guess the other thing that a mother can do for a son is not hold his gender against him.

—Here's what I think you meant: fathers have too much control over a writer – a male vocation according to you – when they are alive. Men are always trying to tie the silk tie like their fathers could, or mow the lawn at the correct height given climate conditions and density of ranunculus. And when fathers die, a world of feeling and perception becomes available: quit cutting it, let it meadow. Be yourself.

My mother held my gender against me, too. The tight red jeans she called dreadful; haircuts with too much angle or sheen, dreadful; menopausal symptoms in my thirties, nonsense. She suspected every man of wanting sex from me and nothing else, suspected that I encouraged them. The choir director who made us sing Benjamin Britten's tone cluster of twelve-part harmony; the grade seven teacher who explained Mussolini and taught bluegrass and drilled me – perfected my forearm pass to eliminate the need to fall on my knees – in volleyball; the Mennonite blonde boy who gave me yellow roses and a jade ring when I graduated and who is a doctor. He tracked me and now telephones out of the blue, thirty years later. “They never get over you,” my mother brags. “They never recover from you,” she says, now wistful and impressed with what can only be termed an unrepresentative sample. But before, that ability to attract was my dread disease, a threat to – maybe the source of – the family's instability. Nurturer? No, she was a tender, keeping the puck out of the net whenever she could see it coming, sometimes a butterfly flail to keep it out. But remote, elitist, too smart for the rest of the team. My mother survived, but not in a way that could be considered useful to a writer. Time may change my mind.

I like the idea that your father's death is still with you in the essays you write.

—Oh yeah, I haven't written about it sufficiently in a way, because I did write about my mother's death and my mother's life in the eighties. I
haven't written about my father's life and my father's death in a way that really puts it to rest for me.

—My father was simple, in the best aesthetic sense of that word and I, too, want to sustain my life with him through art, or maybe to finish our relationship with appropriate closure, the kind only a taut short story provides. But when I try to write about him, he becomes so complex he's pointillist, he's feathers on a Barred Rock: black and white but layered thick. This man was an auctioneer who played tennis and golf and loved les Canadiens, his only outrage a bad call by the linesman: “Ah c'mon fellas!” He loved a good – or bad – pun, women's ankles, “Up a Lazy River” by the Mills Brothers. He anticipated the sports news at eleven o'clock. But he was also once a fair-skinned high school drop-out off to war and then caught and kept in a German POW camp. He once feigned suicide – the newspapers fell for it – just to get away from us, just for awhile. The best thing my father did for me was be like feathers.

In this new collection, the mood is much different, more elegaic. But the prose is different, too. You've always put simple images into complex contexts, but now there seem fewer details, and the context seems simpler. Much less scene-setting choreography as in, say,
The Sportswriter
. Is that because of the themes, or is it just part of your evolution?

—Well, that's how you read them. And so you must be right about the way you read them. But yours is an opinion, nothing more.

—I was going to say you're becoming more Hemingway-esque.

—Oh please, I hope not. That would certainly disappoint me.

—I thought that would make you mad. I said, “I was going to say” it, but I didn't. Don't be mad.

—If I'm not better than Hemingway I should give it up. The world gets complexer and he doesn't. Basically, particularly with those stories of his, as good as they are and affecting as they are, basically the point of view is that of an adolescent.

—You mean Hemingway's point of view?

—Yeah, of a kind of suppressed maturity.

—Hence, his suicide?

—I wouldn't know about that, but probably. Yes, in general suicide – or
its repeated and more public attempts – might be seen as the expression of a kind of suppressed maturity.

—You said in an old interview that the inclusion of the opthamologist in the story “Rock Springs” was accidental. The interviewer pushed you to say something about sight and blindness and all that, but you wouldn't. I've found at least two others in the new book. Now, are these more than accidental? What's with all the opthamologists?

—I think it's a word. I just stick the word in a sentence. Whenever I see other words that one likes in a sentence, I'm pleased, I'm happiest, and so I'm not putting them in for anything that has to do with vision, or blindness. Again, you could say moral blindness and you could get a lot of PhD students to agree with you but you wouldn't get the author to agree.

—But you're not making fun of those PhD students?

—Nope.

—When I moved to the country, to a shingled cabin on Becher Bay and a community linked by hayfields and free range eggs, I had been recently released from university and its theories. I read the authentic details of rural experience out my living room window: junco, herring ball, dozer boat, pike pole. I read nature writers – the Transcendentalists; the newsboys turned eco-journo rockstars in primo-tents along any river; Emily Carr and her sad expertise – and I paid attention to their nouns, their connecting tissue. I watched colour lighten in May on the red cedar, and texture convert on browning bracken. I saw birds through a bastard-saw honed vision and heard their tone clusters. I memorized their names. First lambing season, I learned new words for stuck and sick and abortion; I connected stars and colostrom and warm molasses in a midnight poem never voiced: too abstract. I was ready to find words sufficiently germanic and consonant to fit nature's ugly turns, I was going to make the anti-pastoral into something sharp, clean.

But then the nouveau critics down east passed the legislation: Get urban, get punchy. Those days are gone, man, we're all on-line, we are all one big connected city so get with it, grow up, be vegan. Get a tuxedo. Get high heels or just get high. Get a personal trainer and browse the bars. Pick
friends with Underwoods and crantinis, or better friends with laptops and craft beers and agents. Get cleavage.

Do you know what happens to the septic fields of vegetarians?

Are you finding material in the same places you used to? I'm not asking where you find it so don't get mad. Do the same things move you, Richard?

