by Alden Nowlan
Nowlan’s new experiences in a larger city working for the Telegraph-Journal and Evening Times-Globe, the joys of family life, and the tribulations of a near-fatal bout with thyroid cancer were the subjects of his breakthrough poetry collection in 1967, Bread, Wine and Salt. Canada’s literary community rallied around the promising but stricken poet, securing him a Canada Council grant. In 1968, Nowlan was named writer in residence at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, and that allowed him to quit full-time newspaper work and devote his time to writing.
Despite living with cancer, Nowlan became the centre of Fredericton’s cultural life, producing six more collections of poetry and two short fiction collections, completing the novel Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien, continuing his regular columns in newspapers and magazines, and even becoming a playwright with co-author Walter Learning. The university gave Nowlan a home at the edge of the campus, a location that reflected his role as a sometimes pugnacious and controversial mediator between artists, students, and professors.
Nowlan’s prolific output was cut short on June 27, 1983, when he succumbed to respiratory failure. His legacy lives on in the many writers he influenced, in his posthumously published works (including The Wanton Troopers), and in his former residence on the UNB campus, which has been beautifully restored and renamed Alden Nowlan House in his honour.
Patrick Toner’s interest in Alden Nowlan began in high school. He wrote his MA thesis at Carleton University on the religious and supernatural beliefs in Nowlan’s poetry and, in 2000, a biography, If I Could Turn and Meet Myself: The Life of Alden Nowlan.
1 Robert Bly, “The Nourishing Voice of Alden Nowlan,” preface to One Heart, One Way: Alden Nowlan, A Writer’s Life by Gregory M. Cook (East Lawrencetown, NS: Pottersfield Press, 2003), 11.
An Interview with Alden Nowlan
JON PEDERSEN
For three days in 1982, I interviewed Alden Nowlan for the National Film Board of Canada film production Alden Nowlan: An Introduction. The resulting half-hour film was completed in 1983, after Nowlan’s death. The complete interview consists of approximately five hours of synchronized 16mm film shot by Kent Nason and full-track ¼" audiotape recorded by Art McKay, both of the National Film Board, Atlantic Region.
The following includes about half of the interview; a transcript of the complete interview is available from the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick or the Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick.
Jon Pedersen
All writers complain of the constraints and difficulties under which they work. Is it a painful and difficult process for you?
Alden Nowlan
Well, writing with me is almost an inevitable process. I’m a writer almost in the same sense that I have grey eyes. I would write poems even if no one read them, but I wouldn’t write stories or plays or newspaper columns if no one read them, obviously. But I would be writing poems even if nobody read them.
JP Is Fredericton a good environment for poets? Is poetry taken seriously?
AN I suspect it is, but it really wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference to me where I was, as long as the place where I was wasn’t actively uncomfortable, so long as I wasn’t in a situation which was painful or humiliating. I mean, I’m not really an active enough participant in the community of Fredericton, in a sense, that it makes any great difference to me that I live here, you see. I mean, partly because of my background, I’m not the sort of writer who needs to be associated with other writers in order to be creative.
JP Could you elaborate on that?
AN Well, I grew up utterly alone in many ways. During my adolescence, I was so alone I might almost as well have been on a desert island. In fact I would have been happier on a desert island because then there would have been no one to torment me. And so I’m really a very self-sufficient person. I never mind, really, being alone.
JP Do you and your wife go out much?
AN I don’t know, really, what’s very much or what’s little. It’s all relative, isn’t it?
JP What’s the room like where you work?
AN A mess.
JP Do you have a window in it? Do you need absolute silence?
AN I read somewhere once that Alice Munro (whom I think is perhaps the best short story writer in the country) has said she couldn’t write in a house in which there was another adult, and I’m very much like that. I couldn’t really write anything, except for a newspaper column, when we have house guests or that sort of thing. Writing is a very private thing to me in the sense that if I were working on a poem and someone came into the room, I would automatically cover it with my hand, just as a reflex gesture.
JP And yet you can go on and publish that for the world to see?
AN Yes, but it’s sort of like having a child in the womb and having it born. At one moment it’s a very private part of the woman, in a sense, and then suddenly it has a life of its own.
JP When you first began to write things, why and to whom did you write them?
AN The very first things I wrote were attempts at Biblical revelations because I thought I was going to be a prophet. Then I started writing poems which I thought were enormously good. I mean, I thought I was intensely precocious, but looking back, the sort of things I wrote when I was eleven and twelve were the sort of things that anyone eleven or twelve could have written if they’d wanted to do it.
JP How successful are you at saying what you want?
