Flirt: The Interviews

by Lorna Jackson

  —Seems like a hypocritical thing for a doctor to say. After all, I’m sure there were worse than you in the seventies in a place like that.

  —Tough love?

  —Nonsense.

  —It was a good time to leave. I remember not much.

  —Memory is a very interesting organ. I bet if you started to write a story

  – not autobiographical, but personal – about that time, I bet you’d begin to recover details and feelings and events. They’d be suspect in their accuracy, of course, but you’d have them.

  —Not yet. I’m not hungry for those details yet. And the story seems sort of bewildering and pathetic. I was wrong about everything.

  —Oh, the story could work around that. Give that young woman a little more power, blonder hair and a head scarf, or maybe set it in the sixties, and really work out the landscape so the story’s also about that, and I think you’d have an interesting moment to play with. But these things take time, you’re right. A story can’t always be squeezed out of history. With me, writing has something to do with the fight against death, the feeling that we lose everything every day, and writing is a way of convincing yourself perhaps that you’re doing something about this. You’re not really, because the writing itself does not last much longer than you do; but I would say it’s partly the feeling that I can’t stand to have things go … Speaking of hungry. There’s a Dutchman down the way who makes divine sausage and bakes his own sourdough buns. He usually has a bottle of Kenyan beer tucked in a cooler under his tailgate.

  —It seems to me your stories are getting sexier.

  —Well, you may be right. Hello Harry! He’s handsome, don’t you think? His wife’s arms jiggle and she talks about her sons’ PhDs too much. Still.

  —Most of them begin with a paragraph loaded with female desire, female want, some naughty language. And later that desire is mocked, then refused and finally satisfied in some way.

  —What story are you thinking of?

  —“Floating Bridge.”

  —Of course. You would like that story, given the lives you’ve led.

  —I love that story.

  —I do, too. But tell me why.

  —For all the right crafty reasons: the invisibly-stitched physical description of characters; the ambiguous relationship between the cancerous woman, Jinny, and her asshole husband, Neal; the plottiness that has become a bit of a pattern in your later work whereby a caregiver or nurse – a third party – is introduced into an existing relationship; the class-conscious settings of paradise and its opposites; your weaving of present and past. I love it for your skill, is what I’m saying, and how you manage to dance so much so fast, without your tights getting saggy.

  —I’m not sure that metaphor quite works. But add it to the list.

  —And because I’m getting older and because men … I, but they, we – well, the ending.

  —Ricky’s kiss on the bridge pleases you, doesn’t it.

  —It really really does. When the boy drives poor Jinny home – they’ve only just met – and he stops and they look at the stars on the bridge. She’s forgotten her hat in the corn field and she has only a nob of a head. He touches her waist and kisses her. He says “oh.” I asked my friend Johnny why Ricky kisses her.

  —Oh, I’d like to hear a man’s opinion on that.

  —Johnny’s not just any man. But he said, “What’s in him at that moment? I don’t know, some bizarre cocktail of bravado and compassion and oedipal urgings. Why does he do it? Because she wants him to and he’s a good boy. Because he’s so alive he’s bigger than death. Because he’s on an Experience-gathering expedition, and this is a Big One. Because this is where he brings girls to kiss them, and she’s a girl. Because they’ve slipped out of the stream of time and become ageless. Because he’s so beautiful it would be a scandal if nobody were kissing him. Because he reads her well enough to know he can get away with it, and getting away with things is the teenager’s raison d’être. Because he’s in awe of the moment he’s concocted, and knows he has to do something remarkable to mark it …”

  —John’s words comfort you, don’t they.

  —They do.

  —Why do you think he kisses her? Before you answer, try to open your mind, your heart, try to think about where you are – in the country on a hot day and eating a handful of blackberries that will stain your lips, holding my hand like we’re girlfriends off from school for the turning-point summer we’ve been waiting for. Look at me. Now, why do you think he kisses her?

  —Feel this under the dog’s front leg. Here, Alice. Put your fingers under mine. Feel that? There’s a little tumor under there, floating around, fixing for trouble. But look at him, smiling in his sleep, oblivious. Good dog.

  He kisses her because she gives him the word “tannin”. No woman has given him a word. Take off your hat, Alice. He kisses her because she’s beautiful regardless of time. Because he can’t help it.

  I Flirt with RICHARD FORD

  —Waiting for you to phone feels like high school. Will he? Won’t he? How do I look?

  —But I called, whereas in high school they likely didn’t.

  —I went to high school in Vancouver and stood far too many cold afternoons under the colonial street light on the corner of Wiltshire and 43rd with boyfriend X, after our respective rugby and volleyball games. I tried to convince him I wasn’t too crazy to love long term, that just because my sister was near death I wasn’t sad all the time, I could tell a good joke, cared about the civil rights movement and necked well, though ancient at fifteen. We stood so long my toes froze, in sight of my square blue Georgian house, its rhododendrons, my mother’s cream-coloured Austin inept in the driveway, but we didn’t go in there. X helped keep me whole but by graduation, he had taken up with a rough covey of rugger chicks who liked their boys straddling rebuilt Harleys with long scars where pins held their ruptured bodies – elbows, knees. Girls who drank hard liquor fast and smoked weed in their parents’ condos at Whistler and took pills and called that carefree. My sister dead, I quit the team, and found a nice United church redheaded boy who refused to fuck but could fingerpick a punchy acoustic guitar – his brother’s D-28 Martin – and who lived for the scratch and squeeze of tight harmony. Of course, moral differences ripped us apart, and the phone calls stopped coming when I begged the world for one more talk. Richard, this is already better than high school.

  —We’ll see.

  —Thank-you for calling.

  —My pleasure so far.

  —You may occasionally hear the sound of chickens. My office looks out on a rough little coop built seventy years ago from field stones and cedar shingles by a local shoemaker and is now home to a dozen Barred Rocks and a couple of freakish and testy Black Minorcas. Their egg yolks this time of year are a yellow not otherwise found in nature and taste rich as French pastries, thick from a diet of hatching slugs. Early this morning, turkey vultures circled low and shadowed the windows Hitchcock-wise. I found the hens stockstill, like a watercolour, huddled under the tayberries. The rooster – a huge and handsome Barred Rock, his tail a conquistador’s helmet – posed on the nearby pathway, ready to give it up for his girls, to be their he-man. I urged and flicked them back to the coop and fixed a board across the hole they’d excavated under the run’s wire. The vultures circled and watched and dipped close in their primitive formation and then sauntered off. Today, all day, the rooster will crow. Your voice sounds sweetly Southern and bourbon-soaked. Am I right?

  —It’s only noon where I am. What a peculiar question.

  —Are journalists asking you different questions this time?

  —I just kind of started, last week, so the questions seem quite fresh. They don’t seem to be questions about “does the landscape influence your work,” “Do you have a problem writing about women,” “Why are your men kind of western guys?”

  —Has your celebrity changed the tack we’re taking?

  —I don’t think celebrity lasts very l
ong, frankly, so I’m unaware of that. For the most part, when people ask me questions they’re quite nice, and I can usually get my head into them. They aren’t frivolous and they aren’t dumb. Particularly in Canada, I’m always pleased with the kind of preparation journalists do. Much better than in the US of A.

  —Well that’s nice to hear. I am not only a journalist, though, and my questions will arise from several positions: writer, teacher, critic. Your writing showed me many things when I started working with the sweet calisthenics of the short story. I like men who are kind of western guys, maybe that’s it. If my questions seem odd or random, they are, and they need to be.

  —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 sa
me 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?