JP
You've always written plays in collaboration with Walter Learning. Do you think you'll ever write one by yourself, and if you do, what sort of subjects would you choose?
AN
I don't know if I'll ever write a play on my own or not because I think of it so much in terms of it being something that I do with Walter. If you collaborate with someone â particularly if you collaborate as much as Walter and I have done, because we've finished three stage plays and started half a dozen others and done quite a number of TV plays and radio plays â in a sense, there exists an entity which contains part of Walter Learning and part of Alden Nowlan and is independent of us both. At one point we thought (I think perhaps we were right) that we ought to use a pseudonym to represent this character â this author who was really neither of us but kind of a combination of the two. It's sort of as if we'd had a child together and he were the mother and I were the father.
JP
The character of the creature in your play
Frankenstein
â once you said that character was one of the most autobiographical things you've ever written. Could you explain that?
AN
Often people have taken it for granted that Kevin O'Brien in my novel
Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien
is a straight autobiographical figure, and I've told many of those people (only half jokingly) that the creature in our stage adaptation of
Frankenstein
is much more autobiographical than Kevin O'Brien is.
JP
In what way?
AN
All of us are alienated to certain degrees at certain times, but the creature is utterly alienated. And he, as he appears in the play, I think, personifies exactly the way I felt when I was fifteen and sixteen years old. I, in effect, was the creature. During that period, I never strangled anyone (as the creature does), but I can tell you that I often was tempted to do so and sometimes wish that I had.
JP
Could you talk a bit more about your alienation as an adolescent?
AN
The worst forms of alienation are . . . the worst results are not that other people think that you're inferior. The horrible thing is when
you
begin to think that you're inferior. I think this is true of minority groups. For a long time, I think, this was true of many Blacks or many of our native people. They'd been told for so long that they were inferior that they'd come to believe they
were
inferior. And in the individual case, it's not so bad really to be unloved as it is to convince yourself that you are utterly and permanently
unlovable
. And that's what the creature feels, and that's what I felt during my adolescent years.
JP
Could you be even more specific about the factors in your adolescence that contributed to this feeling of alienation?
AN
Well, I've written somewhere that the worst sort of indignity is loneliness without privacy â loneliness in a crowd. It isn't so bad to be alone (or I shouldn't imagine it to be) if you were a hermit or a monk or if you were marooned somewhere. But it's desperately hard to be utterly alone in a situation where you also have to deal with encounters with other people. And that's the sort of situation that I was in, really. In retrospect, I think that it probably was good for me because I've found that there's an enormous amount of truth in what Nietzsche said. Nietzsche said that “what does not kill me, strengthens me.” And I've found that to be very, very true.
JP
What's the sensation a writer has when he hears his own words from the mouth of somebody else â a really good actor?
AN
At least in my case, when I hear my words from the mouth of a really good actor, I always develop an enormous affection for that actor. And if he or she does an appalling job of delivering my lines, I (perhaps irrationally and unfairly) develop an intense dislike for that person. I can't help but emotionally take it very personally, even though I know that's not very rational. But a person could be an excellent individual and still do a very bad job of delivering my lines. I believe that rationally, but I feel in my heart that anyone who can't deliver my lines well is a black-hearted villain and ought to be driven out of the theatre.
JP
You asked me earlier on not to interview your family â your aunts and uncles back home and even your wife. Could you talk a bit about that? Why would you feel reluctant?
AN
Well, I think it's because it's essentially irrelevant to my role as an artist. I think it's probably much more noticeable in politics than it is in the arts and probably much more noticeable in the U.S. than it is in Canada, but we get this whole business that when Jimmy Carter was president, his brother Billy became a celebrity, which was really unfair, you know, in many ways to brother Billy, who would have been very happy running a little service station down in Plains, Georgia. If it were not for the pure accident that his brother became president of the U.S., he would never have become a celebrity. And my point is that it was pure accident and it's utterly irrelevant. Many of the people who know me and are related to me either by blood or by marriage are only vaguely aware that I write at all. And certainly they have no conception of what being a writer is.
I could probably give a better . . . a fairly good example of this business of being unaware of what somebody does. There's a wonderful story that Walter Learning told me. During the second production of
Frankenstein
, Walter played one of the minor comic relief characters â a character who did a bit of slapstick humour to give the audience a chance to laugh so they wouldn't laugh at the serious parts. Well, the play went to Newfoundland, and Walter's dear old grandmother came to one production. After the production, she came to him and, in tones of great relief, said, “Now at last, boy, I know what you does for a living.” Obviously, from her point of view, she thought he spent all his life playing slapstick parts on the stage. But at least that gave her something to hold onto.
It's very hard for people who are illiterate or semi-illiterate to form any conception of what it is that a writer does. You see, they would have less conception of what I did than I would have of what an astronaut did. So it would be just as relevant to interview me about the NASA project as it would be to interview some of my cousins about my writing.
