The Wanton Troopers (29 page)

JP
Do you think that writers should confront society — the illusions and faiths of society?

AN
Well, I think some writers should confront the illusions of society. It depends on the nature of the writer. There have been some very great iconoclastic writers, but it's an attitude that I don't think is central to me. It might be in certain societies. I don't know how I would feel if I were a writer in a country where writers are strictly curtailed by government agencies and that sort of thing. But in society as it exists now, I don't feel any great urge to attack it. I would have felt, I suppose, a much stronger urge when I was younger. And the reason I don't feel it strongly now, I think, isn't that I've changed so much as that the world has changed an enormous amount. There aren't nearly so many things to attack as there were in the fifties. I, at one point in the early fifties, was actually investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. During this whole McCarthy era, you know.

JP
Could you tell me a bit more about that?

AN
Well, it was funny in a way, because at the time I was actually investigated by the RCMP — I suppose the RCMP intelligence squad — it was just after I had left Nova Scotia and come to New Brunswick, so that I personally didn't encounter it at all. I simply heard about it from people like my father, the librarian, and the editor of the weekly newspaper, who had been questioned. And it was all because I'd written some letters to the editor of a newspaper which was then published in Cape Breton called the
Steelworker and the Miner
, which was a very left-wing newspaper — in fact, I think it was edited by a communist. And what strikes me as so funny in retrospect is all of this money and effort being spent to investigate the views of some poor little eighteen-year-old boy in a backwoods village in Nova Scotia
. .
. who couldn't have overthrown the government even if he had wanted to. And I think it's funny they could be that absurd and frightening that they could be that thorough.

JP
How quickly do your attitudes and the way they reflect in your writing change?

AN
I suspect that my attitudes tend to change slowly and almost imperceptibly, to me.

JP
What writers have you learned the most from technically, and what sorts of things did you learn?

AN
I think possibly the writer I learned the most from technically was William Carlos Williams. And I think this is true of a great many of my generation of Canadian poets and the generation of Canadian poets preceding mine. I think that many of the Canadian poets of the generation that's just a bit younger than I am — the sort of George Bowering-Lionel Kearns generation — learned a good deal of the things that they learned from American writers who had learned from William Carlos Williams.

JP
Have you ever cribbed anything from other writers?

AN
Oh, well. All writers, although not all of them would admit it, are shameless thieves. T.S. Eliot said that minor writers imitate, great writers steal.

JP
D.H. Lawrence had a willingness to trust his instinct and follow it freely, so he said. And Forster, or Flannery O'Connor, as you mentioned, said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” What do you think of this notion of an internal voice, a sort of primitive commentator inside you?

AN
Oh, I think our ancestors, when they said that man was body and spirit and soul, were expressing a genuine truth. Obviously even Hugh Hefner would be prepared to admit that we are body, and I would take the soul to equal the conscious mind and the spirit to be an unconscious thing speaking inside us.

JP
Does this “spirit” come into play when you write poetry?

AN
Oh, I think so. And one of the fascinating things about writing poetry is the inspiration often comes when you're trying to do the most disciplined form. I think that I've come up with some of my best individual lines when I was working with strict metrical forms. When I simply started out, for instance, simply knowing that the line had to be iambic pentameter — five distinct beats — I would work and work simply to get a line that made sense and had five distinct beats. But in the end, suddenly, a line sort of leaped through that was perfect from my point of view but which wouldn't have come at all had I not had to go through all that straining.

JP
Robert Bly says that you are psychically brave because you skate out along “the edges of fear” in your poetry. What do you have to say about that?

AN
Well, I think we come back there to the business of the importance of being able to distinguish what you really think and feel from what you think that society around you expects you to think and feel. In other words, to admit to yourself what it is — the way that you react to things. And I think it's not only important in poetry and in fiction but it can be enormously important to a journalist. Simply to admit that he finds something boring or tedious or the emperor wears no clothes, you know.

JP
In the poem “There is a horrible wing to the hotel” what are you really talking about?

AN
Well, there are various types of ideal poems, but one of them would be a poem which expressed something as a poem which you couldn't express in any other way. And I think in “There is a horrible wing to the hotel” and in many of my darker poems — because I sort of have daytime poems and nighttime poems — I'm striving to express something in the poem which really couldn't be expressed outside of the poem. So, therefore, to attempt to explain it would be to destroy it.

JP
What value is there in the exploration of such strange and far-out ideas?

AN
I don't really think that any ideas are strange and far-out. Possibly because so much of life has seemed strange to me, I'm prepared to accept as quite normal almost any degree of strangeness. I have certain moments in which I'm quite prepared to believe in vampires and werewolves. If it's a really good horror movie on TV, I don't like to watch it when I'm alone in the house.

There's a definite association, I think, in our society between alienation and the artist, but I don't think that that needs to be at all. And I think that the historical period during which there has been that feeling of almost the necessity of the artist being alienated from society is comparatively brief. You know, through the eighteenth century, writers didn't feel at all alienated from society. And then, of course, during the Romantic period of Keats, Byron, and Shelley, they did. But then again, during the Victorian age, they didn't. And I don't think it is essential to be alienated from the society around you in order to be a great writer because obviously Shakespeare was very much a part of the society around him. He wasn't alienated at all. And he's still generally conceded to be the greatest writer in English.

JP
They say that as a writer you must be super observant of your environment. Can you comment about that?

