The Root Cellar (29 page)

JL: Rose feels that she has never belonged anywhere. She has been traipsed around the world by her grandmother, and her grandmother never allowed her to have friends. So she has had no anchor but her grandmother—a woman who probably cared about her but was so undemonstrative as to seem unloving. Rose desperately needs to feel not only loved, but that she
belongs
somewhere. At the start of the story, she certainly doesn’t feel that she belongs with the Hawthorn Bay family, but she has begun to feel that by the end. I remember what an important moment it was for me, in the writing of the book, when, on Christmas Day, Aunt Nan gives Rose a miniature toy car that once belonged to her brother, Rose’s father. In that moment Rose suddenly feels that her father was not just a daydream—he once lived, he was Aunt Nan’s
brother, his connection to her own world is real. She does belong to the Hawthorn Bay family. I felt that shared moment so strongly.

LD: While writing it?

JL: Yes. Those sudden, intense shared moments are so pivotal in life, as they are in stories. They tie us together in a way that years of shared experiences can’t always do. Looking back on the story after I wrote it, I could see that the connection Rose makes with Aunt Nan through that toy car, the connection she makes with Sam sitting on the stone wall in Oswego while he plays Will’s song, the connection she makes with Will when she buys him the 10-cent harmonica—they pull the bits and pieces of her life together. I didn’t see that while I was writing, though. Often, while I’m writing, I don’t consciously realize the underlying meaning of what I am saying.

D: Do you think that’s true for most writers?

JL: I think it’s true in the books I like best. When a book is full of deliberate symbolism, it can be very interesting, but it’s apt to be completely cerebral. It never touches the heart. So I don’t strive for symbolism or for figuring the underlying meaning of my stories too carefully. I trust my subconscious to do that job.

LD: Do you feel that you have to allow a story to tell itself to a certain extent?

JL: Yes, I do. But, at some point, you have to take the story that has told itself and give it shape. You know, as an editor, that an important part of your job is to get the writer with a story that has all but told itself to organize it into a cohesive narrative. When hopeful young writers ask me how I work out a story, this is what I tell them: I plot my story carefully. Then, when I start to write, characters, dialogue and even events I haven’t planned leap onto the page. Then comes the hard part: I have to decide whether to stick to the carefully plotted outline or go with what’s appeared unbidden. If you stick with the outline, you end up with a dead story. If you follow every stray thought, your story won’t hold together. Somehow you have to merge these two strands. This is what makes writing an art, not a science.

LD: Let’s look, for a moment, at some of those “unconscious” ideas now. In
The Root Cellar
, you circle around ideas of being gone, as much as of belonging. Rose is gone—separated from herself and her world, as well as shifting through time. Will is gone—he runs off to war. Mrs. Morrissay is there one minute and gone the next. And what makes the story so moving
for me is that Rose has to learn how to find herself above all. All the way through the novel, in the language and the images, I feel you are circling back to that idea. Even in the importance that you give to music and song. Lost and found; music and silence; sorrow and joy; darkness and light. How conscious were you of these powerful ideas when writing the book?

JL: I never thought about any of those themes, not consciously. Nor did I realize when I set out to write this story that I was going to war with it. I’m sure that what was happening here in Canada politically played a part in how I was feeling. The separatists in Quebec were being quite
noisy
—I can’t think of a better word for it—and I remember thinking, “Oh Lord, are we going to have a civil war in this country?” I grew up in the shadow of the American Civil War. It was still very alive in national memory when I was a child. There were still veterans from that war marching in the Memorial Day parades. They were old, old men, probably as old as the oldest of the Second World War veterans now. Our Vermont village had sent soldiers to that war. The stories my neighbours told about that war had been told to them by people who’d lived through it. My great-grandmother remembered seeing Abraham Lincoln when she was a child. We still sang
Civil War songs in school. I was born only sixty-seven years after the end of that war, and I am now seventy-two years old. It wasn’t so very long ago.