AN Well, I agree with Paul Verlaine, who said that “no poem is ever finished. At best it’s always abandoned.” You never really say what you want to say.
JP Do you often feel frustration or disappointment?
AN Momentarily, but it’s not prolonged because I think you have to make peace with your own limitations, actually.
JP How do you feel about criticism? Have you found professional criticism helpful or a hindrance?
AN The criticism in this country . . . First of all, I think the gift of being a genuinely fine critic is probably rarer than the gift of being a genuinely fine creative writer. But as it is, criticism can be done by anyone who wants to do it, and I think that the standards in this country have actually deteriorated since I’ve begun to write. When I started to publish things, my first little sixteen-page chapbook of poems, for instance, was reviewed by Northrop Frye, among other people. And now, you would be more apt to find a book by Northrop Frye being reviewed by some seventeen-year-old in the slow learners’ class in Moose Jaw. That sort of thing has changed. Of course, many, if not most, of the book reviewers don’t read the books anyway and generally just look at the jacket and flip it open and look at two or three pages. Also, in this country, where the reviewers and the poets and the fiction writers all tend to be the same people, obviously you get a lot of the business of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” you know, and you even get people attacking your book because a friend of yours attacked a book of theirs, you see.
JP Have you ever been tempted to strike out at your critics?
AN I used to, but it’s a loser’s game. I probably would strike out at them if I could do it with the style of Irving Layton. I have one thought that has entered my mind, though, just recently. I’ve always felt that I could write a good horror novel, like Stephen King’s. I had this wonderful fantasy recently of writing a horror novel which would become a bestseller and be made into a movie similar to The Shining, with Jack Nicholson, and make me an enormous amount of money. And I would buy a helicopter and I would fly from one end of Canada to the other, and I’d particularly stop for an afternoon in Toronto, and I would piss from my helicopter on every book reviewer in the country!
JP You told me last week you did something you’ve always wanted to do.
AN Last week I did a thing which I’ve been trying to will myself into doing for years. I received a fat envelope of clipping service reviews of my last book from Clarke Irwin, and I took out the reviews without reading any of them and threw them into a filing c
abinet. Because the thing about it is, the good ones only make you feel good for about half an hour, whereas the bad ones, no matter how stupid they are, can make you feel bad all day. Because we’re all so vulnerable that even if you know the person who wrote the review is, first of all, an idiot, and secondly, he didn’t read the book at all, there’s sort of a little voice inside you telling you you’re probably as bad as he says you are. And even if you don’t have that little voice, it’s so frustrating because you can’t retaliate. There’s no way you can punch him in the mouth. There’s no way you can answer him, really.
JP So being an artist — a poet — is really a very vulnerable place to sit.
AN It’s often occurred to me how interesting it would be if people in other fields of endeavour were subjected to the same sort of public criticism that artists are. For instance, if you took a medical doctor and on Friday there was a review that said Dr. Smith’s bedside manner leaves much to be desired and his knowledge of drugs is certainly not up to date, and as for his operating technique — it’s a complete fiasco, and anybody who deals with him is in mortal danger of losing his life. Or if you reviewed the works of policemen, you know, and said, “In this investigation Sergeant Jones showed the utter incompetence to which his observers have now become accustomed.” That is the sort of thing an actor or painter or writer — any sort of artist — has to cope with constantly. Politicians deal with all sorts of criticisms too, but the thing they do is not so private — it doesn’t make them so vulnerable.
JP What sort of influence have you had on other writers?
AN That’s a very difficult thing to assess. That would be something that’s more for them to say than for me to say. I think one influence I could say that I’ve had is the influence of simply having been here. You see, when I started to write and publish things, there really was nobody else at all writing in New Brunswick and not many in other parts of the Maritimes, and so I think that I might conceivably have been an influence in that. You take a brilliant young New Brunswick-based novelist such as David Adams Richards, and I think there may well have been an influence on him, say, when he was in high school and starting to write, simply by seeing one of my books in the high school library and thinking, “Gosh, you can live in New Brunswick and you can write about New Brunswick,” you know.
JP Do you keep a sort of abstract reader in mind when you write?
AN Yes, I suppose I do, because in a sense when I began to write poems, I was addressing them . . . Well, I did it partly for the same reason some other lonely children invent an imaginary playmate, and so I suppose in a way I address them all to some imaginary playmate — a kind of a sympathetic listener. And the best thing is when, through personal contacts — meetings with strangers or letters from people — I discover that someone has gotten the message. It’s like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean and it floats across and someone tells you they’ve received it.