AN
I don't think that it's necessary for a writer to be super observant. I think that it's probably very necessary that he compensate for his areas in which his observation is weak by exercising the areas in which his observation is strong. In my own case, I am very weak visually — in the sense that I tend not to notice what people are wearing, you know. I've known people for months and didn't notice that they had some physical deformity until some friend pointed it out to me. But I'm very aware of the things that people say and the nuances of their voices and the idiomatic expressions they use and how the words they use don't always have their dictionary meaning. So that in the audio section I'm very strong.

JP
Do you write poetry every day?

AN
You really can't write poetry on a nine-to-five basis as you can write prose. On the other hand, you do work at it every day in the same sense that people who are clergymen point out, rightly, that they are really working on their sermons every day because they are observing things from life and listening to people, which will eventually become material for a sermon.

JP
So you write poetry, then, at certain times of the week or month, or is it every couple of months you would begin to write poetry?

AN
It varies. Usually, if I'm involved in some lengthy prose project such as working on a play, I try, for instance, to have it so that if I work for three weeks on the play, I work a week on nothing but the verse.

JP
Just one week concentrated.

AN
Yes.

JP
When you switch from journalism or prose to poetry, do you make special preparations to prepare the ground?

AN
Well, the hardest part of all of being a writer who writes in a great many genres as I do — plays, journalism, short stories, and poetry — is the switching from one to the other, because it's not something that you can do very quickly. If I've been working for a week on poetry and then try to write a newspaper column, the problem I have is that I work too hard at it. I'm too meticulous, you see. Because often a newspaper column is much better if it's dashed off than if it's written carefully. If you write it carefully, being conscious of the subtleties of the language and the nuances of the words, the reader will probably miss the point entirely. Because, obviously, the reader is going to be dashing through that and he smells the toast burning and he tosses it to one side, whereas people will perhaps read a poem over and over. And yes, it's very often very difficult to switch from one to the other, very frustrating.

JP
Alden, can you tell me a bit about the way you find words that juxtapose in a poem to create a sort of haiku feeling — a sort of unexpected feeling?

AN
Well, it's mostly a process of trial and error, actually. And often it seems almost purely accidental, although I suppose there's something that's simmering in the subconscious.

JP
Do you ever find these sorts of juxtapositions almost independent of a poem and sort of catalogue them in a book or something?

AN
Oh, yes, I make all sorts of notes of, sometimes, just metaphors and of odd terms and that sort of thing. I used to make lists of rich, mouth-filling words, but I tend to use a much simpler vocabulary now. In fact, I found, three or four years ago when I was preparing a collection of selected poems, that in some of my earlier poems, there was a word or two that I'd now forgotten what it meant, and I had to look it up in the dictionary.

JP
Do you keep a journal, a diary of sorts?

AN
I have at various times. I used to start a diary every January first and some of them would go as far as January seventh. I think the longest any of them lasted was probably the first of February.

JP
You told me that you sometimes have to set yourself a deadline to finish a poem. Can you tell me again about that?

AN
Possibly because I'm an old newspaper man, I'm very dependent upon deadlines. And so, at various times, I have created completely imaginary deadlines for poems — telling myself that I had to have a poem done by Saturday. There was a period when I forced myself to write a poem a day. And when I was doing it — in the sense of saying that I had to have it done by Saturday — often it was very imperfect, but at least it was finished. And I had something to work on later. Whereas if I hadn't set the deadline, I probably would have abandoned it halfway through.

JP
You sometimes paint pictures — watercolours. Could you talk about that?

AN
Well, I don't paint much anymore. I used to paint a little — sort of in keeping with Gilbert Keith Chesterton's wonderful observation that anything that's worth doing at all is worth doing badly. And I think that's very true in the sense that, while I was always a very bad painter, I think that I learned to be much more observant of good paintings as a result of doing bad ones than I would have been if I hadn't done any at all.

JP
The little watercolour that you have hanging in your living room, could you describe it and tell me what it's about?

AN
The watercolour that I have framed in my living room is basically there because I decided that it was the weak best of a very bad lot. And I felt so good about it that I framed it.

JP
And what does is show?

AN
Oh . . . basically, a woman sleeping.

JP
Does it have any particular meaning for you?

AN
Well, one night during the period when I was doing watercolours . . . I suppose, actually, I should give some very philosophical explanation of how and why I did it. But, in fact, one night, during the time when I was doing watercolours, I was sitting in the living room of our house and my wife was asleep on the chesterfield, and I was sitting there getting increasingly sloshed, and I simply did watercolour after watercolour and that was the best of the lot. I was the sort of painter who always did it better when he was half sloshed. Which means I was pretty amateurish.

JP
Would you care to say anything about what you're writing now?

AN
The last project that I finished was in collaboration with Walter Learning — a radio adaptation of George du Maurier's novel
Trilby
. The radio play is called
La Svengali
. It looks into the whole business — well, of course, in
La Svengali
or
Trilby
, a hypnotist — a mesmerist as they called them in the nineteenth century — takes a little girl who's tone-deaf and turns her into a great operatic singer. But in the play, we try to carry it a bit beyond that and, by implication, go into the whole business of how someone creates someone else or uses them as an instrument. You know, like Colonel Tom Parker with Elvis Presley or Brian Epstein with the Beatles. To a degree, you have created them or you could certainly imagine that you had. But I could visualize Tom Parker standing in the wings, accepting all that adulation as being for him.