LD: As a new Canadian, did you have to take on a different perspective on the American Civil War than you might have done if you had still lived in the U.S.?

JL: I didn’t. Historically, the pre-Confederation Canadian governments supported the American South because the British did; the North England cotton mills got their cotton from the American South. In fact, Jefferson Davis, who was the President of the Southern Confederacy, sent his son to Bishop’s College School in Lennoxville, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. But probably most Canadians supported the North, as slavery was outlawed in all provinces here. A great many people along the border supported the Underground Railroad that helped escaped slaves find their way to Canada.

LD: Strange to think that your birth was closer to that war than you are to your own birth today! When you moved to Canada and found yourself in a community of United Empire Loyalists who had fled as refugees from the
States, did you find that your new community had held onto its stories in the same way that they had in the States?

JL: Yes, and they still do!

LD: Was that one of the reasons you came to write the book? To tell those people’s stories? I do remember you saying, when you began
The Root Cellar
, that you were deeply concerned that we, in Canada, didn’t have a strong tradition of writing down the stories about ourselves and our past and our country. You became one of the first significant writers in children’s literature to do that. Is it still important to you?

JL: Oh yes, I think it’s terribly important. I think a community only develops a sense of itself through its stories. We don’t know who we are without our stories. Families don’t know, a community doesn’t know, a nation doesn’t know. Story is the heart of a people—story in sculpture, in painting, in music, in writing. At every family gathering, sooner or later, someone says, “Do you remember the time …?” Everyone else will nod, remembering, and the stories begin. At national holidays, radio and television programs fulfill that function. Stories remind us who we are and bind us together.

LD: What are the novels that, for you, do tell those Canadian stories?

JL: When we’re talking novels for adults, I’d say Margaret Laurence’s, Alistair MacLeod’s, W. O. Mitchell’s—really, there are quite a number. And, although they’re short stories, Alice Munro’s.

Among the books for young people, I suppose Lucy Maud Montgomery is the quintessential Canadian writer, even though she belongs to a time long past. Her prose is pretty flowery, but it still conveys that down-to-earth quality that characterizes so much Canadian fiction—even our fantasy. It characterizes our national psyche. Among the contemporary writers, while there are certainly others, Jean Little, Kit Pearson, Kevin Major, Brian Doyle, are the names that leap into my head.

LD: Do you feel we can get a truer sense of our hopes and traditions, our past, our country, through fiction than out of history textbooks?

JL: I think you need both. You can get the facts (or at least an approximation of the facts) from the history books, but the only way to get
inside
history is through fiction. But I don’t like fictional biography. I am really bothered by the idea of taking someone’s life and turning it
inside out or embroidering fiction all over it. I respect historical reality too much. You can never know the absolute truth about the past, but you can come closer to how it might have been by examining it through the hearts and minds of fictional characters. You can take a period of time, read everything you can find about the people who lived during that time, and create characters who might have lived then—but you have to be careful not to assign your twenty-first-century sensibility to them. Writing
The Root Cellar
was an intriguing exercise because I had a twentieth-century heroine moving back in time to befriend two nineteenth-century kids.

LD: Who therefore had to explain themselves to each other.

JL: They had a hard time understanding how each other thought. There were quite a few misunderstandings. But I was telling their story with the firm belief that, underneath those surface differences that growing up in different time periods would create, they would all be the same. I am quite sure that if we could go back in time one hundred, two hundred, two thousand years, once we’d gotten over the startling differences in clothing, language and cultural attitude, getting along would be not so different from the
encounters we people from so many cultures have every day. Despite the sometimes very great differences, once they’re overcome we always find that while we may
think
differently, we don’t
feel
differently. We all hurt when we stub our toes.

LD: Is that why stories about travelling through time fascinate you?

JL: Partly, I suppose. Partly it’s because I really want to know what it was like to live during those periods I write about. Partly it’s the pure romance of the idea; I would love to go back in time.