—I'm just takin' notes, you know, I'm just takin' notes all the time. In essence, where I am finding material is in what I hear, what I hear people say, what I think about what people say, what I read in the newspapers, what I see on TV, what I read in other books, yeah, my source material is unending. Things that move me? I think a lot of things move me, so I will assume that the same things do move me, matters of life and death, matters of love disappointed and love realized, relationships between parents and their children, the difficulties of spacial and physical dislocation, the adaptations necessary to new landscape, those kinds of things are the same things that move me.

—Do you still venture up to Saskatchewan to hunt? You seem a frequent visitor to Canada. Is it the hunting and fishing that draws you? Do you still run with Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane and the boys? Do you fish on the West Coast, was that ever a part of the business?

—Yeah, Ray Carver and I did it for years and when he died I quit going'cause I don't get along with his wife. Not that she would take me fishing anyway. She might take me out on a boat and throw me in with a big piano tied to my leg, if she possibly could, but I don't, I quit doing that when Ray died. And now I have a house in Maine and I do some. I haven't seen McGuane in a long time, I see Jim once in a while. The odd thing about life as it has gone on, I see fewer and fewer and fewer people of any kind and particularly fewer of my writer colleagues. I'm still friendly with Jim, Jim's very dear to me, and Tom, who I'm less friendly with, we lead different kinds of lives. I don't hunt with either of them. I mostly hunt with my wife.

—Thirty years I was a city chick and came to the country without friends from that botched landscape. I lived in the city when it meant something, before it meant so little. I disagree with you: it is not complexer. Those Eastern pundits want me to believe that urban has not been covered. They seek a new urbanity? These press corps dilettantes
have only just discovered the city's gifts – inflated price tag still dangling from its sleeve – and so prescribe that art must cover the action, the family and its flirting, cheating, and corrupt inventories, the flippo drugs for which the privileged brats of my graduating class now hock mumsy's Doulton figurines. Thirty years ago in my Vancouver, kids were snatched from Halloween streets; hanging oneself from a tree in Maple Grove park was optional for teenage boys with meanstreak dads and a sexuality not defined by the push and grunt of a rugby scrum; bleached blonde and bosomy mothers kept mid-mornings open for Mr. Neighbour; drunken writers blew it under the viaduct; incurable diseases – cancer a dirty word that might be catching – were kept secret; gentle men like my father gave up on commerce and its ladder and ran away from home. Now what? What's complexer now?

I looked to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Race Rocks and Cascadia, to the spawning of sockeye salmon in a desperate and detergent-fouled Goldstream River, not for the consolation of cheapshit metaphor, not for lack of imagination. I know the city's stupid secrets, printed as they are now in a too-sharp digital format. I know the city; I want what came before. Why did we abandon that? Who will read the city's history, trace its underground streams, and where? Treeplanters with poems shoved into their knapsacks? Mention a raven now and bingo: you're a) too pastoral or b) a fucking racist.

Does knowing the
New Yorker
will publish the best of your work change the writing of that work in some way?

—It might, to be honest with you, but I'm not aware of it. There maybe some sort of pre-cognitive selection that goes on in the things I will and won't write about which means that they're adapted to what I think the
New Yorker'
s sensibilities are, but the
New Yorker
has a wide sensibility, often an erratically wide sensibility and I don't think that I make any adaptations to fit in. I won't get paid enough money if I publish elsewhere and I don't have a teaching job.

—Wait now. I wouldn't call what I do “job,” at least not in the “accrue capital and security and retire well in Irish linen” sense of the word.

—I'm always trying to kind of angle for the bucks here.

—Oh, to have bucks for which to angle! Are you suggesting I am my own victim? That I should quit my so-called job and write cheatin' hurtin' stories for the huge rags? Okay, sign me up. Will I need to learn to live on less, just until the real money starts pouring in? If I buy a second house in the Gulf Islands, should I have someone – a former student or hardluck alco-poet maybe – rent it while I winter in, say, Thessalonika? Do I charge them the going rate, or discount for artists and small press losers? What purpose will landscape serve in my fiction? Why will my men all be sort of western guys? Why will I have trouble writing about women?

—This period in my life in which I've been publishing stories in the
New Yorker
, it won't last forever, it'll go away, other writers will come along and take those slots. It's just been this time for me, this period.

—That drawl, that sonorousness and suggestion of ice clinking in a good glass, you have such a pleasing voice, I hear it always when reading your work, even though I try to dismiss it so I can get a clean reading of a character.

—Before I lock 'em up and put 'em in a book, I read 'em aloud myself, so I know what their essential rhythms are.

—Your writing has never relied on irony for its power.

—Nope.

—Sincerity seems more to the point with your work.

—Yup. I'm an essentialist.

—We are being told that we have reached the end of irony. Does this supposed cultural shift have importance for a writer like you?

—No. No. It has no importance for me and it isn't true. I mean, we haven't reached the end of irony, are you kidding? That's such a cultural myopia that says things like that. Another day will dawn whether we want it to or not. No, I don't think irony is under any attack and all that may be happening to it is that it's being replaced.

—You are the king of the retrospective narrator. You often choose the retrospective voice when sons are recalling fathers, and you achieve a lovely split consciousness, at once young and also painfully wise and old. Why do you choose that perspective?

—I can tell you exactly the cause: I read Sherwood Anderson when I was twenty-three years old, and I was so moved by “Death in the Woods,” and I wanted to know why so much that I thought, “oh gee, if I could just write stories like that for the rest of my life, I would.” That's the exact reason.

—With Earl in “Rock Springs” you've said it's to prove that he made it out of the life he was living, the mistakes he kept making.