JP So your poems, then — it’s fair to say they always have a message or something specific you want to say?
AN Oh, I think so, yes. Otherwise, if it was completely abstract . . . if you had, for instance, an enormously precocious infant who, before it learned to speak, decided that the language, as it stands, is completely old hat and we no longer need messages and so on, well, that child, when it was hungry, instead of asking for food, might say, “Gobbledy gook.” It probably wouldn’t get anything to eat, you see.
JP Do you think people might sometimes think they understand your poems too quickly?
AN Oh, I think so. One of the wonderful lines from André Gide — which I would have published in the front of one of my books if Norman Mailer hadn’t already done it — is “Do not understand me too quickly.” I think that often happens, yes. And another thing that happens with those few reviewers who actually read the books is that, because they see the surface simplicity, they first of all assume that that’s all that’s there and secondly assume that I just sat down and dashed the thing off. Whereas the fact is, in order to give the effect of immediacy and spontaneity, I may have written the thing as many as twenty-eight or thirty times.
JP So it’s normal with you to write and rewrite?
AN Oh, yes.
JP Does the continual revising of your work sometimes work against you?
AN I suspect that it might but it’s hard to tell. I find people who like earlier poems better than the later versions and that sort of thing.
JP Do you use any artificial helps — stimulants, drugs?
AN Well, I’ve . . . Some of my best ideas for poems have come to me when I was drinking. Of course I didn’t set out to drink just so I could get the poems. It’s also true, as Norman Mailer says, that most of his ideas come when he’s too drunk to do anything about it. That has occasionally happened to me too.
JP Do you make a practice of trying to write when you’re drinking?
AN No. There are a lot of drinking writers, of course. The late Hugh Garner said that he became a freelance writer because it was the job that interfered the least with his drinking. And there is an element of truth in that. If you have a nine-to-five job, you can’t get drunk in the afternoon — you’ll lose your job — but if you’re a freelance writer, obviously you can. You just have to work a little harder the next day. Because you’re in control of your own fate to a certain extent. And . . . what was I after saying?
JP Can you tell me — do you type or write? Do you have a word processor?
AN Well, I used to write everything by pencil, and I think in my experience most creative writers do write in longhand and then retype it, but now I do everything on the typewriter, which is great for me because I’m the sort of writer who — and I found out somewhere that Dylan Thomas did the same neurotic thing — that if I make a mistake and one line has to be rewritten, I start at the beginning and retype the whole thing. So I may have ten typewritten pages for one line. Also, if I’m writing prose, I sort of think on the typewriter. Flannery O’Connor, the great Southern writer, quoted, in comparison with herself, an old Southern woman whom she heard say, “I never know what I think until I’ve heard what I say.” Well, I never know what I think, really, until I’ve seen what I’ve typed. So when I’m typing, if I’ve started a sentence in my mind and then abandoned it, I’ve already typed it, so there’ll be a whole page with beginnings of sentences that trail off into nothing. I can’t just sort of sit there as some people can and think a line out and then type it.
JP What are your work habits like? What sort of schedule do you keep?
AN Well, I work every day because I’ve found there’s an immense amount of truth in what my friend the painter Bruno Bobak says. Bruno says a profound inspiration always comes to him when he’s working. And I’ve found this too. I believe there is such a thing as inspiration for a painter or a writer, but invariably it comes, you know, when you’re working.
JP So how much time each day would you spend working?
AN Oh, it varies an enormous amount. If I were working on a play, for instance, and we were getting close to the deadline, I might work twelve or fourteen hours a day. But in the normal run of things, I probably wouldn’t work any more than four or five hours. Probably more often four than five.
JP Have friendships ever intruded on your work and given you cause for resentment?
AN No, no, I don’t think so. Well, there have been times when the doorbell rang and I’ve said, “Damn!” but I’m always glad to see the person when I open the door.
JP Do you think that being a very practiced, very proficient writer sometimes blocks original thoughts?
AN I think there’s probably a danger of it, yes. What I try to do with poems is, I try to write them as spontaneously as I would have done back when I started out as a poet, before I realized it was supposed to be hard work. Because when I started out as a poet, for instance, I would be covering meetings of the Hartland town council, and I would write sonnet after sonnet in my notebook, which pleased the members
of the council enormously because they thought I was assiduously writing down what they said. I would write as many as four to six in an evening. Now, I try to write with that same spontaneity. And then I usually throw the poem in a drawer and leave it there — days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. And then periodically I go through all the things in this drawer and pick out something which appeals to me at that particular time and try to rework it, almost as though originally it had been done by someone else.