LD: I know from working with you that your research is always very thorough.

JL: As thorough as I can possibly make it.

LD: Even the language and conversation. For example, Joe Haggerty, the soldier, speaks in a particular way that you researched carefully.

JL: I got his dialogue from a Civil War diary. I can still remember sitting in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., reading that diary. (What a wonderful library that is. The huge, round reading room is so beautiful!) The diary was so engrossing that I felt, when I had
finished reading it, as though I really knew this poor foot soldier whose wife had left him because he hadn’t been paid and he couldn’t send her any money. I felt I just had to give him even a small part in my story. Finding a diary like that is like striking gold. To be able to actually read what somebody felt and wrote, at the time and in the actual situation you’re writing about, makes you feel as though you’ve heard his voice speaking to you.

LD: Language has its own characteristics of place and time; it grows and evolves just like people, with recognizable traits. It’s a special joy of the novel that you reproduce how people spoke in different places and different times.

JL: I think the accuracy of dialogue is terribly important. Without the echo of real speech, it’s very hard for a reader to make his or her way into a story. Rose is a twentieth-century, middle-class New Yorker; Will and Susan are farm kids in rural Ontario in the 1860s. They couldn’t possibly speak in the same way. I won’t have it exactly right, of course. It’s very hard to get right. When I was writing
Shadow in Hawthorn Bay
about Mary, whose native language is Scots Gaelic, I had to really puzzle out how to give her voice. I didn’t want to write dialect; I don’t like dialect, and it’s hard to read.
I settled for the cadence of Gaelic-influenced English. That’s more or less what I did with Will and Susan’s nineteenth-century speech. I don’t think speech patterns changed all that much between the 1960s, when Richard and the kids and I went to live in Prince Edward County, and the 1930s, when Richard grew up there. And I don’t think there were great changes in a specific locality between the 1930s and the 1860s, either. There used to be more significant differences between towns as close as fifty or sixty kilometres, but those are now largely erased because of television and radio.

LD: When you began writing
The Root Cellar
, did you imagine it would be the first of three books that would draw on that landscape of your farm and Prince Edward County? That the story of the Morrissays would spread out from there like the spokes of a wheel, encompassing Scotland and Vermont and New Hampshire?

JL: Oh, no. I was only thinking about that particular story. When I write a story, I am there in that story. I live in it. I never think about what I will write next. Do you remember how it was when I was writing
The Root Cellar
? I was so involved. I remember coming to your office at your publishing house of Lester & Orpen Dennys on Charles Street one morning, and I
read to you the scene where Susan and Rose find Will after the war. We sat there, the two of us—

LD: —with the tears pouring down our faces!

JL: I never do read that part out loud when I am reading the story. I don’t want to cry in front of an audience!

LD: One of the things that is, of course, so marvellous, so great about your writing, is the quality of the storytelling. The storytelling is embedded in worlds that are historically fascinating, and are filled with historical detail and the language of the time, but the heart of it all is the richness of the storytelling.

JL: Story is why I write for younger people. Story—in the way that Aristotle defined it, as a conflict rising to a climax leading to a denouement—isn’t important to contemporary fiction for adults. So many adult novels today are more like beautifully written case histories.

LD: Of events, as well as characters?

JL: Oh, sure. And the events are interesting, the characters are often strong; the narratives are, in fact, most often character-driven. I like a lot of
contemporary novels because of the good writing and because I care a lot about character. But I do love
story
.

LD: And why do you think it’s necessary, during the writing of a novel, for you to keep going back over and over a story until you’ve got it right? Has that always been a part of your writing? Do you think it important to good writing?

JL: I really can’t say for everybody’s writing. As you know, I’ve worked as an editor, and I have found that the stories of writers who are unwilling to rewrite often fall short of their potential. I think I probably have to rewrite more than some people have to, but if I feel something is wrong, I feel compelled to work through as many as six, seven or eight drafts. I’ve rewritten some chapters in my books fifteen times.