JP
Your only novel,
Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien
, dealt with your childhood in a sort of fictional way. Were you satisfied with that approach, or do you think you'll go at it again in some other form?
AN
Well, I suppose, actually, like all writers, or like most writers, all that I ever write about is what it's like to be me. I don't really think of
Kevin O'Brien
so much as being autobiographical, or semi-autobiographical, as I think of it in terms of it's being a study of personality and a time. And of how, as time passes, we constantly are developing into different people, almost like a caterpillar developing into a butterfly, except that the butterfly then perhaps changes into a bird and the bird changes into something else. But at the same time, all those previous selves are inside us, you see. And inside each of us, somewhere, there's a five-year-old who's apt to get out at any moment and throw a tantrum . . . I've thought at various times, in fact, of doing a play in which all of the characters were various past selves of the central character, and they were encountering and interacting with one another on the stage in the same way they really do encounter and interact with one another inside us.
JP
Did you write
Kevin O'Brien
with ease or . . . ?
AN
It was very difficult for me to write
Kevin O'Brien
, just as it's very difficult for me to write a play, even in collaboration. Because I think that all writers are divided into marathon runners and sprinters, and I, essentially, am a sprinter. And to be a good novelist, you have to be a marathon runner, and so
Kevin O'Brien
as a novel is written in a very episodic style. Some reviewers said that it was a book of short stories masquerading as a novel. That doesn't worry me, really, because I don't care how it's defined as long as it works. But it was, yes, very difficult for me.
JP
Did you work on it each day or in really concentrated periods?
AN
I worked on it mostly in periods of intense concentration in which I would do one section of it, and then there might be an interval during which I did other things, and then I would go back to it and work on it again for a week or two weeks, very hard.
JP
When you were writing
Kevin O'Brien
, how many words roughly would you expect to write in a day?
AN
With me, it's almost impossible to measure how many words I write a day because I rewrite so extensively. And I might very well, say, write two thousand words on Monday and throw fifteen hundred of them away on Tuesday. So it would be difficult to say whether on Monday I'd written two thousand words or only five hundred.
JP
Do you think in ideas? Or do you think in words, pictures, or what?
AN
I'm . . . not sure, really, how anyone thinks. I tend to think that we probably all are essentially like primitive man, and we really exist on a purely emotional level, in that we feel things in our guts. The only difference being that as civilized men we feel we must give some plausible verbal formulation to this feeling, so we invent words and make it into a plausible theory, but it really originated in what we felt here [he indicates his gut].
JP
Do you take your dreams seriously? Do they affect your work?
AN
It's funny about dreams. One of the most frustrating things about dreams that I've found as a writer is that on several occasions I've had a dream which, while I was dreaming and during the first few seconds after I woke up, seemed to me to be the nucleus of an absolutely great poem. And sometimes I've even scribbled it down in the night, and almost invariably the next day, it turned out to be absolute gibberish. So while I think that dreams may have meaning, it's probably just a meaning that applies in the dream. I have very interesting dreams. I think I have a far more interesting life when I'm asleep, in some ways, than I do when I'm awake.
JP
You were telling me this morning about a poem that actually did work out that came from a dream.
AN
Yes, I have one poem which actually came straight from a dream. Well, in fact, it was a nightmare. And I had the nightmare and woke up and wrote it down and didn't change a word of it. And not only was it . . . not only did I use it in a book, but it's probably been reprinted more often than any other of my poems. It's called “The Execution.”
JP
You came very close to death. How did that affect your work and your life in general?
AN
Well, the effects of coming close to death weren't nearly as radical as you might expect, simply because we're mercifully able to put death out of our minds so easily. I probably find it harder than most people, and I think it's probably a very healthy thing to think about death. I think that far from it being a morbid thing, if I were one of these people like a maharishi, instead of suggesting that people sit down and meditate, I would suggest that they sit down each day and think about their own death for five, ten, or fifteen minutes. And I think they would be much happier during the rest of the day and probably much kinder to the people around them.
JP
And that's the effect it had on you, basically?
AN
I think so, yes.
JP
What do you think happens to you after you die?
AN
I'm not sure. I would be inclined to think that the same thing happens to us after we die as happens to a rose or a bird or any other thing that's alive. The only kind of afterlife which I find emotionally plausible is the kind of afterlife which the ancient Greeks believed in, in which the dead exist in a kind of shadow land in which they're perhaps not completely aware that they are dead. You know, I find the traditional kind of Christian eschatology completely implausible.
JP
No pearly gates for you?
AN
I'm afraid not, though it's been a wonderfully useful imagery and great things have been said about it. Chesterton, a man whom I admire enormously and, of course, a man who was a Catholic, said a marvellous thing once. He said that there is a hell, but God never sends anyone there.