The Wanton Troopers

by Alden Nowlan

  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.

  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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 producti
on, 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.